5
In the month of May . . . the perfidious race of the Scots began to rebel.
HEMINGBURGH
They caused a certain bloody man, William Wallace, who had formerly been a chief of brigands in Scotland, to revolt against the King, and assemble the people in his support.
LANERCOST
IN the spring of 1297 Wallace left Dundaff. Accompanied by only nine men, he made his way south to Gilbank, and some time in April he went heavily disguised to Lanark to visit Marion. Blind Harry implies that they got married at this time, ‘beginning by a bond, with sure witnesses’, adding ‘my author [i.e. John Blair] says she was his lawful wife’. That this event probably took place shortly before the birth of Marion’s baby seems implicit in the ensuing lines: ‘I cannot say precisely how long they enjoyed this happy state, but in course of time a child was born to these two lovers, a goodly child, a maiden bright and beautiful . . .’1
Nowadays St Kentigern’s Church is a majestic ruin in the eastern suburbs of Lanark. In the thirteenth century the burgh was confined to the crown of the hill and this ancient church lay outside the town walls. Wallace was accustomed to go there on Sundays to celebrate mass. Marion’s house was at the other end of the town, at the foot of the high street close to the western extremity of the town walls, of which little vestige now remains. The site of this house, near St Nicholas Church and its life-size statue of Wallace, is marked to this day by a plaque.
After a time, William began to move about the town more openly, apparently confident that the English would not molest him. By now he and his companions had been joined by Sir John Graham and a band of fifteen well-armed men. Where this gang, numbering twenty-six in all, was accommodated we can only imagine, but they were probably too formidable a force for the occupying powers to tackle head on. Sir William Heselrig, Sheriff of Clydesdale, was not the man to tolerate such a show of defiance for long, though. With Robert Thorn, captain of the garrison, he devised a plan to capture the infamous outlaw.
The opportunity arose one fine Sunday morning in May when Wallace and some of his men were coming out of St Kentigern’s Church after worship. On this occasion William was not clad in concealed armour as usual, but sporting a new suit of green cloth, a long-established custom at the advent of summer. As he and his companions traversed the busy high street, William was accosted by the strongest soldier in Heselrig’s command. The soldier addressed him sarcastically, in a mixture of English and French: ‘Dieu garde, good day, bon Seigneur and good morn!’ Wallace responded in a medley of Scots and Gaelic: ‘Gud deyn, dauch lard, bach lowch banyoch a de’ (good evening, lazy lord, if you please, God bless you). By now some other Englishmen had sidled up and joined in the taunting. William, sensing danger, refused to be baited; but one of the soldiers mockingly snatched at his long sword, crying, ‘What should a Scot do with so fair a knife — as the priest said who last fucked your wife.’ This was accompanied by further taunts, implying that one of the priests of St Nicholas was the true father of Marion’s child.
William must have felt his anger rising as these coarse jibes continued, but by now the English crowd had swollen to about two hundred, and somewhere at the back of this throng were Heselrig and Thorn themselves. The odds were overwhelming but William, sensing that the English meant to take him, struck suddenly and with customary deadly force. The fight was fast and furious, Harry’s only descriptive note focusing on a particularly gory moment. Wallace struck off the sword-hand of an Englishman; the blood from the stump gushed forth so strongly that it struck William in the face and temporarily blinded him. In the narrow street, however, the English could do little by sheer force of numbers and the Scots, veterans of many such encounters, skilfully fought a rearguard action and withdrew through the town gate in good order. They took immediate refuge in Marion’s house, then escaped through the garden and back gate into the open countryside, where they concealed themselves in a little stronghold amid the sandstone Cartland Crags, a spectacular chasm about a mile north-west of Lanark forming the bed of the Mouse Water.
Fifty dead and wounded Englishmen littered the Lanark streets. The rest, led by Heselrig and Thorn, regrouped and marched up to the door of Marion’s house, demanding the surrender of the gang of ruffians. From the upper window Marion played for time to give her husband a chance to escape, and argued with the sheriff; but when the English realised that the Scots had got away Heselrig in his anger had the door smashed in. Marion was seized and put to death on the spot. Harry adds laconically, ‘I cannot tell you how,’ but Wyntoun’s account is slightly different and rather fuller. According to this chronicler, Heselrig came to Lanark after the disturbance, ordered Marion’s arrest and then caused her to be put to death. Improbably, he adds that Wallace, in disguise, was actually a witness to her execution. The exact circumstances will never be known.
What is incontrovertible is that Wallace was maddened beyond control at this atrocity. His father had been slain, his mother had been persecuted (and is believed to have died about this time) and now his wife had been cruelly put to death. Honour demanded that he take the life of Heselrig; but Wallace was determined that the death of the sheriff should be such a frightful spectacle that it would strike terror into the hearts of the hated enemy. Patrick Auchinleck, hearing of Marion’s death, journeyed to Cartland Wood with ten men. That night Wallace and his band prepared to go to Lanark. Little suspecting that the outlaws would return to the town, the English security was lax. The soldiers guarding the various gates in the town walls gave no thought to the men who came through singly at different times; but once within the town the little band formed up. While Graham’s party headed for the house occupied by Robert Thorn, Wallace and his men went straight to the sheriff’s residence, a tall building. Smashing in the brass-bound door with his foot, Wallace rushed upstairs and found the sheriff in his bedroom where he felled him with a single downward stroke of his great sword, cleaving his skull right down to the collar bone. For good measure, young Auchinleck ‘made siccar’ with three stab wounds to the fallen sheriff’s inert form.
By now the alarm had been given and others of the household rushed upstairs. Young Heselrig, coming to his father’s aid, was struck a mortal blow by Wallace who toppled him over the staircase. The raid took the English by complete surprise. Thorn’s house was set alight and he and his household were burned to death. The Scots went on the rampage that terrible night and slew many Englishmen — Harry puts the number of dead at 240. Only the womenfolk and priests were spared, but they were forcibly ejected and sent on their way without goods or provisions. Thus runs the account given by Blind Harry and, without so much detail, by Andrew of Wyntoun.
What makes this episode so significant, setting it apart from William’s earlier exploits, is that, for the first time, we have an incident that is independently corroborated. At his trial in 1305, amid a general list of killings, arson, destruction of property and sacrilege, the first specific charge brought against Wallace was that he had murdered the Sheriff of Clydesdale, whose name, oddly enough, was rendered in the indictment as Hesebrig (clearly a clerical error). That this crime was singled out for special mention was symbolic, for, in English eyes, it was regarded as the signal for the widespread resistance which triggered off the first War of Independence.
Uprisings, revolts and disturbances there had been in plenty over the previous months — Wallace’s own contribution had been not inconsiderable — but the murder of Heselrig and the massacre of the garrison at Lanark was on a larger scale than anything that had gone before; more importantly, it encouraged Scots everywhere to believe that the hated English were not invincible after all.
Immediately after this incident Wallace and his band of followers moved westwards to their old familiar territory in Ayrshire. From all over the south-west of Scotland men flocked to his side. Old comrades, such as Adam Wallace and Robert Boyd, were joined by new allies, such as Sir John Tinto, and a thousand men on horseback were raised from Kyle and Cunninghame alone. By midsummer the whole south-west was aflame with revolt; Wallace was now at the head of three thousand well-armed men, together with a large number of others who lacked ‘horse and gear’. News of the uprising spread like wildfire, but inevitably the English authorities were alarmed and sent word to London. That the Scots were in revolt was common knowledge in England that summer, for among the fighters who flocked to Wallace’s encampment was Gilbert de Grimsby whom the Scots nicknamed Jop. He was a man of great stature, born at Riccarton and therefore someone who would have known William since childhood. He had enlisted in the English army and served under Edward in Flanders and Picardy. A fine figure of a man, he was selected by Edward himself to be a pursuivant or herald and to him had fallen the honour of bearing the sacred banner of St John of Beverley at the head of the English army which paraded through Scotland after the Battle of Dunbar in 1296. His distinguished services in that campaign were rewarded by King Edward who, on 13 October that year, issued a directive to Earl Warenne stating that ‘Gilbert de Grimmesby’ should be found an appointment worth twenty marks per annum.2 On hearing of Wallace’s rebellion he had deserted and made his way secretly north to join the rebel ranks. He brought invaluable intelligence concerning the English army and its disposition, and William rewarded him by making him his standard-bearer.
Although discontent with English rule gave the rising its spontaneous character, it would not have succeeded as far as it did without the support of certain influential men. Chief among these were James the Steward and the Bishop of Glasgow, the two surviving Guardians of 1286. Robert Wishart belonged to the family of Wishart or Wiseheart from Pittarrow in Angus and was either a nephew or cousin of William Wishart, Bishop of St Andrews and Chancellor of Scotland in the reign of Alexander III. William Wishart was bishop-elect of Glasgow in 1270, but before he was installed he was transferred to the bishopric of St Andrews, and Robert, then Archdeacon of St Andrews, was preferred to the see of Glasgow in his place. No record of his early career survives, and the earliest documentary record of him concerns his consecration at Aberdeen in 1272. He rapidly achieved a leading position among the prelates who directed the affairs of state in Alexander’s reign, and his appointment as one of the six Guardians on 16 March 1286 was an obvious choice. As has already been mentioned, he was responsible for the administration of Scotland south of the Forth (along with James the Steward and John Comyn of Badenoch). Subsequently, he was one of the Scottish commissioners who negotiated with Edward at Salisbury, and his signature appears on the letter sent to Eirik II informing him of the marriage proposed between the Maid of Norway and Prince Edward.3 At this juncture Wishart, with Bishop Fraser of St Andrews, seems to have supported Edward and later he acquiesced in the elevation of John Balliol to the throne.
Wishart’s gradual disenchantment with King Edward probably arose from the attempts by the latter to anglicise the Scottish Church. Wishart was the most ardent champion of the rights and liberties of the Church in Scotland and strenuously opposed the ejectment of Scottish clergy and the appointment of English priests in their stead. In treating the Scottish Church in such a high-handed manner, Edward clearly misjudged the prelates of that country. Unlike the magnates, most of whom were committed to Edward’s cause on account of their extensive English estates, the prelates, by and large, were men of a more independent turn of mind. They were more likely to have risen from the ranks of the Scottish community and were therefore not so susceptible to Anglo-Norman influence. It may be stretching a point to suggest that opposition to English rule was co-ordinated and orchestrated by the hierarchy, but those of its priests who had not been replaced by English appointees were certainly at the heart of the passive resistance in 1296–97. Master John Blair of Dunfermline, Thomas Gray of Libberton and the uncles of Wallace at Dunipace and Kilspindie were by no means isolated examples.
In the early months of 1297 Wishart was already engaged in intrigue against the alien government which had been foisted on the Scots. Suspicions of Wishart’s disloyalty were conveyed to King Edward who wrote specifically to Pope Boniface VIII asking to have Wishart deprived of his see. To this the Pope would not agree, although he sent a letter to the Bishop of Glasgow commanding him to desist from his opposition to Edward and denouncing him as ‘the prime mover and instigator of all the tumult and dissension which has arisen between his dearest son in Christ, Edward, King of England, and the Scots’. This admonition had no effect on Wishart who, by midsummer 1297, had come out in open support of Wallace. This signal act of defiance was to cost him dear later on. Imprisoned after the sorry débâcle at Irvine in July 1297, Wishart was singled out for close confinement, though he was later released. For his continued intriguing with such rebels as Wallace, however, the bishop was one of those expressly excluded from the generous terms offered to the defeated Scots at Strathord in February 1304. Wishart not only granted absolution to Robert Bruce for the murder of Comyn on the altar steps of Greyfriars in March 1306 but officiated at Robert’s coronation at Scone later that month. When he was captured by Aymer de Valence after the Battle of Methven the following July (where he had fought with the best of them, clad in armour) he was sent in chains to Nottingham and thence to Porchester Castle where he was kept for eight years in strict confinement, eventually losing his sight as a result. Not till after the Battle of Bannockburn did he regain his liberty, being one of the five prisoners then exchanged for Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. He returned to his diocese where he died in November 1316. His impressive tomb, bearing a recumbent effigy of the bishop-statesman, can be seen in Glasgow Cathedral to this day.4
The possibility that Wallace and Wishart met in the early summer of 1297 cannot be ruled out, although it remains no more than supposition that they did.5 Whether such a meeting took place or not is immaterial, for Wishart would have been kept well informed of the revolt. Indeed, he would have been aware of the exploits of the young outlaw over the preceding months. Wishart had many kinsmen well placed in the Church, and the medieval Church was admirably suited to subversive activities, providing the organisation and the communication whereby the revolt was co-ordinated and maintained. It is probable that Wishart was responsible for giving the rebellion a cloak of respectability by claiming that it was a just war in the name of King John, the anointed sovereign of Scotland. While he was trying to persuade the ever-cautious Steward to lend his support to this cause, Wishart learned that Wallace had gained a valuable ally and this, in turn, persuaded the Steward to back the uprising. Sir William Douglas, ‘le Hardi’, late governor of Berwick Castle, had been released from confinement late in 1296 and lost no time in aligning himself with the rebels.
Blind Harry represents Douglas as attacking and capturing the castle at Sanquhar before being himself besieged there by the Captain of Durisdeer. A message is sent to Wallace who promptly heads south and raises the siege, defeating the English at Dalswinton and killing some five hundred of them in the process. Douglas is then appointed constable of all the castles between Drumlanrig and Ayr. Whatever the truth of all this, it is significant that, on 12 June 1297, King Edward declared forfeit all Douglas’s lands and property in Essex and Northumberland as a consequence of his actions.
When Edward heard of this important defection, he ordered the Earl of Carrick to muster the men of Annandale and launch an attack on the Douglas stronghold. According to Hemingburgh, the Bishop of Carlisle suspected the loyalty of the younger Bruce and made him swear, on the bible and the sword of St Thomas à Becket, a special oath of allegiance to Edward before setting out on the expedition, but this may be no more than a fiction of hindsight.
From the absence of any mention of Lochmaben, it must be assumed that the occupation of that Bruce stronghold by Wallace’s men was short-lived. At any rate Robert Bruce, the future King of Scots, marched his forces over the hills from Dumfriesshire and down the valley of the Clyde to Douglasdale whose castle was being held by Sir William’s English wife, Eleanor Ferrers. She was his second wife, a widow whom Douglas had forcibly abducted while she was visiting Scotland; she was not only won over by his charm but became an ardent supporter of the Scottish cause. Incidentally, his first wife was the sister of James the Steward. Sir William himself had gone to Ayr to join the main body of the rebels. The young Earl of Carrick made no more than a token attack on Douglas Castle, but then abruptly, and for no apparent reason, changed sides. Hemingburgh explains this volte face naïvely by saying that Bruce joined the Scots because he was a Scotsman. Young Robert addressed his father’s tenants of Annandale before the walls of Douglas Castle: ‘No man holds his own flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception. I must join my own people and the nation in which I was born.’ He said that his oath at Carlisle had been given under duress and he appealed to the Annandale men to join him, but with the exception of a few they apparently declined. The Annandale levies slipped back over the hills to Dumfriesshire while the young earl and his supporters, with the men of Douglasdale and Lady Douglas and her family, journeyed westwards into Ayrshire. In Carrick he had no trouble in recruiting his own tenants.
The action of the Earl of Carrick at Douglas was his crossing of the Rubicon, but it was a baffling one. He had a strong position in Scotland and was almost a protégé of Edward. Why give up all that for some vague concept of Scottishness which barely existed? Wishart and the Steward were life-long supporters of the Bruce faction, but Sir William Douglas was a staunch Balliol man — and the uprising was nominally on Balliol’s behalf. Why go against family interest in support of the traditional rival of his house? It has been suggested that as early as 1297 the Earl of Carrick had aspirations to the throne, but this is extremely unlikely and there is nothing, in the events during the revolt from 1297 to 1304, to support this.
Far more important than the Earl of Carrick’s change of heart was the emergence, in the north of Scotland, of another outstanding rebel leader. Among the Scottish knights taken prisoner after the Battle of Dunbar were Sir Andrew de Moray of Petty, his brother Sir William (known as ‘le Riche’ from his vast wealth), and the son of the former, also Andrew de Moray. The two knights were imprisoned in the Tower of London while the younger Andrew was held at Chester Castle for a time. He was released, or escaped from custody, some time later and made his way back north, arriving in Moray in the spring of 1297. Sir William de Moray had already been set free, having agreed to join Edward’s army for the campaign in Flanders, but Sir Andrew had chosen to remain in prison rather than fight for the English. With his father languishing in an English prison and his uncle effectively a hostage in English hands, the action of young Andrew in raising revolt was rash to put it mildly. No reason for taking up arms has ever been suggested; it is sufficient to say that by April 1297 Andrew de Moray had raised the whole of Moray against the English who maintained a strong presence in the area, with large garrisons in the castles of Inverness, Urquhart, Nairn, Forres, Elgin and Lochindorb.
The Morays were a powerful family of Celtic stock, possessing extensive estates at Dingwall, Petty, Alturlie, Avoch, Boharm, Botriphnie and Croy in the region that bore their name, as well as the powerful lordship of Bothwell in Lanarkshire. As previously noted, Blind Harry says that Sir Aymer de Valence held Bothwell at this time; and if not Sir Aymer, then certainly some other powerful English baron must have been in occupation of such a strategically important stronghold. The priest of Bothwell was, in fact, David de Moray or Moravia, youngest brother of Andrew and William, and following their incarceration he assumed the position of head of the family and administrator of its estates. His promotion in the hierarchy was thereafter nothing short of meteoric, evidence of the strong support of Bishop Wishart. He was appointed a canon of Elgin in 1298 and Bishop of Moray and Caithness a year later, though his lasting achievement was the foundation of the Scots College at Paris in 1325. David de Moravia seems to have lent much more than spiritual support to his nephew’s insurrection, being not only the conduit to Wishart and the Steward but giving Andrew immense logistical back-up. Moray was one of the few districts in Scotland in which the normal feudal system did not operate; its inhabitants owed their allegiance direct to the sovereign without the intermediary of a feudal superior. Thus the revolt, when it erupted, was unequivocally in the name of King John.
It is a measure of how slowly news travelled in the thirteenth century that King Edward was not apprised of this northern revolt till June; even then he seems to have been unaware of its leader till much later, for as late as 28 August 1297 Andrew de Moray was granted letters of safe-conduct to journey south to London, there to visit his father in the Tower.6 Needless to say, young Andrew had much weightier matters on his mind by that time and the visit never took place.
In the spring of 1297 Andrew de Moray raised his standard at Ormonde Castle in the Black Isle and harried the English garrisons in the north-east. This was a rising of the common men, led by minor gentry. Moray’s chief lieutenant, in fact, was Alexander Pilche, a prominent burgess in Inverness of German or Flemish origin, and it has been suggested that he was the real force behind the uprising.7 Be that as it may, Andrew de Moray was, by birth and upbringing, the rightful leader of the revolt in the north. His forces, though small, were well mounted and knew their terrain. They were organised into flying columns which harassed and attacked the English at will, striking with ferocious rapidity and vanishing just as swiftly, leaving terrible carnage and destruction behind them. Little is known for certain about Moray’s activities, although there is extant a very graphic account in a letter addressed to King Edward from his ‘diligent and faithful friends’ which stated that Moray led ‘a very large body of rogues’ and besought the King to come north and rid them of this menace.8 Moray’s first essay on a grander scale was the siege of Urquhart Castle on the western side of Loch Ness, but he lacked the ballistic engines necessary to reduce it by force. Other castles, however, fell into his hands, including the strongholds of Banff, Elgin and Inverness itself.
Significantly, opposition to Moray came from the northern nobility led by the formidable Effie, Countess of Ross, and closely supported by Henry le Cheyne, Bishop of Aberdeen, whose brother Sir Reginald was governor of Moray. Interestingly, the Earl of Ross was, at this time, still held in the Tower of London where he had been confined since the Battle of Dunbar. His son was to have accompanied Andrew de Moray to London that August when they had been given permission to visit their fathers, and it is not known whether the young Ross made the journey or not. Edward’s immediate response to Moray’s activities was to release from his continental service John of Badenoch and the Earl of Buchan, both members of the powerful Comyn family, who were then despatched to Scotland to stiffen the feudal faction and restore law and order in the north.9
It was perhaps unfortunate for Edward that not only was he himself out of the country at the time, but the Earl of Surrey, Warden of the Kingdom and Land of Scotland, had also taken himself off to the south for the good of his health as the winter of 1296 set in, and then delayed his return north by making great play of his activities in Northumberland and County Durham.10 When apprised by Edward of the insurrection of Wallace in south-west Scotland, Warenne wrote to his royal master complacently, ‘And know, Sire, that the delay which we have made will cause you no harm whatever, if God pleases.’11 Hemingburgh would later write that the earl’s attitude was ever afterwards ‘the fountain and origin of all our troubles’. On 14 June 1297 Edward gave Warenne an explicit order to return to his post forthwith, but it was not until the end of July that he reached Berwick. Even then he lost much valuable time by despatching his grandson Henry de Percy to negotiate with the Scots. In the meantime Scotland was nominally in the hands of Hugh Cressingham whose seat of administration was at Berwick. Far from governing Scotland with the firm hand which his master required, Cressingham was proving to be thoroughly inept at carrying out Edward’s orders regarding the refortification of Berwick. The stone walls which the King had commanded had yet to be built. There was more than a suspicion that the Treasurer was diverting into his own coffers the funds which had been earmarked for this project.
English rule was more rigorously maintained at Glasgow, however, where Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, backed by crack troops of St Cuthbert’s Host, was in residence. Edward had decreed that the bishopric of Glasgow should henceforward be subordinate to Durham, a matter that only made Wishart more rebellious. Scone, where the Scottish kings had been crowned for centuries and which was therefore a symbol of national unity, was the seat of William de Ormesby whom Edward had appointed Justiciar of Scotland. From this ancient and sacred site in the very heart of the country, English justice was dispensed in a brutal manner. Ormesby’s chief remit was to seek out and bring to Edward’s allegiance the men of lesser importance whom the King desired should swear fealty to him, over and above the magnates who had already done so. Those who were reluctant to take the oath were coerced by bands of soldiers, fined, sequestered or outlawed. Even those who made the journey to Scone and took the oath were taxed a silver penny each by the clerks of the court, who became very wealthy as a result.12
Some time in June Wallace, arguably at the behest of Bishop Wishart, planned and executed a daring raid that aimed at striking terror into the very heart of the English regime. Riding north with a hand-picked body of cavalry, he met up with Sir William Douglas at Perth and together they advanced on Scone a few miles to the north-east. Ormesby’s troops melted away as the Scottish army drew near and the Justiciar himself barely escaped with his life, fleeing southwards and not stopping until he was safe back within his estates in Northumberland. He abandoned a great quantity of goods and chattels. Tradition maintains that Wallace and Douglas slew many Englishmen in this brief campaign and laid siege to several castles, but details are lacking.
By late June, southern Scotland was in a ferment. Everywhere English troops had withdrawn into their castles and were in a state of virtual, if not always actual, siege. It was now apparent how illusory had been the subjugation of Scotland. The English in effect were confined to the towns and larger burghs, but only those which could be supplied by sea were tenable, for the Scots had cut their overland lines of communication, and bands of armed rebels roamed the countryside at will. The focus of discontent consisted of four men, clearly named in the English chronicles as the Bishop of Glasgow, James the Steward, Andrew de Moray and William Wallace. The Lanercost Chronicle stated trenchantly that the bishop,
ever foremost in treason, conspired with the Steward of the Kingdom, named James, for a new piece of insolence, yea, for a new chapter of ruin. Not daring openly to break their pledge to the King, they caused a certain bloody man, William Wallace, who had formerly been a chief of brigands in Scotland, to revolt against the King, and assemble the people in his support.
Blind Harry’s account of the early summer of 1297 is very confused. He avers that King Edward came north with an army of sixty thousand men which was scattered like chaff by the invincible Wallace in a pitched battle near Biggar, an astronomical number of the slain being close relatives of the King. Notwithstanding the strong local tradition which persists to this day, this is pure myth, although it may be that Harry got mixed up with the later Battle of Roslin. There are also conflicting accounts regarding Edward’s awareness of what was actually happening in Scotland at this time. Edward, it is known, was busy making preparations for his latest expedition to Flanders although he was not wholly negligent of the northern troubles. Early in May he was having his siege-engines overhauled at Carlisle and on 24 May he addressed a circular to his leading lieges in Scotland. During May and June he received the oaths of fealty of a number of Scottish magnates to serve him ‘in Scotland against the King of France’.
If the Battle of Biggar is total myth, the strange episode known as the Barns of Ayr may also be partly apocryphal, for it does not sit well with the known facts, nor with the chronology of the period, although it figures in The Brus, John Barbour’s epic poem which, written about half a century after the event, is generally trustworthy regarding historical events. According to Blind Harry, an eyre-court was summoned, by a judge whom he names Arnulf of Southampton, at Ayr for 18 June. To his credit, Henry de Percy would have nothing of this plot and deliberately went to Glasgow in order to absent himself from the proceedings. The leading Scots of Ayrshire were summoned in the name of King Edward to appear at a lofty building known as the Barns (used as barracks) on the town’s outskirts. The entrance was strongly guarded and the Scots were admitted one by one. No sooner were they inside the door than a noose was slung over their heads and they were hauled off their feet and strung up from an enormous beam running the full length of the building. In this treacherous manner some 360 barons, knights and gentlemen were summarily executed without trial. First to hang was Sir Ranald Craufurd, Sheriff of Ayr, followed by Sir Bryce Blair and his uncle Sir Neil Montgomery and many others including Kennedys from Cassilis, Campbells of Loudoun, Barclays, Boyds and Stewarts and the flower of Ayrshire nobility. Afterwards the bodies were stripped and thrown into the yard.
Barbour mentions this atrocity in passing, in lines lamenting the death of Crystal Seton: ‘It was great sorrow assuredly that so worthy a person as he should in such manner be hanged. Thus ended his worthiness.’ The ensuing passage mentions Sir Ranald Craufurd and Sir Bryce Blair ‘hangyt in till a berne in Ayr’. The Complaynt of Scotland, a work of the sixteenth century and therefore long after the event, spoke of the incident as a matter of great public notoriety whose barbarity was common knowledge.
Wallace himself had gone to Kingace that day and thus evaded the trap. When he entered Ayr in the afternoon he was intercepted by a young woman of the Craufurd family who gave him the frightful news. William sent her off to rally Robert Boyd, Adam Wallace and such other friends and kinsmen as had survived the slaughter. He himself was set upon by a cavalry patrol and only escaped to Leglen Wood after he and his closest comrades had slain ten of the enemy. A day or two later, however, his band being reinforced, Wallace returned to the town. He instructed a girl to mark with chalk the doors of the houses wherein lived the English, and then gave orders that these doors were to be securely fast, so that the residents were trapped. With Boyd and fifty men keeping a close watch on Ayr Castle, William took the rest of his men to the Barns where the English judge and a large company were sleeping off a late-night carousal. Kindling and brushwood being placed all round the huge wooden building, Wallace gave orders to torch the place. With great relish Harry describes in the most lurid detail how the inmates perished. A hundred and forty English troops quartered at the priory were subsequently slain by Prior Drumlay and his monks in a subsidiary incident ever afterwards known as the Prior of Ayr’s Blessing. The garrison of the castle, seeing the dreadful conflagration at the Barns, sallied forth but were ambushed by Boyd’s men and slaughtered. Harry estimated the English death toll at five thousand.
This legend, though manifestly exaggerated, may well have a grain of truth in it, despite some glaring discrepancies. In the first place, Sir Ranald Craufurd was certainly alive after 18 June 1297. It has been suggested, though not very plausibly, that Arnulf the Justice was, in fact, the Justiciar Ormesby whom Wallace had attacked at Scone. It may be that this incident was loosely based on the fact that, more than a year later (26 August 1298), King Edward entered Ayr with his troops and found that the castle had been razed to the ground by the Scots, but the Barns themselves seem to have been the figment of someone’s imagination. Lord Hailes, in his Annals, suggested that perhaps the story had arisen out of the pillaging of the English quarters at Irvine in July 1297. Somewhere in this distorted and garbled tale there may be the dim recollection of some atrocity and grim reprisal, for the incident figures in the writings of John Major as well as in the poems of Barbour and Blind Harry.
According to local legend, Wallace is said to have watched the conflagration from the top of a hill about two miles south of Craigie. In 1855, on the 550th anniversary of Wallace’s death, a castellated tower was erected on the summit of Barnweil Hill as a tribute to the great patriot. The story goes that the hill got its name from a comment of Wallace as the Barns went up in flames: ‘Don’t they burn weel.’ The name, however, is of much greater antiquity than 1297.
In June or July 1297 there was an uprising in Fife fomented by Macduff, the claimant to the earldom. This may have been an act of sheer opportunism, for it did not gain wide popular support and was speedily suppressed by the pro-English Earl of Strathearn. On 1 August Warenne reported back to Edward that Macduff and his two sons had been captured and ‘they shall receive their deserts when they arrive’. Around the same time, Sir Alexander of Argyll was reported to have seized the Steward’s castle of Glasrog (Glassary) and to have attacked Alexander of the Isles, a loyal supporter of King Edward. This ties in with Harry’s account of an expedition by Wallace to Argyll to rescue Neil Campbell of Lochawe, his old schoolmate from Dundee, from the clutches of MacFadyen whom Edward had made Lord of Argyll and Lorn. Wallace was alleged to have defeated MacFadyen and installed Duncan of Lorn and Sir Neil Campbell in his place.
There was also the strange sideshow in which Douglas burned Turnberry Castle, a Bruce stronghold, and in retaliation the young Earl of Carrick ravaged Douglasdale, seizing the wife and children of Sir William and carrying them off to Annandale. This may tie up with the fact that the Bishop of Carlisle summoned the elder Bruce after the Wallace-Douglas raid on Scone, and forced him to swear his allegiance again. Perhaps the raid on Douglasdale was intended to demonstrate the loyalty of the Bruces to King Edward.
Robert Bruce, the future King of Scots, has often been accused of deviousness and untrustworthiness, and this curious episode would, on the face of it, seem to prove the point; but there is also the possibility that he made a show of allegiance to Edward at this time to conceal the fact that he was actually conspiring with Bishop Wishart, James the Steward and the latter’s brother, Sir John of Bonkill. Some time that summer young Bruce attempted to muster his father’s men in Annandale but they were singularly lukewarm regarding this enterprise. He had more luck with his own tenants in Carrick and they went on an orgy of burning and slaying, summarily evicting the English from southern Ayrshire. The English chroniclers, touching on this affair, were particularly outraged by Bruce’s brutal treatment of the English clergy. It has been suggested that this independent action by Bruce was evidence of his ambitions of gaining the throne, and there is always the possibility that he embarked on this course of action as a counterweight to the success and rising popularity of William Wallace. It has been argued that Bruce would naturally despise Wallace as a man of relatively low birth — and a man who was now openly espousing the cause of the rival Balliol; but there is nothing to support this contention and, indeed, all the evidence, scanty though it is, seems to point in the opposite direction, as will be seen in due course.
By midsummer 1297 Scotland appears to have been in a state of almost total anarchy. Most historians take the line that the revolt was caused by the arrogant and overbearing behaviour of the occupying forces. But even if the English had been the model of diplomacy and discretion and had handled the Scots with kid gloves, a general uprising was probably inevitable. The Scots may have quarrelled and fought amongst themselves, but they were certainly never going to knuckle under to any alien power however benevolent that might be. Ironically, the English occupation probably gave the Scots, for the first time, a real sense of nationhood. Hitherto Scotland had been inhabited by men of different races and languages, with different traditions and outlook. Now they were drawn together by the sense of dwelling within the same country, beginning to feel in their hearts that they were the same people when, regardless of race, they had a community of ideas, of interests, of memories and of hopes. This is what eventually made them a nation, but it was to be a nation tempered in the fire of the long drawn-out Wars of Independence.
Edward, however, could tolerate the deteriorating situation no longer. Early in June, while Warenne continued to vacillate, Edward appointed Sir Henry de Percy and Sir Robert de Clifford ‘to arrest, imprison and justify all disturbers of the peace in Scotland and their resetters’. Having eventually, and with the utmost difficulty, raised an army of three hundred horse and forty thousand foot in England north of the Trent, Percy and Clifford crossed the border early in July and advanced through Annandale. Marching north through Nithsdale, they came through Sanquhar and Cumnock and advanced into Kyle where they came upon the Scottish army encamped at Irvine. To honour this rabble with the title of an army is an exaggeration; it was a motley assemblage of earls, barons and knights with their tenants and vassals, together with the burgesses of the towns and probably many others who owed allegiance to no lord but were attracted to the coming showdown by the prospect of adventure and booty. From the outset the magnates could not agree on leadership and the chain of command, far less a common strategy for dealing with the imminent English expedition. In fact, the bickering between the various magnates who had condescended to take part in this campaign so disgusted Sir Richard Lundie or Lundin, a professional soldier who had never previously sworn fealty to Edward, that he now changed sides and took his own contingent of men-at-arms over to Percy, declaring vehemently that he would ‘no longer serve with men who were at discord and variance’.13
This defection might have been expected to bring the Scottish lords to their senses but, in the memorable words of Lord Hailes, ‘All the leaders were independent, all untractable. They would neither fight, retire, nor treat by common consent.’ On 7 July the Scottish army surrendered ignominiously, apparently without firing an arrow, and its commanders submitted to Percy and Clifford. Significantly, the Earl of Carrick was forced to agree to hand over his infant daughter Marjorie as a hostage and two days later Wishart, the Steward and Sir Alexander de Lindesay became sureties for the young earl’s good faith. Despite this, it appears that the wily Bruce managed to hang on to the little girl. Douglas and Wishart were less fortunate. First Douglas and then the bishop surrendered their liberty, allegedly stung by insulting slurs on their honour. On 16 July Osbert de Spaldington, governor of Berwick, informed King Edward that Sir William Douglas had failed to provide hostages or guarantors and was now ‘in your castle of Berwick, in my keeping, and is still very savage and very abusive, but I will keep him in such wise that, please God, he shall by no means get out’. Earl Warenne himself wrote to Edward on 1 August on the same subject, saying that Douglas was ‘in good irons and in good keeping’. Spaldington kept his unruly prisoner in irons, pending his shipment south where, on 12 October, he was incarcerated in the Tower of London. By 20 January 1299 Sir William was reported as being ‘with God’, a euphemism that probably concealed the brutal imprisonment which brought this doughty knight to an early death. Bishop Wishart was subjected to no less brutality, being confined in chains in Roxburgh Castle. Sir William’s harsh treatment, however, was to be avenged many times over by his son. Then a boy of thirteen, he grew to manhood and, as Sir James Douglas, was renowned as one of the greatest fighters in the later Wars of Independence.
The ignoble collapse of the magnates at Irvine contrasts vividly with the dauntless resolution of William Wallace, who continued to operate in the field with a mixed army of Scots and Gallovidians (as Hemingburgh was careful to describe it). This partisan force conducted a brilliant campaign in the classic guerrilla pattern, harrying Percy’s baggage train, cutting lines of communications and killing stragglers. The death toll from this action alone was conservatively put at over five hundred. Edward may have cowed the Scottish magnates, many of whom were conscripted into the expedition to Flanders, but Wallace and Moray were unbowed. The English chronicler Knighton succinctly described the situation:
The whole followers of the nobility attached themselves to Wallace; and although the persons of their lords were with the King in England, their hearts were with Wallace, who found his army reinforced by so immense a multitude of Scots that the community of the land obeyed him as their leader and prince.11
According to Hemingburgh, the surrender at Irvine filled Wallace with disappointment which grew to fierce wrath against his pusillanimous colleagues, and found expression in his attack on Bishop Wishart’s palace in Glasgow which was plundered and sacked. On the face of it, this seems highly unlikely, for Wishart had been Wallace’s staunchest supporter and, unlike most of the magnates, had surrendered himself honourably into English captivity. Indeed, King Edward later suspected that Wishart had deliberately sacrificed himself, and submitted to internment in Roxburgh Castle in order to plot its betrayal to the Scots. That an attack on Glasgow took place about this time appears to be confirmed by a story by Blind Harry. With three hundred horsemen Wallace rode across Glasgow bridge before the English authorities were aware of their presence. While Adam Wallace and Patrick Auchinleck led 140 men to attack along the North East Row from the rear, Wallace and Boyd led the main onslaught up the High Street. Apart from the minstrel, this engagement in Glasgow is documented from other sources. On this occasion there occurred the following conversation, often repeated as a specimen of Wallace’s wit. William asked Auchinleck which squadron he wished to command. ‘Uncle, whether will ye upbear the bishop’s tail, or pass before and take his benison?’ Auchinleck quipped in return, ‘As you yourself are still, to my knowledge, unbishoped [i.e. unconfirmed], you shall take the blessing; and, as for us, we shall do our best to bear up the bishop’s tail’ — an allusion to carrying the train or ceremonial robes of high ecclesiastics on occasions of state.15 Harry has Wallace engaging the forces of Percy and Bishop Bek, slaying the former and defeating the latter, with four hundred casualties on the English side. Percy, of course, was not killed at Glasgow and was probably nowhere near that city at the time, but Bek had made it his administrative headquarters and it was Bek, rather than Wishart, that Wallace was striking against. The battle was fast and furious, commencing at nine o’clock in the morning and over by midday, Wallace and his victorious troops being well south of Glasgow again by one o’clock.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Wallace was now the only Scottish general in the field south of the Forth. He regrouped his forces at Dundaff where he spent five days. To this place came Duncan of Lorn, with an elderly guide named Gilmichael, bringing the bad news that the earls of Atholl, Menteith and Buchan, now making common cause with the English, were harassing the Scots in Argyll, led by Sir Neil Campbell of Lochawe. Duncan had been ousted by his kinsman, John of Lorn, who had come into the King’s peace and been ennobled by him. John was now allied to MacFadyen whose Irish troops joined in the fray. To take the pressure off Campbell and Duncan, Wallace now led an expedition into Argyll and defeated MacFadyen at the Pass of Brander, at the head of Loch Awe. Harry speaks of the earls and MacFadyen combining to produce a force of fifteen thousand that pillaged through Argyll, slaying men, women and children and laying whole districts waste. Although this is clearly exaggerated, there must have been some substance to it. The showdown came at Craig Bhuidhe (the yellow rock) which Campbell was determined to defend as long as possible, and with three hundred men he held up the enemy advance until Wallace’s band arrived. Curiously, Harry singles out Sir Richard Lundie as one of the able knights who fought on Wallace’s side in this battle, but this must be discounted for Lundie remained firmly in the English camp throughout this period, as will become apparent later. Similarly, the story that Malcolm, Earl of Lennox, also brought a contingent of troops to this engagement seems unlikely, for that earl was at this time, if not wholly on the English side then certainly sitting on the fence. Here again, Harry is the sole source for evidence of this battle, but despite such discrepancies regarding Lundie and Lennox, the details of numbers involved on the Scottish side, as well as the accurate description of the locale, could only have come from the results of some real event.
Throughout the summer of 1297 Wallace conducted a campaign in the Highlands. In the meantime Percy and Clifford had journeyed across country from Irvine, and were in Roxburgh on 15 July. Here they met up with Cressingham with three hundred armoured horses and ten thousand foot soldiers. Eight days later, the Treasurer wrote to King Edward at length. From this we gather that Percy and Clifford considered that they had achieved their objective, but Cressingham urged the King that ‘even though peace had been made on this side of the Scots water [i.e. the Firth of Forth], yet it would be well to make a chevauchée on the enemies on the other side’ — a clear reference to Wallace and his allies who were continuing to combat the English and their collaborators in Dunbartonshire, Stirlingshire and Perthshire. Cressingham then went on to specify his enemy and what should be done about him: ‘An attack should be made upon William Wallace, who lay then with a large company — and does so still — in the Forest of Selkirk, like one that holds himself against your peace.’ This vast wilderness, often referred to simply as the Forest, in fact extended far beyond the Borders as its name implied, reaching the southern bank of the Forth. It seems likely that Wallace and his band were then encamped on the northern side of the Forest, not far from Stirling.
On 24 July Cressingham wrote again to the King. Edward, who had been encountering considerable difficulties in equipping his Flanders expedition, not least from a fractious baronage who insisted on the reconfirmation of Magna Carta before they would support him, had written to Cressingham ordering him to raise money from the rents and taxes of Scotland to finance Warenne and Percy in their military operations. In reply, the Treasurer now informed his royal master, ‘Not a penny could be raised, until my lord the Earl of Warenne shall enter into your land and compel the people by force and sentence of law.’ He then went on to explain the situation more fully:
Sire, let it not displease you, by far the greater part of your counties of the realm of Scotland are still unprovided with keepers, as well by death, siege, or imprisonment; and some have given up their bailiwicks, and others neither will nor dare return; and in some counties the Scots have established and placed bailiffs and ministers, so that no county is in proper order, except Berwick and Roxburgh, and this only lately.16
Cressingham’s letter speaks volumes for the passive resistance of the Scots, painting as it does a stark picture of the reality of the English occupation. The selfish and cowardly magnates might have grovelled before Percy and Clifford, but the country as a whole was not at peace. No doubt realising that he had blurted out more than he had intended, however, the Treasurer concluded on a note of false optimism. ‘All this will be speedily amended, by the grace of God, by the arrival of the said lord the Earl, Sir Henry de Percy, and Sir Robert de Clifford, and the others of your Council.’ Quite how the situation was to be improved by the arrival of these men Cressingham did not specify.
The trouble in the north was by no means confined to Wallace and his forces. Further north Andrew de Moray’s insurrection was gathering momentum. Under instructions from their English overlords, the Bishop of Aberdeen and Gartnait, son of the Earl of Mar, had attempted to combat this menace. Early in June King Edward had ordered the Earl of Buchan, and later the Earl of Mar, to give them assistance. On 25 July Mar, Comyn and Gartnait reported that, eight days earlier, their forces had encountered ‘Andrew de Moray with a great body of rogues’ at a place called Launoy on the River Spey which most writers could not identify, although Barron (1913) argued convincingly in favour of the district known as the Enzie (which would be rendered in Norman French as L’Ennoi or phonetically as L’Aunoy).
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this large, wild tract was covered by dense woodland and was one of the principal royal forests in the north of Scotland. Just inside its western boundary was a great marshland extending eastwards from the Spey and known as the Bog of Gight, immediately to the north of which Castle Gordon was afterwards built. The road from Aberdeen to Inverness ran through the Enzie, skirting this bog to reach the ford at Bellie, and it was therefore a logical place at which to mount an ambush of the advancing English forces. This was confirmed by Comyn’s letter: ‘The aforesaid rogues betook themselves into a very great stronghold of bog and wood, where no horseman could be of service.’ Sir Andrew de Rathe (Rait) was despatched by Comyn and Gartnait to Cressingham at Berwick, with an up-to-date situation report. Characteristically, Cressingham played down Rathe’s information when he wrote again to Edward, on 5 August, saying that ‘it is false in many points, and obscure, as will be well known hereafter, I fear’. Cressingham’s attempt to make light of the troubles in the north was confounded the very same day, when the Constable of Urquhart reported how Moray had besieged his castle; and shortly afterwards Sir Reginald le Cheyne, the King’s Warden in Moray, complained to the King that Andrew de Moray and his ‘malefactors’ had spoiled and laid waste his goods and lands. Sir Reginald himself fell into the hands of the insurgents shortly afterwards, probably when Inverness Castle capitulated to Moray.
For Wallace’s progress during the summer of 1297 we have, once more, to fall back on Blind Harry to a large extent, and the problem that perplexes us is that while much of what the minstrel says has the ring of truth there are some glaring discrepancies. The encounter with MacFadyen at the Pass of Brander seems to have been inconclusive. Harry states that Wallace decided to lay siege to Stirling Castle, but this anecdote must be taken with a very large pinch of salt, as Harry gets the name of the constable wrong, and says that when the castle fell Wallace entrusted it to the Earl of Lennox which, in view of the fact that the earl was on the other side at the time, is an impossibility. At any rate, the story goes that Wallace and Sir John Graham rode through the town at the head of a hundred men on horseback, daring the constable to come out and fight. Harry names this official as Rokeby, although the records show that the constable was Sir Richard de Waldegrave, who had been appointed to this post on 8 September 1296. The story of the assault and capture of Stirling Castle at this time seems to be entirely apocryphal.
Stirling was, in fact, to remain in English hands until mid-September. Meanwhile MacFadyen was still at large and his men, mainly Irish, were rampaging through Argyll. Sending Gilmichael ahead to spy out the land, Wallace and Duncan of Lorn advanced through Strathfillan. This was an arduous march which took its toll of the foot soldiers, and even the horses began to fail. According to Harry, Wallace had set out with over two thousand men, but the problems of providing food for such a large number induced him to leave the bulk of his men in Strathfillan while he went ahead with a hand-picked body of a hundred cavalry. Behind him there followed Sir John Graham with a similar number, and then Adam Wallace of Riccarton with a reserve force of five hundred men. In Glendochart, Gilmichael and Sir Neil Campbell came to report. Beyond Loch Dochart, Gilmichael ran into one of MacFadyen’s scouts and slew him. The Scots dismounted and crossed the moss and crags on foot to join up with Campbell’s local forces. Although outnumbered by MacFadyen’s Irishmen, the Scots had the element of surprise when they attacked at dawn the following day. The ensuing battle lasted more than two hours and at one stage even the experienced campaigner Jop (Gilbert de Grimsby) was uncertain how it would go. Those Irishmen who were not killed in battle were drowned when they tried to escape across the loch. The Scots in MacFadyen’s army threw down their weapons and begged for mercy. Wallace gave instructions that the Scottish prisoners should be spared, but to the Irish he gave no quarter.
MacFadyen himself escaped, and took refuge with a bodyguard of fifteen in a cave under Craigmore. He was pursued by Duncan of Lorn and a large force who slew the enemy and brought back MacFadyen’s head, ‘which Lord Campbell placed high in Craigmore upon a stone, for the honour of Ireland’. At Ardchattan, a mountainous fastness in Lorn on the shores of Loch Etive north-east of Oban, Wallace held a council at which he formally handed over Lorn to Duncan, bidding him ‘hold it for Scotland with the Right, and thou shalt well enjoy this inheritance’, and he even promised that, should his treacherous nephew John of Lorn (who was then in London) return to Argyll, he, too, would get his lands back. ‘I would lose no one whom righteousness may save.’17
Harry, apparently drawing heavily on the Latin account by John Blair, enumerated some of the leading knights who attended this assembly. In particular he described Sir John Ramsay of ‘Ouchterhouse’ (Ochtertyre) and his son Sir Alexander who, he says, subsequently captured Roxburgh. Interestingly, Harry interpolates a brief passage (after saying that Alexander held that stronghold until traitors plotted and caused his death): ‘I have been blamed, to tell the truth, regarding this statement, and therefore will but lightly pass this tale; but it was an event openly spoken of, and for such I trow they ought not to deem me worthy of blame.’
Another prominent figure at this council was ‘the Bishop of Dunkeld’ whom Harry describes without actually naming. It has been presumed that he was referring to Matthew Crambeth who, in 1289, had been co-opted as a Guardian of Scotland after the deaths of Alexander Comyn and the Earl of Fife. Harry, by describing him as ‘of high lineage, of St Clair blood’, however, clearly meant William Sinclair, Crambeth’s successor, who did not become bishop until 1304, if not later. On the other hand, Sinclair is believed to have been Co-Adjutor of Dunkeld during the time when Bishop Crambeth had been abroad, in France and Rome, on diplomatic missions for King John. He had been living quietly in Bute, under the protection of the Steward, since being evicted from the diocese in 1294. Possibly with a view to restoring Sinclair to his cathedral, Wallace now ordered a cross-country march which brought his little army eventually to the gates of Perth, although Harry hints that the ensuing siege was intended by way of revenge for the way Wallace had been mishandled in that town the previous year.
Sir John Ramsay pointed out that the walls of Perth were low because they were surrounded by a very deep moat; if this obstacle could be passed, the town would be easily captured. The Scots tarried at Dunkeld for four days making elaborate preparations for the assault. Some fifty lines (970–1020) of Harry’s epic were devoted in such detail to the preliminaries and the assault itself as to give an air of truth to his narrative. This appears to have been the first time that Wallace employed siege-engines of any sort, which were constructed in the forest, employing the best wrights of the surrounding district, and then floating the contraptions down the Tay to the outer defences. The English put up a stout defence with their artillery (arbalests and mangonels capable of hurling large rocks). Graham and Ramsay led the attack on the turret bridge while Wallace conducted the main assault at the centre of the town. Harry says that two thousand Englishmen perished in the carnage, but even allowing for pardonable exaggeration the slaughter must have been horrendous. A young knight named Ruthven, who had brought thirty men to the conflict, distinguished himself so well that day that he was afterwards appointed captain and Sheriff of Perth, with the hereditary lieutenancy of Strathearn.
Having first made a lightning attack on Cupar, whose English abbot fled at his approach, Wallace swept over the north-east with characteristic vigour. At Glamis he was joined by the Bishop of Dunkeld and that evening they reached Brechin. Gathering men as he went, Wallace marched through the Mearns and advanced on Dunnottar Castle, an enormous fortress with impressive natural defences, standing on a promontory. Some four thousand Englishmen and their supporters had fled there as the Scots approached. The bishop begged Wallace to spare their lives and let them depart; but the Scots suspected that some day they might return, and their wholesale slaughter was ordered. Many of them sought refuge in the church which formed part of the castle complex; with grim economy the Scots merely set this building alight, roasting alive the unfortunate inmates. Those who ran out of the building were promptly put to the sword. It was a reprise of the Barns of Ayr. Others jumped off the cliffs to their death rather than let themselves be taken by the dreaded Scots. Incredibly, when the massacre had been completed, many of the Scots went down on their knees and asked the bishop for absolution. Wallace laughed sardonically: ‘I forgive you all. Are ye men of war, and repent for so small a matter? They rued not how they did to us in the town of Ayr, where they hanged our true barons.’
Hastening on up the coast to Aberdeen, Wallace attacked the shipping in the harbour and destroyed it. The impression is given of the English trying to flee, a hundred vessels being heavily laden with goods and a great company of soldiers. At the ebb-tide the Scots rushed down on this armada, slaughtered the troops, plundered their goods and burned their boats. ‘None got away but priests, wives and children,’ adds Harry as a matter of course. This Scottish host swept all before it, heading north to Crimond in Buchan and then westwards to link up with Andrew de Moray on the Spey. No record of the first meeting of the two great guerrilla leaders exists, but it appears that there was an immediate rapport and from then onwards, until Moray’s death, the two generals acted in concert.
Wallace was back in Aberdeen by 1 August, making elaborate arrangements for the administration of the north. This appears to tie up with a report made by Earl Warenne on that very day to Edward, saying that Sir Henry de Lazom or Latham had seized the castle of Aberdeen ‘and there makes a great lord of himself’. Warenne went on to say that he had not heard of Lazom’s fate, but promised that ‘if caught, he shall be honoured according to his deserts’. Interestingly, Sir Henry was an Englishman who went over to the Scots; this renegade subsequently had his estates in Lancashire confiscated in retaliation, he being described in the sequestration as ‘a rebel adherent of the Scots’.18
From Aberdeen Wallace rode south, to supervise the siege of Dundee. Unlike Perth and Aberdeen, which had fallen with relative ease, Dundee was stoutly defended, as was Stirling. Despite obvious errors and discrepancies in his narrative, it seems that Blind Harry is essentially correct; Scotland north of the Forth was largely in Scottish hands by August 1297 with the exception of these two great strongholds.
It was in a bid to relieve these fortresses and crush the rebel Scots that Earl Warenne finally made his move. On 14 August he was replaced as Warden of Scotland by Sir Brian Fitz-Alan, the energetic castellan of Angus. This move was made at Warenne’s own request, he being ill at the time and anxious to return to his Surrey estates. However, he was ordered to remain at his post for the time being, and in obedience to Edward’s wishes he pressed on from the Borders with the intention of reinforcing Stirling and raising the siege of Dundee. Edward, confident that the veteran Earl of Surrey would carry out his orders, departed for Flanders a fortnight later aboard his flagship, the Cog Edward. Dundee had not yet capitulated when Wallace got word that an English army under Warenne and Cressingham was moving northwards in the direction of Stirling. Leaving Alexander Scrymgeour to continue the siege of Dundee, Wallace and Moray, now acting in concert, marched their men from the east and north to converge on this strategic position.