By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  David marched back into Northumbria on 8 April, intent on devastating the county of Durham and coastal Northumberland. This time, the situation was even more serious for Stephen. His enemies had coordinated their movements in Normandy, the West Country, and on the Welsh border. Stephen headed west, leaving Archbishop Thurstan of York and his northern barons to deal with the Scots, who were again meeting with considerable success. David’s main force threatened Durham; amongst the religious establishments sought out and hit along the way was Stephen’s own foundation at Furness Abbey. In June, another division defeated an English force eighty miles south of Carlisle. Apparently, ill-founded rumours of Stephen’s imminent arrival put the Scots to flight once more. But they did not go far. The defection of the eminent northern baron Eustace fitz John to David, bringing with him manpower and strategic strongholds, incited the Scottish king to launch yet another invasion at the end of July, and one on a far larger scale than his previous expeditions.

  It has been suggested that David planned to ravage beyond Yorkshire deep into England. His confidence and ambition had grown not only from his new northern ally, but from the knowledge that Stephen was busy in the South-East, successfully suppressing rebellions in Kent, where his wife was blockading Dover, and in the South and West, where Stephen had invested a number of castles. As ever, the line of march was marked by the fires of the Scots’ raiding parties until David reached the Tees in mid-August. Stephen spared some household knights to reinforce the royalist muster in York. On 22 August, the Scots were smashed at the battle of the Standard near Northallerton. King David barely managed to escape, leaving his infantry to be massacred. He retreated to Roxburgh and did not bother Northumbria again for some while.

  This bald recital of facts about King David’s three invasions of 1138 is of the type to be found in any number of history books relating any number of campaigns at any time. Such narratives are necessarily condensed to provide the essential details of campaigns and to recount the protagonists’ movements, but they do little to capture the reality and horror that accompany them. For David’s expeditions were marked by atrocity on a truly appalling scale. As David Crouch has written concerning the first six months of 1138, ‘A harsher period of Stephen’s reign had opened, and as his strategy hardened so, naturally, did that of his opponents.’30

  The sources certainly seem to attest to this. John of Worcester is the most restrained. The invasion occurred only two years before he stopped writing his chronicle. Amid the Scots’ burning of fields and depredation in the countryside, he records that the ‘dreadful invasion’ of Northumbria and surrounding area over six months meant ‘many were captured, robbed, imprisoned and tortured; ecclesiastics were put to death for the sake of the property of their churches, and one can hardly count the number of the slain on either our side or theirs’.31 (The comment on numbers is ambiguous; could it mean royalist troops also committed atrocities – as they surely did – or is it just a reference to combat deaths?)

  Henry of Huntingdon, who had close ties with Lincoln (and hence was closer to the events of 1138) began writing his contemporary account of events from around 1133, in ‘the present time’, as he says. His rendition of the Scottish events sets the tone for reporting the invasion.

  The King of Scotland … commanded his men in barbarous deeds. For they ripped open pregnant women and tore out the unborn foetuses. They tossed children on the points of their lances. They dismembered priests on their altars. They put on to the bodies of the slain the heads cut off crucifixes, and changing them round, they put back on the crucifixes the heads of the dead. Everywhere that the Scots attacked would be filled with horror and barbarity, accompanied by the cries of women, the wailing of the aged, the groans of the dying, the despair of the living.32

  Robert of Torigny had finished his chronicle by 1154. Although distant from events in Normandy, he was well travelled and well informed, not least from Henry of Huntingdon, who visited him in 1139, just a year after the invasion. Understandably, he closely follows Henry’s details. Orderic Vitalis, who finished his chronicle in 1141, was also a Norman monk; his version also seems to follow Huntingdon, but is much shorter, concentrating on the pregnant women. The Gesta Stephani, written in the 1140s by either Bishop Robert of Bath or someone within his circle, agrees with Huntingdon that King David gave direct orders to his troops to wreak death and destruction everywhere they went: he ‘sent out a decree through Scotland and summoned all to arms, and giving them free licence, he commanded them to commit against the English, without pity, the most savage and cruel deeds they could invent’. Frustratingly, just as the author is about to relate what happened during the invasion, substantial lacunae deprive us of important information: David is, ‘organizing squadrons and battalions, against all the land, which was large and rich …’33

  The main source for the atrocities of 1138 is Richard of Hexham. Richard was a canon of the abbey at Hexham at the time of the invasion; he became prior in 1141, finishing his chronicle by 1154. Unsurprisingly, given his geographical location, his most pressing concerns were with the Scots rather than with the troubles of King Stephen further south. Richard heaps outraged opprobrium on the Scots of the first invasion in January: ‘that cursed army, more atrocious than the whole race of pagans, neither fearing God nor regarding man, spread desolation over the whole province, and murdered every where persons of both sexes, of every age and rank, and overthrew, plundered, and burned towns, churches and houses.’ He writes that the Scots took great sadistic pleasure in their grisly work, as ‘they put to the sword and transfixed with spears’ all they came across, not sparing the most vulnerable: the young, the old, the women and the sick. Non-combatants sought to escape the Scots by fleeing from their villages, but many were still cut down: the Scots ‘massacred numberless persons in the wild’ as they overran the province, ravaging everything ‘by sword and fire’.34 The hyperbole is palpable when he records – notably as hearsay – that when the Sots slaughtered a large group of children, they even dammed a brook to collect the blood for drinking.

  The second invasion is reported in similar terms: ‘The king of Scotland … with his execrable army, once more returned to Northumberland, and with no less ferocity and cruelty than he had previously exhibited.’ The pattern of brutal ravaging was repeated. Richard again details the areas of depredation, carefully specifying that the Scots struck targets they had missed first time around, and ‘anywhere’ that ‘had escaped uninjured’ previously. A division sent by David to Yorkshire under his nephew William was no less ruthless.

  Sparing no rank, no age, no sex, no condition, they first massacred, in the most barbarous manner possible, children and kindred in sight of their relatives, and servants in the sight of their masters, masters in sight of their servants, and husbands before the eyes of their wives; and then (horrible to relate) they carried off, like so much booty, the noble matrons and chaste virgins, together with other women. These naked, fettered, herded together, by whips and lashes they drove them before them, goading them with their spears and other weapons. This took place in other wars, but in this to a far greater extent. Afterwards, when they were distributed along with the other booty, a few of them from motives of pity restored some of them to liberty … but the Picts and many others carried off those who fell to their share to their own country. And finally, these brutal men … when tired of abusing these poor wretches like animals, made them their slaves or sold them for cattle to other barbarians.35

  This is quite a catalogue of horror and, understandably, many historians have treated such reports with scepticism. For a start, familiar accounts are repeated with suspicious regularity later in English sources throughout the medieval period. To cite just one example from many, coming 160 years after the events described above, a letter from King Edward’s court to Pope Boniface in 1301 complains about the savagery of the Scots in 1296 performing the same atrocities mentioned above, adding the cutting off of women’s breasts and, in an echo of the Hexha
m Chronicle, even mentioning the large-scale slaughter of a group of schoolboys, burned alive having been blockaded in their school. Trying to determine what is real and what is prurient sensationalism for propaganda purposes is a difficult task; but extravagant embellishment or even outright fabrication of one incident does not automatically negate others. For example, the burning of the schoolboys is not only also included in the chronicle from Lancerost in the fourteenth century, but it is stated as occurring in the town of Hexham. Has Richard’s story been embroidered over time into a new version, or are the letter and Lancerost Chronicle based on recent fact? Is the repetition of similar brutal acts a topos, or have the acts become a stock literary theme because they are actually perpetrated so frequently? Then there is the influence of Bible stories and stained-glass windows luridly depicting the slaughter of the innocents: which events are prompted by witnesses, and which are implanted in the minds of suggestible writers by the religious environment? Writing an accurate account of a battle or siege is difficult enough (even in the modern age), so how much more difficult it was to write about ravaging, when endless raiding parties split of from the main column to cause their damage.

  The repetition may equally be due not to tradition, but to the reality of the situation. The fourteenth-century Lancerost Chronicle mentioned above, a local source like Hexham, records the Scottish wars in similar vein to the chroniclers of the twelfth century; its descriptions of ravaging and raids provide an ‘accurate and realistic picture of the kind of war which characterised those parts’.36 It is interesting to compare the descriptions of twelfth-century writers about the Harrying of the North in 1069–70 with the Scottish invasions of 1138. The earlier ravaging is also related in gruesome fashion, but the focus is on the after-effects, the consequences of the brutal military actions; for 1138, Richard of Hexham (and Henry of Huntingdon to a lesser extent) add explicit details of the act of atrocity itself, description of the action rather than of the effect. This may be to further demonize the enemy in an atmosphere of ethnic hatred, but it also may simultaneously represent the fears felt by the writers and their communities in the here-and-now of the war-torn North. Richard of Hexham was writing from within the war zone. As he writes, ‘In this raging and tempestuous period’, the ‘noble monastery of Hexham’ was ‘in the very midst of the collision, and placed as it were on the very route of these ruffians, so as to be surrounded by them on every side’.37

  Much of what he did not see first-hand would have been reported by victims and eyewitnesses seeking refuge in the monastery or simply reporting to it. Similarly, it is the local writer Simeon of Durham who also offers the most violent images of Scottish incursions. Simeon’s writing stops at 1129, but he writes of Scottish atrocities against the English fifty years previously in 1070 in the same way as Richard of Hexham (which is not surprising, as again there is a Hexham connection: the text has mid-twelfth-century interpolations from a monk at Richard’s monastery). The Scottish king Malcolm

  ordered his troops no longer to spare the English nation … to carry them off captives under the yoke of perpetual slavery … Some aged men and women were beheaded with the sword; others were thrust through with spear … Infants … were thrown high into the air and in their fall they were received on the points of lances and pikes thickly placed in the ground. The Scots … delighted in this cruelty as an amusing spectacle.38

  On occasion we must doubt Richard of Hexham’s writing, but otherwise, as touched on above, he shows himself to be reasonably objective and factual for the time: while writing of the invasion, he is concerned to make an accurate record of the movements of the Scots and the places they did and did not attack; he allows that some Scots took pity on their captives and released them; that, despite his apocalyptic version, others were spared for ransom. He says that the sufferings are not unique, but typical of other wars, but that they have taken on a new intensity in the current conflict; and that the blood-drinking episode is unverified hearsay. It is more than likely – but not certain – that isolated incidents have become generalized; but this is not as important as the accumulation of individual atrocities and their total number, for it is this that captures the savage nature of the wars, and this that inflicted the greatest miseries on non-combatants.

  It is worth bearing these points in mind when discussing propaganda, for it may well be the case that some of the atrocities were not fabricated to this end, but rather that actual atrocities were inflated for propaganda purposes. We do not have to accept Richard’s account in toto, simply on the basis of self-contradiction. Clearly, it was not the case that the Scots killed everyone in their path, as Richard tells us of the fate of many women taken captive. He also writes of ransoms, but here it seems to relate to soldiers. Simeon is more distinct on this: ‘Young men and maidens, and whomsoever seemed fit for toil and labour, were bound and driven before the face of their enemies, to be reduced in perpetual exile to slaves.’39 Some of these women died of exhaustion on their march northwards. What is evident from the sources is that those most likely to be killed were any that resisted the slave drive – husbands, fathers and sometimes mothers – and the most vulnerable, as they had least value and would not easily keep up with an army on the warpath. Slavery was still prevalent on the Celtic fringe at this time, much to the horror of more civilized English writers (but, as we shall see in the next sections, that did not mean captives in England were no longer financial commodities to be bartered). Those that were not to be taken were slaughtered to get them out of the way, to terrorize others elsewhere who might resist, and also to undermine the authority of the English king by showing how incapable he was of protecting his own people. As with the sack of Jerusalem and any other number of atrocities, who died and who survived lay at the whim of the sword holder.

  The most obvious example of propaganda writing is the episode of damming and drinking children’s blood. Richard reports this with the qualification ‘it is said’. This is an obvious example of placing the barbarous enemy way beyond even the worst behaviour expected from the most depraved people. Such a depiction of the Scots elevated conflict against them into a holy war. At the Battle of the Standard, the leading ecclesiastics consciously emphasized this aspect under the standards of the northern saints (from which the battle derives its name), calling for the English to be the means through which God would punish the Scots. The incessant slaying and decapitation of priests at the altar may well be propaganda based on truth. Churches were always the ultimate places of sanctuary, but were often sought out in vain. The Scots’ treatment of them was not so different from that of others in this regard, as some examples from France indicate: in 1440, John Talbot burned to death over three hundred men, women and children taking refuge in a church in Lihons; the churches in Béziers were execution chambers; and when even a king of such renowned piety as Louis VII could torch a church full of non-combatants, as he did in Vitry in 1143, then their value as places of refuge clearly fluctuated according to the situation. It was only natural that priests should be at the altars of their churches with their flocks huddled in the aisles. It was also natural for them to be targeted as sources of wealth. And if Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, could be cut down in his cathedral by knights from the King’s household, what hope was there for a humble parish priest faced by vicious, beggarly common soldiers intent on little but plunder? Babies impaled on swords and pikes and pregnant women being cut open were a constant of medieval warfare reporting and beyond, as woodcarvings and prints from the sixteenth century reveal, and as do written accounts from much later. We cannot identify with any certainty when and where they happened; but given other excesses committed in this and other wars of the Middle Ages, and also given the extra bitterness from a frontier war with ethnic hatreds, it is likely that something similar occurred in 1138 as the chroniclers say.

  Vitriol and accusation of atrocities were not reserved for the Scots, but for all on the Celtic fringe. Thus, when the Welsh went raiding in 1136, the G
esta Stephani recounts that these ‘men of an animal type … cleared the villages by plunder, fire and sword, burnt the houses, slaughtered the men…. Addicted to every crime, ready for anything unlawful, they spared no age, showed no respect for any order, were not restrained from wickedness either by time or by place’.40 John of Worcester writes of the same event that it ‘was the occasion of a vast and widespread destruction of churches, towns, wheat and cattle’. Of the two rounds of extensive killing, the second was the greater: ‘There was so great a slaughter that (not taking into account those who were carried away into captivity) there remained 10,000 women whose husbands, with numberless children, had been either drowned, or burned, or put to the sword.’41 Such reactions were prompted not only by disgust but also by a sense of cultural and political superiority bound up in the conscious English imperialism of the time, on which John Gillingham and R. R. Davies have written so insightfully. Expansion, conquest and domination – under the ever-useful imperial guise of a civilization mission – could be undertaken with a lighter conscience and with more support if the enemy could be labelled as bestial savages.

  The fact that Scotland had elements (mainly the frightening Galwegians) that still practised the old-style warfare of slavery and slaughter only added credence to the reports of atrocity. King David and his cavalry could be relied upon to abide by the code of chivalry and take other knights for ransom, but some of his more unruly troops, utterly excluded from this code, were less likely to be so accommodating. It was a similar problem with the Welsh, who, as Gerald of Wales observed, cut off heads instead of taking prisoners, and massacred captives instead of taking ransom. The Irish were to receive the same treatment, when, non-coincidentally, the English moved into their home territory later in the century. The Irish themselves were accustomed in their power struggles to ‘pursuing a policy of slaughter, plunder and burning’ and decapitation on a horrific scale. In 1069 at Osriage in south-western Leinster they saw no reason to change their habits when King Dermot’s Irish forces celebrated a victory with their new Norman allies: