1
Of Scotland born, my richt name is Wallace.
BLIND HARRY
Wilhelmus Waleis, Scotus, et de Scotia ortus (William Wallace, a Scot and of Scottish birth).
INDICTMENT, WESTMINSTER, 23 AUGUST 1305
FEW national heroes have had such an obscure and contradictory background as William Wallace. The year of his birth has been variously stated as anywhere between 1260 and 1278, his father’s name was Malcolm, Andrew or William, his mother’s name is given as Jean, Joan or Margaret or not stated at all, her surname being Crawford, Craufurd, Crawfoord or some other variant. But most glaring of all is the mistaken assumption that Wallace was born in Renfrewshire. This error can be traced back no further than the early eighteenth century but has been blindly followed by every writer since that time.
It derives from the fact that William Wallace was styled ‘of Ellerslie’, from the land held by his father Sir Malcolm Wallace, who was styled of Auchenbothie and Ellerslie. As Auchenbothie is in Renfrewshire (near Kilmacolm) it has invariably been understood that Ellerslie referred to the Renfrewshire town of Elderslie, and this view has, not surprisingly, been reinforced by the town itself which, in the course of the nineteenth century, created the myth of his birth and boyhood there. A small castellated house, the oldest edifice in the village, was habitually pointed out to visitors as the birthplace of the Wallace. No matter that this structure could not be dated earlier than the sixteenth century, the belief arose that it must have been erected on the spot where the patriot was born.
Likewise a venerable yew in the garden, popularly known as Wallace’s Yew and still standing, is associated with the myth although it could not have been planted till centuries later. There was also a gnarled oak nearby which, from its great age, was regarded as somehow connected with Wallace. Indeed, a local legend, not supported by any reference in Blind Harry’s poem, let alone historical record, has it that this great oak once gave shelter not only to the patriot but also to three hundred of his followers, when they were being hard pressed by the English. An eighteenth-century description of this ancient oak states that it had a girth of 21 feet, stood 67 feet tall and its branches covered almost five hundred square yards. In the early nineteenth century, however, the relic-mongers got to work and by mid-century only a blackened trunk remained, and even that perished in the great storm of February 1856.
To this day Elderslie proudly boasts its connection with Scotland’s greatest hero, not only in the road signs at the boundaries of the town, but in the Wallace Tavern whose Ring o’ Bells sign perpetuates one of the many myths and legends surrounding the local hero. The ancient yew and the foundations of the castellated house have been preserved in a public park alongside an ornate monument, erected as recently as 1970 and now the town’s chief landmark.
Much of the history of William Wallace is derived, directly or indirectly, from the epic poem composed by Blind Harry in the fifteenth century, more than a century and a half after Wallace met his death in 1305. Harry claimed — and, indeed, made frequent references to his source — that his poem was based on a prose manuscript compiled by John Blair in Latin and submitted to Pope Boniface but apparently no longer extant. Blair was a friend of Wallace from their schooldays and subsequently his chaplain. As Blair’s manuscript has never been found, it is a matter of speculation how closely Harry followed it. While it is unlikely that the minstrel was blind from birth (as was claimed by the sixteenth-century historian John Major) or, indeed, the uneducated man which, self-deprecatingly, he claimed to be, he was certainly steeped in the oral traditions of his time and doubtless grafted on numerous anecdotes which had circulated during and since the time of Wallace.
The lengthy passages of the poem dealing with Wallace’s early career and rise to fame have an air of verisimilitude and a wealth of circumstantial detail which, confirmed by those shreds of documentary evidence still extant, lead me to suppose that this part at least of the minstrel’s epic is a useful guide, despite some very obvious discrepancies in chronology. By contrast, there are glaring errors in the later sections, such as the great Battle of Biggar (which never took place) and the assertion that, on the eve of his betrayal, Wallace had virtually cleared Scotland of the hated Southron, when in fact he was a fugitive, on the run with no more than a handful of men. This points to the fact of John Blair’s lost account having terminated some time after 1298 but probably by 1303, the minstrel then filling in later detail from popular myths compounded by his own imagination.
Such glaring errors tended to blind scholars to the general usefulness of the poem, and it was vilified and neglected by turns. This trend was set by Lord Hailes, towards the close of the eighteenth century, questioning the value of Blind Harry’s poem as an historical record and echoing the doubts expressed by John Major centuries earlier. Perhaps this was a case of familiarity breeding contempt for Major, born two hundred years after Wallace, was a boy at the time when Blind Harry was writing his poem and tended to be rather dismissive of the exploits set out in that saga. Major fell into the trap of rejecting out of hand stories which he could not corroborate from independent sources; but research by later scholars showed Major to be wrong and Harry right. For a time the exploits recounted in the poem were accepted without question, but then the pendulum swung back again at the end of the eighteenth century and historians since that time have tended to ignore or overlook Harry, seeking the truth elsewhere. It is only within quite recent years that Harry’s statements have been re-examined and tested against historical evidence, but a thorough analysis of the poem is still awaited.
Blind Harry mentions Ellerslie without actually saying where this place was, but all of the other details concerning the antecedents of Wallace, together with his exploits before he became a national figure, are placed fairly and squarely in Ayrshire, and more particularly that portion of the county known as Kyle. Moreover, John Major himself stated that ‘This William was one of a family of only inferior nobility in the district of Kyle, in which the surname is common.’1 The confusion arose because Elderslie in Renfrewshire developed into a place of some importance, whereas the place from which the hero’s family took their title was a small and quite obscure estate near Kilmarnock. It featured on commercial maps as recently as 1946 but has since all but vanished, confined to the large-scale Ordnance Survey sheets, and it was not of sufficient importance to merit an entry in the six-volume Gazetteer of Scotland, published in the 1880s. Ellerslie or Elderslie are variants of the same name and both spellings have, at some time or another, been used in maps and documents to denote both the Ayrshire and Renfrewshire places. Today the Ayrshire place has adopted the more modern spelling of Elderslie, but throughout this book I have retained the original spelling merely to distinguish it from the Renfrewshire town.
Ellerslie, Ayrshire, was, until the Second World War, a hamlet which developed around a colliery and brickworks. All have now vanished, but the name is perpetuated in Elderslie, a large house which was formerly the home of the colliery manager and is now the residence of Sheena and William Frew, directors of Annandale Engineering, a company specialising in architectural and ornamental ironwork. Ironically, while the name Ellerslie has virtually disappeared, this part of Kilmarnock and Loudoun district is now known as Annandale — not to be confused with the historic district of that name in Dumfriesshire, the heartland of the Bruce family.
When the myth of the Renfrewshire origin developed in the nineteenth century a counter-claim was raised by the Wallace Club in Ayrshire. Even this overlooked the likeliest birthplace (at Ellerslie itelf) and maintained that Wallace was born at Riccarton Castle. This ancient edifice had long since disappeared but a plaque was erected on the wall of a building in Fleming Street, Kilmarnock, occupying the site of the castle. During road-widening in the 1980s, however, this building was demolished and the plaque was consigned to the oblivion of a district council repository. It has now been re-erected — on the wall of Kilmarnock Fire Station — and its existence must be one of Ayrshire’s best-kept secrets.
Even the surname Wallace has given rise to confusion. The medieval names Walays, Waleys or Wallensis (from which are derived the modern surnames of Wallace, Wallis, Welsh and Vallance) merely denoted a Welshman in the language of the English-speaking peoples in both England and Scotland, just as people surnamed Inglis were Scots of English descent, and the Scotts were Borderers from the Scottish side. The surname or rather epithet Waleys or Wallensis is widespread in charters, writs and other documents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in both England and Wales. From this arose the notion that the Wallaces had come to Scotland from Wales, which Blind Harry, alluding to the father of the hero, expressed thus:
The secund O he was of great Wallace,
The which Wallas full worthily that wrought
When Walter hyr of Waillis from Warrayn socht.
‘The secund O’ in this context means great-grandson. These lines refer to Walter, the Steward and progenitor of the Stuart dynasty, who was a Warren or Warenne of Shropshire. There is an ancient tradition in the Welsh Marches that Walter Warenne courted a Welsh lady to whom he was vaguely related, and that the go-between in the affair was one Richard the Welshman, the great-grandfather of Sir Malcolm Wallace, father of William. This tradition is confirmed by the fact that Ricardus Wallensis held lands in Kyle, the northern part of Ayrshire, under Walter the Steward. Walter was the son of Alan, himself the son of Flaald, a Norman mercenary who had obtained considerable lands in Shropshire from William the Conqueror. Alan married a daughter of Warin, Sheriff of Shropshire, from whom the surname of his son was derived. Walter Warenne was one of that Norman military élite recruited by King David I (1124–53) to come north and assist him in subduing the diverse Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples under his rule, and welding them into a nation. King David introduced the feudal system and made grants of land to these Norman knights and barons. Thus the feudal bailieries of Cunninghame, Kyle and Carrick came into being. The River Irvine, running due west to the sea, formed the boundary between Cunninghame and Kyle.
In the thirteenth century Cunninghame was governed from the port of Irvine by Hugh de Morville, the Great Constable of Scotland, while Kyle came under the control of Walter Fitzalan. Richard Wallace may have been one of those retainers who settled in Kyle as a vassal of Walter whom the King appointed as his Steward. On the other hand, the story of a Welsh origin may be entirely fanciful, for Wallensis applied just as well to the people of the south-west of Scotland of ancient Cymric stock, the descendants of the Britons of Strathclyde, ethnically and linguistically akin to the Cumbrians and the Cambrians.
At any rate, Richard Wallace acquired lands in the vicinity of Kilmarnock and gave his name to the village and parish of Ricard-tun, or Riccarton. Richard was a witness to a charter of Walter the Steward, granted to the Abbey of Paisley some time before 1174. The Steward held lands of the King in both Renfrewshire and Ayrshire and it would not be surprising for members of the Wallace family to hold lands of the Steward in either or both counties.
According to one account, Richard Wallace had a son and grandson of the same name, contemporaries of the next three Stewards. The third Richard, styled Walense alias Waleys, lived in the time of Walter II and his son Alexander the Steward. He held the estate of Auchencrowe or Auchencruive on the River Ayr, as well as the original Riccarton estate. To fit the nineteenth-century notion of Elderslie in Renfrewshire as the birthplace of the hero, a pedigree was concocted which traced William’s ancestry to one Henry Walense who held lands in that county from Walter, the first Steward of that name. Henry was believed to be a younger brother of Richard the first Wallace; furthermore, it was conjectured that he had a son named Adam who was the grandfather of William. Improbably, after the judicial murder of William in 1305, his Renfrewshire estates were alleged to have passed some time later to the Wallaces of Riccarton. The source of this story was George Crawfurd who compiled a history of Renfrewshire, published in 1710. Crawfurd asserted that ‘the lands of Eldersly returned to the family of Craigie, a younger son of that ancient family obtaining them in patrimony about the beginning of the reign of King Robert III’, which would place this transaction no earlier than the closing years of the fourteenth century.
Even in this regard, however, there is nothing to connect the Wallaces of Renfrewshire with the Wallaces of Craigie. A John Wallace of Elderslie is recorded as appending his seal to a resignation of the lands of Fultoun to the monks of Paisley in 1409 and he may be the same Johannes Wallace de Eldersly, Scutifer (shield-bearing) mentioned in a chartulary of the Monastery of Paisley in 1432; but a landowner in Ayrshire would be just as likely to have a connection with Paisley Abbey (the greatest monastic foundation in the west of Scotland) as one from Renfrewshire, or Lanarkshire for that matter. There were certainly people named Wallace holding land in Renfrewshire by the mid-fifteenth century and this reinforced the myth, but unfortunately there is nothing which definitely connects them with the Wallaces of Craigie. The last of the Renfrewshire line was Helen Wallace who married Archibald Campbell of Succoth and sold her estate to Alexander Speirs in 1769. To confuse the matter even further, it should be noted that the land which she disposed of, and which was called Elderslie, was not actually in the village of that name, but located some miles away, in the parish of Renfrew. Miss Wallace and her family had merely assumed the title ‘of Elderslie’ on the assumption that they were somehow descended from, or at least connected with, the famous medieval hero. On this land the Speirs family built a mansion called Elderslie in 1777–82 and over the ensuing century acquired a number of relics allegedly associated with William Wallace, which they installed in their house. These relics (including one of the many two-handed broadswords which, to this day, masquerade as Wallace’s weapon) were of doubtful provenance to say the least, but were accepted unquestioningly, just as the assumption that William Wallace had hailed from Elderslie, Renfrewshire, was taken for granted. By Victorian times, therefore, the myth itself had acquired considerable antiquity.
In another account, however, the son of the first Richard was Adam Wallace, referred to in a document of the second Walter as miles noster (our knight). He is said to have been the father of two sons, Sir Richard, who succeeded him in the Kyle estates, and Malcolm. Within the parish of Riccarton was the five-pound land of Ellerslie, which was held by Malcolm ‘in portion-natural, holding by ward and relief of the family of Richardton’.2 Ellerslie, to the south-east of Crosshouse and west of Annanhill, was about a mile west of the medieval town of Kilmarnock and a little over a mile north-west of Riccarton village.
According to the Craigie Wallace genealogy, however, Malcolm married Jean Craufoord, daughter of Sir Ranald (sometimes shown as Ronald or Reginald) Craufoord of Corsbie in Ayrshire, the Sheriff of that county. From other sources, however, it appears more likely that the lady’s name was Margaret de Craufurd. The archaic name Corsbie vanished long ago but, translated into modern English, it survives as Crosshouse, on the road between Kilmarnock and Irvine and about a mile north-west of Ellerslie. The issue of this marriage included three sons, Sir Malcolm the eldest, William and John, as well as at least two daughters who were much older than their famous brother for each had a son, respectively Tom Halliday and Edward Little, who, though nephews of William, were his faithful companions in arms. Blind Harry is, however, the sole source for these details. He refers to Edward Little as Wallace’s sister’s son and Tom Halliday as ‘sib sister’s son to Good Wallace’.
In the Scotichronicon,3 compiled about 1442 and thus predating Blind Harry by some thirty years, the reference to the origins of William Wallace is tantalisingly brief, the Anglicorum malleus (hammer of the English) being described simply as filius nobilis militis{ }. In the manuscript preserved in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Latin reference to the ‘noble son of a knight’ is followed by about half a line which had been left blank for the name of William’s father to be inserted subsequently, when the compiler had ascertained this detail. In the copy of the manuscript now in the National Library of Scotland, Malcolm Vales was inserted in a much later hand, while the earliest printed version inserted the words eiusdem nominis (of the same name, i.e. William). But the Harleian manuscript in the British Library, another version of the Scotichronicon, has an entirely different insertion: domini Andree Vallace domini Kragge (Lord Andrew Wallace, Lord of Craigie).4 This variant has, at least, the merit of being more substantial and specific than the others, which suggests that someone took great pains to ascertain the truth.
The family of Craufurd, to use the Ayrshire spelling, traced its ancestry back to Thorlongus, an Anglo-Danish chief who was expelled from Northumberland by William the Conqueror and who obtained lands in the Merse from King Edgar of Scotland around the beginning of the twelfth century. A hundred years later, a Sir Ragnald or Reginald de Craufurd married the heiress of Loudoun at the head of the Irvine Valley, and was created first hereditary Sheriff of Ayr. His grandson, Sir Ranald, was the father-in-law of Sir Malcolm Wallace and thus the grandfather of William. In turn, he was succeeded in both the title and the sheriffdom by his eldest son, also Sir Ranald, the brother of Margaret de Craufurd and uncle of William Wallace. This is an important point, for those who take the view that the Scottish hero was a very young man cite as evidence the fact that his grandfather Sir Ranald was still alive in 1307.5 In fact William’s grandfather was dead by 1297 and the Sir Ranald who was alive ten years later was the hero’s uncle.
The Morville family declined in power in the course of the twelfth century and their lands in Cunninghame passed to the Craufurds in 1189. The Craufurds of Craufurdland Castle continued to be major landowners in the district until within living memory. Another family to which the Wallaces were attached by ties of blood were the Boyds of Kilmarnock, who had their seat at Dean Castle about a mile north of the medieval town. A witness to a charter of 1205 between Bryce de Eglingstoun (Eglinton) and the town of Irvine was one Dominus Robertus Boyd, miles (Lord Robert Boyd, knight). There is a tradition that this surname was derived from the Gaelic word buidhe (yellow-haired) but it may equally have been of Norman origin. The son of this knight, also Sir Robert, distinguished himself at the Battle of Largs in 1263. A local tradition maintains that in the mopping-up operations after Haakon’s defeat, Sir Robert Boyd and his companions routed a Norse army at a place called Goldberry Hill. The words Gold Berry were later adopted as the motto of the Boyds of Kilmarnock in commemoration of this feat of arms. The son of the victor of Goldberry, another Robert Boyd, was one of Wallace’s ablest lieutenants throughout the early campaigns of the Wars of Independence and subsequently gave his staunch support to Robert Bruce.
Apart from the families to which he was related, the majority of the incidents in the early part of William’s military career took place in the Irvine Valley, so that the tradition of a connection with Elderslie in Renfrewshire is no longer tenable.
The matter of William’s birthplace is more easily resolved than the date of his birth. In this regard Blind Harry is contradictory, stating that he was forty-five years of age when he was betrayed to the English.6 Some authorities have regarded this as a clerical error for thirty-five, which would place his birth in 1270 rather than 1260, but the same lines conveyed that Master John Blair and Sir Thomas Gray (the parson of Libberton in Lanarkshire) had known Wallace from the age of sixteen ‘until other nine and twenty had passed’. This is flatly contradicted by Harry elsewhere, when he states unequivocally that William was only eighteen at the time of the Selby incident in Dundee. This, in turn, raises the question of when this fracas took place. Some scholars have suggested the end of 1296 or the beginning of 1297, which would put William’s date of birth in 1278; but this would make him no more than nineteen years of age when he defeated the English at Stirling Bridge — which is preposterous. Alexander Brunton (1881), on no good ground, assumed that the Selby incident took place in 1294 and from this computed the date of Wallace’s birth as January 1276, making him twenty-one at the time of his greatest victory and twenty-nine years and seven months old at the time of his execution. It seems more probable that the Selby incident took place in December 1291, as will be shown in Chapter Two, and this would therefore place William’s birth in 1272 or 1273. Various nineteenth-century writers have suggested a date circa 1270, while the Marquess of Bute7 made a plausible case in favour of 1274, which had a certain attraction, for it implied that Wallace was the same age as Robert Bruce who succeeded where he had failed. Aeneas Mackay8 cautiously suggested ?1272, which is probably not far out.
The Scotland into which William was born about 1272–73 was prosperous and at peace. Alexander III had been on the throne since 1249 and his comparatively long reign was to last another fourteen years. He continued the policies of his predecessors, relying heavily on a baronage which was Norman in origin and French in tongue to administer his diverse dominions. The native inhabitants of Scotland had only been under the rule of the one monarch for about four generations and local loyalties were as yet stronger than any notion of national patriotism. The term Scotia, previously used to designate the land north of the Clyde and Forth isthmus, was only applied to the whole of the kingdom in the reign of Alexander III. Orkney and Shetland were still part of the Scandinavian empire, while the Inner and Outer Hebrides had only been under Alexander’s sovereignty since 1266. Caithness and Sutherland were still largely Norse, while large tracts of the north and west, as well as Galloway in the extreme south-west, were Celtic; even in the Lowland counties of Ayr and Lanark was Gaelic still commonly spoken. Paradoxically, the Scottish language, which would eventually dominate the Lowlands, was originally confined to the south-east, around Edinburgh and the Lothians, although in the course of the twelfth century it spread all over the Forth and Clyde basins, then south to the Solway and west to Kyle. In the time of Alexander III it was spreading up the east coast north of the Forth.
The largest and most prosperous town in the kingdom was Berwick, situated at the mouth of the River Tweed and the centre of Scotland’s thriving trade with the Low Countries and the Baltic. It was described by one English chronicler of the thirteenth century as ‘a city so populous and of such trade that it might justly be called another Alexandria, whose riches were the sea and the waters its walls’. It was, indeed, one of the most important ports anywhere in the British Isles, producing a customs revenue estimated as equal to a quarter of England’s as a whole. Significantly, the bulk of its trade was with the Low Countries, northern Germany and Scandinavia, and relatively little with England. Edinburgh, the capital city, was almost as large, whereas Glasgow was relatively unimportant but for its cathedral. The population of Scotland was less than half a million — about a quarter that of its southern neighbour.
Relations with England were better than they had been for generations. Because the border between the two countries had never been precisely delineated, the Scottish kings long nurtured an ambition to annex Cumbria and Westmorland which had at one time formed the southern part of the kingdom of Strathclyde, and also portions of the old kingdom of Northumbria. It was to resist Scottish expansionism under Malcolm III Canmore that William the Conqueror had founded Newcastle upon Tyne in 1079 and his son William Rufus had fortified Carlisle in 1091.
The frontier effectively lay in a straight line from the Solway to the Tyne. Ironically, the claim to Northumberland rested on the marriage of David I to the granddaughter of Earl Siward of Northumbria. King Henry I would not recognise David’s claim to this powerful northern earldom, but readily acknowledged the Scottish king as Earl of Huntingdon whose title and estates also came to him as a result of his marriage. It was this ambiguous position, of Scottish kings who were also English magnates, which was to bedevil Anglo-Scottish relations at the end of the thirteenth century.
David’s marriage might have won him a valuable English estate and a prestigious title, but it was to embroil him in English politics and create problems a century later. During the wars between Stephen and Matilda for succession to the English throne (1135–54), King David used the chaotic situation to further his own ends. The Empress Matilda was David’s niece — as was the wife of Stephen who granted Northumberland as an English fief to Prince Henry, son of King David and heir to the Scottish throne. David died in 1153 and Prince Henry predeceased him, so his successor Malcolm IV (1153–65), derisively known as ‘the Maiden’, was forced to surrender David’s territorial gains. Malcolm was succeeded by William the Lion (1165–1214), a man of sterner stuff as his epithet implies. When the English king, Henry II, was confronted by an uprising in 1173, King William invaded northern England in support of the rebels. His capture, near Alnwick, in July 1174 not only put paid to his territorial ambitions but resulted in the temporary loss of Scottish sovereignty.
Since the tenth-century alliances against the Danes, in which the English ruler had been styled as ‘father and lord’ of the king of Scots, the position of Scotland in relation to England had been open to various interpretations. Since the time of William the Conqueror the Scottish kings had held English fiefs and had done homage for them. The exact nature of this homage had never been defined and the meaning of the act of homage had been left deliberately ambiguous.
The act of homage was a ceremony used in the granting of land, and indicated the submission of a vassal to his lord. It could only be received by the suzerain in person. The vassal would uncover his head, lay aside his sword and spurs, and kneel before his lord. He would stretch out his hands, which the lord would grasp in his, and then say: ‘I become your man from this day forth, of life and limb, and will hold faith to you for the lands I hold.’ The oath of fealty followed the act of homage, and then came the ceremony of investiture, either directly on the ground or by the delivering of a turf or a handful of earth. The obligations involved in the act of homage were often general and varied in nature, but they provided a strong moral sanction for more specific engagements.
So far as the position of the kingdom of Scotland in relation to the King of England, the matter was clarified by the Treaty of Falaise (1174); William the Lion was only released from captivity on condition that he did homage to Henry for the Scottish crown. The terms of this treaty, however, were cancelled fifteen years later when Richard the Lionheart sold the rights acquired by his father for a large sum of money which was used to finance Richard’s adventures in the Holy Land. This bargain merely annulled the Treaty of Falaise and left the question of homage exactly where it had been before 1174.
William the Lion continued to hope for the annexation of Northumberland and in 1194 offered to purchase it from the ever impecunious Richard, but the deal fell through when Richard insisted that William would have no right to fortify castles in this territory. Furthermore, William the Lion meekly gave way to Richard’s successor King John, to whom he conceded the right to choose a bride for his son Alexander, the English princess Joanna (sister of Henry III). Alexander II (1214–49) tried to seize Northumberland while King John was otherwise preoccupied by his rebellious barons at the time of Magna Carta; but in 1236 he was forced to give up his claims to Northumberland in exchange for a grant of land in the north of England.
Ever since the time of Malcolm Canmore in the eleventh century, the Scottish kings had chosen English princesses as their brides — or had them foisted on them. When Joanna of England, first wife of Alexander II, died childless, he broke with tradition and defied his brother-in-law Henry III by choosing a bride for himself. Marie de Couci was the great-great-grand-daughter of Louis VI of France. Alexander III, who ascended the Scottish throne at the age of eight, was therefore half French. The years of his minority were marked by a bitter struggle between two powerful Norman factions led by Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith, and Alan Durward, Justiciar of Scotland. In 1251 he was manoeuvred into marriage with his cousin Princess Margaret of England, and Henry III seized the opportunity to demand from his son-in-law homage for the kingdom of Scotland, homage which Alexander firmly but politely refused. Otherwise Alexander’s relations with Henry III who was his uncle as well as his father-in-law, and Edward I, his brother-in-law, were superficially very cordial.
The marriage of Alexander’s daughter Margaret to Eirik of Norway, son of King Magnus and grandson of that old adversary Haakon, cemented the treaty by which the Norwegian king had relinquished the Western Isles. Alexander was well satisfied with the political marriages which seemed to safeguard Scotland from external threats, and in the latter years of his long reign he concentrated on consolidating his kingdom. Alexander’s equanimity was marred only by a succession of domestic tragedies. His younger son David died unmarried in 1281. Alexander, the elder son and heir to the throne, died three years later; although married to the daughter of the Count of Flanders, he had produced no heir. In 1283 his sister Margaret of Norway died in childbirth, leaving as heir to the Scottish and Norwegian thrones a girl baptised Margaret but better known to posterity as the Maid of Norway. After Prince Alexander’s death the sorrowing king took steps to have his baby granddaughter acknowledged by the magnates of Scotland as his successor. The following year, in 1285, he remarried, and the hopes of Scotland were pinned on his beautiful young French bride, Joleta (Yolande) of Dreux, presenting him with a sturdy son who would ensure the continuation of the dynasty. Joleta was another descendant of Louis VI, and in these Franco-Scottish marriages lay the seeds of the Auld Alliance which flourished between Scotland and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The untimely death of Alexander, however, brought this incipient French influence to an abrupt end.
The Scotland of the 1280s was a comparatively wealthy country, far removed from the beggarly nation which English propagandists were to satirise in succeeding generations. One has only to consider the splendid religious houses of the period, the great cathedrals from Glasgow in the south to Dornoch in the north, the magnificent abbeys and monasteries at Arbroath, Scone, Dunfermline and Cambuskenneth north of the Forth, as well as Paisley, Kilwinning, Crossraguel, New Abbey and Dundrennan in the south-west, and Holyrood, Kelso, Jedburgh, Dryburgh and Melrose in the south-east. These majestic buildings could only have been erected in a country possessed of considerable resources. Secular development matched this religious might and the country was studded by hundreds of castles, regal, baronial and knightly, the fortified homes of the landed classes. It was an age in which a prosperous bourgeoisie emerged, and many of the cities and towns of the present day date their burghal charters from this period. The wealth and status of Berwick has already been mentioned, but it was by no means the only great port in Scotland. Inverness, for example, was the centre of a shipbuilding industry that attracted orders from the Baltic and France. When the Count of Blois accompanied St Louis to the crusades in 1249 the largest ship in his fleet was built specially for him at Inverness.
Documentary evidence for the way people lived in thirteenth-century Scotland is meagre, but archaeological operations in very recent years are beginning to reveal much more about how people lived and worked, about what they ate and wore, and how they spent their time. Later generations would look back on the reign of Alexander III as a golden age. Recent evidence reveals that Scottish agriculture was more prosperous than its English counterpart. Scottish wool exports amounted to 20 per cent of those for the whole of England, while a buoyant export trade in hides reflects the highly successful cattle industry. Significantly, it was a period of abundant silver coinage of a good quality. Taxation was low and trade flourished. The inhabitants of the new towns enjoyed a varied diet, they wore homespun woollens and good leather boots. Houses were still largely wattle and daub but in Perth, Aberdeen and Berwick there were many stone houses with cellars.
From the documents of the period some idea of the scale and diversity of Scotland’s exports and imports can be gained. There was a thriving export trade in fish, timber, wool and hides to the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia as well as to northern England and Ireland. Economically, socially and culturally, Scotland was orientated towards the mainland of northern Europe rather than towards her more powerful southern neighbour. After the treaty of 1266 relations between Scotland and the Norse countries improved rapidly — a fact which is often overlooked.
Significantly, serfdom was abolished in Scotland by the end of the fourteenth century, long before slavery ceased to exist in England. Successive Scottish kings were wealthy enough not to require ‘voluntary aids’ and similar imposts at times of unusual expenditure. When Marjory, the sister of Alexander II, married the Earl of Pembroke, the King gave her a dowry of ten thousand marks out of his own pocket. Similarly, the four thousand marks for the purchase of the Western Isles in 1266 were paid by Alexander III personally. By contrast, Henry III of England was forced to seek extensions of time in making payments towards the dowry of his daughter Margaret, first wife of Alexander III, because he was chronically short of money. Perhaps the most telling evidence of the relative prosperity of Scotland in this golden age was the attention to the infrastructure. Scotland has often been portrayed as a wilderness of trackless wastes or, at best, a land where the few tracks through the vast forests could only be traversed by men on foot or horseback. More recent research, however, has revealed that this was a period when a network of good roads, capable of taking wheeled carts and wagons, was established. More importantly, the erection of bridges requires a great deal of money and expertise; in the course of Alexander’s reign bridges were built over the Tay at Perth, over the Esk at Brechin and Marykirk, over the Dee at Kincardine o’Neil, Durris and Glenmuick, and over the Spey at Orkill. Many of these roads and bridges were destroyed during the Wars of Independence and not replaced till long afterwards, reflecting the poverty and destitution which came in the wake of Scotland’s struggle to regain its freedom.
Young William Wallace, growing up at Ellerslie, would probably have been quite unaware of such matters. He grew up in a time of peace and plenty, when trade flourished and law and justice prevailed. About the time of his birth King Henry III of England died and was succeeded by the man who would one day become William’s deadliest adversary. England, like Scotland, was free from external threat and so stable domestically that Edward (who was in Sicily when he got the news of his father’s death) took his time about returning home. After a leisurely journey through Italy and France, where he did homage to his cousin Philip III, he went to Gascony where he stayed for almost a year. He landed at Dover on 2 August 1274 and was crowned at Westminster sixteen days later. He was thirty-five years of age, tall, well proportioned and handsome. Considerably above average height, he certainly deserved his nickname of Longshanks.
William Wallace, perhaps inheriting something from his Danish ancestry, also developed into a sturdy youth and when fully grown attained a height of two metres — six foot seven inches — with proportionately large hands and feet, and a muscular physique. In an age when the average height of a fully grown man was not much over five feet, to judge by the clothing and armour surviving from the period, William was truly a giant of a man. Blind Harry’s physical description is probably not far removed from the truth:
Wallace’s stature, in largeness and in height,
Was judged thus, by such as saw him right
Both in his armour dight and in undress:
Nine quarters large he was in length — no less;
Third part his length in shoulders broad was he,
Right seemly, strong, and handsome for to see;
His limbs were great, with stalwart pace and sound;
His brows were hard, his arms were great and round;
His hands right like a palmer’s did appear,
Of manly make, with nails both great and clear;
Proportioned long and fair was his visage;
Right grave of speech, and able in courage;
Broad breast and high, with sturdy neck and great,
Lips round, his nose square and proportionate;
Brown wavy hair, on brows and eyebrows light,
Eyes clear and piercing, like to diamonds bright.
On the left side was seen below the chin,
By hurt, a wen; his colour was sanguine.
Wounds, too, he had in many a diverse place,
But fair and well preserved was aye his face.
Of riches for himself he kept no thing;
Gave as he won, like Alexander the King.
In time of peace, meek as a maid was he;
When war approached, the right Hector was he.
To Scots men ever credence great he gave;
Known enemies could never him deceive.
These qualities of his were known in France,
Where people held him in good remembrance.9
And the Scotichronicon, compiled closer to his own time, confirms this:
He was a tall man with the body of a giant, cheerful in appearance with agreeable features, broad-shouldered and big-boned, with belly in proportion and lengthy flanks, pleasing in appearance but with a wild look, broad in the hips, with strong arms and legs, a most spirited fighting-man, with all his limbs very strong and firm. Moreover the Most High had distinguished him and his changing features with a certain good humour, had so blessed his words and deeds with a certain heavenly gift, that by his appearance alone he won over to himself the grace and favour of the hearts of all loyal Scots. And this is not surprising, for he was most liberal in all his gifts, very fair in his judgments, most compassionate in comforting the sad, a most skilful counsellor, very patient when suffering, a distinguished speaker, who above all hunted down falsehood and deceit and detested treachery; for this reason the Lord was with him, and with His help he was a man successful in everything; with veneration for the church and respect for the clergy, he helped the poor and widows, and worked for the restoration of wards and orphans bringing relief to the oppressed. He lay in wait for thieves and robbers, inflicting rigorous justice on them without any reward. Because God was very greatly pleased with works of justice of this kind. He in consequence guided all his activities.10
Some nineteenth-century historians tended to scoff at these descriptions, without offering any alternative explanation of Wallace’s extraordinary physical and mental powers. Burton (1897), for example, derided ‘the later romancers and minstrels who have profusely trumpeted Wallace’s personal prowess and superhuman strength’. This overlooks the plain fact that Wallace came to maturity in an era when strength, stamina, endurance, courage and, above all, skill in handling sword and dagger were of paramount importance in the emergence of leaders, when warlike renown depended so essentially on personal deeds of derring-do. In view of this, it would have been astonishing — indeed, well-nigh incredible — had Wallace not been a man of pre-eminent physical strength and considerable manual dexterity. By what other means could the second son of an obscure knight, a mere youth just out of his teens, without the support or patronage of a single great magnate, have maintained himself, attracted followers, impressed the enemy, secured the enduring hatred of Edward Plantagenet, and become the hero of a nation, if he did not possess quite exceptional physical strength and prowess?
Apart from his physical attributes, Wallace was endowed with considerable mental faculties. He had the conventional upbringing of a boy of his class and time. The younger son of a minor laird, he received the rudiments of his education at home, probably at his mother’s knee. Various writers, mindful of the supposed boyhood at Elderslie, have suggested that he would have received a formal secular and religious education from the monks of Paisley Abbey. While this cannot be ruled out — William’s father was also laird of Auchenbothie, and Paisley lay within the fiefdom of his feudal superior, the Steward of Scotland — it would be unwise to stress this possibility as a probability. At any rate Paisley Abbey would have offered the best centre of learning in the south-west of Scotland at that time, whether the Wallaces were closely connected with Renfrewshire or not. Evidence of William’s early religious education is provided by the psalter which he habitually carried on his campaigns, and his attachment to the Psalms of David was noted by the eyewitnesses of his execution. There is less ground for supposing that William was the fine all-round scholar which the Marquess of Bute made him out to be:
I conceive that there can be no doubt that his mental culture was at least as great as would be that of a person in a corresponding position at the present day . . . Sir William Wallace at least knew how to read and write three languages — namely, his own, and Latin and French; and it appears also that he knew Gaelic. He knew the ancient and modern history, and the common simpler mathematics and science of his own day.11
Although he could read and write, probably more attention was paid to the acquisition of horsemanship and martial skills, sparring with his elder brother Malcolm and learning to fight with the dirk and the claymore. The latter was to become William’s favourite weapon. With a five-foot double-edged blade and a handle almost a foot in length, it was taller than most men. It was worn in a scabbard strapped to the back, and unsheathed by reaching over the shoulder. This was a two-handed weapon, relying on the reach and the strength of the man wielding it for deadly effect, rather than the agility and skill required of lighter swords; but in the hands of a swordsman like Wallace its whirling movement could hack and slash with a velocity and force which even the armour of the period could not withstand.
William would have been about ten or eleven years old when Edward Longshanks completed his six-year conquest of Wales, in 1283. Three years later, some thoughts as to a future career for young William were being expressed at a time when momentous events were taking place. In 1285 Philip III of France had died; in the summer of 1286 Edward crossed the Channel and made his way to Paris where he did homage to the new King, Philip the Fair, in respect of his fiefdoms in France. It is ironic that this act of homage should not have been construed as affecting the sovereignty of England in any way; yet Edward and his predecessors had tried to use the homage of the Scottish kings in respect of their English estates to assert their paramountcy over Scotland. Things were so settled in England that Edward felt secure enough to remain abroad for three years. During that time he was preoccupied with the administration of Gascony and repeatedly trying to mediate in the long-running struggle between the houses of Anjou and Aragon. His long absence, however, threw the government of England into confusion. On his return, in 1289, he was obliged to dismiss most of his judges and ministers for corruption. Finally, Edward’s answer to political discontent and economic unrest at home was to seek a scapegoat; on 18 July 1290 he ordained the expulsion of all Jews from his kingdom. Some 16,000 men, women and children were expelled, often in circumstances of great brutality, and set a precedent soon followed by other countries in western Europe.
Restless and ambitious, Edward now turned his attention to Scotland. William Wallace was probably in his fourteenth year when disaster struck, and Scotland was plunged into a sequence of events that changed the course of history utterly. Monday, 18 March 1286, was a wild, stormy day in the east of Scotland, with more than a hint of snow in the air and equinoctial gales raging round the coast. It was a day beset by evil omens and strange rumours that it would be the Day of Judgment. People remembered the gloomy death-bed prophecy of Prince Alexander and spoke of coming woes in hushed tones. Others remembered the wedding feast of the King and Joleta at Jedburgh the previous summer, when a mummer, dressed as a skeleton, had upset the wedding masque and terrified the superstitious onlookers. In hindsight they took this as a portent of the King’s imminent death.
Alexander himself seems to have shrugged aside the forebodings of his courtiers. When a soothsayer warned the King that his horse would be the death of him he robustly solved the problem by having the unfortunate steed put to death. Later a story gained credence that it was the sight of this beast’s decomposing remains which had frightened the King’s new mount into rearing up and throwing its hapless rider over the cliffs.
On 19 March the King held a council in Edinburgh Castle, then relaxed over a good meal and fine wines with his barons. When the banquet broke up the hour was late and another storm was brewing. The King’s advisers urged him to remain in the Castle that night, but Alexander ignored their counsel and decided, on the spur of the moment, to return to his residence at Kinghorn on the other side of the Firth of Forth. He was forty-four years old, in the prime of life, fearless, wilful and apparently anxious to return to the voluptuous young wife half his age.
He set out from Edinburgh that stormy night, accompanied by his squires, and braved the perilous crossing of the Firth from Dalmeny to Inverkeithing. There he was met by Alexander le Saucier, master of the royal sauce-kitchen and a bailie of the burgh. The Saucier bluntly asked the King, ‘My Lord, what are you doing out in such weather and darkness? How many times have I tried to persuade you that midnight travelling will bring you no good?’ The last remark seems to imply that the King was in the habit of commuting nocturnally between Edinburgh and his royal manor. At any rate, Alexander turned down the offer of hospitality and ignored the warning, and with an escort of three esquires and two local guides, set off for his house at Kinghorn. Eleven miles of indescribably bad road lay between Inverkeithing and Kinghorn. Not far from their destination Alexander became separated from his companions in the teeth of a howling gale and a pitch-black night, took a wrong turning and ended up on the cliffs of Pettycur. The exact manner of his death will never be known, but his body, the neck broken, was found the following day among the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Joleta had not conceived, and a few weeks later the youthful widow returned to her father’s house at Dreux.
The King’s death, so sudden and unexpected, spread consternation throughout the country. Fordun’s eulogy and lament for Alexander doubtless summed up the general feeling of loss: ‘O! Scotland, truly unhappy when bereft of so great a leader and pilot.’12 Two weeks after Easter that year, or little more than a month after the King’s tragic death, the magnates and prelates of Scotland met at Scone near Perth and took the oath of fealty to their sovereign lady, Alexander’s granddaughter Margaret of Norway, and solemnly swore to protect and uphold the peace of the land. That done, they set up a form of provisional government, appointing six custodes pads (Guardians of the Peace) as regents.
The Guardians consisted of two earls, Alexander Comyn of Buchan and Duncan of Fife; two barons, James the Steward and John Comyn of Badenoch; and two bishops, Robert Wishart of Glasgow and Wiliam Fraser of St Andrews. The earls and Bishop Fraser had special responsibility for Scotland north of the Forth, the barons and Bishop Wishart for the southern districts. The ethnic composition of the Guardians was not so finely balanced: the Comyns hailed from Picardy and the Steward from Normandy, while the Frasers or Frasiers were a Norman family which settled in Tweeddale in the late twelfth century; the other two were of mixed Anglo-Saxon or Celtic blood, but even Earl Duncan had a Norman mother.13 The earls of Buchan and Fife were the most powerful landowners in the north of Scotland, while Comyn of Badenoch, despite his title, had extensive lands in the Border counties. The most significant factor about the choice of Guardians was the omission of anyone who might be regarded as a serious contender for the throne.
On the face of it, Scotland continued much as before: ‘for three years in peace the realm stood desolate’ were Harry’s picturesque words. But before the year was out powerful factions were beginning to emerge. Like the Guardians, the leaders of these groups were of Norman origin, from Bailleul and Brix respectively; interestingly, though, both had strong Celtic connections. Devorgilla, heiress of Galloway, was the mother of John Balliol, while Marjorie, Countess of Carrick in her own right, was the daughter-in-law of the Competitor Bruce, wife of the Earl of Carrick and mother of Robert Bruce the future king. In the south Balliol, Lord of Galloway, and Bruce, Lord of Annandale, mustered their adherents; in the north Comyn of Badenoch also cast covetous eyes on the empty throne. Meanwhile the Guardians thought it courteous, if not exactly prudent, to keep King Edward informed of developments, even to the extent of despatching an embassy to Gascony. The aim of this mission was well intentioned, to seek Edward’s friendly assistance and advice; later, however, it was to be interpreted as an acknowledgment of his overlordship.
In the dangerous political vacuum created by the death of King Alexander and the minority of his distant granddaughter, the Guardians were at pains to emphasise that they had been elected by common counsel of the community of the realm. Within three months, trouble erupted in the south when Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, together with his eldest son, the Earl of Carrick, raised an army and invaded Galloway, seizing the Balliol stronghold of Buittle and the royal castles of Dumfries and Wigtown. The exact reason for this assault is obscure, but in the context of the period it was clear enough. Possession of Dumfries Castle gave the Bruces control over the route through Nithsdale to their lands in Carrick and, by the same token, contained the Balliols in Galloway. Later, John Balliol would refer to this outrage in his own Pleas for the Crown:
The aforesaid Sir Robert de Brus and the Earl of Karrick, his son, dared to take by force of arms with banners displayed the aforesaid Lady of Scotland’s castle of Dumfries, against her peace. And thence the aforesaid Sir Robert advanced to the castle of Botil, and there he caused one Patrick McCuffok within the Bailey of the same castle to proclaim that all the —— [illegible] should immediately depart from the land. The Earl of Karrick with the assent and power of his father took the aforesaid Lady’s Castle of Wigton in Galloway, and killed many of her men there.
On 20 September 1286 a group of noblemen which included one of the Guardians, James the Steward, as well as the Bruces father and son and the Lord of Islay, met at the seat of the Earl of Carrick and entered into a band or sworn agreement to give aid to Thomas de Clare and the Earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, against their enemies. The Turnberry Band may have been occasioned by no more than some vague Norman-Irish adventure, although many historians have asserted (on the flimsiest of evidence) that the Band upheld Bruce’s claims to the throne. In fact the conspirators took an oath saving the fealty of all parties to the king of England and ‘to whoever shall be king of Scotland by reason of the blood of the late King Alexander’ — which seems to have been an allusion to a hypothetical son of the supposedly pregnant Joleta.
The Guardians issued a writ to sheriffs and other royal officers to mobilise knights, freemen and others who owed military service to the royal dignity for the defence of the realm, and there is some evidence to suggest that levies were in fact called out in the spring of 1287. In all probability, therefore, Sir Malcolm Wallace and his eldest son would have been called up, and it is not impossible that young William, now fourteen or fifteen and already a well set-up lad, would have had his first taste of military action at this time, serving as page or esquire to his father. By the time the forces of law and order had been mobilised, however, the revolt of the Turnberry Band — if it was indeed a revolt — had fizzled out and the south-west of Scotland was restored to its former tranquillity. Nevertheless, the meeting of September 1286 left an ugly taste in the mouth; the Guardians lacked solidarity, and powerful magnates like the Bruces could flout the law with impunity whenever it suited their purpose.
Even when Scotland had a lawful king on the throne, the great magnates had had a tendency to treat the crown as their plaything. In the reign of Alexander III the chief troublemaker had been Alan Durward. In 1254, acting in concert with the earls of March, Strathearn and Carrick, Robert de Brus and Alexander the Steward, he had kidnapped the King and Queen Margaret and held them incommunicado at Kelso Abbey. King Henry III had retaliated by mounting an expedition to rescue his daughter and son-in-law, but in the aftermath of this incident Alexander III had been compelled to acknowledge Henry as his superior and virtual master of Scotland. Only three years later the Comyns seized the King and Queen and confined them in Stirling Castle. The matter was only resolved in 1259 when the Anglo-Norman earls of Hereford and Albemarle met with the Scoto-Norman John Balliol at Melrose and negotiated peace terms.
Thereafter there was an uneasy peace that lasted about three years. In 1289 Alexander Comyn died of old age, but in September that year Duncan of Fife, whom the Lanercost Chronicle describes as cruel and greedy above the average, was murdered by his own family. The earls were thus left unrepresented in the collective Guardianship. In their place, however, were co-opted Matthew Crambeth, Bishop of Dunkeld, and Sir Andrew de Moray or Murray of Petty. The latter, although only a knight, was a powerful magnate with important holdings not only in the north of the country but also in Lanarkshire, including the strategic stronghold of Bothwell to the south of Glasgow. More significantly, the composition of the Guardianship had subtly changed, diminishing the importance of the Norman element. Despite his name, Sir Andrew was the descendant of a Flemish mercenary who married into the Celtic nobility.
It was probably during this ominous period, in the lull before the storm, that William Wallace spent some time at Dunipace in east Stirlingshire where he lodged with an uncle, a younger brother of his father, who was the cleric there, at a chapelry of Cambuskenneth Abbey. By now William had shown by his intellect that he might make a career in the Church, the traditional role for landless younger sons. Blind Harry describes the parson of Dunipace as ‘a man of great riches’, a ‘mighty parson’ and ‘a full kind man’. William was about sixteen or seventeen by this time, and his education now proceeded in a more mature manner. In particular, his uncle inculcated in him moral maxims compactly framed in Latin, and referred frequently to the great classical authors. This priest is given the credit for instilling in William’s soul that passionate love of liberty which was to be the keynote of his elevated character and his glorious career. The very formula employed to imprint the memorable injunction has been preserved down the centuries:
Dico tibi verum, libertas optima return;
Nunquam servili sub nexu vivito, fili.
My son, I tell thee soothfastlie,
No gift is like to libertie;
Then never live in slaverie.
This was a precept which remained firmly implanted in William’s mind till the end of his days.
Meanwhile, protracted negotiations were taking place to arrange the marriage of the Maid of Norway and the five-year-old Lord Edward, son of King Edward I and a year her junior. Eirik II, himself a mere youth, bowed to the inevitable and acquiesced in Edward’s plans. The negotiations culminated in the Treaty of Birgham on 18 July 1290, ratified by King Edward at Northampton a month later. From the Scottish viewpoint, this marriage was to be the union of two individuals, and in the terms of the treaty the Guardians emphasised that, while Edward and Margaret might be one flesh, Scotland must remain quite separate from England.
Previously, the Guardians had sent four emissaries (Bishops Wishart and Fraser, John Comyn of Badenoch and Bruce of Annandale) to treat with commissioners of Norway and England regarding the entry of the little Queen into her realm. The three groups of commissioners reached an amicable arrangement and presented their report to King Edward at Salisbury on 9 November 1289. Margaret was to come over to England or Scotland on All Saints Day (1 November) 1290. She was to come free of any prior marriage contract, but Edward I was to be given assurances that she would not be married except by his ordinance, will and counsel, and that Scotland was in a safe and peaceful condition, so that Margaret might live there willingly ‘as its true lady, queen and heir’. The Scots reserved the right, however, to remove any unsuitable guardians or servants supplied by Norway and replace them by Scots who were to be approved by men of both countries and by King Edward’s agents. In these and other matters the arbitration of Edward was sought as a matter of course.14
At the same time, Pope Nicholas IV issued a bull granting dispensation for the marriage of the two cousins, King Edward having advanced the plea that it was a matter of political necessity that Margaret should be married to his son. From the correspondence in March 1290 it was clear that the Scots, on their side, welcomed the marriage. At this time they wrote to Eirik II formally asking his acceptance of the match, and at the same time they wrote to Prince Edward referring to ‘the joyous tidings of which many people speak’ — an allusion to the papal dispensation.
On the English side, the chief architect of the Treaty of Birgham was Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, a leading prelate and a powerful magnate. The son of Walter, Baron of Eresby in Lincolnshire, he had come to the notice of King Edward while still a young man and had been nominated by him to the bishopric of Durham. The monks of Durham were then at loggerheads with the Archbishop of York and elected Bek unanimously. Immediately after his consecration at York in January 1285 he was asked by Archbishop Romanus to excommunicate the rebellious monks, but this he flatly refused. This was only the first of several incidents in which Bek asserted his independence of his Archbishop. He soon emerged as a prelate of the secular and political type. He was one of the most magnificent lords in all England, always surrounded by a large retinue of barons and knights. Personally extravagant, he was nevertheless to die a rich man. Paradoxically he had simple, not to say austere, tastes and was famed for his chastity; it was said that he had never even looked a woman in the face. He was the very epitome of the Church militant, a mighty hunter delighting in horses, hawks and hounds, more at home in armour and chain-mail than in the vestments of his high office. This then was the man who was King Edward’s chief agent in his dealings with the Scots. In February 1290 King Edward appointed him custodian of the Scottish monarch’s estates in Penrith and Tynedale in the north of England, but the following June he was empowered to admit to the King’s peace the men of the Scottish Islands ‘who were in war and discord’. In August, when the marriage of the royal children was arranged, Bishop Bek was foisted on the Guardians as Lieutenant for Margaret and her would-be husband and they were instructed to defer to him in all matters ‘which are required for the governance and peaceful state of the realm’. This appointment, however, came to nothing when the Maid of Norway died.15
The terms of the Treaty of Birgham explicitly preserved the independence of Scotland ‘separate, free and without subjection’. Tenants-in-chief were required to do homage in Scotland alone, no court outside the kingdom could have jurisdiction over persons in Scotland, nor could York or Canterbury interfere in the elections of the Scottish clergy. The legal framework of Scotland was to be preserved intact and no writ of common law or letter of special favour could be issued other than by the normal process of the ‘King’s chapel’ and of the Scottish realm. Other clauses limited the rights of any parliament other than that of Scotland to legislate for, or impose taxes on, the Scots. The treaty was a canny document; the Guardians did their utmost to protect their country’s interests both for the present and, as far as they could foresee, for the future. It is clear that the purely or mainly Scottish element had prevailed at this point. The Norman magnates had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by seeing Scotland firmly under English control, for they had lands in both countries. For the moment it seemed as if the integrity of Scotland was to be maintained, although, in truth, King Edward was only biding his time and sooner or later the marriage between the Queen of Scots and the heir to the English throne would inevitably lead to a merger of the two kingdoms.
A portent of things to come, however, occurred in June 1290 when King Edward quietly installed Walter Huntercombe as governor of the Isle of Man. The island had been ceded by Norway to Scotland in 1266 but now it effectively became an English protectorate. Cynically, soon after this coup, the Manxmen were induced to petition Edward saying that they needed his protection. This illegal act seemed oddly at variance with Edward’s apparent reasonableness towards the Scots and Scotland at this time. Nevertheless, he had, in effect, seized an important part of the Scottish realm — an island which was strategically important to England and Ireland as well as Scotland.
The English occupation of the Isle of Man was overlooked in the general flurry of preparations being made to welcome the Maid of Norway to her kingdom. Edward himself fitted out a ship for the express purpose of bringing the girl-queen over from Norway. The victualling of the ship was meticulous, including sweetmeats, fruit and 28 pounds of gingerbread. The vessel arrived in Norway in May 1290 but returned to England a month later, empty-handed. Eirik decided to send his daughter to Scotland via the northern isles which then formed a part of his kingdom, and it was at Kirkwall in Orkney that envoys of the Scottish community were to meet their sovereign at the beginning of October. Meanwhile, the magnates of Scotland assembled at Perth to meet the Prince-Bishop of Durham, together with John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, and the Dean of York.
Warenne, one of the wealthiest and most powerful magnates in England, had married Alice of Lusignan, half-sister of Henry III, and was thus very close to the English throne. Born in 1231, he was a veteran of many campaigns in Gascony and Wales and one of King Edward’s most trusted advisers. As early as September 1285 he had been sent on a mission to Scotland,16 and between September and November 1289 he was one of the commissioners engaged in negotiating the Treaty of Salisbury with the Scots, whereby the Maid of Norway was to come to Scotland and subsequently marry Prince Edward.17 On 14 February 1290 he went back to Scotland as Edward’s envoy and on 20 June he was appointed, with Bek, to treat with the Scottish Guardians, assisting the Bishop in concluding the Treaty of Birgham on 18 July. On 28 August he was nominated Proctor for Prince Edward on the occasion of his intended marriage, and the following day was appointed to head the embassy sent to treat with Eirik II in Norway.
Subsequently the English mission, accompanied by Bishop Fraser of St Andrews, made the arduous journey north to Orkney. On 9 October Bishop Fraser wrote to King Edward from Leuchars, even before setting out from Fife, saying that he had just heard a disquieting rumour that the Queen had died. He feared that civil war would erupt as a result, unless Edward took steps to prevent it. The letter went on to hint that John Balliol might go to Edward, and Fraser urged the King to handle him carefully ‘so that your honour and advantage may be preserved’. The closing remarks of this letter made the worthy Bishop’s views clear. He urged Edward to come up to the Borders, to be ready to install the rightful heir ‘if so be he will follow your counsel’.
The generally accepted story is that Queen Margaret turned ill on the voyage from Norway to Orkney and died soon after landing there, on 26 September. Her little corpse was returned to her sorrowing father at Bergen — and thus the ancient Scottish dynasty finally and tragically came to an end.