8
To sla he sparyd noucht Inglismen;
Til Scottis he dyd gret profyt then;
The grettest lordis of oure land
Til hym he gart them be bowand:
Willy, nilly, all gart he
Bowsome till hys byddynd be;
And till hys byddyng, quha were noucht bown,
He tuk and put them in prisown.
WYNTOUN
SHORTLY after his triumphal return to Scotland, probably at Christmas 1297, William Wallace received the accolade. This much is stated by Fordun, adding that he was knighted by ‘a certain distinguished Earl of the Scottish nation’, without specifying who actually performed the ceremony. In the Middle Ages anyone of the nobility, from the king himself down to the humblest knight, could knight another, but in practice it was confined to royalty and the great magnates. There has been considerable speculation as to who knighted Wallace. James the Steward or Malcolm, Earl of Lennox, have been suggested; even the elder Earl of Carrick, although this seems less likely. One recent writer has stated the younger Earl of Carrick as a matter of fact.1 By a process of elimination, only the future King Robert could have performed this ceremony. The Earl of Fife was a minor; Angus and March supported King Edward; Caithness, Ross and Sutherland were too remote; while Atholl and Menteith were serving with the English army in Flanders. This narrows down the possibles to the earls of Buchan, Strathearn, Lennox and Carrick. While the claim advanced for Lennox is usually based on his early friendship with Wallace (from his northern campaign), the ambivalent attitude of this magnate before and during the battle makes his role in conferring knighthood unlikely. Buchan and Strathearn, no matter which side they were currently on, were tainted by their pro-English collaboration in the months prior to the battle and their outlook thereafter was ambiguous. This left only the younger Earl of Carrick. It could be argued, of course, that his own position had been pretty ambivalent, but he had now come out firmly on the Scottish side. Besides, he was actually related to William Wallace. Wallace’s Uncle Richard was married to the young earl’s aunt and the link between the Bruces and the Wallaces was continued in the next generation by the marriage of Sir Duncan Wallace (a first cousin of the patriot) to Eleanora, Countess of Carrick, widow of Alexander Bruce, Earl of Carrick.
At any rate, the point is not material. Some of Wallace’s detractors have questioned whether he was knighted at all, but this suggestion can easily be brushed aside. Documents and charters issued by Wallace from early in 1298 onwards append the Latin wordmiles to his name, while even English documents describe him by this title, and there is the evidence provided by a contemporary English political ballad which mentions the knighthood bestowed on him when he returned from England. Matthew of Westminster uses the miles epithet in describing Wallace’s invasion of Northumberland and King Philip of France addressed Wallace as a knight in a missive of that year.
The earliest document still extant, in which William used the title himself, was the charter granted at Torphichen to Sir Alexander Scrymgeour on 29 March 1298. The Scrymgeours had been hereditary standard-bearers to the kings of Scotland since the reign of Alexander I, and the present knight had been one of Wallace’s most loyal supporters since May 1297, distinguishing himself at the siege of Dundee, the town of which he was now formally appointed constable. The Latin charter speaks for itself. The preamble styles the grantor as ‘Wilhelmes Wallays, Knight, Guardian of the Kingdom of Scotland and Leader of its armies, in the name of the illustrious Prince, Lord John, by the Grace of God King of Scotland, by consent of the Community of that Kingdom’. The charter goes on to say that, ‘by consent and assent of the nobles of the said kingdom’ (per consensum et assen-sum magnatum dicti regni), six marks of land in the territory of Dundee were given to Scrymgeour, as well as the constabulary of the castle ‘for faithful service and succour given to the said kingdom, in carrying the Royal Banner in the army of Scotland’. It ends ‘In witness of which thing the common seal of the fore-said Kingdom of Scotland is affixed to the present writ.’2 This charter is of such a nature that only the sovereign, or his representative, could pretend to issue, because it deals with the declared property of the crown and constitutes a right of constabulary which required a royal writ. It clearly states that Wallace was acting with the consent and assent of the magnates; previously he claimed to be acting on behalf of the community of the realm, so this marks a shift in power.
Blind Harry avers that Wallace was formally elected sole Guardian of Scotland at a council held at Perth, the very council which the Earl of March refused to attend. This would place the election immediately after Stirling Bridge and before the invasion of England; but Fordun and Wyntoun, the earliest authorities on the subject, claim that the election took place later, following the return from England. Bower, admittedly a much later authority, asserts that the election took place at a council convened in the Forest Kirk, identified as the Cistercian monastery near Carluke. Significantly, there are no hard and fast details regarding these councils, and it seems improbable that anything like a representative assembly, attended by the magnates, prelates and leading burgesses of the realm, could have been summoned in the chaotic circumstances of the period. And even if such a council had been convened, it is hard to imagine that the nobility of Scotland, far less the great magnates, would have been unanimous in electing such a young man, only recently knighted, as their sole ruler. Burton concluded that Wallace’s elevation had ‘the consent in some shape or other of the burghs and other portions of the Estates’, but Lord Hailes summed up the situation admirably: ‘That he deserved the office is certain. How he obtained it, must remain for ever problematical.’ The truth may be that, being the right man in the right place at the right time, Wallace simply took the reins of government into his hands, and with a triumphant army backing him solidly, there was no one, magnate or otherwise, who dared oppose him.
Be that as it may, we have incontrovertible evidence that Wallace was issuing documents as joint leader of Scotland (without reference to the King himself) from 11 October 1297, then as joint leader in the name of King John (7 November), and now as Guardian. There were no references to Andrew de Moray after the document of 7 November, and it is presumed that he died about that time. If Barron is correct in his surmise that the wounded leader was borne back to Moray to die, he may have been dead already by 7 November; news from Moray would not have travelled very fast to northern England, especially with Wallace conducting a campaign of such rapid movement. All that can be said with certainty is that, sometime between November 1297 and March 1298 Wallace took, or obtained, the title of Guardian, whether by formal election or common consent cannot be determined. One thing is certain, however; he now had possession of the great seal of Scotland, for the Scrymgeour charter was thus appended. Incidentally, the grant to Scrymgeour was later confirmed by Robert Bruce, who alluded to his predecessor as Lord William Wallace, a title which Wallace himself never assumed.
That Wallace was no longer merely the leader of the army but supreme governor of Scotland soon became evident. Officially he was styled Gardein du Reaume in Norman French or Custos Regni in Latin. Wyntoun refers to him as Wardane of Scotland. Technically he was a regent or viceroy, always scrupulous in claiming to act on behalf of King John (still enjoying easy captivity in the south of England); in fact he had dictatorial powers, and he needed them badly if he was to achieve his political goals as well as consolidate his military gains.
This is arguably the most important phase in Wallace’s turbulent career; unfortunately it is also the least known, due to a paucity of archival material. In default of any transactions or deliberations of a council, we can only look at the circumstances of Scotland at the beginning of 1298. We have a young man, a giant of a man in spirit as well as physique, the man who has not only trounced the most formidable army in Europe but also carried the war into the territory of one of the most powerful nations of the period. He has just taught the enemy a bloody lesson and, more to the point, he has returned laden not only with the material riches of the northern counties but large stocks of grain, cattle and other foodstuffs — manna from heaven to a nation on the brink of starvation. This is a young man whose innate modesty shines forth, a selfless patriot manifestly working solely for the good of his people.
In stark contrast is the self-serving, double-dealing nobility, some of whom had changed sides so often that it is difficult to keep track of their momentary allegiance. These earls, barons and knights, whom the common people had become accustomed to regard as their natural leaders, had been thoroughly discredited over the past decade. Some of them, like Sir William Douglas, Sir Andrew de Moray of Petty and the Earl of Ross, were in English prisons; others, like Sir Alexander Comyn, brother of the Constable of Scotland, had been conscripted into the English army now fighting in Flanders; some, like the Black Comyn, were at liberty but living under close supervision in England, or, like the Red Comyn (his son) afraid to step out of line on account of their closest relatives held hostage in England. There were those Scottish magnates, like Patrick, Earl of March, and the constable himself, who chose to support Edward of their own volition, and there were those magnates who were, in fact, more English than Scots anyway. In this category came the elder Earl of Carrick who, despite his marriage to a Celtic heiress, Marjorie of Carrick, was probably born at Writtle near Chelmsford, the son of a great magnate whose lands in Annandale were insignificant compared to his vast estates in Essex and Yorkshire. Gilbert de Umfraville, the Earl of Angus, was the son of a Northumbrian knight, had been the ward of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and became a powerful English baron.
All of these men had sworn fealty to Edward, not once but several times. Indeed, their oaths had been given, and broken, so often that one wonders what reliance could be put on them. By contrast, William Wallace was the one outstanding figure in the Wars of Independence who had never taken the oath of fealty to Edward; his assertion to that effect was all that he managed to utter at the farce of a trial held in 1305, yet it was as a traitor that he was tried and condemned.
Apart from the fact that Scotland’s natural leaders had been hamstrung by their position in regard to Edward, they were also divided among themselves. The powerful Comyn family were closely related to King John, but if they ever wavered in their allegiance to him it was to further their own claim to the empty throne. For this reason the Comyns and the Bruces were seldom able to co-operate. The wheeling and dealing between these factions and those who supported now one, now the other, are positively Byzantine in their complexity; but when they were not conniving and conspiring against each other they were undermining the one effective ruler the Scots now possessed. Fordun has a chapter entitled ‘Regarding the Conspiracy of the Magnates against the Guardian’ in which he represents the magnates as saying ‘We will not have this man to reign over us’, and denounces the ‘stupid folly of the foolish’ and their ‘insidious envy’ with many biblical parallels. ‘So, through envy was brought about the downfall of the clergy, the ruin of the people, and the destruction of the people.’3
Given such a pernicious background, it is nothing short of a miracle that Wallace was able to govern his unruly country and achieve as much as he did in the pitifully brief space of time allotted to him. In his political dealings he was to exhibit that same decisiveness and ruthlessness that had marked his military career. He had precious little time for feudal factiousness and scant respect for rank and precedence. Fordun has a most revealing passage which probably explains why only the most altruistic of the magnates gave him their support:
So Wallace overthrew the English on all sides; and gaining strength daily, he in a short time, by force and by dint of his prowess, brought all the magnates of Scotland under his sway, whether they would or not. Such of the magnates, moreover, as did not thankfully obey his commands, he took and browbeat, and handed over to custody, until they should utterly submit to his good pleasure.
Even if this account of Wallace’s treatment of the magnates were only partly correct, it would well explain why not one of the Scottish earls ever gave him wholehearted support. Jealousy alone estranged them from him. In Lord Hailes’s words, ‘His elevation wounded their pride; his great services reproached their inactivity in the public cause.’
Nevertheless, it is significant that, when the magnates of Scotland were summoned, in the name of King Edward, to a parliament at York on 14 January 1298, not one of them heeded the command. Failure to turn up to that assembly led to their automatically being branded as public enemies. That the negative response of the magnates to Edward’s command was so all-embracing seems further evidence of the grip which Wallace had on Scotland at this time. The euphoria of Stirling Bridge had been reinforced by the successful campaign through northern England and it has been suggested that the magnates sensed a new power growing up around them which they had to take into account. Edward, on the other hand, was still on the Continent, and seemed the lesser of two evils. But if the magnates failed to attend the York parliament it was only as part of their temporising policy. For the moment they would play a waiting game.
On the appointed date the magnates of England assembled at York which, for the duration of the ensuing war (a period of six years), would remain Edward’s temporary capital, the Exchequer and Bench and other departments of state being transferred there. The Earl of Surrey seems to have taken the chair, as Edward’s representative, but all the great earls and barons of the country were present on that august occasion, and included the Earl of Gloucester (Edward’s son-in-law), the Earl Marshal, the great Constable, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, the redoubtable Henry Lord Percy who had taken the Scottish surrender at Irvine, and such rising stars as John de Wake and John de Segrave, who would play a prominent part in the execution of Wallace seven years later. It is only fair to point out that it was with the greatest difficulty that English magnates were persuaded to attend. Although they put up the impression of solidarity at York they were, in fact, seething with discontent at the heavy burdens placed upon them by Edward’s foreign adventures, and were only won round when Edward sent confirmation of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest from Flanders.
While Edward was absent on the Continent the regency was nominally in the hands of the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales. Young Edward lacked the moral strength of his father and was already showing evidence of those traits and character defects that would eventually topple him from his throne. In what was virtually a power vacuum, the rebelliousness of the barons came dangerously close to open revolt. King Edward’s two principal lieutenants, the Constable Hereford and the Earl Marshal Norfolk, openly defied their master and denounced their fealty. The Church refused to pay the tax levied by Edward for the prosecution of his foreign wars — half a year’s income — and also repudiated its corporate fealty.
Edward was in no position to do much about Scotland, although certain measures were taken which indicate the situation. Orders were given for the replacement of the Scottish prelates by Englishmen, evidence of the complicity of the Scots clergy in the resistance movement. The dismissal of the Lord of Annandale from the governorship of Carlisle in October 1297 has already been mentioned. His successor, the Bishop of Carlisle, subsequently received orders from Westminster, promulgated on 14 November, to prepare to receive the young Earl of Carrick into the King’s peace, but there is no evidence that Robert Bruce complied with this and, indeed, Clifford’s raid into Annandale demonstrates the opposite. Meanwhile, there were further imposts and levies with a view to raising the money for the forthcoming expedition against the Scots. On 8 December 1297 a writ was addressed to the Archbishop of York for raising funds in his province for ‘an immediate expedition against the Scots, our enemies and rebels’,4 and two days later a writ was addressed to the people of Wales for the levying of troops. On the same date Earl Warenne was reappointed commander of the army, by a writ addressed to all the earls, barons, knights and others ‘beyond the Trent’. Further writs, dated 13, 18 and 19 December, made arrangements for the payment of the Welsh troops going into Scotland.
The Scotichronicon is the sole authority for a curious story that Edward even sent a furious letter to Wallace himself at this time, saying that ‘if the king himself had remained in his kingdom, Wallace would not have dared to make such an attempt’ — an allusion to the audacious raids into northern England — and warning him of dire reprisals if he should invade England again. Bower has Wallace retorting cheerfully that he intended to be back in England again after Easter. This anecdote seems highly unlikely, given the character of the protagonists. Edward would surely never have deigned to communicate with a man whom he regarded contemptuously as an outlaw and a brigand; nor would Wallace have so flippantly made such a challenge, especially at a time when he must have been only too well aware of the prodigious preparations being made to invade Scotland.
When the Scots magnates failed to attend the York parliament, the assembly was put back for eight days to enable the recalcitrant earls to change their mind. The second assembly was summoned to appear at Newcastle, with a view to assessing the potential strength of the army required for the invasion. On 22 January, therefore, the English magnates reassembled and estimated that the army now consisted of ‘two thousand chosen horsemen, armed cap-a-pie, of other horsemen more than twelve hundred, and of foot soldiers, including Welsh, more than a hundred thousand, while, as they advanced to the frontier, every day added to the numbers both of horse and foot.’ With this formidable army, the largest so far to take the field against the Scots, Earl Warenne, atoning for his precipitate flight from Stirling the previous September, mounted a counter-offensive. He crossed the border and made straight for Roxburgh which was on the brink of capitulating. The castle had been under siege for several months, but now that the Scots had brought up some kind of giant catapult it was no longer so impregnable. At the approach of the English army, however, the besieging Scots melted away. Warenne made a cautious and leisurely advance as far as Kelso; but there, for some inexplicable reason, he came to a halt. It has been suggested that Wallace, with a hand-picked force of light cavalry, hovered round the extended lines of the English army in such a manner as deterred Warenne from pushing forward into the hills.
Instead, the English army followed the Tweed down to Berwick early in February, intent on dislodging the troops under Henry de Haliburton. As at Roxburgh, the Scots vanished at the approach of the army; Warenne relieved the garrison of the castle which had withstood a three-month siege and which, starving and diseased, had been on the point of surrendering to the Scots. It was there that a letter from King Edward caught up with Warenne, saying that he intended to return to England shortly and directing the earl to take no further action against the rebellious Scots until he arrived to take over the supreme command. It is probable that Edward had grave doubts about Warenne’s ability to defeat the brilliant young general who had so soundly beaten him a few months previously. The costs of maintaining such a vast army in the field, especially in the depths of winter, must have been exorbitant, so Warenne stood down the levies from the northern shires, retaining only the troops from the more distant counties, as well as the Welsh contingent.
During the winter of 1297–98 Wallace had also been busy with administrative matters. First and foremost, he organised Scotland into military districts and devised a plan for raising levies of all able-bodied males over the age of sixteen. Over every four men was set a fifth known as a quaternion; over every nine was set a tenth (decurion); over every nineteen was set a twentieth; and so on, in hundreds (centurions) and thousands (chiliarchs), so that a proper chain of command was established. This system, with its terminology derived from classical Rome and Greece, cut right across the previous feudal arrangement and was clearly intended to limit the power of the landowning classes — a matter which could not have endeared him to the so-called ‘natural leaders’. Bower also states that Wallace caused a gallows to be erected in every town, burgh and village as a mute threat to those who failed to comply with the conscription regulations. That this was no mere threat was demonstrated by the fact that when Wallace discovered that some burgesses of Aberdeen had not turned up, he paid a flying visit to that town with a small body of hand-picked men, ‘and at Aberdeen and in its neighbourhood punished with a hanging those who had stayed away from the army without excuse’. Bower adds, ‘He returned to the army more quickly than you would believe,’ to get on with the business of carrying the war into the enemy’s own country.
Some attention was also given to drilling the foot soldiers, so that large bodies of men could move in close order without colliding. At this time Wallace invented the schiltrom, forerunner of the square which was to dominate British infantry tactics till the end of the nineteenth century. His foot soldiers were armed with formidable spears, twelve feet in length, and the men were drilled until they were able to form a compact mass with spears bristling outwards in all directions, a fearful obstacle to the English cavalry. That the Scots infantry were able to manœuvre in close order in a perfectly drilled manner and keep their formation was put forward by Bower as the reason why the English army, confronted by this well-disciplined force at Stainmore in Cumbria, chose to back down and withdraw as best it could without putting the matter to the test. When the Scots wished to charge the retreating English, Wallace forbade this on pain of death,
saying that in the course of other struggles between the kingdoms it was the prepared plan for a splendid victory to wait until the arrogant king of England along with his royal forces and fearsome commanders turned tail before a few commons and patriots of Scotland on land which he claimed as his, although the sword had not yet been drawn on the other side.
Wallace also made a valiant attempt to overcome the insurmountable problem of feudalism, a concept which was essentially alien to the Scottish temperament. The power of the magnates and knights derived from their military service, but from their ranks were also drawn the sheriffs and constables, the officials and administrators, while many of the higher clergy were recruited from the lower echelons of the nobility. Now Wallace began appointing base-born men, and the sons of minor gentry like himself, purely on their own merits.
So too in matters spiritual, he engineered the appointment of William de Lamberton to the powerful see of St Andrews. This cleric belonged to a family which had settled in Berwickshire towards the end of the eleventh century and had taken its name from the hamlet in the parish of Mordington near Berwick. In 1292 Lamberton was chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral and was thus a protégé of Robert Wishart. Although he swore fealty to Edward in 1296 he was one of the first clerics to come out in open support of Wallace the following year. This support was now repaid by Wallace nominating Lamberton to the bishopric left vacant by the death of the pro-English William Fraser. On Fraser’s death, however, another strong adherent of Edward, William Comyn, brother of the Earl of Buchan, had been nominated by the Culdees to the bishopric and had actually set out for Rome in person to seek confirmation from Pope Boniface VIII. Wallace, exerting all his diplomatic skills, succeeded in overturning Comyn’s nomination and getting his own man elected instead. The Pope subsequently confirmed Lamberton’s appointment and he was consecrated at Rome on 12 June 1298. These facts were recounted to the Pope in 1306 by none other than King Edward himself, when seeking to have Lamberton’s appointment nullified.5 Incidentally, the Pope’s confirmation of this election was, on 17 June 1298, addressed cautiously to ‘his dearest son in Christ —— illustrious King of Scotland’, the name of the monarch being left blank.6
Having secured the appointment of his own nominee, Wallace made a clean sweep of the Scottish church, ejecting all the English priests whom Edward had presented to Scottish benefices. This ecclesiastical purge received the heartiest endorsement from the Scottish clerical historians, but naturally was vociferously condemned by the monkish chroniclers of England who accused Wallace of the murder of priests and nuns (a charge specifically raised against him at his trial in 1305). It is not improbable that many English clergy were forcibly ejected, and that some of them were murdered in the heat of the moment, but this was an unfortunate aberration and no part of Wallace’s official policy.
Most of Wallace’s energy in the early months of 1298, however, went into the direction of the war. Once invasion was imminent Wallace gave orders for the destruction of the towns in Berwickshire and the Lothians. The population of this vast area was evacuated north of the Forth and the countryside laid waste. This scorched-earth policy was ruthlessly calculated to deny shelter and sustenance to the invader. King Edward returned from Flanders, landing at Sandwich on 14 March, and lost no time in going to York to take over the personal supervision of the invasion plans. Nothing was to be left to chance, and Edward’s planning was meticulous. Organising an expedition on the scale he envisaged took some time; but it is clear that there were diversionary raids and skirmishes, testing the strength of the Scottish defences and the will of the people to resist, before the main onslaught. During the lull before the storm, for example, Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, with Sir John Siward, son of the Earl of March, crossed directly from Flanders with a substantial force and landed in Fife with the intention of splitting the Scots in two. This expedition at first met with little opposition and laid waste a great deal of Fife before it ran into Wallace and his army on 12 June, in the forest of Blackironside or Blackearnside, near Abernethy. From the nature of that locality it appears that the engagement was something of a running fight rather than a pitched battle, but the result was the annihilation of the invaders.
On this occasion the Scots suffered some grave losses. Sir Duncan Balfour, Sheriff of Fife, and perhaps Sir Christopher Seton, were among the casualties.7 Sir John Graham was badly wounded, and one of Blind Harry’s tenderest passages describes how Wallace, instead of taking a much-needed rest from the fighting in the fierce heat of a summer noon, carried water in his helmet from a nearby stream for the relief of his wounded men.
The actual invasion of Scotland was scheduled for 25 June. From the middle of March onwards, elaborate plans were set in train. Realising the problems of feeding such a large army, while fighting over terrain which the Scots had denuded, Edward set up a depot at Carlisle where provisions were to be brought over from Ireland. A large quantity of shipping was stationed at ports along the east coast of England for the purpose of bringing supplies to Berwick and Edinburgh as and when these towns fell into English hands again. A parliament was held at York on 25 May and again the Scottish magnates were summoned but ‘neither came nor sent’. Two days later Edward issued orders to the sheriffs to have the county levies mustered at Roxburgh no later than 23 June. On 28 May he appointed Patrick, Earl of March, as captain of Berwick Castle. During the days immediately before launching the invasion Edward, in a rare show of piety, visited the shrines of St John of Beverley and other local saints, invoking the support of God in what he now perceived as almost a crusade.
Edward reached Roxburgh on 24 June. By this time, according to Hemingburgh, the English army consisted of three thousand heavy cavalry, four thousand light horse and eighty thousand foot. Interestingly, the vast majority of the infantry consisted of paid troops recruited in Ireland and Wales, rather than feudal levies from the English counties. Riding at the head of this vast army, Edward advanced through the Lothians to Kirkliston. As he went, he beheld only scenes of devastation, the burned-out ruins of farms and villages, bereft of crops and livestock. Already, as may be imagined, the English columns stretched back towards the Borders and were vulnerable to the hit-and-run tactics in which the Scots delighted. Moreover, the English army was frequently assailed by flying columns based in the castle of Dirleton near the coast of East Lothian, together with Tantallon between the Lammermoor Hills and the sea, and Hailes north of the Tyne. Dirleton’s twelfth-century stronghold was to impede the progress of another English invasion, 350 years later, until it was demolished by Oliver Cromwell. On the earlier occasion, however, the task of taking out this thorn in the English flank was deputed to Bishop Bek. This time the storm-troops of St Cuthbert’s were no match for the gallant defenders who fought off the attack. Dirleton and Tantallon were formidable fortresses and, without siege-engines, the warrior-bishop had little hope of reducing them. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Bek’s troops were short of provisions and were obliged to scavenge for peas and beans in the ruined fields. In desperation Bek sent one of his lieutenants, Sir John Fitz-Marmaduke, back to Edward asking for reinforcements. According to Hemingburgh the King addressed Sir John sarcastically, ‘Go back and tell the Bishop that in so far as he is a bishop he is a good man, but that his goodness is out of place for this task.’ Edward’s implacable hatred of the Scots was chillingly illustrated in the orders to Fitz-Marmaduke:
You are a cruel man, and I have several times rebuked you for being too cruel, and for the pleasure you take in the death of your enemies. But go now and exert all your frightfulness, and I shall not even blame you, but praise you. And mind you do not see my face again until these three castles are burnt.
Faced with such uncompromising earnestness, Sir John enquired, ‘And how am I to do this, my lord King, since it is so exceedingly difficult?’
‘Go,’ replied Edward with mounting exasperation. ‘You will do it by doing it [quia faciens facies], and you will give me your promise that you will do it.’
With this not particularly helpful answer ringing in his ears, Sir John rode back to the bishop. Fortunately for Bek’s forces, three English supply vessels called at nearby Dunbar and the troops, their bellies full, renewed the onslaught. After two days of fierce hand-to-hand combat, they forced the Scots to surrender on condition that their lives would be spared. The other castles were then attacked, but were found to have been abandoned, whereupon they were consigned to the flames as Edward had commanded.
While Bek’s men tackled the three castles on their flank, Edward’s army rested for several days at Kirkliston, a village ten miles west of Edinburgh on the banks of the River Almond which separates West Lothian from Midlothian. The English were now virtually in the heart of Scotland and could strike in any direction at will, once it became apparent where Wallace and his army were to be found. Further advance was hampered by lack of provisions. Edward’s supply ships on the east coast had been held up by contrary winds and until vital provisions could reach them the vast army was on short rations. It is significant that, on 20 July, shortly before the confrontation of armies near Falkirk, the Scots attacked the great supply base at Carlisle with the intention of rupturing the flow of provisions from Ireland. The Scots besieged Carlisle Castle for two weeks and devastated the surrounding town. The blockade of Carlisle had the desired effect, for thereafter Edward was to get no supplies from that source.
As usual, Wallace was having to rely on the common people for the bulk of his support. Hemingburgh attributes the lukewarm attitude of the Scottish magnates to the fact that Wallace ‘was deemed base-born’, despite his recent knighthood. Nevertheless, among his adherents could be numbered Macduff of Fife. The position of James the Steward was as ambivalent as ever, although Edward’s doubts regarding his loyalty led to one of the Steward’s castles being seized on 31 August and handed over to Sir Alexander de Lindesay as a reward for his services. On the other hand, the Steward’s younger brother, Sir John Stewart of Bonkill in Berwickshire, contributed a contingent of archers from the Borders, together with a company of foot soldiers from the Stewart lands in Bute. Such cavalry as Wallace could muster was under the command of John the Red Comyn, nephew of Balliol and destined to dubious immortality as the man whom Bruce slew at Dumfries in 1306. Sir John Graham, having recovered from wounds sustained at Blackearnside, was back in the saddle in time for the main attack. Sir Robert Boyd had raised a sizable force from the Kilmarnock and Loudoun area. There was also Sir Nichol de Rutherfurd, a knight with substantial estates in Northumberland as well as Berwickshire. His English lands had been seized by Edward in 1296 and thereafter Rutherfurd had adhered to the Scottish cause. Last, but by no means least, there was the young Earl of Carrick whose loyalty was not something that either Wallace or Edward could rely upon. But in addition to harrying the Annandale estates of the elder Bruce the previous winter, Edward now foreclosed on Bruce debts which went back to the time of the young earl’s grandfather, and seized over six hundred and fifty pounds worth of goods from his Essex estates, in retaliation for Bruce’s failure to hand over little Marjorie as a hostage.8 The sequestration of his Essex property seems to have been the last straw, for now Bruce threw in his lot with Wallace and held the castle of Ayr for the Scots. From this stronghold he could control shipping in the Firth of Clyde and prevent supply vessels from Ireland getting to Greenock and Glasgow.
It must be emphasised, however, that Wallace’s support came from the grass-roots — the squires and bonnet lairds, the yeomen, farmers, cottars and peasantry, the burgesses, craftsmen and labourers of the towns and villages, the little people who answered the call to arms not because of some great magnate’s bidding but because a nobler cause was at stake, the freedom to live without alien interference. It has been surmised that the bulk of Wallace’s support came from Lothian and the Borders, whose populace had been displaced by the English advance, and who therefore had most to gain from a Scottish victory. Hemingburgh frequently makes a distinction between Scots and Gallovidians, Scoti et Galwalenses. The similarity between the Latin name for the latter and Wallace’s own surname in that language leads one to suppose that the term was loosely applied to the people of the south-west of Scotland generally, rather than to Galloway in particular, even although ethnically there was little now to distinguish between the Strathclyde people of Cymric stock and the rest of the inhabitants of Scotland.
Hemingburgh’s fine distinction between Scots and Gallovidians is echoed in the metrical chronicle of Robert de Brunne, who says that Wallace’s army was composed of troops from Scotland, Galloway, the March and the Isles. In this context the March signified the area around Dunbar and hence probably the Lothians in general, while the Isles may have been a reference to John Stewart’s Butemen. Thus Scotland implied the central regions bounded by the Forth and Tay. Some of the Highlanders whom Andrew de Moray commanded at Stirling may have continued in Wallace’s service, and the men of Fife, by and large, rallied under Macduff; but in general the Scottish army that took the field in the summer of 1298 was recruited south of the Highland line.
