The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  And the price of maintaining a knight in the field hadn’t done anything since the Norman Conquest except get more expensive. The cost of a mount was almost unimaginably high for anyone other than a noble. An average warhorse—the “great horses” that were the product of longstanding breeding plans, and necessary for carrying an armored man in battle—cost more than £18, and 10 percent of them more than £40; one of Edward II’s horses cost him more than £70, or nearly forty times the average wage of his subjects.

  Knighthood was costly to the knight’s psyche, as well as his wallet, even though the profession of arms in medieval Europe regarded violence as a kind of sacrament. Ramon Llull, the great Catalan philosopher and poet of the early fourteenth century, famously wrote that “God and chivalry are in accord,” since the chivalric code demanded that knights only raise their swords on behalf of virtue. In the words of Gutierre Díaz de Gómez, the friend and biographer of Don Pero Niño, the Spanish “Unconquered Knight” of the late fourteenth century: “Knights . . . are forever swallowing their fear . . . they expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to the adventure of life in death.” A French knight of the early fourteenth century, Geoffroi de Charny, advised other knights that the best way to cope with things such as sleeplessness, uncontrollable memories, and depression was to tell oneself that the battle was just, and not for private gain, and thereby make it more tolerable.

  The contemporary reflections of Llull, Díaz, and de Charny are something of a clue to the real advantage of mounted knights: preparation, more than horses, or even armor, which, like their swords, was two-edged: good for protection, not so much for fighting. The amount of effort required to move while carrying up to forty pounds of iron or steel armor literally doubled the metabolic requirements of its wearers. Once unhorsed, armored knights used at least four times the amount of energy as, for example, the foot soldiers who turned them into scavenger meat at Courtrai.

  As the Medieval Warm Period reached its last decades, the vulnerability of armored horsemen to disciplined foot soldiers, the Achilles’ heel of medieval knighthood, was exposed more and more frequently. Stirling Bridge and Courtrai are the traditional examples; Bannockburn would be another. What these conflicts had in common was the kind of cohesion that could make well-trained infantry the match for equally well-trained and disciplined cavalry. At Courtrai that cohesion was a secondary consequence of the population growth enabled by centuries of mild climate: the new towns and villages had grown large and plentiful enough to support militias that could regularly train together.* At Bannockburn, however, the source was more personal: the charisma and determination of Robert Bruce.

  By 1314, Bruce had been at war for nearly twenty years, and had long since realized that his instincts as a tourney knight were useless in a real war against English cavalry. His only hope for success was the imposition of discipline on his infantry—enough that his spear-bristling schiltroms could be moved as units, rather than in wild charges, which would make them as useful in attack as they already were in defense. Some of this was made possible by the relatively egalitarian nature of the Scottish host. Unlike English (and continental) armies that were, by design, hierarchical in the extreme, “the gradations of wealth were less steep” in Scotland, which meant that both chiefs and men were likely to be armed with similar weaponry.

  And disciplined foot soldiers were likely to be as fierce as any knight. Infantry weren’t disposed to abide by anything like a code of chivalry, which regarded them, in any case, as less than worthless. Archers, killing from two hundred yards away with missiles that covered those two hundred yards in less than five seconds, had no way to accept surrenders even if they wanted to. The result was an enormous increase in the risk of death to mounted knights. In twelfth-century Flanders, after a yearlong campaign between French and Flemish barons, only five knights had died, only one of them in battle (one apparently died from blowing his horn too vigorously). At Courtrai alone, hundreds of knightly corpses littered the field.

  Edward’s knights, therefore, were in greater danger than they knew when they departed Berwick on June 17. They, and the rest of the English host, arrived in Edinburgh four days later; as recorded in the Vita: “like a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, rather than an army on the march.” Since the agreement between Edward Bruce and Mowbray obliged the relief column to arrive by midsummer, timing was tight. The English had one day to march the twenty miles to Falkirk, then one more for the remaining twenty miles to Stirling, where the Scots waited, on the north side of the Bannock Burn, a stream that flowed north to the River Forth, and which crossed the Falkirk-Stirling road.

  While a dozen different accounts of the Battle of Bannockburn are extant, it’s worth noting that no one knows with any certainty where it actually took place. The likeliest candidate looks very different today from how it did that June day in 1314, when—significantly—the area just west of the road into Stirling was a tangle of sluggish streams, which would play havoc with the footing of the English cavalry.

  Whatever their absolute location, their relative ones are fairly well established. King Robert placed Moray’s division on his far western flank, and held the eastern one himself, with Douglas and Edward Bruce in between, and close enough that each could reinforce the other as needed. Their positions were fortified by digging “pottes” in the land where the road rose at a shallow slope—disguised pits intended to cause injury, but even more to channel an advance across a chosen front “to force the enemy to bunch at a single well-guarded spot.”

  On the twenty-third, the English arrived in sight of Stirling, thus satisfying the original agreement made by Mowbray and Edward Bruce: the garrison would not be required to surrender the castle. Upon learning this, the English almost immediately started fighting. With one another. The issue was command; Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, and Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, each asserted a claim on the title of “Constable” and therefore commander of the vanguard. Gloucester was Edward’s choice, Hereford the hereditary Constable, so the king split the difference and made them joint commanders—a poor decision on its own merits, even without the apparently salient fact that Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, was the finest soldier in the English army, and the one who had defeated Robert Bruce in battle in 1306. The choice wasn’t the sort that boosted the troops’ morale, which may have been why one of the army’s more impetuous knights, Henry de Bohun (Humphrey’s nephew) took it upon himself to improve things. Seeing King Robert, easily identified by his crown, inspecting his troops, the young knight immediately charged, sword swinging. By the time he made it up the long and boggy slope to where his target waited, his horse was blown, he “myssit the nobile king,” and King Robert contemptuously—the de Bohuns had been given the Bruce family lands in Carrick and Annandale when Robert was a fugitive—split Henry’s skull with a single swing of a battle ax.

  King Robert’s skill at mayhem makes for entertaining reading, and certainly added to his legend throughout subsequent centuries as, indeed, it did during his own. But if battles had ever been decided by champions meeting in single combat, they weren’t any longer. If Henry de Bohun’s death had any meaning, it was a symbolic one: a demonstration that chivalric bravery wasn’t nearly as important as terrain. It was a distinction that mattered. As the military historian John Keegan has noted, at the beginning of the fourteenth century it was widely regarded as unchivalrous to select a battlefield that would offer a topographical advantage; “taking the high ground” was, somehow, ignoble.

  Not to the Scots, though. All of the skirmishes during the first day at Bannockburn were about terrain. When a patrol of a few hundred knights rode to the east of the New Park, trying to both flank the Scots and take the ground above them, Bruce rode furiously to his own division, and, forming them into schiltrom, marched out of cover to meet the English cavalry on ground where they had left themselves no room to maneuver.

  Even so,
the Scots weren’t dug in behind a palisade of spikes on defense, but attacking in a moving formation, and it’s a testimony to eight years of experience and discipline that they maintained the integrity of the schiltrom despite attacks from the cavalry. Hours of fighting later, King Robert had demonstrated that his infantry was just as formidable as an attacking force as it was on defense. That night, Bruce addressed his men:

  We have every reason to be confident of success, for we have right on our side. Our enemies are moved only by desire for dominion, but we are fighting for our lives, our children, our wives, and the freedom of our country . . . See that your ranks are not broken so that, when the enemy come charging on horseback, you meet them steadfastly with your spears . . . You could have lived quietly as slaves, but because you longed to be free you are with me here, and to gain that end you must be valiant, strong, and undismayed . . . You know what honour is. Bear yourself in such fashion as to keep your honour.

  The following day, Monday the twenty-fourth, dawn broke on the English cavalry, which found itself unable to maneuver, with streams to their right and left, and a very deep ditch behind them. They could not, therefore, have been happy to see three columns of Scottish infantry marching toward them in echelon, each one behind and a little to the left of the one in front. Their archers, who had broken the Scottish schiltroms at Falkirk, were still in line of march rather than perpendicular to the line of advance, which meant most of them couldn’t even see the enemy, much less engage them. Sir Ingram de Umfraville proposed to Edward that the English feign a retreat, and so tempt the Scots to break ranks in order to plunder the huge baggage train that Edward had hauled from Berwick. The king, noting the Scots kneeling en masse, refused, saying, “Yon kneeling folk for mercy pray.” Umfraville—in Barbour’s telling, anyway—responded, “but not from you; from God for their sins. These men will win all or die.”

  The first Scottish division to advance was Edward Bruce’s; the earl of Gloucester ordered a charge, and was killed almost immediately. Moray and Douglas followed suit, which finally brought them into the range of Edward’s Welsh archers, who did some notable damage before the marischal, Sir Robert Keith, could get his small division of light cavalry into action, and broke them up. By then, the schiltroms had made contact with the cavalry, and were able to use their well-practiced tactic of spearing horses in their unarmored flanks and bellies in order to get them to throw their riders—and, even more destructively, to panic other horses as they ran around riderless. When King Robert finally committed his reserve division to the battle, it became a rout.

  King Edward, by all accounts, fought bravely enough to have his first horse killed under him. No doubt he would have continued to fight had not the earl of Pembroke, realizing the danger of a king taken hostage by a Scots army, grabbed the reins of the monarch’s second mount and dragged him off to Stirling Castle along with five hundred of the remaining cavalry. There, Sir Philip Mowbray refused to open the gates, making the perverse-but-persuasive argument that he was now obliged to surrender the castle, which would have meant surrendering the king as well. Faced with this unassailable logic, the king and the cavalry headed east, past Edinburgh all the way to Dunbar, then to Berwick, where he met Isabella on June 27.

  The disaster was complete. In ten days, the largest English army to enter Scotland since Falkirk had been transformed into a rabble in retreat. Among England’s captains, only the earl of Pembroke kept his nerve throughout the battle, returning to the field after rescuing the king, organizing a fighting retreat, and leading his men home on foot to Carlisle. Of those left behind, at least four thousand foot soldiers were killed, along with two hundred knights, against perhaps four hundred Scottish infantry, and no more than two knights. Thirty-four nobles were among the English dead, including John Comyn, the nephew of the earl of Pembroke and the son of King Robert’s onetime victim. Thousands of prisoners were taken, including the earl of Hereford, who was exchanged for the long-imprisoned Robert Wishart, bishop of Glasgow, along with King Robert’s queen, sister, and daughter. Valuables amounting to more than £200,000 were captured, along with both the Great Seal of England and the Royal Shield. The author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi was both merciless and accurate: “Indeed I think it is unheard of in our time for such an army to be scattered so suddenly by infantry, unless when the flower of France fell before the Flemings at Courtrai.”

  Edward, who was already regarded as deficient in martial virtue, was widely blamed for the disaster. From the Vita, again: “If he had employed himself in the pursuit of arms, [he would have] excelled King Richard [I]. Indeed, his make-up was fitted to this: he was tall of stature and a finely formed man of great strength with a handsome face . . . If he had given as much energy to the pursuit of arms as he spent in rustic pursuits, England would have prospered well.” Even Edward’s youthful enthusiasm for ditch digging wasn’t forgotten: Robert de Newington, a messenger in the royal household, recorded that Edward’s failure to win the battle of Bannockburn was because he spent his time in “making ditches, and digging, and other improper occupations.”

  Scotland, unsurprisingly, was exultant. As reported in Fabyan’s Chronicle (and repeated in Christopher Marlowe’s 1593 play about Edward’s “troublesome reign”) the victorious Scots, “inflamed in pride, in derision of Englishmen,” made this rhyme as follows:

  Maidens of England, sore may you mourn

  For your lemans you have lost at Bannockbourn,

  With a heave and a ho [alternatively, a Heavelow]!

  What weeneth the King of England

  So soon to have won Scotland,

  With a rumbelow

  Even better known than the “rumbelow” (likely a nonsense word) is the first stanza of Robert Burns’s 1793 poem “March to Bannockburn” :

  Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled

  Scots, wham Bruce has aften led

  Welcome tae yer gory bed

  Or tae victorie!

  Bannockburn was indeed a great “victorie.” As much as any battle in history, it was the great rallying cry in a struggle for national independence. For generations of military historians, it demonstrated the tactical value of disciplined infantry, in attack as well as defense. And for anyone still in doubt on the subject, Bannockburn proved how wide was the gap in talent for combat between Robert Bruce and Edward II.

  Even more significant, for the population of both Scotland and England, was what occurred afterward. While Bruce had demonstrated his ability to win a great set-piece battle—to be sure, one he had not sought—his long-term strategy was to bleed not Edward’s army but his subjects: to capture or burn the harvests of northern England’s farms, to extort northern England’s gold, and to destroy, as much as possible, northern England’s food. In this, he was following a strategy of affliction explicitly described and proposed by a French nobleman named Pierre Dubois fourteen years before Bannockburn in a work that promised “Successful Expeditions and Shortened Wars.”*

  While Bannockburn had been as complete a victory as one could wish, it did little to shorten the war between Scotland and England, which would continue for another fourteen years. Since Scotland was far too small to conquer England, and, after Bannockburn, England couldn’t envision defeating Bruce any time soon, the real result of the battle was not decisive victory but strategic stalemate. This was good news for Scottish independence, but very bad news for the farms and villages of northern England and southern Scotland, which would henceforth be the only battlefields on which the two nations could meet.

  The deliberate attacks on those farms would have been hugely destructive at any moment in history. However, they didn’t occur at just any moment, but rather a year before the worst storms in human memory appeared as if to announce to the farmers of Scotland and England—not to mention France, Flanders, Germany, and Scandinavia—that the four centuries of good weather were now at an end.

  CHAPTER SIX

&
nbsp; “The Floodgates of the Heavens”

  1315–1316

  By the middle of 1314, Edward II had been King of England for seven years. Very nearly each one of them had been worse than the preceding one, with the lowest point to date coming on the fields of Bannockburn. The trend continued. If the first half of the year had been a disaster for Edward, the second half was a misery. In September, three months after Bannockburn, he called a parliament at York to deal with the changed situation in Scotland, but the only business it was able to conclude was the hostage exchange with King Robert. He did manage to assemble a mobile force under the earl of Pembroke and send it into Scotland to relieve the Bruce’s siege of Carlisle Castle and temporarily buy a respite from Scottish raiders, but could do little to alleviate the sufferings of his northern subjects, who faced a more ruthless and powerful attacker than even James Douglas’s hobelars—light mounted infantry (riding hobbins, or hobby-horses). The summer and fall of 1314, saw, according to the Vita, “such plentiful rain that men could scarcely harvest the wheat or store it safely in the barn.”

  To the world’s farmers, drought is generally more feared than its opposite. But too much rain can be as terrifying as too little, since societies are built to accommodate normal amounts of rainfall, and roads, bridges, and especially farms in a region that receives less than five inches annually look very different than those in a place that gets more than two hundred.

  Lacking satellite data, we cannot know the specific cause of any historical rainstorm. Any number of phenomena can cool air to its dew point, including contact with a colder surface—water to land, for example—or evaporation, or adiabatic cooling (the same thing that causes the air escaping a bicycle tire or the air you blow out of your mouth to feel cold). Gases expand when they move from a small chamber to a larger one, and since pressure and heat are proportional, lower pressure equals lower temperature. Because air pressure is lower at higher altitudes, it cools and condenses. But the mystery of the storms of 1315 and 1316 isn’t their appearance but their duration, and especially their timing, so close to the estimated end of the Medieval Warm Period. A good guess is that when the very cold winters of 1309–1312, during which pack ice extended all the way from Greenland to Iceland, and polar bears could walk from one to the other, were whipsawed back into shape by a drop in the North Atlantic Oscillation in 1315, all the instability that had been held back by the high NAO index came flooding into continental Europe.* Some variety of large-scale atmospheric motion caused a huge mass of air to rise over Northern Europe, condense into water, and transport it to Earth. And so the rains began.