Part Two
9
The architecture of hegemony: Wales
Henry III’s successor was his son Edward I (r.1272–1307), a king who combined the military aggression of a Norman warlord with an enthusiasm for legal nicety. He was for his time a giant, six foot two inches tall, intelligent, legalistic, a brilliant soldier but with a bad temper. As a young man he had in 1265 rescued his father from Simon de Montfort’s rebellion. When he returned from a crusade to take power in 1274, he was brimming with confidence. He codified English law in the Statutes of Westminster and demanded a census and warrants of feudal entitlement from landowners across the country. When Earl Warenne, lord warden of the Scottish Marches, was challenged for his warrant by royal inspectors, he flourished the rusty sword his ancestors had wielded at Hastings and declared, ‘This is my warrant.’
In Wales the warrant that mattered was Henry III’s Treaty of Montgomery. It lay in the homage Llywelyn paid to England on behalf of Wales, but it was homage as a newly independent nation, not a subject province. And while it might apply to Pura Wallia, it did not apply to the Marcher lords. Their most powerful voice was that of Gilbert de Clare of Glamorgan, now erecting Britain’s grandest castle at Caerphilly. De Clare was not an ally of the princes of Gwynedd. To him, Wales was in no sense one country. It belonged to England.
Llywelyn had married de Montfort’s daughter, tactically shrewd under Henry III but a serious handicap when his son Edward was on the throne. Edward considered Llywelyn unreliable and demanded he ‘bend the knee’ in his king’s presence. Llywelyn declined to do this, leading Edward to call him a ‘rebel and disturber of the peace’. Submission was demanded and declined. The outcome undid all the progress made in Anglo-Welsh relations over the previous century. It rendered the Treaty of Montgomery null and void.
Edward now paid Llywelyn a different kind of compliment, invasion with main force. His campaign in Wales in 1277 was the costliest military adventure seen in the British Isles since the Norman Conquest. It was gratuitous and cruel, setting the rules of engagement for an emergent Edwardian empire. In July an army of 15,000 seasoned troops assembled at Chester, composed of English and Welsh mercenaries and soldiers of the Marcher lords. In addition, there were many ‘King’s Welshmen’, all with grudges against Llywelyn. They included his brother Dafydd and the Lord of Powys, Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn. As so often in his domestic conflicts, Edward divided to conquer. He was supported by baggage trains, road engineers, castle builders and off-shore naval support.
When Edward’s ships occupied Llywelyn’s supply base on Anglesey, the Welsh immediately surrendered, but the conditions of settlement stored further trouble. It allowed Llywelyn to retain Gwynedd, but only with an intolerable fine of £50,000. His brother Dafydd turned rebel and in 1282 rose against Edward, supported by lesser princes. They shamed Llywelyn into joining them.
Edward’s reaction was swift and savage. By 1283 Llywelyn’s head was off and posted on the Tower of London alongside that of his brother. The latter was all that remained of Dafydd after the first recorded case of a new and terrible punishment for treason: hanging, drawing and quartering. To castles at Aberystwyth, Builth and Flint, Edward now added Conwy, Beaumaris, Criccieth and Harlech. Most spectacular of all was Caernarvon, its design based on the walls of imperial Constantinople. They together formed the grandest symbol of medieval conquest in Europe, yet supposedly within one kingdom.
As well as being military assets, Edward’s Welsh castles were imperial ‘shock and awe’. They were designed by Master James of Savoy, builder of crusader forts in the Levant, and recorded as costing £80,000, a stupefying sum for its day. Surrounding each castle was a French-style fortified town, from which the Welsh were excluded from living or trading. New Marcher lords were appointed, answerable solely to the king. The son of Edward’s ally Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys changed his name to de la Pole to sound more Norman.
Edward now declared Wales ‘united and annexed’ to the English crown. His first-born son would be ‘Prince of Wales’, the infant being crowned in Lincoln to add to the shame. Pura Wallia was shrunk and dubbed a principality, formed of just four counties now called ‘the king’s lands’, Anglesey, Caernarvon, Merioneth and Flint. Under the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan, Wales had to adopt English common law, largely replacing the code of Hywel Dda.
Every one of Edward’s ordinances fuelled a Welsh sense of oppression that lasted throughout the late Middle Ages. To mark the settlement, Edward staged a spectacular banquet at Nefyn at the end of Wales’s Llŷn peninsula. He had ‘reburied’ King Arthur at Glastonbury and decided that he, not any Welshman, was to be Arthur’s descendant, the banquet being served on a round table on Arthurian lines. Celt, Saxon and Plantagenet were to be fused into one imperial myth. When I chided a Welsh tourism minister for the poor promotion of his Welsh castles, his reply was, ‘Why should we promote such symbols of English oppression?’ Old resentments die hard in Wales.
The architecture of hegemony: Scotland
The death in 1286 of Alexander III of Scotland led to his succession being disputed in a ‘great cause’ between Robert the Bruce and John of Balliol. Both were descended from Anglo-Norman settlers, le Brus and de Baliol. Both would have probably spoken French. Edward I backed Balliol (r.1292–6) as the more compliant contender, providing that Balliol pay him homage and other demeaning tributes. These included donating much-needed levies for Edward’s French wars. Balliol refused, declining to acknowledge Scotland as a vassal state. In 1295 he and his barons, mostly Normans, duly revived Alexander II’s alliance with France, with each agreeing to support the other in conflict with England. No move was more likely to infuriate Edward.
With Wales already under his belt, the English king secured the homage of Balliol’s rival, Bruce. He then advanced into Scotland in 1296, sparking what became the first war of Scottish independence. He sacked Berwick and marched through Edinburgh, Stirling, Perth and Elgin with an army of 11,000 mostly Welsh mercenaries. Balliol, though lawful king of Scotland, was ritually stripped of his knightly regalia and taken to London as a prisoner. The Stone of Scone, historic seat of coronation of Scottish kings, was removed to London and placed under the English throne in Westminster Abbey, to remain there until 1996. Scotland was left with an English governor and garrison, effectively a colony. When Edward wanted to consult its parliament – which, unlike Wales, it did possess – he summoned it south to Berwick.
Nothing was gained by this oppression. With clans feuding, claimants dying and English bases in Scotland vulnerable to guerrilla attack, the country descended into chaos. A year later a young knight, William Wallace – the name meant Welshman, probably a native of old Strathclyde – killed a sheriff in a brawl over a woman and raised the flag of revolt. He wiped out an English force sent against him at Stirling Bridge in 1297 and famously made his belt of a tax-gatherer’s skin. Edward marched north to confront Wallace. A measure of his intent was shown in his taxation of Ireland for supplies for this campaign. The levy was enormous: 500 cows, 1,000 pigs and 1,000 tuns of wine.
Wallace was defeated and went on the run for seven years, to be captured in 1305 and hanged, drawn and quartered in London. He became a lasting Scottish nationalist hero, his persona glorified by the actor Mel Gibson in the 1995 film Braveheart. Wallace sent a letter in 1297 to the merchants of Lübeck requesting trade, as ‘the Kingdom of Scotland, God be thanked, has been recovered by war from the power of the English’.
Scotland now reverted to type. Robert the Bruce’s grandson, also Robert (r.1306–29), feuded with another royal claimant, John Comyn, killing him in a fight and crowning himself king of Scotland in 1306. This Bruce proved a remarkable figure. Despite their Norman background, Scottish barons were clearly ever ready to support their king against the English. Edward in London murdered every Bruce relative he could find and knighted 300 noblemen if they joined another Scottish campaign. In 1307 he once again marched north, but in Carlisle at the age of sixty-eight he fell ill and died. He was eulogised as ‘a great and terrible king … a conqueror of lands and a flower of chivalry’. On his grim tomb in Westminster Abbey is one inscription: ‘Edward hammer of the Scots lies here’.
Edward’s effete son Edward II (r.1307–27) was not the man to fight on. When he did come north in 1314, he was ambushed at Bannockburn outside Stirling and his army was humiliated. Two-thirds of his soldiers died in what was the worst defeat for an English army on home soil since Hastings. North of the border it was a victory to echo down the ages as Scotland’s Agincourt. Edward was seen escaping on a horse for his ship at Dunbar.
Bannockburn restored Scottish morale after the fall of Wallace. Robert the Bruce’s barons in 1320 presented him with the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter in Latin addressed to the pope, still regarded as arbitrator of European kingship. It stated, ‘As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ They added that they would be loyal to Bruce, but their superior loyalty was to Scotland. If he were to ‘yield Scotland or us to the English king or people’ they would dethrone him. Arbroath was Scotland’s Magna Carta.
This was followed in 1328 by the Treaty of Edinburgh, when Edward III (r.1327–77) made a formal acknowledgement of Scotland as a sovereign nation and ‘our dearest ally and friend’. This meant that in 1329, when Bruce died at the age of fifty-three, he could boast that for a quarter-century he had been the undefeated monarch of an independent European state. This state of grace did not last. Bruce was succeeded by the five-year-old David II (r.1329–71), surrounded by disputing claimants to the regency, with David opposed by a Balliol claimant in open alliance with England’s Edward III.
Edward now regarded Scotland as a dangerous ally of his impending foe, France, with whom in 1337 he began what was to be the Hundred Years War. He was right in this regard. In accordance with Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’, a Scottish army in 1346 recklessly marched south at French bidding to avenge Edward’s victory over France at Crécy. It was crushed at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, where the young David was captured. He was held prisoner for eleven years in London and Hampshire, later admitting it was a preferable residence as king to being north of the border. He particularly appreciated his new mistress.
When able at last to negotiate a treaty with Edward, David II was to prove one of Scotland shrewdest monarchs. He first sought the confidence of Edward III, culminating in the 1357 Treaty of Berwick. In return for promising a large ransom to the impecunious English king, David was returned to Scotland. When his Scottish parliament predictably refused to pay, he ‘bequeathed’ Scotland to Edward, knowing well that the Scottish parliament would again overrule him. None the less, David died in 1371 after a forty-two-year reign leaving his country as independent as had Bruce before him. He was succeeded by Robert Stewart, descendant of the Norman Lord High Stewards of Scotland, starting a new era in Scotland’s history.
The architecture of hegemony: Ireland
In 1315, just a year after his victory at Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce had taken his fight against the English to Ireland, in response to an O’Neill invitation to help oppose the overbearing English. His agent in this venture was to be his brother Edward, claiming Irish antecedence through his mother. Edward wrote to ‘the Irish chiefs’ a letter (in Latin) that stands as a seminal, if rare, document in the canon of pan-Celtic – or perhaps Irish–Scottish – dealings:
Whereas we and you and our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent you our beloved kinsman, the bearer of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God’s will our nation [nostra nacio] may be able to recover her ancient liberty.
This remarkable plea for Scots–Irish bonding worked in Ulster, with its long-standing affinity with the western Scots. The Irish chief, Domhnall O’Neill, justified his alliance to the pope, pointing out that ‘the Kings of Lesser Scotia all trace their blood to our Greater Scotia and retain to some degree our language and customs’. The reference to ancient Dalriada at least had historical validity. Whether the southern Irish would see the Bruces as liberators or merely allies of the O’Neills was less certain.
The language used in such documents shows that, although pan-Celtic sentiments like these are rare, they did lie somewhere below the surface of national feeling in medieval Britain. As Rees Davies puts it, they served as ‘eloquent testimonies to the individual identities and, in small degree, to the shared sense of oppression of the non-English peoples of the British Isles’. A shared enemy is at least a fair-weather friend.
Edward Bruce landed at Larne in Ulster in May 1315 with an army reputedly of 6,000 men. The O’Neills declared him king of Ireland, with significant talk of extending the campaign against the English back across the Irish Sea into Wales. Given the weakness of Edward II’s throne at the time, such a co-ordinated uprising had a plausible chance of success.
In the event, the manner of Bruce’s march south cost him all hope of support. He sacked towns and killed inhabitants that showed any loyalty to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In November 1315 he defeated the former Marcher lord, Roger Mortimer, now Lord of Meath, and burned the town of Kells. Soon the countryside from Connacht south to Munster was under his control, but by 1317, with Ireland locked in a famine, Bruce was reduced merely to ravaging the countryside outside the Dublin Pale.
Most of southern Ireland soon regarded Bruce’s oppression as worse than England’s. One tract referred to ‘Scottish foreigners less noble than our own foreigners’. At the Battle of Faughart near Dundalk in 1318 Bruce was finally brought to heel by an English army. He was killed and his body parts distributed across Ireland. His treatment of the Ireland he claimed to rule had been counterproductive and he was not mourned.
This was no basis on which to build a united Scots–Irish front against England. Even so, by the fourteenth century English sovereignty in Ireland had shrunk to the Pale round Dublin, from Kells in the north to the Wicklow mountains in the south. A rudimentary Offa’s Dyke was built to mark it. The Pale was governed by English earls such as those of Desmond, Ormond and Kildare, but even their loyalty to England was not reliable. Outside the Pale, records suggest that the use of the English language (often meaning French) was diminishing. Ireland spoke Irish.
Under Edward III, English rule within the Pale was strengthened in 1366 by the Statutes of Kilkenny, their provisions similar to Edward I’s Rhuddlan treaty with the Welsh. The document complained, in French, that many English in Ireland ‘forsaking the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages do now live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion and language of the Irish enemies … and England laws there are put in subjection and decayed’. The old Norman families were said to have become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. The word ‘enemy’ to describe the Irish was instructive, as was the words English language for French.
The Statutes of Kilkenny rank among the classic texts of English imperial rule. They banned the use of the Irish language (though not the French) ‘by the English’. They banned Anglo-Irish intermarriage, joint worship, fostering of Irish children by English parents and any exhibition of Irish culture, storytelling and songs, all on pain of land expropriation and transfer to English ownership. The Irish sport of hurling was to be replaced by archery and lancing. The measures were to be enforced by the king’s second surviving son, Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence and Earl of Ulster, who arrived as England’s viceroy and remained in Dublin just a year before leaving in disgust. A giant of nearly seven feet, he left for Italy, marriage to a Visconti and death two years later. Like Rhuddlan, far from abating local hostility, Kilkenny fostered it.
Was this an empire?
The Llywelyns in Wales and the Bruces in Scotland and Ireland demonstrated the capacity of England’s neighbours to cause trouble if treated with sufficient hostility. But in no case did they threaten Plantagenet England’s existence or its crown. Edward I’s grandfather, King John, had lost most of his French empire and Edward had no intention of seeing his English one shrink any further. But his response was out of all proportion to the threat, and his solution of personal homage was tenuous. Wales was now divided between the Principality and the March and suffering the lash of the Treaty of Rhuddlan. Ireland ended the fourteenth century in tenuous subservience under the draconian Kilkenny statutes, which would today be termed apartheid. Scotland remained two countries, the Lowlands and the Highlands, still a patchwork of fiefdoms under the dubious thraldom of Edward III’s Treaty of Berwick.
Of the three, only the last treaty was opposed. The result was a sort of standoff, Scotland’s monarchy alone of the three nations commanding a critical political mass. Edward’s empire had no formal constitutional status. The three nations were annexes and protectorates rather than colonies, stumbling from one crisis to another under what appeared to be the Plantagenet motto, that of the emperor Caligula, Oderint dum metuant – let them hate so long as they fear.
Had England at the start of the fourteenth century handled this empire otherwise, the British Isles might have emerged from the Middle Ages on course to becoming a unitary state of one realm rather than four. Other formerly Celtic-speaking territories such as Northumbria, Cumbria and Cornwall were being assimilated into England. Similar assimilations were taking place across Europe. It needed only diplomacy and compromise to achieve consent. Instead, the borders originally sketched by Agricola and Offa became ever more entrenched barriers to a singular identity.
Ireland became more detached, the old Norman settlers merging into the Irish population and even changing their names. Nest’s descendant Gerald FitzMaurice became Gearóid Iarla. John Bermingham became Sean Mac Feorais. In Wales, the Llywelyns’ incipient nationalism was snuffed out but Edward’s ban on bardic culture saw a defiant flowering of Welshness. The poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1315–50) became one of medieval Europe’s most vivid erotic poets in the tradition of Petrarch. He wrote an ode to a seagull as his messenger of love and another in praise of his penis. Dafydd was sadly hidden from wider fame by his writing in the Welsh tongue.