Uniting the Kingdom?

Few men living in the summer of 1297 were genuinely enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting in Flanders alongside Edward I, but John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, was a clear exception. All his life – and this year he would be sixty-six – the earl had been a staunch supporter of the Crown and the king’s close friend.¹

On this occasion, however, Warenne’s anxiety to serve had less to do with his loyalism and more to do with avoiding the responsibility that had been foisted upon him the previous year. In 1296, true to form, he had marched with Edward against the Scots, and had led the English in their decisive victory at Dunbar. But the earl’s reward for this feat had been his appointment as Scotland’s new royal governor, and it was a role he clearly did not relish: within a few months he was actively offering the job to others. The king may have been well pleased to have rid himself of a turd, but his old friend was correspondingly dismayed to find himself charged with its custody. Warenne, in fact, behaved entirely as one might expect in such circumstances, and stayed as far away as possible, saying that the task was bad for his health. According to Walter of Guisborough, the earl found the Scottish weather so unbearably awful that he spent most of his time in the north of England.²

Inevitably, the absence of the governor had a deleterious effect on Scotland’s new English government, which by 1297 was already struggling to cope with a host of additional problems. Imposed on the country against the will of its people, the regime was in any circumstances likely to have proved unpopular and been perceived as oppressive. As it was, thanks to the stream of emergency demands emanating from England, the administration was from the first a genuinely extortionate affair. The Scots, like the other peoples of Edward I’s empire, were expected to supply the money and materials that would enable their overlord to prosecute his war against France. When, in May 1297, they were asked to supply the manpower as well, it proved to be the last straw: at that point unrest and resistance in Scotland boiled over into outright revolt. Trouble started in the west, at Lanark, where the English sheriff was killed.³

Behind this revolt, it seemed, lurked the usual suspects. One of the prime movers, for example, was Robert Wishart, the bulldog bishop of Glasgow, who six years earlier had stood up to Edward I at Norham. Also involved were several high-ranking members of the Scottish nobility, not all of whom had been captured or imprisoned during the English invasion the previous year. A surprising newcomer to their rebel ranks was the young earl of Carrick, Robert Bruce. Grandson of the late competitor for the throne, son of the disappointed collaborator of 1296, this third Robert might have been expected to toe the family line and aid the English, but instead he broke with ancestral tradition and threw his weight behind the patriotic cause. ‘I must join my own people,’ he reportedly told his father’s knightly tenants, ‘and the nation in which I was born.’⁴

Alas for the Scots, however, their aristocratic and ecclesiastical leaders once again proved stronger in their patriotism than they did in arms. Towards the end of June an English army crossed the Border from Cumbria, and within days the rebels were forced to surrender. On 7 July Wishart, Bruce and their allies submitted to terms at Irvine on Scotland’s western seaboard. To the young English commanders who had obtained this easy victory, it seemed that was the end of the matter. They rode east to the government’s base at Berwick, from where a letter was dispatched to the king a fortnight later. ‘Sire,’ it read, ‘your enemies are dispersed and dismayed.’⁵

The author of this now-anonymous announcement was evidently not the new regime’s treasurer, Hugh Cressingham. Unlike the military men fresh in from the field, or his boss, John de Warenne, who continued to linger in England, Cressingham worked in Berwick at the centre of the web. He could perceive the whole picture and, as he explained in his own letters to Edward, it was deeply alarming. ‘By far the greater part of your counties in Scotland still have no keepers,’ he said, ‘because of death, sieges or imprisonment.’ There were other rebels massing in the north, beyond the River Forth, and also in the south, in the Forest of Selkirk. Cressingham himself had wanted to march against them immediately – indeed, he had personally raised an army for this purpose – but had been out-voted. The consensus at Berwick was that they should wait for Warenne to arrive. ‘And so,’ the treasurer lamented as he drew to a close, ‘matters have gone to sleep.’⁶

While the English slumbered, the Scots were indeed being roused. Those in the north were led by Andrew Murray, the son and heir of a prominent local lord. Captured the previous year at Dunbar, he had escaped during the winter and raised rebellion in the spring. By August a number of northern towns and castles were already in his hands.⁷

Meanwhile, in the south, leadership had been assumed by a certain William Wallace. Unlike Murray, Wallace was a virtual nobody – nothing at all is heard of him before this juncture, bar a possible reference in a court roll of 1296 which mentions ‘William le Waleys, a thief’. When, the following year, he bursts unheralded into the picture, he is described by English chroniclers as ‘a bloody man’, ‘a chief of brigands’, ‘a vagrant and a fugitive’. Most likely he was a younger son of Alan Wallace, a minor landowner in Ayrshire; such origins would account for the fact that his earliest activities were concentrated in western Scotland. The death of the sheriff of Lanark in May 1297 had been his handiwork, and thereafter he appears to have based himself in Selkirk Forest with his growing band of followers. ‘The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, ‘the retainers of great lords adhered to him.’ By August 1297 Wallace and his popular army had moved into northern Scotland, where they linked arms with Murray’s forces.⁸

By this point, finally, John de Warenne had arrived in Berwick and been convinced by a no doubt frantic Cressingham of the urgent need for military action. There was yet more delay while they waited for those Scots who had surrendered at Irvine to complete their submissions (a process that was deliberately drawn out by the likes of Wishart and Bruce). But at last, probably as the end of August approached, the English army and its reluctant captain set out to crush the Scottish rebels.⁹

To do so they had to enter northern Scotland, and that meant crossing the River Forth – a feat easier said than done. The Forth rises in the west, near Loch Lomond, and flows east to meet the sea, thus effectively cutting the country in half. Moreover, for much of its eastern length it forms a broad tidal estuary, or firth, which could not be crossed except by boat. In fact, in the thirteenth century the Forth was referred to as ‘the Scottish Sea’, and on contemporary maps, northern Scotland was designated as Scotia ultra Marina – Scotland beyond the Sea.¹⁰

Warenne therefore marched his army towards the first place that the Forth could be bridged, which at that time was the royal burgh at Stirling. As the principal gateway between northern and southern Scotland, Stirling had a unique strategic importance (indeed, on one thirteenth-century map, the town’s bridge is shown as the only link between the two halves of the country). It was also a brilliantly defended gateway: half a mile from the bridge, on the river’s southern shore, stood Stirling Castle. Nothing survives of the original medieval fortress, but it was almost certainly built of stone, and (like its latter-day replacement) rendered all but impregnable from its situation atop a great outcrop of volcanic rock.

When the earl arrived at Stirling in early September he discovered that Wallace and Murray were waiting for him on the opposite side of the Forth. By all accounts the Scots were greatly outnumbered, and thus the English commanders naturally assumed that, as at Irvine, their enemies would wish to negotiate. On this occasion, however, the negotiators were turned away with a celebrated rebuke. ‘Go back and tell your people that we have not come for the benefit of peace,’ said Wallace, ‘but are ready to fight, to avenge ourselves, and to free our kingdom.’

According to Walter of Guisborough, who preserved these attributed words, this was invitation enough for the more hot-headed in the English camp. But wiser heads, the chronicler added, had surveyed the surrounding terrain and foreseen the danger. The bridge, their only way forward, was also their major obstacle, for it was only wide enough for men to cross in two-by-two formation. In addition, there was not much room to manoeuvre once they reached the other side. At Stirling the Forth meanders in large, lazy loops, and consequently the northern end of the bridge connects not to an open plain but to a narrow tongue of land. ‘There was no better place in the kingdom of Scotland,’ Guisborough was later told, ‘to put the English into the hands of the Scots – the many into the hands of the few.’

Nevertheless, in the final council of war, the voices of caution were overruled. Cressingham, conscious of the enormous daily cost of fielding the army, argued for an immediate advance. Warenne, once woken from a long lie-in, agreed, and the order was duly given. It was late in the morning of 11 September 1297, and events that day unfolded with all the inevitability that had been predicted. The English began to cross the bridge and array themselves on the northern shore, but were attacked while their host was only half-formed. The Scots rushed towards the river, seized the bridgehead and so divided their enemies. Those English who had already crossed – Cressingham was among their number – were surrounded and killed. Those stranded on the southern shore – who included Warenne – could only watch the slaughter as it happened. Eventually the earl came to his senses, ordered the bridge to be destroyed, and rode hard in the direction of England. From Stirling to Berwick it is nearly a hundred miles. The old man, says Guisborough, did not rest until he reached the Border.¹¹

As Warenne’s forces were being wiped out by Wallace and the Scots, the greatest political crisis that England had faced for thirty years was also fast approaching its apparently unavoidable climax. A parliament had been summoned for the end of September, but it seemed that the time for talking had already passed. Royalist knights were assembling at Rochester in Kent to strengthen the hand of the regency government, and the regents themselves, nominally led by the thirteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon, had moved from Westminster to within the walls of London, ‘on account of the danger of sedition’. Their fear was readily understandable. On 21 September, the aggrieved earls of Norfolk and Hereford, Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun, met with their supporters at Northampton, and found that they were many. Guisborough, with some exaggeration, estimated that they had 1,500 horse, and also added that they had a large force of foot.¹²

But by this date, if not before, news of Stirling Bridge had arrived in London, and immediately the situation was transformed. A disaster on this scale demanded a united response and made it imperative that the government settle with the opposition. Obtaining a settlement still took some time: the earls, fearing a trap, refused to enter the capital until their own guards had been posted on the gates. At length, however, thanks to the mediation of Archbishop Winchelsea, an agreement was reached, and the threat of civil war was averted.¹³

The basis of the agreement was Magna Carta, the ‘great charter’ famously wrung from King John over eight decades before. That the earls and the regents should have turned to such an apparently distant precedent might seem surprising, but in fact their response was entirely to be expected. For one thing, the political situation in 1297 was in many respects similar to that of 1215. King John had fought an unpopular war against France and made intolerable demands on his subjects in order to pay for it. Taxation had been heavy and unreasonably frequent; military service had been demanded overseas; political opponents had been broken by distraining them for debt. The circumstances that had produced Magna Carta, in short, were almost identical to those that had produced the current crisis.¹⁴

There was, however, a more obvious reason why men in 1297 should regard the ancient charter as the answer to their present woes, which was that, during those eight intervening decades, it had become the touchstone of good government. Throughout the reign of Henry III the rebel manifesto of 1215, revised somewhat in favour of the Crown, had been repeatedly confirmed and reissued. The same was true of a subsidiary document developed to deal with the highly contentious jurisdiction known as the Royal Forest. Together, the Great Charter and the Forest Charter had become the best known and most totemic of all royal promises, and hence the usual first recourse at times of political contention. Whenever folk felt that their rights and liberties were under threat, the cry would go up for ‘the Charters’. For the same reason, if the government could see no other way out of a crisis, a regrant of ‘the Charters’ could be offered as a popular panacea.¹⁵

This, indeed, had been the scenario earlier in 1297. When, in July, the earls had drawn up a written statement of their grievances (the so-called Remonstrances), they had complained that Magna Carta was being neglected ‘to the great loss of the people’ and that the Forest Charter was ‘not kept as it used to be in the past’. Edward, around the same time, had offered to confirm both Charters in return for a new grant of taxation.¹⁶

On this occasion, however, the king’s opponents clearly felt that the Charters, while important, would not by themselves be enough. The Remonstrances also complained about the extortionate levels of prise, and the punitive ‘maltote’ on wool – matters for which Magna Carta, because of its age, offered no remedy. Nor did the Charter have anything helpful to say about taxation. For decades it had been assumed – and Edward I had done much to encourage the assumption – that tax could be collected by the Crown only if consent had been given by parliament. But in 1297, much to the anger of his opponents, the king had imposed a levy of an eighth, having obtained nothing more than the approval of ‘the people who stood about in his chamber’.¹⁷

When, therefore, they sat down to negotiate in the autumn, the earls demanded – and received – more up-to-date assurances. Although the agreement they reached with the regents became known as ‘the Confirmation of the Charters’ (Confirmatio Cartarum), it actually included several new clauses, which promised that the maltote would be abolished altogether, and accepted that any future prise or taxation could be taken only ‘with the common assent of the realm’. These were major concessions, and met most of the opposition’s demands. The government’s only victory lay in having moderated some of the language, and in having kept the new clauses separate and distinct from Magna Carta itself. Nevertheless, the regents could also feel pleased with the deal they had struck, for it re-established the much-needed political consensus. When the Confirmation of the Charters was sealed on 10 October, the mutual feeling was one of immense relief. Soon afterwards parliament gave the necessary ‘common assent’ for a new tax, and the magnates agreed that together they would set out against the Scots. ‘Everyone was glad that day,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, adding that Edward of Caernarfon and his counsellors ‘remitted to the earls and their followers all rancour of spirit and ill will’.¹⁸

But all of this, of course, depended on the approval of their absent king.

Edward had landed safely in Flanders six weeks earlier, but thereafter his fortunes had resumed their familiar downward trajectory. Soon after their landing his troops had fallen to fighting among themselves, further reducing the strength of an already inadequate army. Some of his allies, he discovered, had been defeated by the French the previous week; others meanwhile, despite the enormous sums they had been paid, had not yet materialised. The count of Flanders himself had turned out, and had escorted the English to Bruges, but the locals there had proved altogether less welcoming, and the threat of insurrection had forced the king and his host to flee to the more defensible city of Ghent, where they had remained ever since. Edward, it is true, had succeeded in putting some pressure on Philip IV: his ally and son-in-law, the count of Bar, had led some Welsh troops on plundering raids into French territory. As one chronicler attests, however, ‘the king was surrounded by perils’. It must have come as a considerable relief when, on 9 October, the French agreed to a two-month truce.¹⁹

Nevertheless, Edward was not about to abandon his Continental campaign, nor was he going to be distracted by events back home. By the time the truce was sealed, for example, he must have known of Warenne’s defeat at Stirling Bridge, yet when he wrote to the regents a week later, it was to urge them to send more money to Flanders, so that his still-absent German allies might be induced to appear. Soon after this (for news could travel between London and Flanders in under a week) he must have been presented with the deal that had been reached in England. It can hardly have pleased him. Before leaving for Flanders his own attitude towards his opponents had been uncompromising; now, it seemed, he was expected not only to bow to their demands but also to forgive them their trespasses. According to Walter of Guisborough, the king hesitated for three days before eventually making his decision, but in reality there was only one viable option. The Scots, he knew from experience, could easily be subdued at some later date; similarly, he could revisit the debate with his English subjects when circumstances were more propitious. But for the time being, it was imperative that he should keep up the pressure on Philip IV, for otherwise Gascony might be lost forever. The truce with France had only one month left to run. On 5 November, therefore, Edward did what expediency dictated and ratified the Confirmation of the Charters. As his messengers departed to carry his sealed approval back to England, the king looked expectantly to the east for the arrival of his German allies.²⁰

While the political leaders of England laboured to resolve their differences, their countrymen in the north had been left exposed to unaccustomed suffering and terror. The Scots had followed up their victory at Stirling Bridge with assaults on every town and stronghold in southern Scotland; by early October only a few embattled outposts, such as the castles at Berwick and Roxburgh, still remained in English hands. By this date, too, the people of northern England had already been sent into a panic by sporadic Scottish raids. Yet worse was still to come. In early November William Wallace – now in sole command following the death of Andrew Murray from wounds sustained at Stirling – led his army across the Border and subjected the populations of Cumbria and Northumbria to a harrying on a scale they had not experienced in living memory. ‘In all the monasteries and churches between Newcastle and Carlisle,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough, ‘the service of God totally ceased, for all the canons, monks and priests fled before the Scots, as did nearly all the people.’ Carlisle itself came under siege, and at the nearby priory of Lanercost the chronicler accused the invaders of indulging in ‘arson, pillage and murder’. The fury of the Scots was soon spent – by the end of November they had returned home, laden with spoil – but the devastation they had caused was long remembered, and served to cement Wallace’s reputation in England as a bloodthirsty bogeyman.²¹

As the north burned, significant developments were occurring on other fronts. Back in Westminster, the regents had received the king’s ratification, and the earls had resolved to march against the Scots. In Flanders, meanwhile, there had been a discreet but dramatic shift away from the idea of military action. Edward had now learned that his principal ally, the king of Germany, would definitely not be joining him, and this intelligence dashed any hopes of mounting a major campaign against France. As he explained in his letters home, the truce had lately been extended for three more months, and the plan now was to push for a permanent peace. This, however, meant it was even more imperative that he should seem strong in the coming weeks, and the king therefore concluded by instructing his regents to send additional troops over from England in advance of the final negotiations.²²

Thus, as the tumultuous year 1297 drew to a close, the atmosphere everywhere was one of anxious anticipation. The earls and barons of England readied themselves to ride north, and the Scots steeled themselves for the oncoming assault. In Wales large numbers of men were recruited to provide the English with the necessary infantry, and in Flanders their king waited to see whether the essential diplomatic breakthrough could be achieved.²³

For Edward, the anxiety ended on 28 January 1298, when an agreement with France was finally reached. Under its terms, both sides agreed to suspend hostilities for a further two years, and to put their quarrel over Gascony to the judgement of the pope. If this was not the permanent peace that the English king had hoped for, it was nevertheless about as good a deal as he could reasonably expect in the circumstances. His legal and moral case for retaining the duchy was likely to be far more persuasive than the distinctly limited military pressure he had been struggling to apply for the past three-and-a-half years. In the immediate term, moreover, the new truce meant that he could stand down his forces in Flanders and return home: a week after it was sealed, the king ordered a hundred ships to come and carry him back to England.²⁴

A ceasefire with France also meant a rethink for Scotland. As soon as the truce was in place, Edward sent letters postponing the planned invasion until his return. On the face of it this was a terrible waste of resources: by the time the royal messengers arrived, the English army, 16,000 men strong, had already relieved Roxburgh and Berwick, and was just about to advance into the Scottish interior. From the king’s point of view, however, it was more important that he should lead the assault in person. An under-resourced or ill-commanded effort (and, though Edward can hardly have known it, the earls’ army was already facing shortages) ran the risk of another failure and that was a completely unconscionable prospect. By the same token, the thought of victory being achieved in his absence was not an altogether happy one either. The diminished army now paused on the Border was composed in large part of men who had opposed him the previous year, and he did not wish to hand these individuals any further political advantage. When Edward returned from Flanders – he landed at Sandwich on 14 March 1298 – it was with a determination to reassert his authority not only in Scotland, but in England as well.²⁵

But Scotland had to come first, which meant that for the time being the king had to continue to appease his English critics. Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun were equally determined to defend the guarantees of good government they had obtained the previous year, and so the parliament that was summoned for York at the end of May could well have proved contentious. (It would be the first occasion that Bigod and Edward had stood face to face since their row at Salisbury fifteen months earlier.) In the event, though, the meeting seems to have passed without incident; it may have helped that, immediately after his return, as was his wont, the king had launched a major inquiry into ministerial abuse. Soon the assembly at York was over, and an ostensibly united English army rode out from the city to deal with the Scots. Some suspicion still lingered within their ranks. As they rode north, Bigod and Bohun heard it whispered that Edward was secretly planning to disregard the Confirmation of the Charters on the grounds that his ratification had been given overseas; when they reached the Border, the earls refused to go further without reassurances that this was not the case. Once again, the king adopted a conciliatory line, and induced four other magnates to swear on his soul that, once the Scots had been defeated, he would address his critics’ concerns. Bigod and Bohun declared themselves satisfied, and the army began its advance.²⁶

It was massive. The infantry alone, as their pay rolls attest, amounted to almost 26,000 men; the cavalry, numbering perhaps as many as 3,000, was also mightily impressive. Clearly, Edward had been wise to postpone: the French truce had not only allowed him to redeploy his forces from Flanders; the spring had also witnessed the return of the English veterans from Gascony, led by the earl of Lincoln, who now rejoined the king. Patriotism, too, goes some way to explaining the large cavalry numbers, for the English military classes burned to avenge Stirling Bridge. The main reason, however, for the exceptionally high turnout probably lay in the nature of the campaign, as confirmed in the recent parliament. The Scottish nobility – many of whom had been released in return for fighting in Flanders – had also been summoned to appear at York. But inevitably they had failed to do so, and as a result had been declared disinherited. The English were setting out, said Peter Langtoft, ‘to take vengeance, and to deprive the Scots of land and tenement’. This, in other words, was not a punitive campaign like that of 1296, intended to bring errant vassals back into line: it was a new war of conquest, of the kind that had led to the carve-up of Wales. Victory in Scotland now held out to the English aristocracy the enticing prospect of rich and (to judge from Dunbar) easy pickings. They had been summoned to fight by virtue of their fealty, but they turned out in great numbers in expectation of gain.²⁷

Before this redistribution of wealth could occur, however, there was a dragon to be slain in the form of the Scottish army and its undisputed leader, William Wallace (or rather Sir William Wallace, for the people’s champion had since been knighted and named as his country’s sole Guardian until John Balliol could be restored). The only problem lay in locating the beast. As the English advanced into Scotland, burning and wasting as they went, no sign of the enemy was seen, and no intelligence could be had. After a week of fruitless provocation they paused at Kirkliston, a few miles west of Edinburgh, where supplies were expected by sea. But another week passed with no word of Wallace and, worse still, no food from England. Contrary winds prevented the majority of ships from getting through; those that did arrive were mostly carrying wine. Drunken fighting soon broke out between the English and Welsh infantry, and the latter withdrew, threatening to side with the Scots. According to Guisborough, Edward showed only cool disdain, saying, ‘Who cares if our enemies joined together? We shall beat them both in a day.’ But there could be no disguising the fact that his campaign had run into serious difficulty.

Then, suddenly, on the morning of 21 July, the longed-for news arrived. The king was about to retire to Edinburgh to reconsider his strategy when a spy reported that the Scots were just twenty miles to the west, readying themselves to attack the English army as it retreated. ‘Praise God, who up to now has delivered me from all difficulties,’ said Edward. ‘They shan’t have to follow me, for I shall go to meet them this very day.’²⁸

It was not, in fact, until the dawn of the next day that the king finally caught up with his quarry, whose spears were spotted on high ground close to the town of Falkirk. For the English this brought a welcome end to weeks of uncertainty, and an especially restless twenty-four hours. They had spent the previous night camped at nearby Linlithgow in fearful expectation of a Scottish ambush: every rider – including Edward himself – had slept on the ground next to his standing horse (‘with their shields as pillows,’ said Guisborough, ‘and their armour as bedclothes’). For one fraught moment it had seemed that their foes were indeed upon them; a rumour that the king had been wounded had caused an abortive rush to arms. Edward, it turned out, had been hurt in the night, but by rather more prosaic means. His horse, carelessly kept by its groom, had trodden on him.²⁹

Now, in the clear light of day, it was apparent that the Scots had abandoned all thought of ambush; in the distance they could be seen arraying themselves ready for battle. To compensate for his inferior numbers, Wallace had adopted a defensive strategy. His army was drawn up on the side of a small hill, at the foot of which ran an insubstantial stream. His greatest asset, the massed pikemen of his infantry, were arranged in four great circular brigades, or ‘schiltroms’, as the Scots called them. With their bristling spears turned outwards, these giant hedgehogs would give the foot soldiers a fighting chance against a cavalry charge. Nestled between them for protection were the archers of Selkirk Forest, while the Scottish cavalry were stationed at the rear. Both these contingents, however, were tiny in comparison with their English counterparts.³⁰

The strength of Wallace’s formation is well attested by the reaction of his opponent. Edward, when advised of it, was inclined to be cautious: superiority in numbers only counted for so much. The last time he had charged uphill at a supposedly inferior foe, the result had been a disastrous defeat. That, of course, had been at Lewes, well over three decades earlier, and was, to be fair, his first taste of battle. But when one remembers that the king’s most recent battlefield experience was the almost equally distant engagement at Evesham, the reason for his caution becomes even more apparent. Edward was now in his sixtieth year; his hair, once blond, had turned to snowy white. In general terms he was in remarkably robust health, but on this particular morning, thanks to his night-time mishap, he was nursing two broken ribs. Having arrived at Falkirk, he proposed pitching camp, and allowing his tired and hungry troops to feed themselves and their horses. His commanders, however, would have none of it: hesitation, they argued, would leave them once again exposed to attack. The king in due course agreed. The order to advance was given, and the Battle of Falkirk began.³¹

At first, Wallace’s strategy seemed as if it might well work. The first line of the English cavalry, led by the earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, thundered towards the Scots, but immediately ran into difficulty. The little stream they had dismissed as an insubstantial obstacle in fact fed a much larger area of boggy marsh, which halted their headlong charge and sent them veering to the left. The second line, commanded by the bishop of Durham, swerved right to avoid the same pitfall. It soon became apparent, however, that these initial diversions had done the Scots no favours. The marsh, while protecting them from a frontal assault, had merely forced their opponents to attack from the sides, and the Scots now found themselves caught in a pincer. Their schiltroms, as expected, were highly successful in deterring the English cavalry, but this simply meant that the cavalry concentrated on the softer target presented by the Scottish archers. Eventually the schiltroms stood alone, at which point the English infantry unleashed a hail of stones and arrows, which ultimately caused so many casualties among the spearmen that they broke ranks. Seeing that their enemies had lost their defensive advantage, the English cavalry rode back in, and the Scottish slaughter was complete.³²

The Scottish cavalry – that is, the Scottish nobility – had fled at the start of the battle. (‘Without a sword’s blow,’ said Guisborough, derisively.) This has given rise to the pernicious but persistent myth that they secretly despised Wallace as a common upstart, and were actually in league with Edward I. As we have already seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The nobles of Scotland had from the first defied the English king and were quite ready to resist him. What separated them from the unfortunate archers and infantry at Falkirk was not their commitment to the patriotic cause, but their ability to flee when they realised that defeat was inevitable. We should not be too quick to condemn as cowards men who faced such overwhelming odds: it was massive numbers and superior firepower, not treachery, that led to the English victory. Nor should we pretend that the behaviour of the Scottish cavalry in any way divided them from their general. Wallace too escaped from Falkirk – presumably on the back of a horse.³³

The decision of the Scottish nobles to flee the field, far from condemning their country to defeat, in fact proved to be its saving grace. Had they been captured at Falkirk, as they had been at Dunbar two years before, resistance would have come to a swift end. As it was, their flight meant that the recent battle, although extremely bloody, was quite indecisive. Edward had succeeded only in killing a lot of Scottish commoners (and, to judge from the sudden drop in his infantry wages, a lot of English ones as well). Irritatingly, he now had no choice but to conduct a massive manhunt. The king therefore dismissed his surviving foot soldiers and set out with his cavalry to catch the Scottish fugitives.³⁴

His first target (after the castle at Stirling, which fell in a fortnight) was Robert Bruce. It is not known whether the young earl was among the Scottish nobles at Falkirk (frustratingly, very few of their names are known), but certainly Edward’s decision to pursue Bruce destroys the fanciful notion that he had fought on the English side. When, in August, the king and his men rode west into Bruce’s earldom of Carrick, it was with the clear hope of capturing a man whom they regarded as one of the main leaders of Scottish resistance. Once again, however, their quarry eluded them. By the time they reached the west-coast town of Ayr, Bruce had burned his castle there and disappeared. Once again, the English ran into difficulties when their fleet failed to make the appointed rendezvous. After a week of waiting in vain, the king was forced to cut short his operations. Plans to move into Galloway were abandoned, and the cavalry instead rode down Annandale, seizing the Bruce castle of Lochmaben, but heading in the direction of England.³⁵

The flight of his enemies, the lack of supplies – these were both serious problems. But what finally crippled Edward’s campaign was an argument with his earls over the spoils of war. The English magnates had set out for Scotland excited at the prospect of acquiring new estates, but at the same time anxious to ensure that the redistribution was equitable. After the conquest of Wales the king had given a lot of land to his closest friends (for example, the earls of Surrey and Lincoln), but to others (notably Norfolk and Hereford) he had given nothing at all. For this reason, it seems, Bigod and Bohun had obtained a royal guarantee that, on this occasion, no grants would be made without their prior approval. As the army retreated from Ayrshire, however, Edward revealed how little store he set by this promise when he spontaneously awarded the Isle of Arran to an Irish adventurer called Hugh Bisset. Bigod and Bohun were stunned, and seem to have concluded that, although they had fought in the first line at Falkirk, they were once again going to be last in line for reward. At the start of September, when the army reached Carlisle, they made their excuses and left for home.³⁶

Realising his mistake, Edward endeavoured to repair the damage. A few days after the departure of the earls and their followers, he began doling out Scottish estates to those men who still remained with him. Naturally, loyalists such as Lincoln were generously rewarded. But, says Guisborough, the king kept some land in reserve lest he should anger those who had already left, and the chronicler’s comments find echo in royal letters sent out a week or so later, in which Edward tactfully promised to put his magnates in possession of the property he had granted ‘or had intended to grant them’. But all of this smacked of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. For years afterwards, to judge from comments made by Peter Langtoft, men would go about saying that the redistribution of estates in Scotland had been unfair. An opportunity had existed to give a large number of Englishmen a vested interest in completing the conquest of Scotland, but the king had foolishly squandered it.³⁷

The campaign of 1298 was clearly at an end, but Scotland was nowhere near subjugated. With the country’s native leaders still at large, there was no hope of re-imposing the kind of civilian administration that had temporarily held sway in 1296 and 1297. English power in Scotland was now limited to the castles captured during the summer – Edward’s last action in the autumn on 1298 was to march the remaining rump of his army along the Border to take the castle at Jedburgh. When the king quit Scotland in October, he left behind him a military occupation of isolated garrisons, with all the danger and expense that that implies. It was his hope that this fragile structure would survive until the following summer, but within just a few weeks he was advised that his positions in Scotland were coming under renewed attack. A frustrating fortnight spent at Newcastle in November failed to get any help to the beleaguered English troops at Stirling. At the end of the year Edward rode south knowing that only another full-scale invasion would suffice.³⁸

The king’s return to England, however, refocused attention on the solemn promise he had made at the start of the summer: namely, that he would satisfy his subjects that he was sincere in his wish to uphold Magna Carta, the Forest Charter and the other concessions he had granted the previous year. Edward might well have argued that, having ratified them in Flanders, he had already given his word. Unfortunately, though, on one particular issue, his subjects felt that he had already broken it.

The issue in question concerned the Royal Forest, which, as we have already noted, was a deeply resented institution. The term itself is misleading to modern ears, for it suggests little more than a few areas of woodland set aside for the king’s personal use: such indeed, had been the Forest’s original function. But in the twelfth century the scope of the Forest had been massively extended, to include vast swathes of the English countryside, both wooded and unwooded. It is an oft-repeated but nonetheless impressive fact that almost all of Essex was officially designated as ‘Forest’.

The reason for this expansion was financial. The Royal Forest was governed by its own law, and anyone caught breaking it – by killing a deer, for example, or by cutting down a tree – was liable to be fined. It did not matter that such infringements might be committed by individuals on their own lands within the Forest. Nor did transgressors have much in the way of legal recourse if caught. The Forest was an arbitrary jurisdiction that stood completely apart from the rest of the judicial system. The king and his foresters could impose fines, and even death, entirely at will.³⁹

It is easy to understand, therefore, why people would wish to have the running of the Royal Forest regulated – hence the Forest Charter – and easier still to see why they would wish to escape it altogether. The very first clause of the Charter held out just such a tantalising prospect, for it promised that the extent of the Forest would be reviewed. ‘Good and law-worthy men,’ to use the Charter’s own words, would walk or ride through the Forest to determine what its original bounds had been prior to the later expansions. Contemporaries coined a name for this inspection process: they called it a perambulation.⁴⁰

Having regranted the Forest Charter in 1297, Edward could reasonably be regarded as bound by the same promise. Indeed, during his absence in Flanders, his regents had gone so far as to order a perambulation of the Forest soon after they had confirmed the Charters. The king himself, on the other hand, had been suspiciously noncommittal. According to Walter of Guisborough, he had promised a new perambulation to his critics in May 1298 as part of his wider effort to quell public concerns on the eve of his march to Scotland. Since then, however, there had been a notable silence. The closest Edward had come to addressing the issue had been his appointment in November of commissioners to look into the offences committed by his Forest officials – an act that fell far short of public expectations.⁴¹

This royal procrastination was not entirely capricious. As far as the king was concerned, there was simply no need for a perambulation to take place, for the good reason that it had already happened when the Forest Charter had first been issued. In 1225 the teams of ‘good and law-worthy men’ had carried out their task, and Henry III had duly conceded that large areas of Royal Forest should no longer be classed as such. Edward was therefore happy to confirm the Forest Charter, but he regarded its opening clauses – that is, those promising a perambulation – as redundant.

Unfortunately for the king, the issue was not quite so cut-and-dried as he believed (or pretended). A perambulation had indeed been performed in 1225, and the extent of the Forest had been reduced in line with the perambulators’ findings. But, just two years later, Henry III had arbitrarily reclaimed certain areas as Forest. It was all a long time in the past, but local communities tended to have elephantine memories when it came to such executive injustices, and now believed that the moment had come to settle a long-standing score with the king’s government.⁴² Moreover, it was not just the inhabitants of debatable areas of Forest that viewed the issue as important. Edward’s failure to proceed with a new perambulation by the end of 1298 raised serious questions about his general trustworthiness, and this touched everyone. The king had solemnly sworn to uphold Magna Carta and the Forest Charter – documents that, seventy years after their original publication, had attained the status of semi-sacred texts. Any attempt to reinterpret their contents in the Crown’s favour, no matter how cogently argued, was bound to create a world of trouble.

Edward appears to have been blithely unaware of the storm that was brewing. When, in early February 1299, he summoned a parliament to Westminster, it was professedly in order to obtain advice about Gascony. (Happily, the pope had ruled that the duchy should be returned to English control, but the French had as yet to agree to the details.) The king might perhaps have imagined that the opposition would have been diminished by the death of Humphrey de Bohun. The outspoken earl had died on the last day of December, to be succeeded by his namesake son, but only in the tenurial sense: there is no good evidence to suggest that the new, twenty-two-year-old earl of Hereford adopted his father’s confrontational political stance.⁴³

If Edward was counting on quiet, however, then he was quickly disappointed. When parliament met in March there was, in Guisborough’s words, ‘great contention’. The opposition, now led solely by Roger Bigod, remained strong in voice and in number, and demanded that the king honour his much-repeated promise to confirm the Charters. Edward’s unpreparedness is suggested by his uncharacteristically flustered response. After several days of fruitless debate, he guaranteed his critics an answer on the morrow, but then slipped out of the city in secret at dawn the next day. When his exasperated opponents caught up with him at Harrow, the king blamed his sudden exit on Westminster’s noxious air and again assured them of an answer if they would return to London.⁴⁴

The response, when it finally came, provoked outrage. Edward reissued the Charters, but it soon transpired that he had tampered with their contents. Not only had he added a catch-all reservation, ‘saving the rights of our Crown’, he had also deliberately omitted the first five clauses of the Forest Charter – those that promised a perambulation and the reduction of the Royal Forest. At this, says Guisborough, parliament broke up, and the king’s critics returned to their own parts unpacified. Meanwhile, in the streets of the capital, Edward’s revisions came close to provoking a riot. On 2 April the city’s governors were ordered ‘to arrest, try and punish persons congregating by day and night, and speaking ill of the king’.⁴⁵

Realising that he still had a major struggle on his hands, Edward ordered parliament to reassemble the following month, and in the meantime took steps to counter his critics. From the first the opposition had enjoyed the support of the citizens of London, who still resented the king’s decision in 1285 to strip them of their ancient rights of self-government. This support had been mutual: while Edward had been in Flanders, Bigod and Bohun had presumed to relax the Crown’s control of the city, and had ordered the royal warden ‘to bear himself in all things as if he were mayor’. Now, a fortnight before parliament was due to resume, the king made his own bid for London’s support. On 17 April – Good Friday – he formally restored the city’s ancient liberties. Even then, he took no chances. Although parliament had been summoned to Westminster, its deliberations in the event took place at Stepney, to the east of the city – an attempt, perhaps, to avoid a repetition of the earlier civic unrest.⁴⁶

But the dissension continued. Bigod returned to London, said one chronicler, accompanied by a thousand horse, evidently determined to hold Edward to account. The king, though, still refused to give ground, and the opposition were again ‘exasperated by his irritable and empty words and prevarications’. When the session ended a fortnight later, it seems clear that nothing had been resolved. Edward left for Dover, in order to oversee the dispatch of ambassadors to France. Bigod, meanwhile, went west to the Welsh Marches, and his great castle at Chepstow, where engineers had been working through the winter to add giant crossbows to the top of the main tower. Others evidently returned home from parliament and began to voice their discontent. Now it was not just London but the whole country that was speaking ill of the king, saying openly that he did not intend to keep the Charters.⁴⁷

With his subjects everywhere railing against him, Edward had no choice but to cave in to his critics’ demands. On 25 June he issued an extraordinary propaganda letter, promising that a new perambulation of the Forest would begin in the autumn, and announcing that men had already been appointed to perform the task. Disingenuously, he blamed his opponents for the delays to date, and begged people not to believe the rumours that were circulating about his attitude towards the Charters. It was a remarkable declaration, not least for the efforts taken to publicise it, which in turn reveal the extent to which the royal credibility was felt to have collapsed. The king’s officials were told not only to proclaim the letters in towns and villages, but also to take with them ‘some worthy person of religion’ for the purpose. In Worcester, at least, the proclamation was made in English – ‘the mother tongue’, as the local chronicler called it.⁴⁸

A few days later Edward’s fortunes were notably improved, albeit on a different front. By the end of June his ambassadors were back from France with the news of a diplomatic breakthrough. A treaty had been agreed with Philip IV that would lead to a permanent peace and the restoration of Gascony, and it was to be cemented in the conventional manner. Edward’s son, the fifteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon, was to be married to Philip’s daughter, Isabella. Since, however, the princess was only three years old, their wedding would have to wait for some years. In the meantime, there was to be a more immediate match. Edward himself would marry Philip’s sister, Margaret – sufficiently mature at seventeen, though perhaps not thrilled at the thought of being led to the altar to a man more than three times her age.⁴⁹

But with the possible exception of Margaret, everyone was much happier at the end of the summer than they had been at the start. The king’s climbdown on the perambulation, the joyous event of his marriage, the prospect of a lasting French peace: all this combined to cool the political temperature at the English court. When the bride-to-be arrived at Dover on 8 September, the welcome party that met her off the boat was led not only by Edward of Caernarfon, but also by Roger Bigod, recently returned from his two-month sojourn in the March. Similarly, when the wedding ceremony took place two days later, it was performed at the door of the Canterbury Cathedral by the king’s other long-standing critic, Archbishop Winchelsea. The nuptials were followed by several days of feasting and chivalric celebration, and a glance at the guest list reveals the extent to which good relations between Edward and his earls had been restored.⁵⁰

In part this was due to the rapid rate of renewal among the higher aristocracy in recent years. Besides Bigod, the only other veterans at Canterbury were Surrey and Lincoln, who in any case were archloyalists. As for the rest, they had all succeeded to their father’s titles in the past three years. The new earls of Hereford, Warwick and Lancaster were all young men in their twenties, as was Aymer de Valence, son and heir of the king’s late half-uncle, and de facto earl of Pembroke. As such, they must have had a different relationship with Edward – one that, given the king’s already legendary reputation, was likely to have been more unquestioningly devoted than that of their predecessors. Such men were in addition keen to prove their prowess, not only in the tournament that took place at Canterbury, but also in war.⁵¹

And war was now back at the top of the agenda. Throughout the summer, domestic politics and diplomacy had repeatedly delayed Edward’s intention to lead a new army against the Scots. With these problems now seemingly behind him, the king was once again ready to march north. A week after his wedding the order went out to muster at York on 12 November. Edward had conquered Wales in the depths of winter; he would do the same with Scotland.⁵²

Scotland itself had become a land of confusion. Defeat at Falkirk had severely dented the credibility of William Wallace and obliged him to stand down as his country’s sole Guardian. Leadership of the Scottish political community had now passed to two other young men, both in their twenties. One of them, as might be expected, was Robert Bruce, whose importance to the patriotic cause had received indirect acknowledgement from English efforts to apprehend him the previous year. The other was John Comyn, the son and heir of the man of the same name who had backed John Balliol during the Great Cause (which, for the record, made him Balliol’s nephew). Authority among the Scots, in other words, had passed to a new generation, but was split between the representatives of two traditionally hostile factions.⁵³

For those charged with the task of defending Scottish independence, Edward’s recent marriage had come as a bitter blow. ‘The people of Scotland are aware of the alliance between our king and the king of France,’ wrote the English constable of Lochmaben in October, ‘and they are greatly depressed about it.’ Since the Scots had been allied with France since 1295, they had hoped, not unreasonably, to be a party to the peace. But, in spite of French and papal pressure, Edward had adamantly refused to countenance their inclusion. To him Scotland was not a rival sovereign power, as France was, but a subordinate adjunct of his own kingdom. Those Scots who challenged him he regarded as nothing more than rebels, whom in due course he would chastise into submission.⁵⁴

Nevertheless, in order to get the peace he desired, Edward had been obliged to make one substantial concession. At the insistence of papal and French negotiators, John Balliol had been freed from English captivity. In July the deposed king of Scots had been escorted across the Channel and handed over to the pope’s representatives. To some Scots – John Comyn and his allies – this gave heart, for Balliol’s release was an essential first step on the road to his restoration. But for those who had always been opposed to Balliol’s kingship – that is, for Robert Bruce and his supporters – it was most unwelcome news. Within weeks of the prisoner’s transfer, the tension between the two sides boiled over. When they met at Peebles on 19 August, an argument broke out, then a fight. ‘John Comyn leaped at the earl of Carrick [i.e. Bruce]’, reported an English spy, ‘and seized him by the throat.’⁵⁵

And yet, despite the fact that their spies were able to report such dissension among the Scottish leaders, English commanders in Scotland generally had very little to smile about. Supplies were constantly running low, wages were in arrears, and garrisons were threatening to desert or mutiny. Everything was exacerbated by the attitude of the natives, who continually seized crops and horses. For all their political differences, one thing still united the Scots: the desire to resist their English occupiers.⁵⁶

Edward intended to pick up in Scotland precisely where he had left off the previous year. According to Walter of Guisborough, the king set out in November 1299 ‘wishing to break the Scottish siege of Stirling Castle’. Remarkably, the great fortress, so crucial for controlling the northern kingdom, was still in English hands despite a whole year of enemy assaults.⁵⁷

The prospect of success seemed very good. Although the long delay had been frustrating, it meant that the main supply depots at Carlisle and Berwick were now well stocked. Moreover, Edward now had the support of his leading subjects. When he rode north to York, all the earls who had attended his wedding rode with him. Even Roger Bigod, whose poor health prevented him from riding in person, sent his army of followers under the captaincy of his most senior household knight, John de Seagrave.⁵⁸

But by the time he arrived in York, the king was aware of a serious problem with infantry recruitment. Because of the winter weather, and because of a perceived diminution in the quality of the coinage (forged foreign pennies of low silver content had recently flooded the market), men were unwilling to serve. In response, Edward told his recruiting officers to be more persuasive, and permitted them to offer higher rates of pay. He also postponed the infantry muster, which had been due in a week, and moved it from Newcastle to Berwick.⁵⁹

When the king reached Berwick in mid-December, however, it was obvious that these extra inducements had not been nearly enough. Of the 16,000 foot soldiers he had ordered, only 2,500 had materialised. Worse still, it was now equally clear that there was virtually no support for the campaign among England’s knightly class. The earls may have accompanied the king with their retinues, but few other magnates had bothered to turn out (royal pay rolls reveal fewer than forty additional names). The cavalry’s absence, moreover, had nothing to do with bad weather or bad money. This was a deliberate, political boycott.⁶⁰

The king’s mistake, once again, had been his signal failure to deliver on the Charters. Unbelievably, despite his elaborate and heavily publicised promise of the summer, no perambulation of the Forest had taken place. Edward might have realised the danger this posed to his Scottish plans had he taken proper consultation during the autumn, but it seems that the artificial gaiety and harmony occasioned by his wedding had convinced him that this would not be necessary. The ‘parliament’ he had held the following month had actually been nothing more than a council of senior magnates, and as such had completely failed to gauge the mood of the country. The north-country chronicler Peter Langtoft was in no doubt that the king had gone to Scotland ‘ill-advised’, and blamed the low turnout on one reason above all. ‘Know for certain,’ he wrote, ‘that it was caused by the perambulation, which was not performed as was granted.’⁶¹

The only solution, as Edward himself now belatedly realised, was to have a full and frank discussion with his subjects of the kind he had consistently avoided since his return from the Continent. On 29 December writs went out summoning the biggest parliament England had seen since 1296. Earls, barons, knights and burgesses; bishops, priests, abbots and friars: all were instructed to assemble in London at the start of Lent ‘for the safety of the Crown and the welfare of the people’. Three days later, having seen in the new century at Berwick in what we may reasonably assume was an impotent rage, the king started out on his return. His mood during the journey south can hardly have been improved by the news that reached him en route. Stirling had finally surrendered to the Scots.⁶²

With patience wearing thin on both sides, the parliament that met in March was predictably lively. ‘Do you think I am a child, or a deceiver?’ asked Edward angrily when, according to one chronicler, his critics not only asked him to confirm the Charters but also required that their own seals be applied to the documents for greater security. In spite of Roger Bigod’s reassurances to the contrary (‘we know you to be a good and prudent prince,’ the earl reportedly told the king), most of Edward’s subjects must by now have felt that ‘deceiver’ was a fairly accurate description. Certainly, after three years of evasion and broken promises, they considered that the Charters, even with the extra concessions of 1297, were insufficient. In 1300 both the laity and the clergy (still lined up between Bigod and Winchelsea respectively) came to parliament armed with long lists of additional demands. In the clergy’s case the king simply turned a deaf ear. The Church had made it plain from the outset that it would offer the Crown no financial assistance, so why should the Crown offer the Church any redress?⁶³

Financial assistance, however, was something that Edward desperately needed, so some form of settlement with the laity had to be found. In the end, after three weeks of ‘long and exhausting’ argument, the king agreed to a new set of articles (‘The Articles upon the Charters’ is their modern label). For the most part they were concerned with the regulation of prise – still a very contentious issue because of the ongoing wartime demands – but they also created a new enforcement system for the Charters, whereby local worthies would be appointed in every county to ensure their upkeep. Taken in conjunction with the Charters themselves – now finally reissued on 28 March – this amounted to a substantial package of concessions. As Edward made clear in the preamble, he had granted it in expectation that henceforth his subjects would ‘be readier in his service, and more willingly helpful’.⁶⁴

But for most people the king had still not gone far enough. For all their length, the new articles had nothing to say about the most contentious issue of all, namely the Royal Forest. As parliament drew to a close, Edward appointed men to carry out the perambulation, but only on conditional terms. He continued to insist that, whatever the investigation’s findings, the ‘rights of the Crown’ must be protected – a proviso that would effectively render the whole exercise pointless. His critics therefore responded by upping their demands, and making their consent to the much-needed tax similarly conditional. A perambulation, promised or even performed, was now no longer enough: the Forest must actually be reduced in extent before any funds were collected. ‘When we have secure possession of our woods,’ they told the king, ‘we will willingly grant a twentieth, so that the folly of the Scots may be dealt with.’⁶⁵

It is extremely doubtful whether, in any circumstances, Edward would have agreed to such large demands in exchange for so small a subsidy. As it was, he could not afford to wait for months while the Forest was surveyed. His garrisons in Scotland were under attack and awaiting deliverance; a campaign was scheduled for the summer and must proceed as planned. If the knights of the shires would not grant him taxation, so be it: he would find another way to finance the coming expedition. But they could not deny that they owed him military service.⁶⁶

Or could they? As Edward left Westminster in April to spend the spring making his usual round of spiritual preparations in East Anglia, military service was once again being vigorously debated. The argument between the king and the knightly class had died down after his departure for Flanders, but in 1300 it had flared back into life. At the start of the year, no doubt greatly piqued by the boycott of his winter campaign, Edward had revived his earlier attempts to link military obligation to landed wealth: all men worth £40 a year had been instructed to turn out in the summer. This had provoked an immediate protest in the recent parliament and, although nothing had been conceded in writing, the king evidently decided to let the idea drop. On Easter Monday, when he was at St Albans, his earlier orders were revised. Sheriffs were now told merely to invite the £40 landowners to come to the muster (although, ominously, they were to note the names of those who refused).⁶⁷

But the debate did not end there. Such was the mood in the country, and so unpopular had the Scottish war become, that even traditional service obligations based on tenure were beginning to be contested. At some point in the spring of 1300, for example, the local gentry in County Durham turned out in support of foot soldiers who had been imprisoned by their bishop for deserting the winter campaign. The people of Durham, they declared, were ‘St Cutherbert’s Folk’, and as such not bound to provide any military service at all beyond the Rivers Tyne and Tees. Later, in early June, there were similarly extraordinary scenes in Yorkshire, when knights from all counties assembled to tell Edward that they owed him no service in Scotland. In this case the knights lost the argument: the king, as was his wont, resorted to the written record, and proved from a number of twelfth-century chronicles that there was a long tradition of service north of the Border. Nevertheless, the fact that Edward was having to go to such lengths to persuade his knightly subjects to fight flies in the face of Peter Langtoft’s assertion that men marched to Scotland in 1300 ‘well-willing’. Only for those who had been granted or promised lands in Scotland can that comment have held true. Many others clearly had to be argued into fighting, and this could produce distinctly limited results. The muster roll for the 1300 campaign noted that Hugh fitz Heyr, a Shropshire landowner of little consequence, was obliged by the terms of his tenure to serve in the king’s war ‘with bow and arrow’. It also noted that ‘as soon as he saw the enemy he shot his arrow, then went home’.⁶⁸

When the army eventually mustered in Carlisle at midsummer, the cavalry numbered around 1,700 mounted men – much better, that is, than the previous year, but not nearly as impressive as the 3,000 horse that had ridden into battle in 1298. The infantry situation was one of similar half-measures, in part due to the parlous state of royal finances. Having failed to obtain a grant of taxation, Edward knew he could not afford to field 26,000 foot soldiers as he had done at Falkirk. The Welsh, who had contributed 40 per cent of that impressive figure, were told on this occasion to stay at home. Officially this was their reward for ‘all the great work they have done in our service in the past’; in reality it was an ambitious experiment to balance the books. Wales, unlike England, was not subject to the niceties of parliamentary taxation, and in place of men from the valleys the king now wanted money. As Edward rode north, his commissioners were instructed to extract a subsidy from various Welsh districts, which would pay for an army of English foot soldiers – 16,000 had been ordered, though in the end only 9,000 turned up.⁶⁹

Nevertheless, the king’s 10,000-strong host looked impressive enough when it set out from Carlisle in early July. A poet in their midst captured something of the splendour of the scene: the colourful banners, the beautiful pennons hanging from the knights’ lances, the horses richly caparisoned with embroidered silks and satins. Looking behind him, he saw that ‘mountains and valleys were everywhere covered with sumpter horses, and wagons with provisions, and the train of tents and pavilions. The days’, he added, ‘were fine and long’.⁷⁰

As the army’s assembly in Carlisle implies, Edward’s strategy in 1300 was new. Eschewing the eastern route of his earlier campaigns, the king had chosen to concentrate on south-western Scotland, where the garrisons he had established in 1298 had latterly been subjected to repeated attack. Once his hold on this area – modern Dumfries and Galloway – had been consolidated, he would then be able to strike north into Ayrshire, and lay waste the lands of Robert Bruce.

His first target was the castle of Caerlaverock, which lay just a few miles across the Border on the opposite shore of the Solway Firth. Probably captured in the course of the Falkirk campaign, but subsequently retaken by the Scots, this castle and its small Scottish garrison had been making life miserable for their English neighbours at Dumfries and Lochmaben ever since. Their ability to resist a large army, however, was limited: Caerlaverock (which still stands today) is no Stirling. The newly built home of a prosperous local knight, it had been designed with the intention of keeping out local raiders, not repelling a wrathful English king. For a few days in July 1300 its defenders manfully withstood some showy assaults by the English chivalry, but once Edward’s fleet arrived with his heavy siege equipment, they recognised that the game was up. By the middle of the month, in exchange for life and limb, the garrison had surrendered.⁷¹

Yet even before this minor victory had been obtained, the wheels of the English war machine had started to wobble. Although only days had elapsed since their departure from Carlisle, the infantry were already beginning to desert in droves. On 15 July, as he moved from Caerlaverock to Dumfries, the king gave orders that all such fugitive foot should be arrested. But as he moved further west, the haemorrhage continued: on 27 July, orders were sent out to raise replacement contingents. The Scots, who on this occasion had wisely decided to avoid battle, were able to watch from a distance as their enemies evaporated. By the time Edward finally caught up with them on 8 August, half his army was gone. All that followed was a brief, botched skirmish on the banks of the River Cree near Wigtown, which saw the Scots running for the hills and the English, as in the past, left with nothing to do. After a week of pointless waiting, the king turned around and headed back in the direction of Dumfries.⁷²

As the end of August approached, Edward drew up his depleted forces just south of Dumfries and encamped them in the once-serene surroundings of Sweetheart Abbey. Like nearby Caerlaverock, Sweetheart was another recent addition to the local landscape – it had been founded by John Balliol’s mother – and it bespoke a similar, sadly misplaced confidence that Border warfare would remain a thing of the distant past. Now, as a frustrated English king paused in its precinct and considered his diminishing range of military options, the abbey found itself in the middle of a war zone – a situation that made the unannounced appearance of the archbishop of Canterbury all the more surprising. Winchelsea, rather shaken from a perilous journey across the quicksands of the Solway Firth, came bearing a letter from the pope.⁷³

Edward might well have anticipated news to lift his spirits. Boniface VIII, elected in 1294, was not only the broker of the slowly progressing Anglo-French peace but an old personal friend. The two men had met over thirty years earlier, during the last stages of the Montfortian civil war, when the then-young papal notary had been among those trapped in the Tower of London, until the then-young Lord Edward had secured his deliverance. The episode had apparently had a lasting impression on Boniface: even now, as the king was sat in Sweetheart Abbey, the pope was in his palace at Anagni, recalling it for the benefit of English ambassadors. ‘It was then,’ he said, ‘that we gave this king our par ticular affection, and formed the opinion … that he would be the finest prince in the world.’⁷⁴

But Boniface’s fond memories of Edward in 1300 only made the content of the letter that Winchelsea now read out all the more ironic. The pope had written it the previous year, after discussions with an especially persuasive Scottish embassy. Although it started in affectionate terms, it soon moved on to take the king to task over his intervention in Scotland, rehearsing in the process many of the Scots’ historical arguments for their independence. Edward was accused of having ignored these arguments; of having longed to occupy ‘a realm which was then destitute of the help of a king’; and, as a consequence, of having committed numerous ‘outrages of justice’: causing heavy losses to Scotland’s inhabitants; imprisoning Scottish clergymen until they died; occupying Scottish castles and monasteries (this last charge being especially pertinent, given the king’s current location). The pope concluded by telling Edward that ‘out of reverence of God, the Apostolic See and ourselves’ he should leave Scotland alone.⁷⁵

Such an unequivocal admonition from God’s representative on Earth could not be ignored, and would require a carefully considered response. In the immediate term, however, it made no great difference. The cold weather was already starting to set in, and the king’s army had crumbled away to nothing, leaving his campaign dead in the water. At the start of September, Edward dismissed those troops still with him and took ship across the Solway Firth to England.⁷⁶

Outwardly, he blamed everybody but himself for this latest military failure. In an undated letter to his new chief minister, Walter Langton, the king ordered the punishment of both the deserters themselves and the officials responsible for their recruitment. He also demanded the names of any lords who had obstructed the recruitment process, and insisted that any sheriffs who had failed to provide supplies should be chastised ‘so that they may be an example for the future’. As this list of scapegoats suggests, however, the real reason for the expedition’s collapse was a lack of resources and, above all, a lack of money. The cavalry, obliged to serve at their own expense, had on this occasion stayed the course; it was the infantry, starved of food and wages, that had deserted right from the start – an exodus that, as the best-informed chroniclers attest, had ultimately scuppered the English campaign.⁷⁷

Privately, of course, Edward appreciated that scarcity had been the root of his failure. He had gone to war knowing his treasury was short of funds, and embracing the desperate (not to say deluded) notion that this deficit could somehow be made good by tapping the wealth of Wales. As a result, he had succeeded merely in proving an obvious point, namely that the Welsh were insufficiently well-off to subsidise an English conquest of Scotland. What was needed, as the king had known all along, was a sum of money such as could proceed from only one source. Towards the end of September he bowed to the inevitable. Parliament was ordered to reassemble in January.⁷⁸

In the meantime, Edward remained in Cumbria, where he was rejoined by his new queen, Margaret. This reunion must have brought him some cheer, not least because Margaret had recently been safely delivered of her first child, a boy, born at Brotherton in Yorkshire and christened Thomas. Yet even this event, happy as it was, highlighted the contrast between the king’s current situation and his fortunes of old. His previous son had been born in the wake of a successful conquest, rather than in the middle of a seemingly endless war. In the autumn of 1300 Edward’s last act before returning south was to recross the Border for talks with the Scots. His distaste at having to compromise with men whom he considered to be rebels and traitors was clear, and he scoffed at their offer of a permanent peace. ‘Every one of you has done homage to me as chief lord of Scotland,’ he reminded them. ‘Now you set aside your allegiance and make a fool of me as if I were a weakling.’ In the end, all the king would grant was a six-month truce, and his promise that he would return in the spring to lay Scotland waste from sea to sea.⁷⁹

When parliament reconvened at the start of 1301 – in Lincoln, un accountably – Edward made no bones about the reason for the recall. ‘I am without money,’ he reportedly told the assembly. ‘I must have aid of my land if I am to recommence the war with Scotland.’ Such was his poverty, in fact, that the king now proposed that the knights and burgesses should grant him a fifteenth of their goods, rather than the twentieth they had offered the previous year. At this, says one chronicler, there was much disgruntled muttering.⁸⁰

Edward, of course, knew what parliament’s price would be. The perambulation of the Forest, so long postponed, had finally been performed during the past summer, and the results were now in the king’s possession. As he had feared, they weighed heavily against the Crown. Roughly half of the Royal Forest, it had been found, was an unjust extension; thousands of acres all over England were earmarked to be returned to ‘the community’.⁸¹

Lately, by dint of necessity, Edward had started to take the demands of his subjects seriously. In the autumn of 1300, for example, he had quietly instructed his officials to ensure that Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were kept in all their points. The perambulation of the Forest, however, he continued to regard as a ludicrous affair, and not without reason. The men appointed to determine the extent of the Forest had to rely in practice on the testimony of local juries, yet the very fact that these juries were local inevitably affected the nature of their testimony. Those who lived within the bounds of the Forest were only too happy to swear – as, for instance, they had just done in Warwickshire – that once upon a time their region had contained no Royal Forest at all. And ‘once upon a time’ was the perambulation’s second laughable aspect. The Forest Charter asked jurors to recall what the extent of the Forest had been at the start of the reign of Henry II – that is, in the year 1154. Even in 1225, when the Charter had first been published, this was a question that set great store by the collective memory of local communities. By 1300, to anyone even slightly bother ed about the burden of proof, it must have made the entire exercise seem invalid.⁸²

That was certainly the way that the king saw it, and he came to parliament prepared to argue his case. Edward had never trusted the flexible collective memory of his subjects. His first recourse had always been to the written record, and it was to the written record that he now once again turned. In the months leading up to the Lincoln assembly, royal clerks had been ferreting through their rolls, and even leafing through the venerable pages of the Domesday Book, in a quest for evidence with which the findings of the perambulation could be challenged.⁸³

On this occasion, however, the king’s resort to the documents had come too late; the time for negotiation had passed. Edward’s continual evasiveness and demonstrable bad faith in recent years had eroded his subjects’ goodwill and trust, and with it their willingness to compromise. It was now politically unrealistic for him to imagine that the country would accept anything less than a full endorsement of the perambulators’ findings. The fact that he may have had a strong case for contesting them was as irrelevant as it was ironic. The king had finally been backed into a corner, and faced a stark choice: approve the perambulation in its entirety, or forego the much-needed tax.

In desperation, Edward threw the challenge back into the face of his opponents. They too, he reminded them, were bound by their oaths of homage to uphold the rights of the Crown, just as he was bound to uphold them by his coronation oath. He would let the perambulation stand, but only if his critics advised him to do so; the responsibility for forcing his hand would thus be theirs. A committee of twenty-six men (its membership unknown, but presumably including Bigod and Winchelsea, both of whom were present) agonised, afraid they might one day be accused of treachery for their actions, and begged the king to take the decision himself. But Edward remained stubborn to the last, saying ‘he had no desire to ease his people with what was his’. In the end, therefore, the decision was left to the committee, and they chose the Charters over the Crown. On 14 February 1301 the king issued a new confirmation, and ordered that Magna Carta and the Forest Charter should stand ‘in all their points’. The findings of the perambulation, it was announced, would become effective without delay; ‘the community’ would be put in possession of what had become their Forest.⁸⁴

It is important to keep the scale of Edward’s defeat in perspective. What had happened to him in 1301 was nothing like what had happened to his father in 1258. During the great crisis of his reign Henry III had been reduced to a mere cipher, and executive power had been seized by his barons. Edward, by contrast, had been beaten only on a single issue; in all other respects he remained very much the imperious master of his own affairs. Indeed, when the Lincoln parliament had dared to complain about Walter Langton, the king’s palpably corrupt chief minister, and called for his dismissal, Edward had flown into an indignant rage, and silenced his critics with an impromptu lecture on the proper nature of lordship. ‘Perhaps everyone should have a crown,’ had been his sarcastic suggestion.⁸⁵

Nevertheless, defeat on the Charters, and in particular on the issue of the Forest, was painful and humiliating for a king who attached such overriding importance to the Crown’s rights and the sacred oath he had sworn to uphold them. Edward would never forget how ‘the stress of great necessity’ in 1301 had led to ‘the surrender of his hereditary right’. Nor would he forgive those whom he regarded as having forced this surrender upon him.⁸⁶

Although Edward considered the Lincoln parliament to be the lowest point in his political fortunes, it did at least solve his financial crisis – a new tax was set for collection in the autumn – and silence his domestic critics. His international affairs, on the other hand – the threefold problem posed by France, Scotland and the papacy – remained in seemingly insoluble disarray. It was now well over two years since the pope had ruled in favour of Gascony’s return, yet the French had still not surrendered possession. That left Edward reliant on continued papal pressure but, given his recently declared support for the Scots, Boniface now seemed an uncertain advocate for English interests. What if he were to insist on the Scots’ inclusion in the Anglo-French peace? The French had been arguing in favour of such a move for the past two years, almost certainly as a cynical tactic to frustrate the whole process. Even now, in the spring of 1301, French and Scottish ambassadors were meeting at Canterbury to put the suggestion of a three-way peace to Edward’s own representatives.⁸⁷

Edward, naturally, had no intention of accepting their proposal, nor even of renewing his truce with the Scots, which was set to expire in May. It had been expressly for the purpose of subduing his northern enemies that he had compromised his coronation oath; the first writs of summons for a new campaign had been sent out on the very day that the unpalatable deal with parliament had been struck. The king’s utter antipathy towards further negotiation is evident from his absence. At the time of the Canterbury talks Edward was in the west Midlands, having gone to Gloucestershire for the funeral of his cousin, Edmund of Cornwall – a black event more in keeping with his general mood.⁸⁸

Having reached its lowest point, however, the wheel of fortune began to turn slowly but perceptibly in the king’s favour. Soon after the Canterbury talks had ended, Edward was joined in the Severn Valley by several old and loyal friends, chief among whom was the earl of Lincoln, Henry de Lacy. Some six months earlier Lacy and his colleagues had been dispatched to the papal court, partly to fortify the existing English embassy there, and partly to offer a preliminary response to Boniface’s censorious letter. They now returned with glad tidings. Although nothing decisive had been achieved in relation to either Gascony or Scotland, the earl and his party had received a far more favourable reception from the pope than his letter had led them to expect, and this goodwill had translated into an immediate and tangible advantage. Boniface had lately joined Edward in his desire to subjugate a small but troublesome neighbour – in this case, the ever-tumultuous kingdom of Sicily – and to this end he had been trying for several months to levy a 10 per cent tax on all the churches of Europe. The ambassadors had therefore been able to strike a deal. It had been agreed that the pope could raise his tax in England for the next three years – and that half the profits would go to the king.⁸⁹

Here was excellent news! For the past five years the English Church, guided by Winchelsea, had refused to vote Edward any financial aid at all, on the grounds that such grants required prior papal approval. Now, on the pope’s express authority, the clergy would be obliged to furnish the Crown with a three-year tax of 10 per cent. This was definitely one in the eye for the stiff-necked archbishop and his supporters. Moreover, gloating apart, it meant a huge and unforeseen addition to the royal war-chest, already about to be replenished by the recent parliamentary subsidy. Together, these taxes would provide the king with the funds for a decisive Scottish campaign.

It only remained to wait for the return of his son. Edward of Caernarfon, lately turned seventeen, had grown to be tall, good-looking and physically accomplished, and his father – fast approaching sixty-three – had evidently decided that a transfer of authority would be timely. During the controversial Lincoln parliament the king had endowed his eldest boy with a substantial appanage, much as his own father had done almost half a century earlier. The grant included the earldom of Chester, but its principal component was the royal estate in Wales, and as such it came with a new title. ‘Prince of Wales’, used in the past only by the rulers of Gwynedd, was now revived for the heir to the English throne (in which capacity it has been used ever since). Young Edward, of course, born in Caernarfon, had been predestined for some kind of role in Wales, but he had not been back to the land of his birth until this moment. In April 1301 he returned to the principality, there to receive the homages of the Welsh themselves and also of the lords of the March. One month later he rejoined his father, who had been occupying himself in the Severn Valley with pilgrimages and hunting. They met at Kenilworth Castle, where the queen and other members of the royal family were also in residence. A fortnight later they rode north. Edward of Caernarfon had participated in the previous campaign, but his role, as nominal commander of one battalion, had been only a minor one. Now, as prince, his responsibility was greatly enlarged. As the king himself had explained in a letter to the earl of Lincoln, he hoped that his son would have ‘the chief honour of taming the pride of the Scots’.⁹⁰

Edward’s plan, revealed by his letters, was ambitious. Two separate armies, one led by the newly invested prince, the other by the king himself, would advance into Scotland from both ends of the Border, taking the south of the country in a pincer that would close at Stirling. From there they would march together into the north, leaving the rebels with nowhere left to run. This was to be the decisive campaign.⁹¹

The forces were accordingly formidable. For his own army Edward individually summoned over a thousand English landowners to provide cavalry service (a request that, now that the king had answered their criticisms, would be difficult to refuse). Royal recruiting officers, meanwhile, eventually rounded up some 7,500 foot soldiers – a figure not terribly impressive by itself, perhaps, but on this occasion the English were not fighting alone. Edward of Caernarfon’s army was mostly drawn from his new dominions in Wales and the March, and it was considerably larger than that commanded by his father; total expenditure suggests that the prince had almost twice as many infantry. Nor, moreover, was it just the Welsh who were rejoining the fray. For the first time since 1296, the justiciar of Ireland had been ordered to assemble an army, and the magnates of Ireland had been induced to participate by the pardon of their debts to the Crown. Some 650 additional horse and 1,600 extra foot were as a result ready to cross the Irish Sea. From every obedient quarter of Edward’s ‘British’ empire, men and matériel were being marshalled in great quantities so that the one remaining rebel province should finally be subjugated.⁹²

The prince’s army, mustered in Carlisle at midsummer, got off to an impressive start. Avoiding the route through Galloway that had proved problematic the previous year, they marched straight across country to the western seaboard, where they linked arms with their Irish allies. By the end of July Robert Bruce’s castle at Ayr, unmolested since 1298, had fallen in the face of their combined onslaught, and, within four further weeks, the neighbouring castle at Turnberry – Bruce’s birthplace – had also surrendered.⁹³

The king’s army, by contrast, was making somewhat slower progress. From his base at Berwick, Edward had set out on a similar inland route, obliging his host to hack its way through the vastness of Selkirk Forest, wherein Wallace and his fellow brigands had for a long time lurked. Nonetheless, by 21 August the English had reached Glasgow, and Edward was thus only thirty miles from his son’s army. Indeed, the two forces were close enough to communicate: on 2 September, the king heard news of Turnberry’s fall, and gave thanks for it in Glasgow Cathedral.⁹⁴

The pincer, however, was never fully closed. On 7 September a Scottish army appeared outside Lochmaben and began besieging the English garrison there. This, it seems, halted the northern advance of Edward of Caernarfon’s army and drew it back south – they could hardly push on with hostile forces attacking positions to their rear. A fortnight later and Lochmaben had been made secure again, but by this time the prince himself was heading further south, reportedly on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Ninian at Whithorn. This was not necessarily as dilatory as it sounds: the process of subjugating Scotland involved the appropriation of its regalia and relics, and such symbolic larceny was clearly feared by the Scots on this occasion. But it did mean that there was now no hope of the two hosts uniting.⁹⁵

The king’s men, meanwhile, were beset by the more familiar problem of dwindling resources. Even before Edward had reached Glasgow, various English sheriffs had been ordered, in menacing terms, to see that more merchants brought their wares north of the Border. At the same time, in every other theatre, supplies were being squeezed in a desperate attempt to shore up the king’s army. On 28 August the crossbowmen and archers at Berwick mutinied, having received no pay for a month. Yet by early September, when Edward began besieging Bothwell – a mighty stone fortress near Glasgow, seized by the Scots at the start of the year – two-thirds of his infantry had deserted.⁹⁶

Once Bothwell had surrendered, therefore – and the castle’s reduction took a further fortnight – the king decided to go for broke, and marched what remained of his army straight for Stirling. Elsewhere in Scotland, at Edinburgh and at Berwick, his officials strained to procure the engines and other equipment necessary to mount an effective siege. But in the end shortage of funds forced Edward to stop in October at Dunipace, some six miles short of his target. For three weeks he waited for fresh supplies to arrive, his mounting anger brilliantly illuminated by a series of increasingly irate letters to the exchequer. He is astonished, he says, that they have sent so little money; every time they have sent some it has been too little; they should ensure that their inefficiency does not cause him to withdraw; he has been unable to keep his promises to pay his men; every day more of them desert. The tirade concludes on 16 October with Edward in full King Lear mode, speculating in his impotence about what might have been. ‘But for lack of money,’ he blustered, ‘we would have bridged the Forth’, and had the river been crossed, ‘we are sure that we would have done such exploits against our enemies that our business would have reached an honourable and satisfactory conclusion.’⁹⁷

The king’s frustration, with the walls of Stirling in sight, is understandable, but his inclination to blame his officials was (as before) quite unfair. In one of his letters, dated 11 October, Edward informed the exchequer that he thought they should be well supplied with funds from the new parliamentary and papal taxes. Yet the collection of both these levies, as he must have known, had not been scheduled to begin until this point in the autumn; indeed, the king’s orders to assess the fifteenth had been issued only three days earlier, on 8 October. The failure to reach ‘an honourable and satisfactory conclusion’ in 1301 lay not with bureaucratic inefficiency, but with executive impatience. Edward had tried to deliver a knock-out punch but had only had time to draw his fist halfway back.⁹⁸

It remained to be seen whether anything could be salvaged from the campaign’s wreckage. In October the prospect seemed extremely bleak. As the king candidly admitted in his last letter to the exchequer, the desertion of his army left him ‘in danger of losing’ what he had won. Already the Scots were regrouping in Selkirk Forest and around Glasgow, while elsewhere newly established English positions were coming under direct attack. At Turnberry, the castle lately captured by Edward of Caernarfon was being besieged by a Scottish army, and the new garrison at nearby Ayr feared that they would be next. As for the prince himself, he could offer no assistance. His own army was now also dissipated, and his Irish allies had long since sailed for home. By this point he was back in Carlisle, unable to contribute anything beyond the news that ‘the castles of Lochmaben and Dumfries are feebly garrisoned, with troops lacking in victuals and other provisions’. Moreover, in addition to all these discouraging reports coming in from the field, Edward received intelligence in October from abroad. John Balliol, it transpired, had been released from papal custody and was at large in northern France. Rumour had it he was raising an army and was coming to reclaim his kingdom.⁹⁹

Given that Balliol had been detained at the pope’s pleasure, his release might naturally be interpreted as the pope’s own handiwork – a fresh and provocative expression by Boniface VIII of the unequivocal support for the Scots he had first voiced some two years earlier. In fact, however, this was almost certainly not the case. Boniface was by this point endeavouring to remain neutral on the subject of Anglo-Scottish relations. Although Scottish ambassadors to Rome were encouraged by the audience they received during the summer of 1301, so too were their English counterparts. The pope, for example, had declared himself much impressed with Edward’s historical justification of his position in Scotland (composed with the aid of the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, this celebrated letter had cited, among other proofs, the well-known fact of King Arthur’s superior lordship). Genuinely impressed or not, Boniface was certainly aware that his new and mutually beneficial financial arrangement with England was just about to take effect. He was not, therefore, going to rock the boat by taking any firm action in favour of the Scots.¹⁰⁰

Balliol owed his liberty in 1301 not to papal partiality, but to French pressure; which is to say that, while the pope no longer posed a problem for Edward, the king of France continued to be a major pain. Philip IV was still playing the Scottish card for all it was worth, insisting that he could not agree to a permanent peace without his allies, knowing that Edward would never agree to this, and calculating that in this way France’s grip on Gascony could be maintained indefinitely. No sooner had the English advanced into Scotland in 1301 than French ambassadors had arrived on the scene, trying to broker yet another truce. Balliol’s release, procured more or less simultaneously, was part of the same cynical ploy. The army that was reportedly going to restore the former king was to be provided by his French backer.¹⁰¹

The only conceivable way to read Edward’s reaction to this persistent interference is that he decided to play the French at their own game and call Philip’s bluff. In late October the king moved from Dunipace to Linlithgow, established a new headquarters and announced that it was his intention to remain in Scotland during the coming winter (‘to annoy his enemies,’ as he explained in letters sent out a short while later). At the same time, he sent his wily chief minister, Walter Langton, to France, in order to negotiate¹⁰²

As the year drew to a close Langton proceeded to arrange a remarkable treaty, the essential feature of which was that it invited the king of France to put his money where his mouth was. Under its terms, Edward agreed to a nine-month ceasefire with the Scots, and Philip agreed to enforce it. All the territory that the English king had captured in Scotland during his current campaign was to be handed over to French agents for the truce’s duration. Of course, for this to happen, Philip would have to do what to date he had not, and actually deploy some troops in aid of his Scottish allies. The English were obviously banking on the assumption that he would ultimately balk at this commitment. It is certainly impossible to believe, bearing in mind Philip’s previous form over the ‘temporary’ custody of Gascony, that Edward had any real intention of placing so much as an inch of territory into French hands.¹⁰³

Nevertheless, in Scotland this cynical exercise was taken seriously, with deeply damaging consequences for the patriotic cause. The fact of Balliol’s release lent credence to the far-fetched idea that Philip IV was about to sponsor the former king’s return and thereby effect the Scots’ salvation. In some quarters, of course, this was a cause for celebration – the Comyns imagined they were about to regain the lost leader in whose name they were fighting – but for Robert Bruce and his supporters, it marked the end of the road. Bruce had already seen his fortunes decline of late. The previous year he had been nudged out of office as a Guardian; the past summer he had seen his lands once again wasted by English armies and his castles occupied by English troops. The prospect of Balliol’s restoration, which could only increase his grief, proved too much to bear. At some point during the winter of 1301–2, Bruce rode to Lochmaben Castle and turned himself in.¹⁰⁴

At the start of the new year, therefore, Edward’s decision to sit out the winter in Scotland had been almost entirely vindicated. In spite of the ongoing shortages, he had managed to sustain an impressive show of strength at Linlithgow, being joined there for Christmas by his eldest son, the prince of Wales, and also by his queen (lately delivered of another baby boy, named Edmund). Now there was much more to celebrate besides. News arrived from France of the truce’s successful conclusion, which meant he could leave Scotland knowing his recent gains would remain secure. News arrived from Lochmaben of Bruce’s surrender: at last his enemies were beginning to weaken and acknowledge his authority. The king was clearly in a jubilant mood as he prepared to leave Linlithgow. On 20 January, a ‘Round Table’ tournament was held at nearby Falkirk – another brazen display of power, staged on the field of his earlier victory.¹⁰⁵

The best news of all, however, came a few weeks later, when Edward was paused on the Border at Roxburgh. On 16 February, according to the recent treaty, the French were supposed to take possession of the recent English gains in Scotland; as predicted, the date passed without a Frenchman in sight. The king’s bluff had worked, and the essential emptiness of the Franco-Scottish alliance had been duly exposed. Edward was left completely free to tighten his grip on his newly won territories. Even before the king had re-entered England, Master James of St George had set out for the north.¹⁰⁶

Of course, exposing the emptiness of the Franco-Scottish alliance was one thing; persuading the king of France to abandon it was another. Although he had signally failed to assist the Scots, Philip IV was unembarrassed about continuing to use them as his excuse for retaining Gascony. When French negotiators reappeared in England in the spring, they still insisted, much to Edward’s annoyance, that no final peace between England and France could proceed unless Scotland was also included.¹⁰⁷

What eventually solved this seemingly intractable diplomatic problem for the English king was an unexpected and dramatic turn of events in Flanders. Four years earlier, when he had cut short his Continental campaign, Edward had left his Flemish allies to their fate. Philip IV had soon moved in with his forces, occupying Flanders and removing its ruler in much the same manner that Edward had subjugated Scotland. Now, in the summer of 1302, the French king was to suffer a similar patriotic backlash. When the citizens of Bruges rose up and killed their French occupiers, Philip dispatched a large French army to quell their rebellion. On 11 July it met with an opposing force of Flemings outside the town of Kortrijk (Courtrai) and was completely annihilated. This was no ambush, of the kind that humiliated the English at Stirling Bridge. It was rather as if the Scots had won the day at Falkirk. At Kortrijk, the elite cavalry of France were wiped out by an infantry army of Flemish townsmen. Hundreds of French lords fell, including several counts, and the king’s chief minister, Pierre Flote. So many rich trophies were stripped from their bodies that the encounter became known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs. It was a victory so worthy of remembrance that it is still commemorated in Flanders today.¹⁰⁸

In England news of the French defeat, which happened to coincide with a parliament in Westminster, was received with ill-disguised glee. ‘Much was the weeping and sorrow/In all of France, both young and old,’ crowed one English songwriter in a ballad celebrating the battle. The news seemed all the more propitious in that it coincided with an almighty row that had recently erupted between Philip IV and Boniface VIII. In response to Philip’s maltreatment of a French bishop, Boniface had delivered a damning indictment of the king and his government; Philip had retaliated with his own poisonous propaganda, publicly denouncing Boniface and questioning his fitness to hold office. As their quarrel escalated into one of the greatest Church–State conflicts of the Middle Ages, each side became increasingly anxious to ensure their stance had sufficient international backing. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be friends with the king of England.¹⁰⁹

Edward, therefore, having done very little since his return south beyond hunting, spending time with his family and visiting his favourite shrines, found that the tectonic plates of European diplomacy had shifted decisively in his favour. In an effort to win English support for his struggle with France, Boniface dropped the Scots like a stone. In August he wrote to the bishop of Glasgow, Robert Wishart, chastising him for encouraging the patriotic cause, and at the same time sent letters to all the other bishops in Scotland, enjoining them to be obedient to the English king.¹¹⁰

Similarly, when talks with France resumed in the autumn, the English negotiators found that their French counterparts now spoke with an unaccustomed sincerity about their desire for a permanent peace: Edward was actually invited to visit France so that a treaty could be finalised. This suggestion, however, was rejected. The king of England would be staying at home, it was explained, to crush the rebels in Scotland; for the time being, France would have to settle for another truce. Nevertheless, that a decisive shift in French policy had taken place was plain for all to see and Edward made sure that it was seen by giving it widespread publicity, especially north of the Border. When the truce was renewed at the end of November, it was an exclusive, two-way affair: of the Scots there was no mention.¹¹¹

With the papacy now actively condemning the Scots for their rebellion, and the French having forsaken them as allies, Edward’s chances of succeeding in Scotland looked stronger than ever before. In other directions too, circumstances seemed auspicious. England remained politically quiescent; parliamentary and papal taxes approved the previous year had now been harvested; for the first time since the war’s outbreak, royal receipts exceeded expenditure.¹¹²

Success, however, was by no means a foregone conclusion. The apparently ceaseless conflict had ground down the goodwill of the king’s subjects in England, who were resisting royal demands for prise and the provision of ships. As a result, English resources in Scotland were stretched perilously thin. Nothing illustrates the weakness of Edward’s grip better than the sorry predicament of Master James of St George, who had been charged with the construction of new fortresses at Selkirk and Linlithgow. To cement the conquest of Wales, James had been allowed virtually unlimited funds, and had, in consequence, created some of the greatest castles in the world: even during the crisis years of the mid-1290s, the exchequer had found him £250 a week to build Beaumaris. Now, by contrast, he was expected to make do with just a twelfth of that sum – a mere £20 a week. Such budgetary constraints explain why there is no Conwy or Caernarfon to be found in Scotland today. At the end of his career, the king’s great master mason was reduced to the ignominy of working in wood.¹¹³

The extreme fragility of the English hold was exposed early in the new year 1303, when the Scots began attacking and re-occupying castles and towns. Linlithgow, the most strategically important of the two new timber fortresses, held out, but Selkirk, the more expensive, fell in January. There was more bad news for the English the following month, when a force of their cavalry was ambushed at Roslin, near Edinburgh, by a Scottish army commanded by John Comyn. Ralph Manton, the king’s chief financial official in Scotland, was among those killed, and other high-ranking Englishmen were taken prisoner. The Scots were demonstrating to their enemies that denying them a truce had a definite downside.¹¹⁴

Edward therefore left no stone unturned in preparing for his spring offensive. Debtors to the Crown were hit with demands for repayment; foreign merchants were granted new privileges in exchange for a hike in customs. The king even called in the aid for the marriage of his daughter, approved but not collected thirteen years before.¹¹⁵ Every available fiscal resource was squeezed, and every ounce of manpower summoned. Ten thousand infantry were demanded from northern England; unknown quantities were required from Wales. On Ireland, in particular, great hopes were pinned, and in the end some 3,500 men were assembled to embark in 173 ships, the largest naval force the island had ever seen. Many of them were provided by the earl of Ulster, whose debts to the Dublin exchequer, totalling more than £11,000, were written off in return.¹¹⁶ And above and beyond this, of course, Edward now expected service from his newly obedient Scottish subjects: Robert Bruce was instructed to turn out with 2,000 foot and as many cavalry as he could muster. Bring all you owe and more besides: such was the common refrain in every royal writ. The king’s lieges were exhorted ‘to attend so powerfully accompanied that the contumacious resistance of the enemy may be overcome’.¹¹⁷

No single aspect of this furious preparation concerned Edward more than the work of fifty carpenters at King’s Lynn, upon whose skill and diligence his whole strategy hinged. The king’s plan in 1303 was simple. He intended to penetrate northern Scotland – that part of the country in which he had not set foot since 1296, and where Comyn power was strongest. This, of course, entailed crossing the Forth, which in turn explains the sudden burst of industry in Norfolk. Rather than waste time winning control of Stirling, Edward proposed to create a new crossing further down the river – a pontoon bridge, of the kind that had been used to conquer Wales two decades earlier. Great efforts were taken to ensure that the finished product would be both viable and defensible – the Welsh prototype, after all, had worked only on the second attempt, and memories were still fresh of the disastrous attempt to cross the Forth in 1297. Three separate bridges of differing size were built, each of them equipped with drawbridges and giant crossbows.

The scale of the enterprise, needless to say, was enormous. Preparing the bridges took almost four months, and cost almost £1,000. It took a fleet of thirty ships to ferry the completed parts into theatre.¹¹⁸

It is consequently disappointing to discover that this massive feat of medieval engineering was apparently never used. ‘By chance there was no need of it,’ said Peter Langtoft, and it looks as if he was right. Edward and his army mustered on the Border in late May and by 6 June had reached Linlithgow. As the king’s writs show, however, he subsequently moved to Stirling, which suggests that in the event he crossed the Forth by the conventional route. Stirling Castle was still in Scottish hands, but its garrison was too small to trouble the English host as it swept past their walls and marched unopposed into the north.¹¹⁹

The reason for Edward’s unimpeded progress soon became apparent. Within days his officials at Carlisle were writing panicked letters, reporting the arrival in south-west Scotland of ‘a great multitude of armed men’. The Scots, knowing that ‘almost all of the cavalry and infantry were with the king’, were attacking the depleted garrisons of Dumfries and Galloway. Worse still, on 18 June they crossed the Border and began laying waste to northern England.¹²⁰

Thus the nature of the conflict was established. It would not be decided in open confrontation, as at Stirling Bridge or Falkirk, but by attrition. Victory would go to whichever side could mete out the most pain and suffering in the territory of the other, while simultaneously enduring the misery inflicted in their own. Edward in due course heard the news from Carlisle and dispatched a relief force under Aymer de Valence and Robert Bruce. But the king himself pressed on northwards with the bulk of his host, razing everything in his path. ‘Hamlets and towns, granges and barns/Both full and empty, he everywhere burns,’ wrote Peter Langtoft. ‘He advanced taking much plunder,’ added Walter of Guisborough, ‘burning and destroying almost everything.’¹²¹

If Edward hit hard, it was because his chances in a war of endurance were weak. From Stirling he advanced quickly to Perth, but there he was forced to wait for over a month while his supplies were replenished. As in previous campaigns, provisioning was perilously hand to mouth. Even in June, ships and crews were having to be arrested in southern England in order to ferry the requisite grain to the Firth of Tay. When the king finally struck out along Scotland’s north-eastern coast in late July, he continued to be dependent on this naval lifeline. A successful rendezvous with more ships at Montrose delivered him the necessary artillery to reduce the castle at nearby Brechin in early August. But when he reached Aberdeen on 23 August, the ships full of coin he had expected to find were not there. By this point Edward had already lost half his infantry; he could not afford to lose more. After waiting five days with no sight of a sail, he wrote an exasperated letter to the exchequer. ‘If we cannot make these payments,’ he said, referring to the wages of his men, ‘they will go back to their own parts, as they are already doing from day to day.’¹²²

Meanwhile, in south-western Scotland the situation had been transformed by the arrival of the Irish, who landed in the middle of August and began capturing castles along the west coast. The creation of this new front, combined with the simultaneous appearance in the region of forces under Valence and Bruce, seems to have succeeded in drawing the Scots’ fire. Certainly the English garrisons in Dumfries and Galloway, which a few weeks earlier had been on the verge of disintegration, were given succour enough that they managed to hold out.¹²³

The king, too, scraped through by the skin of his teeth. On 28 August, the very day his desperate letter was sent, ships arrived in Aberdeen with the much-needed money, and the reimbursed royal host was able to push on into the heart of enemy territory. By the middle of September Edward had reached the shores of the Moray Firth, and the abbey of Kinloss, which marked the furthest point of his devastating progress. A week later he was laying siege to John Comyn’s castle at nearby Lochindorb. By early October the fortress had fallen.¹²⁴

Comyn himself, however, showed no signs of flagging. At this time the Scots’ sole Guardian was still active in central Scotland, reportedly raiding English positions with a force of a hundred horse and 1,000 foot. To him and his allies it seemed impossible that their opponent could last much longer. In late September Aymer de Valence had written of his hope that some Scottish leaders might be about to come in, but within a few days he was obliged to eat his words. The Scots in question had approached the English camp at Linlithgow, taken one look at the sorry state of its starving Irish garrison, and concluded that their enemies were on the point of collapse.¹²⁵

And yet, in spite of its apparent exhaustion, English power prevailed. When Edward returned from harrying Comyn’s north-eastern heartlands, his forces were too weak to carry through his intention of reducing Stirling Castle, but the king nevertheless made it clear that he was not about to retire any further south. In November he ensconced his army on the north bank of the Forth at Dunfermline Abbey, while his son, the prince of Wales, established a separate camp on the Tay at Perth. It became evident that, once again, Edward was preparing to winter in the midst of his enemies.¹²⁶

If the continued presence of their oppressor in a part of Scotland that had previously offered them safe refuge was an ominous development for the Scots, the location of his new winter quarters must have been more dispiriting still. Dunfermline was the burial place of Scotland’s kings and queens – Edward’s own sister, Margaret, was buried there, alongside her husband, Alexander III. Perth, meanwhile, stood adjacent to the abbey of Scone, long since robbed of its ancient Stone. The English occupation of these two symbolic sites, once the sacred centres of Scottish royal power, served to emphasise the same fundamental point. For more than seven years, Scotland had been a kingdom without a king. For all that time the Scots, and the Comyn faction in particu lar, had fought doggedly and hopefully in the name of John Balliol. It was now certain, however, that Balliol would not be coming back. On 20 May England and France had at last sealed their long-postponed peace, and the Scots had not been included. ‘For God’s sake, do not despair,’ the Scottish negotiators in Paris had written to their com patriots back home. ‘If ever you have done brave deeds, do braver ones now.’ That summer the Scots had done their utmost to heed this exhortation, but, as the winter began to set in, so too did despair, and with it the painful realisation that the cause for which they had been fighting was now irredeemably lost.¹²⁷

Comyn and his allies surrendered early in the new year, having spent several weeks negotiating the best possible deal for themselves and the Scottish people. The terms they eventually secured, if not quite the total amnesty that they had hoped for, were nevertheless remarkably generous. In return for their submission, Edward guaranteed that there would be no loss of life or limb, lands or liberty. Some of those who came in were obliged to accept a period of temporary exile, the duration determined by the perceived scale of their offence.¹²⁸

In truth, Edward could hardly have acted otherwise. What was presented to the Scots as magnanimity was in reality a tacit acknowledgement of their persisting power. Once upon a time, he had regarded the Scots as little more than a joke; a people he might conquer in a single summer, and whose affairs he might reorder at his whim. But since then it had taken him seven long years and every last ounce of strength to persuade them to accept surrender for a second time. The king may not have cared to admit it, but these were men who had earned the right to his respect.

Comyn knelt before Edward in February; some 130 other landowners similarly swore allegiance to the king in a specially convened parliament at St Andrews in March. Thereafter, all that remained was to deal with those few Scots who had refused to attend the meeting and who continued to bear arms against their rightful overlord.¹²⁹

The first target – in the most literal sense – was Stirling Castle. The small Scottish garrison there had long been a thorn in Edward’s side; now their continued obstinacy gave the king the opportunity to conclude his conquest with an appropriately majestic display of royal might. From every quarter of Scotland, English artillery was shipped, trundled and reassembled in order to batter the fortress into submission.¹³⁰ As far away as Perth and St Andrews, lead was stripped from the roofs of churches to make the counterweights that would give the trebuchets their tremendous hurling power. Inevitably, given Stirling’s virtually impregnable situation, the task of reducing it took weeks, but the spectacle was awesome. This was one of the earliest recorded occasions that gunpowder – ‘Greek Fire’, as contemporaries called it – was used in Britain. To distinguish them, possibly even to jollify them, the throwing machines were given names, and proceedings outside the castle soon assumed the air of a chivalric entertainment. Edward thoughtfully had a large new window inserted into the queen’s chambers, so that she and her ladies could observe their gallant menfolk in action.

Eventually, after twelve weeks of bombardment and pyrotechnics, the garrison indicated their willingness to surrender – a decision probably encouraged by the sight of a truly giant trebuchet, the work of more than fifty men for two whole months, approaching the point of completion. Unfortunately, Edward had by this time developed a personal interest in the Warwolf, as the beast had become known, and insisted that no surrender would be accepted until his new toy had been tested. Some modern historians have condemned him for this, though at the time nobody seemed to think his behaviour so very unreasonable: the defenders, after all, had been targeting the king throughout the siege and, indeed, had on two occasions come within a whisker of killing him. At length, on 24 July – presumably after the Warwolf had scored a few hits – a surrender was accepted. The garrison presented themselves, as ritual recommended, barefoot and with ashes on their heads, in the hope that Edward would show them mercy; the king, with equal respect for convention, allowed that their lives would be spared. Thus the siege, and the war, ended in such a way that chivalric expectations were satisfied. There was even a tournament to mark the conflict’s final conclusion.¹³¹

Only one individual of consequence was wholly exempted from the general clemency, and Edward did not intend to waste any more time tracking him down: the Scots themselves could do that as proof of their newly professed loyalty, and in due course they did. William Wallace was captured by his own countrymen in August the following year, led to London in chains, and charged with the crime of treason. This was somewhat ironic, for Wallace was probably the only Scottish leader who had not sworn allegiance to the English king – a fact that the prisoner himself pointed out at his hearing in Westminster Hall. Needless to say, it availed him nothing. On 23 August 1305, while Edward amused himself in the forests of Essex, his sometime adversary was dragged from Westminster to Smithfield, hanged on a gallows, cut down while still alive, disembowelled and beheaded. His entrails were then burned, his body quartered, and the quarters dispatched for public display in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth. His head was mounted on a spike above London Bridge. Thus were the Scots made aware of treason’s terrible reward, and the slaughter at Stirling Bridge was avenged.¹³²