CHAPTER V

War in Scotland 1331–1335

The treaty of Northampton, which was ratified by the English government in May 1328, brought an end to thirty-six years of war between England and Scotland. It was laid before Parliament and presumably approved by them. But it was not popular. The chroniclers who denounced it as the ‘turpis pax’, ‘the cowardice peace’ of a tyrannical government, were expressing the view widely held even among those in the north who had suffered most from the border war. It was also the view of Edward himself. The peace was associated with one of the most humiliating episodes of his youth. The Scots had deliberately repudiated the truces shortly after the deposition of his father and set about forcing a permanent settlement on the new rulers of England while they were still finding their feet and weakened by well-publicized dissensions. In this they were entirely successful. The short war which preceded the peace had been a fiasco. Mortimer and Isabella recruited a large army in England and a troop of cavalry several hundred strong in the Hainault. But the foreign horsemen and the English infantry fought each other in the streets of York with heavy casualties on both sides. The combined army cut off the Scots on the Wear but failed to bring them to battle or to stop them from escaping unscathed to Scotland. The young King, who had been taken up north in the baggage of his guardians, was seen weeping tears of anger and frustration. His discomfiture was completed by the events which followed: raids launched with persistence and impunity into the northern counties of England, then prolonged and tortuous negotiations from which he was excluded. The treaty renounced all of Edward’s claims to overlordship in Scotland, and finally recognized Robert Bruce as king. In July 1328 Bruce’s heir, the future David II, married Edward’s sister. The Scots paid £20,000 by way of reparations for the harrying of the north, most of which was quickly slipped into the money-chests of Mortimer and Isabella. During the 1330s royal propagandists put it about that the peace had been imposed on an unwilling King in his minority, and was not binding on him in his maturity. This was bad law, but it was probably good history.¹

The peace had serious defects of a less personal kind. The first of them was that it left in being the formidable threat of a concerted attack on England by France and Scotland. The treaty which the Scots had made with France at Corbeil in 1326 had provided that, in the event of a war between England and France, the Scotch King should invade England and make war there ‘to the utmost of his power’. In their treaty with England, the Scots expressly reserved their right to comply with this obligation. After four decades of fear, suspicion and war, it was perhaps unreasonable to expect them to lay down their guard entirely by abandoning their only ally. But the reservation had dismal consequences for them. It meant that any English king who envisaged a violent quarrel with France would wish to deal firmly with Scotland first in order to protect his rear. The English civil service had a long memory and an obsessive interest in the lessons of the past. There were still officials who remembered the terrible year 1295 when the Scots had made common cause with the French for the ‘disherison and destruction’ of the English people.

The second grave defect of the ‘shameful peace’ proved to be the immediate cause of its undoing. It failed to deal with the claims of very many English and Scotch noblemen who had been expropriated from their Scotch lands after the battle of Bannockburn. The English had been long enough in Scotland before their expulsion for families like Percy, Wake and Beaumont to set down roots and long enough for many Scots to conclude that the future lay with the invaders. When the English were expelled, these men lost everything they had in Scotland. Some of them could fall back on extensive lands and interests in England. Others had nothing left except their claims against Robert Bruce and his heirs. The peace of 1328 appeared to mark the end of these claims. A few cases were taken up by the English government in desultory and fruitless diplomatic exchanges; some favoured individuals were rewarded by modest pensions from the Exchequer; most were ignored, a betrayal which was profoundly shocking to English aristocratic sentiment and had added to the already swollen ranks of Mortimer’s enemies.

One of the ‘disinherited’ was Henry Beaumont, an able soldier and adventurer of French origin who had once been among the greatest lords of the English-occupied lowlands, holding the earldom of Buchan in right of his wife and the office of Constable of Scotland. At some time in 1331 Beaumont conceived a bold plan to recover his losses. This involved nothing less than an invasion of Scotland by a private army to be raised by Beaumont himself with the assistance of other prominent ‘disinherited’. The greatest of these, who had lost more by the English defeats in Scotland than anyone, was Edward Balliol. Balliol was the eldest son of the hapless King John. He was a forgotten figure who had for some years been living a penurious existence on his heavily mortgaged estates in France. But he was a good soldier and the owner of a valuable name, and he had nothing to lose. So, in the winter of 1331–2 he came to England and settled in Yorkshire. There, preparations were set in train for a seaborne expedition to Scotland. Beaumont and Balliol and their friends set sail from three Yorkshire ports on 31 July 1332, a mixed band of aggrieved Scotch exiles, out-of-pocket Englishmen and mercenaries a few hundred strong.

They were fortunate, or perhaps shrewd, in the moment that they chose. Robert Bruce had died in June 1329, leaving as his heir a five-year-old child, David II. For the first three years of the new reign the government was in the hands of the Guardian, Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, a capable and vigorous old soldier who had commanded the Scotch centre at Bannockburn. Moray was well aware of Beaumont’s preparations and had made his own plans for countering them. But he was a sick man and on 20 July 1332 he died in the castle of Musselburgh on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, where he had chosen to await Balliol’s descent. On 2 August, while the small armada of the disinherited was making its way up the coast, the Scotch leaders gathered at Perth and chose Donald, Earl of Mar, to succeed him. The choice of the Earl of Mar was inevitable, for he was the King’s closest kinsman of full age. But it was unfortunate in every other respect, for he had few political skills and little military experience. He was, moreover, a man of ambiguous background and uncertain loyalty who had lived most of his life in England as friend and courtier of Edward II. That there were misgivings at Perth upon his election, ‘dissensions and disputes’ according to the Scotch chronicler, was not surprising.²

Mar was not destined to govern Scotland for long. On 6 August 1332, Beaumont’s band landed in Fife. Five days later, on the 11th, they destroyed a Scotch army many times larger than their own at Dupplin Moor. The battle was even more significant than its political consequences. The Scots had attacked the invaders in gallant disorder, led by Lord Robert Bruce, bastard son of the great Bruce. The ‘disinherited’ had disposed their small forces according to the formula which a succession of English victories in the Hundred Year War was to make classic. The men-at-arms stood dismounted along a narrow front with fixed pikes in front of their line, while their horses were held at the rear for pursuit or flight. The archers were disposed in looser formation at the flanks, slightly forward of the centre, from where they poured a rain of arrows into the advancing Scotch host. There was a terrible massacre. Some thousands of Scots died of arrow wounds or were suffocated under the piles of corpses. Most of them never reached the lines of the enemy. Mar, Bruce and many of the leading noblemen of Scotland were among the dead.³

*

Edward III’s role in these events was obscure, as without doubt he intended it to be. His situation was not an easy one. He was formally at peace with the King of Scotland who, indeed, was married to his sister. On the other hand he had scores to settle with the Scots, and many friends among the ‘disinherited’ who had helped him to seize power from Mortimer. Beaumont and Balliol certainly consulted Edward III and asked his permission to attempt the reconquest of Scotland. There are varying reports of Edward’s answer. According to the most reliable evidence Edward refused to countenance an invasion across the Tweed, which would be too easy to associate with him; but he was willing to turn a blind eye to the plans of the ‘disinherited’ on the understanding that they entered Scotland from the sea, and that if the enterprise ended in disaster he would publicly disavow them and confiscate their English lands. After his victory, Balliol issued a number of proclamations suggesting that before his departure he had secretly done homage to the English King for the realm of Scotland. He even quoted the exact words used. It is probably what happened. At the end of March 1332 Edward informed the sheriffs of the northern counties that he had received several reports that armed men were gathering to invade Scotland in breach of the peace of 1328, which conduct was to be stopped at once and the perpetrators arrested. Since it could quite easily have been stopped and was not, it may be assumed that these writs had been prepared for consumption in Scotland and were accompanied by oral instructions to do no such thing.⁴

Balliol’s extraordinary success came as a surprise. Parliament had been summoned to Westminster for 9 September 1332. to consider the affairs of Ireland, but Ireland’s troubles were relegated to the background by the snippets of news which arrived daily from Scotland. On the second day of the session, the lords and the knights of the shires emerged from their deliberations to volunteer the advice that Edward should proceed at once to the north of England without even waiting for the conclusion of Parliamentary business at Westminster. For the safety of the realm against incursions from Scotland, they voted him a tenth and fifteenth. It seems that the prevailing wisdom at Westminster was that, in spite of his remarkable victory, Balliol’s enterprise was still likely to fail and that the main danger was of retaliatory raids by a revived and strengthened government of Scotland. But after the dispersal of Parliament good news continued to arrive from the north. A second Scotch army, which had been making its way from the south while the battle of Dupplin Moor was being fought, had made a half-hearted attempt to besiege Balliol in Perth and had then melted away. Galloway, where Balliol’s family had once possessed important interests, had rallied to his cause. It seemed that he would soon extend his rule over most of central and southern Scotland if only by default of organized opposition. Edward III left London in the third week of September 1332 and reached York in mid-October. There he was greeted by the news that Balliol had been crowned at Scone as king of Scotland in the presence of a mixed assembly of armed Englishmen and Scotch malcontents and trimmers. This had happened on 24 September. Since then, Balliol had moved south with his supporters into the Scotch lowlands and installed himself in the huge, partly ruined border fortress of Roxburgh. There he received a steady trickle of submissions and waited upon events.⁵

Edward Balliol desperately needed English assistance in holding his insecurely won kingdom. At the end of November 1332 he made it clear how much he was prepared to concede in order to get it. He issued two open letters acknowledging in glowing terms his debt to England. These began by announcing that, with the help of the King of England and some good Englishmen, Balliol had reconquered his own. He acknowledged that Scotland was and always had been a fief of England. Then came promises for the future. Edward was to have 2,000 librates of land next to the border, to include Berwick-on-Tweed, the gateway for any English army entering the lowlands of Scotland. Moreover, for the rest of his life, Balliol would faithfully serve Edward III with 200 men-at-arms for at least six months in the year wherever Edward had need of them, including Gascony ‘and elsewhere where the King may hold lands or claim rights and where others may seek to prevent him by force from enjoying them’.⁶ These remarkable letters were brought to York by Balliol’s emissaries, and provided the main talking point at the meeting of Parliament which opened there on 4 December 1332.

It was a disorganized and inconclusive affair. York was far away and most of the lords failed to attend. After two adjournments for stragglers to come in, the main proceedings opened on 8 December with a speech from Geoffrey Scrope, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Scrope was a rich Yorkshire parvenu, a lawyer of strong martial tastes who was becoming one of Edward’s principal advisers on foreign affairs. He explained to the half-empty benches that the peace of 1328 could be ignored. It had been made by others who had taken advantage of the King’s youth. That being so, he continued, there appeared to be two ways in which the present situation could be exploited. Edward might claim the kingdom for himself; or he might support one of the rival parties within Scotland in exchange for homage and feudal services. Scrope made it quite clear that the government was not wedded to the cause of Edward Balliol. He reminded his audience that Balliol’s father had forfeited his kingdom to Edward I. As for David II, his representatives, who were present, were briskly told that Edward was not bound to restrain his subjects who had been disinherited in Scotland in the cause of himself and his predecessors and had now begun to reconquer what was theirs. The Lords were asked to deliberate about Scrope’s ‘two ways’ and to give the King their advice, but it was evident that Edward had already decided what advice he wished to hear. He wished to be told to annex Scotland to his crown. In this he was disappointed. After deliberating for an unusually long time by the standards of medieval parliaments, the Lords told Edward that it was too weighty and difficult a matter for so small a gathering, that only five ecclesiastics (all northerners) were present, and that the best thing was to do nothing until an adjourned session could be held in January.⁷

By the time the adjourned session took place the King’s problem had been simplified by a collapse of Balliol’s fortunes as swift and violent as his triumph of August. At some time towards the end of October 1332, the new Guardian of Scotland, Archibald Douglas, had made a truce with Balliol, ostensibly to enable the Scotch Parliament to assemble and decide who was their rightful king. The truce caused Balliol to relax his guard. He dismissed most of his English soldiers and left the relative security of Roxburgh for Annan on the north shore of the Solway Firth. Douglas attacked him there in the early hours of 17 December. Most of his companions were killed in their beds. He himself escaped through a hole in the wall and fled half-naked on an unbridled horse until he reached Carlisle.⁸

In the evolution of Edward III’s policy, Balliol’s sudden expulsion was decisive. The adjourned meeting of Parliament on 20 January was as sterile as the previous one in December and dispersed at the end of the month without proffering any advice to the monarch. Clearly there were misgivings about the King’s new ambitions even in an assembly which had traditionally favoured firm measures against the Scots. But these misgivings, whatever they were, did not trouble Edward’s Council. They had decided to fight in Scotland whatever was said in Parliament. The last public business before Parliament dispersed was the announcement by Chancellor Stratford that Edward had appointed a special committee of six councillors to assist him in the matter of Scotland. They, according to the author of the Scalacronica, were ‘enterprising and warlike men, keen to repair their dented prestige’. They knew that the King had already gone too far for there to be any prospect of patching up relations with the Scots loyal to David II. They also had an eye on France as English policy-makers always did when dealing with Scotland. Edward’s hands were tied in France for as long as the Scots remained independent and hostile. There was unlikely to be a better moment for taming them than the present. It was therefore resolved to invade Scotland in force.⁹

The affair showed Edward III at his worst, devious, impulsive and incapable of looking beyond the events of the moment. Even the events of the moment he saw in purely military terms. It is surprising that a ruler whose subordinates plied him so assiduously with historical lessons should have supposed that the battle of Dupplin Moor would be as decisive on the political plane as it had been on the military one, or that the Scots would accept the loss of most of the lowlands and the introduction of a new class of anglophile landowners descended from the expelled interlopers of an earlier generation. These misjudgements were not made for want of advice. But Edward chose his advisers and although they were neither cyphers nor mediocrities they were generally of the same mind as he was.

*

Whatever illusions Edward III may once have had about the size of the task before him were dissipated now. For the next four years the administrative capital of the kingdom was transferred to York. The Chancery was already installed with its bulky archives in the Chapter House of the cathedral. The normally sedentary offices of the Exchequer and the Court of Common Bench arrived at about the same time and were settled in York Castle. North of the castle the large Franciscan convent became the headquarters of the royal household. A host of clerks, household troops, dignitaries, suppliers and hangers-on as well as suitors in the royal courts crammed themselves into such private accommodation as could be found in the confined triangle between the Ouse and the Foss. York became, briefly, a boom town suffering all the hustle, congestion and disturbance that belonged with prosperity. In the cathedral close, work on the half-completed nave was suspended as zealous royal officers requisitioned horses, carts and materials. Westminster was abandoned to monastic regularity and tawdry indigence.¹⁰

The English invasion of Scotland achieved nothing, but militarily it was a complete success.¹¹ Edward divided his forces into two armies, the first of which, commanded by Edward Balliol, entered the western lowlands from Carlisle in March 1333. The second, under Edward himself, marched north from Newcastle at the end of April. The objective of both forces was Berwick, the powerful fortress-town which guarded the north shore of the estuary of the Tweed. Edward reached the south bank of the Tweed opposite the walls in the second week of May and found Balliol’s force already in place on the north bank. By the end of June, much of the town had been destroyed by catapults and fires, and the garrison weakened by repeated assaults. On 28 June the Warden of the town agreed to surrender in two weeks unless by then he had been relieved.

At first the Scotch Guardian tried to relieve Berwick by mounting diversions south of the border in the destructive tradition of the Scots. Tweedmouth, opposite Berwick on the south shore, was burned. Queen Philippa was besieged in Bamburgh Castle, 15 miles away. In the face of these threats to his subjects and his wife, Edward displayed the ruthlessness and constancy of purpose which became characteristic of him. The Scots were left to do their worst in Northumberland. When Berwick failed to surrender on the appointed day, Edward began to hang hostages, beginning with the son of the garrison commander and continuing at a rate of two a day, ‘and so he wolde teche them to breke their convenauntz.’ In the third week of July, Douglas was forced to take the step which every Scotch commander since the early days of Edward I’s wars had learned to avoid at all costs. He recrossed the Tweed and offered battle to the English army. It was the only hope of relieving the town, but it meant a battle on ground of Edward’s choosing and at a time which suited him.

The ground was at Halidon, a hill 2 miles north-west of Berwick about 500 feet high. It lay across the only route by which the Scotch army could reach the beleaguered town. On 19 July 1333, Douglas attacked the English army there. Edward III’s tactics were the same as those which had won Dupplin Moor for Balliol. He arranged his army with dismounted cavalry at the centre and archers placed slightly forward of them at the flanks. The horses were held at the rear. The object was to remain on the defensive for as long as possible while the enemy pressed through a rain of arrows to break themselves on the English lines. This was exactly what the Scots did. After the battle, the carnage wreaked by the English archers was completed by a relentless pursuit of the fleeing Scots. Seeing the outcome of the battle, their camp followers had fled with the horses. Some of the troops ran for five miles before they were killed. Others threw themselves into the sea. The number of dead is impossible to disentangle from the exaggerations of the chroniclers, but there must have been several thousand. They included the Guardian and five Scotch earls. The few prisoners who had been taken were put to death on Edward III’s order, a final act of savagery for which there is no rational explanation. English casualties were light.

‘And so’, said one Englishman, ‘men freely declared that the Scotch wars had been brought to their close, that nothing remained of the Scotch nation which was willing or able to defend or govern itself. Yet they were wrong, as the sequel showed.’¹² These words were written about five years after the battle. The immediate sequel did not show that they were wrong. Berwick opened its gates to the besiegers on the following day, and was at once annexed to the English Crown together with the county of which it was the head. Balliol set up his capital at Perth, where he ruled in theory all of Scotland and in fact the greater part of it, including Fife and most of the English-speaking lowlands. The young David II and his Queen fled to Dumbarton Castle on the Clyde and clung on there while the tidal wave passed over them. Elsewhere, less than half-a-dozen castles held out for David’s cause.¹³

It now fell to Balliol to perform his magnificent promises of the previous year. There was some delay and indications of backsliding. Balliol knew how much those concessions would cost his reputation among the Scots. His situation was a difficult one as Edward III, intoxicated by the verdict of the battlefield, failed to recognize. In February 1334, however, Balliol summoned the Scotch Parliament to Holyrood Abbey outside Edinburgh to ratify the arrangement which he had made with the English King. It was an ill-attended assembly, there being present a respectable number of bishops but scarcely any lay magnates apart from Balliol’s long-standing friends among the ‘disinherited’ and Englishmen holding land in Scotland. Edward III compromised on some points to make the pill sweeter for the Scots. He agreed not to hear appeals from Scotland and not to require Balliol’s attendance at English parliaments. But on the main point there was no compromise. Balliol met Edward III in Newcastle in June 1334 and ceded to him most of the English-speaking lowlands of Scotland, eight counties lying south and east of a line from Linlithgow on the Firth of Forth to Wigtown on the Solway Firth. On 19 June, in the Dominican convent of Newcastle, he did homage to Edward III, this time in public, for what was left of his kingdom.¹⁴

The battle of Halidon Hill marked an important point in Edward III’s development as a soldier and as a ruler. It was his first taste of victory, a source of measured confidence, perhaps over-confidence, in dealing with more formidable enemies. Edward had taken advice from his friends before the campaign and he was characteristically generous to them afterwards. William Montagu, who had been one of the closest of them, received the grant of the Isle of Man and a royal manor in the Tweed valley. At a humbler level, soldiers who had distinguished themselves in the fighting and merchants and civil servants who had kept the army supplied and paid saw their services recognized by grants of money, land or privileges.¹⁵ He was doing what was expected of a king in a world which valued largesse more than good housekeeping. Edward’s capacity to behave as he was expected to may have come easily to a man of conventional temperament, without cynicism or humour. It was the key to his successful management of public opinion. The Parliament of January 1333, in failing to support an ambitious military adventure by an untried king, had almost certainly reflected widespread unease even among those who hated the Scots:

                    Of Ingland had my hert grete care

                    When Edward founded first to wer

sang the patriotic poetaster Lawrence Minot in his jubilant celebration of the slaughter of Halidon Hill. Royal propaganda saw to it that the jubilation was spread well beyond the northern counties. In London the citizens and clergy processed with their relics from St Paul’s to Trinity Church by Aldgate and back. There was no doubt of the spontaneity of such demonstrations, harbingers of a more militant England.¹⁶

*

In France the troubles of Scotland had been followed with growing concern but imperfect understanding. This was, perhaps, inevitable given the speed of events and the paucity of the French government’s sources of information. Philip VI had interests at once more distant and more compelling than Scotland. Ever since 1329, perhaps even earlier, Philip had been anxious to lead a great crusade against the infidel. Initially, his interest was focussed on Spain, where the Islamic kingdoms were being driven further into their southern heartlands. But in 1331, Philip resolved to mount an expedition to the Middle East for the liberation of the Holy Land, the first such expedition since the ill-fated crusade of Louis IX, which had ended with his death in 1270. On 2 October 1332, the French King had announced his intentions to an assembly of notables gathered at the Sainte-Chapelle, and exactly a year later he formally took the cross in a great ceremony in the Pré-aux-Clercs outside the Parisian abbey of St Germain. Given the uncertainties of the King’s political position within France, it was a courageous, perhaps foolhardy decision. Yet there seems to have been no significant opposition. No one said to Philip that his enthusiasm would be better applied to the needs of his kingdom, as Suger had said to Louis VII in the twelfth century and Joinville to Louis IX in the thirteenth. The crusade was still a predominantly French affair: Gesta Dei per Francos, ‘the deeds of God, performed by the French’ as a twelfth-century chronicler had it. Acre, the last outpost of Christianity on the east Mediterranean mainland, had fallen in 1291, and the only surviving remnants of the crusading states were now Rhodes, which belonged to the predominantly French Hospitallers, and Cyprus, which was ruled by the French Lusignan family. The French nobility had always looked beyond their own frontiers for adventure, riches and atonement. For them the crusading ideal had a reality which it lacked in other classes and other countries. Certainly it was real enough for Philip VI, who bent most of his energies to its preparation for five years from 1331 to 1336. Spies were sent to examine the walls and gates of Levantine cities. The Queen’s physician wrote a treatise on siege engines and the other armaments which would be required. The alternative routes were debated in the royal Council. Arrangements were made with the Venetian Republic for the transport of a great army and its supplies by sea. In the Mediterranean ports of France, preparations were put in hand for the accumulation of a large fleet of war galleys. Commanders were appointed and a date was eventually fixed: August 1336.¹⁷

Scotland was an unwelcome distraction. The news of Balliol’s victory at Dupplin Moor must have reached Paris in about October 1332, at about the same time as the French King was describing his plans to the assembled soldiers and bishops in the Sainte-Chapelle. None of Philip’s advisers seems to have appreciated the significance of the battle. It is quite probable that they did not know how much had been contributed to it by Englishmen, including some close associates of Edward III. If so, their eyes were shortly to be opened. By January 1333 there had been two meetings of the English Parliament at York, at which Edward had made no secret of his ambitions or of the means by which he proposed to achieve them.

The news presented Philip VI’s government with a dilemma. The Treaty of Corbeil imposed obligations on France in such circumstances which were loosely defined but not so loosely that they could be ignored. On the other hand it was dangerous to antagonize Edward III, and unthinkable for a French king to sail for the eastern Mediterranean with the flower of his army leaving a hostile England behind him. Philip even hoped that Edward III would join his expedition. Accordingly, he responded as mildly and unprovocatively as his Chancery knew how. A letter was sent to Edward III the text of which has not survived but which appears from subsequent correspondence to have consisted of gentle complaints coupled with requests for information about what was happening. Another letter, in stronger terms, was sent in March 1333 at about the time that Balliol’s army was leaving Carlisle.¹⁸

Edward took the implied threat of French intervention in Scotland seriously, and humoured Philip VI with some skill. A number of routine embassies visited France at this time, but none was empowered to discuss Scotland. The English Chancery maintained a vigorous correspondence with the French court, dealing at length with every other subject. The omission was quite deliberate. ‘We have received the letters of the King of France,’ Edward wrote to Stratford during the siege of Berwick, ‘but it seems to us and to those of our Council who are about us that it would not be desirable to give any clear answer about the matter of Scotland.’ Instead the French King’s letter was answered with a long complaint about the seizure of some cargoes of wheat and the problems of Aquitaine. French diplomatic agents in England were kept away from the war area for some time by the simple device of delaying the provision of escorts, and when at length they did reach Edward’s camp at Berwick they were kept there until all was over. The only information about Scotland which Philip received officially from Edward was that the Scots had broken the peace of 1328, launching raids on northern England for the destruction of Edward’s subjects and their property, a repetition of Edward’s war propaganda in England which he addressed to the French court on 7 May 1333. Apart from a dark reference to certain ‘remedies’ which were proposed, this letter contained no information about Edward’s plans.¹⁹

By the time it reached Paris, Philip’s Council had become aware that he was besieging Berwick and had already proceeded to robuster measures. A fleet of ten ships was fitted out and sent to Berwick with arms and food for the defenders. The fleet left Dieppe, but encountered fierce northern gales and was compelled to take refuge in the Flemish port of Sluys. There, the cargoes were sold off or pilfered. The English probably never heard about it.²⁰

The closing stages of the siege of Berwick were witnessed by a small group of Frenchmen from the English camp. They were members of an embassy which had come to discuss the English King’s participation in the crusade. They had left France before the English campaign had got under way and by the time of their arrival their instructions were grievously out of date. Their leader, Raoul de Brienne, Count of Eu and Constable of France, was known to be persona grata at the English court, the owner of large estates in England and Ireland, and one of the few Frenchmen about Philip VI who had more than a passing acquaintance with English affairs. But in spite of an intelligent choice of principal, this mission achieved nothing except to discover that victory had made Edward III stickier in his dealings with France. Edward reminded the ambassadors that on the occasion of his homage at Amiens in 1329 Philip had promised that he should enjoy all his rights in France. In Edward’s opinion, those rights were much more extensive than any which Philip had yet conceded. Nothing less would do than a complete reappraisal of the treaties and conventions which related to Aquitaine. ‘You shall tell your master’, Edward is reported to have said, ‘that when he has kept his promises I shall be even more ready than he is to go on the crusade.’ This response was brought back to the French King together with the news of the destruction of his Scotch allies.²¹

The policy behind it, trading Edward’s participation in the crusade for real concessions in Aquitaine, remained the keystone of English policy for three years from 1333 to 1336. If it had been vigorously pursued in the immediate aftermath of Halidon Hill it might well have succeeded, for Philip VI was undoubtedly attracted by the idea. As it was, English diplomacy unaccountably marked time for several months after the battle, during which Edward’s enemies were actively sowing doubts about the finality of the victory and the durability of Edward Balliol’s government. A trickle of distinguished Scotch refugees found their way to the French court, including the teenage John Randolph, Earl of Moray, who had commanded a division of the Scotch army in the battle, as well as some of the less pliable Scotch bishops. They tried to persuade Philip that it was his duty to intervene in Scotland. Philip hesitated and initially did nothing. But he did agree, it may be unaware of the significance of his act, to offer asylum to the ten-year-old King of Scotland in France. David II’s position on the isolated coast of Dumbarton was becoming untenable. His capture by Edward Balliol would have been a serious blow to any prospects of Scotch recovery. And so, early in 1334, Philip VI paid 1,000 marks to the Earl of Moray to fit out and arm a ship to carry the diminutive Scotch court to safety in France. In May 1334, they landed in Normandy.²²

This event forced on the French King a decision which he had been avoiding for almost a year. It came at a particularly delicate moment. There had recently arrived in France an English embassy of which Edward III had high hopes. It was the most exalted that Edward had yet sent to Philip’s court. It consisted of John Stratford, now Archbishop of Canterbury, William Montagu, William Clinton and Chief Justice Scrope, all men who were very much in the King’s personal confidence (two of them had taken part in Edward’s coup d’état of 1330). Their instructions were to negotiate a final resolution of the dispute about Aquitaine on the basis of the restitution to Edward III of the territories which his father had held before the war of Saint-Sardos. To this end, Edward had empowered them to commit him to join the crusade. The ambassadors were met by Philip VI and his court at Senlis, a small walled city of the Ile de France just north of Paris, whose castle was used as a base for royal hunting parties. French sources are more or less agreed about what happened next. According to their account, which is probably accurate, the Englishmen arrived to be frigidly received by Philip’s courtiers. Philip himself, however, was anxious (or persuaded by some of his advisers) that the negotiations shouldsucceed. A committee of three councillors was deputed to talk to them: the Count of Eu, Pierre Roger, Archbishop of Rouen, and the Marshal Matthieu de Trie. All of these men had experience of the English position and probably some sympathy for it. They rapidly came to an agreement. A treaty was agreed in principle on terms which have not survived but which must have embodied significant concessions to Edward III. The English formally took their leave of all the French councillors and returned to their lodgings in the town.

This was probably the point at which Philip learned of the arrival of the Scotch court in Normandy; if not, it is certainly the moment at which it dawned on him that a peace with England which left the Scots to their fate would now be impolitic and embarrassing. As the criers were proclaiming the treaty from street corners, the English were recalled from their lodgings. When they arrived in the King’s presence, they were told that it was of course to be understood that the Scots and their exiled King would be included in the treaty. They were aghast. Nothing had previously been said about Scotland. They had no instructions on the question. As far as their master was concerned the only King of Scotland was Edward Balliol. Indeed, although they probably did not know it, Balliol was at about that very time in the Dominican Convent at Newcastle making the final arrangements to subordinate his kingdom to England and to cede a large part of it in perpetuity. The ambassadors at Senlis did their best, but seeing that their protests cut no ice they left empty-handed for England. Philip’s last words to them were that it seemed that there ‘would never be friendship between England and France until the same man is king of both’, a bon mot whose finality made a firmer impression on the English than perhaps was intended.²³ Philip meanwhile welcomed David II and his Queen and installed them in Château-Gaillard, the great fortress of the lower Seine which an English king had built a century and a half before to defend another French duchy from the encroachments of the Capetians. Here they were to live for seven years sustained by irregular remittances from their supporters in Scotland and by subsidies from Philip VI, drawing dignity from their surroundings and from a small court of Scotch ecclesiastics and officials.²⁴

The affair exemplified all the classic vices of the ‘solemn embassy’: ambassadors ill informed, instructions overtaken by events, failure humiliating and public. The history of Stratford’s embassy and the maladroit manner of its ending became fertile sources of national misunderstanding and resentment. On his return, the Archbishop gave a graphic account of it to a gathering of dignitaries in London, and the parting words of Philip VI passed onto the mythology of French intransigence. English popular opinion believed that Philip had said: ‘There will be no perfect Christian peace until the King of France sits in the midst of England in judgement over the three kingdoms of England, France and Scotland.’ The French for their part believed that Edward had responded that he would ‘never rest until he had Scotland under his heel’. The consequences were serious enough even without patriotic exaggerations. Up to this point, Philip VI had never refused point-blank to consider restoring Edward to his lost dominions in Aquitaine. He had now in effect refused because he had imposed a condition which Edward could not meet without undoing Balliol and surrendering his gains in the Scotch lowlands. What Philip was demanding would not have been tolerated by the English baronage even if Edward himself had been inclined to concede it. Months afterwards, a French ambassador at the papal court tried to explain to the Pope that Philip could not without dishonour escape the obligations which his predecessor had assumed by the Treaty of Corbeil. The Pope replied to this with words of chilling percipience. France was rich, he said, and her riches were coveted. Was there not some risk that Edward III would take a leaf out of Philip’s book, finding allies among the many malcontents within her border and outside?²⁵

*

In southern France the atmosphere was abruptly altered by the failure of Stratford’s embassy and the quarrel over Scotland. The Anglo-French commission appointed under the terms of the treaty of 1331 had been progressing slowly with its enormous task in the spacious surroundings of the Dominican convent of Agen. The proceedings had been surprisingly friendly. Indeed, the commissioners had jointly proposed to their governments that their terms of reference should be altered to allow them to do justice to those inhabitants of Aquitaine, who had been displaced during the war of Saint-Sardos, and not only those displaced afterwards. This proposal was very beneficial to Edward III, as the English commissioners were quick to point out to him. Although it would not put him in possession of the lost provinces, it would put his subjects back in possession of their estates there, giving him friends and allies in a region which he was hoping sooner or later to prize from Philip’s grip. Before the unfortunate Stratford embassy, Philip had agreed to appoint new commissioners with the necessary powers, and with evident reluctance he actually did so at the beginning of July 1334, about a fortnight after Stratford had left. No doubt he had been told that there were other ways of obstructing the commission’s work.²⁶

The new commissioners met on 29 September 1334 in the Carmelite house of Langon and at once fell to bickering on matters procedural and substantive. Were the commissioners’ letters of appointment drawn up in due form? Did their powers extend to all of Aquitaine or only to the Agenais? What should be the order of their proceedings? Some of these matters were trivial but by no means all of them were. At the outset, the French commissioners interested themselves in the case of the castles of Blanquefort and Veyrines, which belonged by inheritance to the Count of Armagnac. The Count had been prevented from taking possession of them in 1325 ostensibly because Edward II had wished to consider the validity of the last owner’s will, in fact because Armagnac, whose principal lands lay outside the duchy, was thought to be a troublemaker and a friend and ally of the French Crown. The French commissioners demanded the surrender of both places. It was a small dispute presenting in its classic form the dilemma of the English government of Gascony. Edward III was plainly in the wrong and his own Seneschal advised him to give way. But Blanquefort was an important fortress, recently strengthened, on the northern outskirts of Bordeaux. There could be no question of allowing the chances of inheritance to put such a place into the hands of a potential enemy. The affair brought chaos to the commission’s proceedings. In October 1334, one of the French members was said to be on his way to Paris to arrange for the confiscation of Edward III’s county of Ponthieu until the two places were given up. His colleagues were later reported to be extorting oaths of allegiance to the King of France by threats of expropriation, banishment and death. Evidently, as Edward III wrote to the English commissioners, their French colleagues were guided ‘more by their own caprices than by judicial reasoning’.²⁷

On 15 November 1334 Edward addressed a gentler protest to the King of France. He was, he said, as anxious for a lasting peace as any man but it was unrealistic to hope for peace unless Philip was prepared to consider his complaints and those of his subjects. What was required was a complete reappraisal of the existing treaties and conventions between the two kings as well as a resumption of the more detailed work of the joint commission in Aquitaine. The letter reveals a growing perception on Edward’s part and that of his advisers of what had gone wrong with previous diplomatic efforts.²⁸ Philip’s reply has not survived, but it was probably of a piece with his actions. He did not see any need to concede what his law did not require. The work of the commission limped on into the following year and then ended. A large number of reports had been compiled and provisional arrangements made for some disputed properties, but no actual restitution had been ordered. It was a complete failure. The consequences of the impasse were potentially very serious. For by one of the more improvident clauses of the treaty of 1331 any deadlock in the joint commission was to be resolved by referring disputed cases to the Parlement of Paris. Hitherto Philip had made a real effort to restrain the Parlement’s enthusiasm for hearing Gascon appeals. But from 1335 onwards Gascon disputes were to find their way there in growing numbers.²⁹

*

Edward’s hands were now tied by an unwelcome revival of the Bruce cause in Scotland, encouraged and, it was believed, financed by France. There is no way of testing the belief, but it is plausible. In July 1334 there was an insurrection in the south-west between the Clyde and Solway Firth. The Bruces had always been powerful in this region, where the English-speaking lowlands merged with the Gaelic communities of the coasts and islands. The leaders of the new rebellion, both men with powerful interests there, were Robert Stewart, the head of his family, and John Randolph, Earl of Moray. The first warning of it was a sudden seaborne attack by Stewart on Dunoon Castle, which fell almost immediately. Rothesay fell soon afterwards to a spontaneous uprising of the Stewart tenants on Bute. In July, the Earl of Moray, who had recently returned from France to Dumbarton, crossed the Clyde and raised most of the rest of the southwest. At the time of these events, Stewart was only eighteen years old. Moray was even younger, ‘a youth not yet full grown’. Together, these two set themselves up as joint regents of Scotland and began to construct the semblance of a government.³⁰

Edward III was now to learn, as he would learn again in France, how much easier it was to win territory than to hold it. Medieval armies usually kept the field for short campaigns, determined by the seasons and the weather. Governments lacked the money and the administrative resources to keep them in the field for longer. Balliol’s friend David of Strathbogie might disport himself as Steward of Scotland, feasting Robert Stewart’s tenants at Renfrew and receiving in state the keys of his castles, but among the dispersed, pastoral population of Scotland whose loyalties were still largely tribal the governing class could not be changed overnight. Had not Galloway risen for a Balliol in 1332 after an absence of nearly forty years? Where towns were few and small and generally unwalled, possession depended on the garrisons of isolated fortresses. Between them, Balliol and Edward III now controlled rather more than a dozen of these, concentrated in the southern lowlands close to the border, in Fife and in the east-coast plain beyond the Tay. But their garrisons were kept at very low strength and controlled no more land than they could see. Even within the walls, loyalties were uncertain.

Balliol was at Stirling when the news of the rebellion arrived, and at once sent to England for help. But events moved faster than the English could do. By the middle of August, the revolt had spread to most parts of Scotland. In the next few days Balliol’s kingdom disintegrated before his eyes. His Council was rent by bitter disputes about the distribution of land, some of which was no longer his to distribute. On 24 August 1334 his closest associates refused to make common cause against the rebels and dispersed to their castles to resist individually. Some were captured before they got there; some were besieged in their strongholds. Those who could hope for any favour from Brace’s friends joined them. Balliol himself fled to English territory at Berwick, narrowly escaping a raiding party which had been sent to intercept him.³¹

Edward III was in serious financial difficulty in the summer of 1334. The Halidon Hill campaign of the previous year had been expensive and Parliamentary subsidies had not closed the gap. The Westminster Parliament of September 1332 had voted Edward one tenth and fifteenth to finance a campaign which was expected to be much more limited and more defensive than the one which occurred. Moreover, its yield had been disappointing: depressed by corrupt under-assessment, late to come in, and partly eaten up by the peculation of local officials. The next Parliament, which had met in York in December 1332 and January 1333, had done nothing to improve Edward’s financial position except to give their grudging consent to a supplementary duty on wool exports. As a result, Edward had become heavily dependent on his bankers. For some months in 1332 there was a complete stop on payments to any other creditors.³² Parliament’s obvious lack of enthusiasm seems to have deterred Edward from seeking further assistance in that quarter. But by good fortune Parliament was actually in session at Westminster in September 1334 when the news arrived of Balliol’s second expulsion from Scotland and the maltreatment of his English followers. A new subsidy, the first for two years, was voted forthwith. Its yield was about 10 per cent up on its predecessor in spite of the ravages of the weather and a deepening agricultural recession. These measures went some way towards relieving the government’s financial embarrassment. The two provinces of the Church, which had resisted demands for taxation for at least a year, were subjected to intense pressure by the King’s ministers. They were induced to make their own grant shortly after the Parliament had done so. At the same time Edward began to increase the scale of his borrowing. He made a long-term arrangement with the Bardi by which the firm advanced him a monthly sum, initially 1,000 marks, against an assignment of future customs revenues, a scheme which lasted in some shape or form for two years, when it was superseded by a more ambitious one. The Italians had already set out on the road which was to lead them to the most spectacular of all medieval commercial bankruptcies, and Edward had partly refilled his war-chests for what proved to be a debilitating succession of campaigns.³³

The King invaded Scotland for the second time in November 1334. On this occasion the Scots avoided giving battle, the old policy of Robert Bruce which would be completely vindicated in the succeeding years. Edward’s first objective was Roxburgh, the great border fortress on the Tweed which had lain in ruins since Bruce had demolished it in 1314 ‘lest the English should ever again rule the land by holding castles’. A large corps of builders whom Edward had brought with him set about rebuilding it while the King waited for reinforcements from the south. Edward had only about 4,000 men with him, consisting mainly of his own household and the retainers of the nobility. His larger plans were dependent on the arrival of the shire levies. What these plans were was not, however, revealed for they were never put into effect. Shortly after the English reached Roxburgh, the snow began to fall and freezing winds howled across the moorland, blowing it in the soldiers’ faces. It was the worst winter for many years. In England, floods and gales added to the misery, destroying buildings, uprooting trees and killing animals. Indifference, bureaucratic inertia and winter combined to prevent more than a trickle of reinforcements from reaching the army.

The Scots stayed well away. After Christmas, Edward conducted a military promenade through the forest of Ettrick in the hope of finding the enemy. Balliol, who had led a separate and smaller force up from Carlisle, conducted an equally fruitless hunt in Peebles. Between them, they laid waste to large tracts of the western lowlands, destroying houses, animals and grain stores, killing those whom they found in their way. Balliol’s ancestral lands in Galloway were spared, but no other attempt was made to distinguish between friend and foe. At the beginning of February 1335 they returned to England. Edward had almost certainly run out of money.³⁴

Philip VI learned of Balliol’s expulsion from Scotland almost as soon as the King of England did, for one of the first acts of the newly constituted Guardians of Scotland was to send him an urgent appeal for help. In late November 1334 Philip notified Edward III of his intention to send ambassadors to him to discuss the matter of Scotland. His original intention had been to send Andrea Ghini, whose past experience of the English question eminently qualified him for the job. But when the embassy arrived in England in January 1335 its leader was found to be the Bishop of Avranches, a worthy but inexperienced Norman whose main claim to fame was the authorship of an index to a well-known encyclopaedia. He was waiting with his colleagues at Newcastle on 18 February 1335 when Edward III returned in an ugly mood from his unsuccessful campaign. The Bishop’s message was straightforward and unwelcome. According to a summary made by an English clerk he wished to know ‘why the English King’s advisers had prevailed upon him to help Edward Balliol, a man who had no right in Scotland, against David and indeed against his own sister David’s wife, who held the kingdom by possession, by the conquest of Robert Bruce and by the treaty with Edward III himself’. Edward did not answer this question, as his father would have done, with oaths. He said that he would consider his reply and deliver it through ambassadors whom he would be sending at some later date to the court of France. The Chancery clerks who were with him did indeed draft a rather disingenuous reply, but it appears not to have been used. Edward had no desire to bring his dispute with Philip VI to a head.³⁵

The French ambassadors asked to be allowed to act as intermediaries to negotiate a truce between the English and the Scots. Edward was more than willing to let them try. Seeing that there were now virtually no English troops in the northern counties and no money in the treasury with which to raise another army, Edward wanted time to prepare and finance his next assault on Scotland more thoroughly than the last. Three lesser members of the French embassy were therefore permitted to proceed into Scotland to negotiate with the Scotch leaders at Perth, while their principals retired to the less warlike atmosphere of Gedling in Nottinghamshire to await events. The outcome of these exchanges was a truce which carried Edward’s hard-pressed government through from Easter to midsummer 1335. The ostensible object was to enable the French ambassadors to negotiate a final peace between Edward and David II’s supporters in Scotland. The French were almost certainly serious about this.³⁶

They knew even less about the condition of Scotland than they did about the personality and ambitions of Edward III. The two young Guardians had by now fallen out and gathered round themselves competing parties of jealous and resentful Scotch noblemen. There were old personal rancours and disagreements about the form of a renascent Scotch government, while such government as there was fell apart around them. Each Guardian seized whatever royal revenues he could lay hands on.³⁷ No serious negotiation would have been possible in these conditions even if there had been a will in England. But there was not. Edward had no intention of making a permanent peace with his enemies. Arrangements for a major summer campaign in Scotland had been put in hand almost as soon as Edward had returned from Roxburgh. On 6 March 1335, the recruiting officers of thirty-seven counties were warned to be ready to meet the King’s need for troops as soon as the order should be given them. The final decision to reinvade Scotland appears to have been taken by a council of noblemen and ecclesiastical magnates at Nottingham on 26 March 1335. On the following day writs were issued calling for all contingents to be in arms at Newcastle on 11 June 1335. Throughout the life of the truce, these preparations continued without abatement, except that the date of the muster was postponed so as to coincide with its expiry.³⁸ The Scots themselves had no illusions. They were making their own plans for the threatened invasion. Religious communities obtained from Edward III certificates of immunity from the coming destruction. For others there were harder decisions. In April, the Scotch leaders met at Dairsie in Fife and although they were divided by bitter personal antagonisms they appear to have agreed to abide by the traditional Bruce policy of avoiding battle. It was decided to evacuate the inhabitants of the lowland villages with as many as possible of their goods and animals to the safety of the hills.³⁹ When the English Parliament met at York on 27 May 1335 Edward III announced his aggressive plans for the summer, and the Lords a Commons endorsed them. As the assembly dispersed, two members of the French Ambassador’s staff left York for France to report to their government. It must have been an unhappy report. The truce still had a month to run, but it was now apparent that they had been duped.⁴⁰

The return of fair weather and the minatory tone of Edward’s letters to his recruiting officers did their work. By the second week of July 1335, three weeks late, he had more than 13,000 men under arms, three times as many as he had been able to muster for the Roxburgh campaign. It was the largest army with which Edward ever entered Scotland. The plan was for a threefold attack on the heartlands of the Scotch national cause in the south-west of the country. Part of the army, under the King’s command, was to march north from Carlisle while the rest, commanded by Balliol, made its way west from Berwick. The two groups were to meet on the Clyde. Meanwhile a third, seaborne force was to be collected in Ireland and to land men in the Clyde estuary. The latter part of the plan was a suggestion of Edward Balliol’s, an intelligent strategic idea but dependent on an exactness of timing difficult to achieve given poor communications and slow recruitment and supply. In the second half of July 1335 Edward’s force marched almost unopposed through south-western Scotland, destroying everything in their path and propelling refugees in their thousands to the hills and borderlands. Balliol’s force, advancing from the east, met virtually no opposition. Edward and Balliol joined forces at Glasgow towards the end of July and, seeing that they were beating the air in the south-west, they turned north in search of an enemy. Edward installed himself at Perth while his army looted and destroyed the country around.⁴¹

*

At the court of Philip VI they were waiting with mounting irritation for the answer which had been promised to the Bishop of Avranches back in February. In the interval French foreign policy had acquired a coherence and sense of direction which had been noticeably lacking before. It also acquired a new hardness of mood. Both tendencies were associated with one man, Mile de Noyers, a nobleman from northern Burgundy who had acquired a dominant place in the French royal Council at the beginning of 1335. Mile de Noyers was a determined and overbearing man with a strong interest in foreign policy and a clear, uncompromising view of where French interests lay. His value to Philip VI in this as in other fields arose from the confident certainty of his advice as well as from his great experience of the machinery of government. In the course of a long career (he was sixty-five in 1335) he had held important positions in the royal service almost without interruption. ‘No one doubts that the Crown may take whatever territory it requires to preserve the public interest and the security of the realm.’ The sentiment itself, and its public announcement must have reminded many contemporaries of Guillaume de Nogaret, the great minister of Philip the Fair. Mile de Noyers had some, although not very much, experience of the diplomatic details of the English problem. He had taken part in some negotiations in 1330 and 1331 and had been addressed by Edward III on one occasion as his ‘dear friend’. But a man of his instincts could not feel much sympathy for Edward’s position as Duke of Aquitaine, nor was he likely to compromise his master’s rights for larger political ends.⁴²

To this change of mood in France, other more personal factors contributed. The French King was experiencing one of his periodic moods of destructive self-doubt, a sense that God was punishing him for the false policies of the past. The occasion, as so often in Philip’s life, was the health of his family. Since his accession Philip had lost six sons either still-born or dead within a few days of birth. The survival of his line depended upon the only surviving son, John, Duke of Normandy, a sickly boy now sixteen years old, whose progress was watched with obsessive concern by his father. In the middle of June 1335 John fell suddenly and seriously ill. In all parts of France processions and public prayers were organized for the boy’s recovery. From Paris the clergy walked barefoot with their relics 20 miles to the village of Taverny, where he was lying. It was not until the following month that John began to recover, and for a long time after that Philip’s conduct of his government was coloured by his gratitude for divine mercy and his abiding fear of a relapse. It was in this tense and lugubrious atmosphere that a decision had to be made about Scotland. It was not a time for cynical political calculation of costs and benefits, nor for casuistic interpretations of France’s treaty obligations to the Scots.⁴³

At the beginning of July 1335, as the English armies were gathering at Newcastle and Carlisle, the French royal Council decided to send a seaborne force of 6,000 French soldiers including 1,000 men-at-arms to Scotland. Philip made no secret of his plans. The Pope was told about them. The Parlement of Paris was informed on 22 July. On the 31st, Pierre Roger, Archbishop of Rouen, announced the decision in an official sermon preached before a crowd of functionaries in the courtyard of the royal palace in Paris. The Archbishop reminded his audience of the treaties which French kings had made with the Scots in 1295 and 1326, and of the shameful conduct of Edward III in disinheriting his own brother-in-law. In these circumstances Philip, although he had nothing to gain personally, intended to restore David to his throne. The enemy was also informed. The Scots, Philip wrote to Edward III, had been asking for his help ‘frequently, continually, insistently’. Placed thus upon his honour, Philip had been obliged to promise that they should have it. An open breach between England and France would certainly involve the cancellation of the crusade, and in the hope of avoiding this misfortune the English government was invited to submit its quarrel with David of Scotland to the impartial arbitration of the Pope and Philip himself. This letter was written on 7 July 1335, the day on which John of Normandy was pronounced to be out of danger. It was brought to Edward III on 20 August 1335 when he was at Perth. The French messengers must have travelled for 150 miles through country which Edward’s army had devastated. The letter was answered at once. The problems of Scotland would not imperil the crusade, Edward said, because he would soon have pacified that country effectively and permanently. Moreover, since Edward was Philip’s cousin and his vassal it was perhaps surprising that Philip should appear to be on the side of the Scots rather than the English. The suggestion of arbitration was obnoxious because Edward was dealing in Scotland with his own subjects and vassals. It was as complete a rebuff as could have been drafted.⁴⁴

Philip had already started supplying arms and victuals to the Scots. This had been known to the English since at least the beginning of February when a large foreign ship was seen discharging a cargo of wine and armour at Dumbarton Castle. The traffic cannot have been easy to sustain. With English garrisons holding important coastal towns in eastern Scotland and the strength of the Scotch Guardians concentrated in the west, French supplies had to travel for 800 miles from the ports of Flanders to the Clyde, navigating for much of the journey from headland to headland and running the gauntlet of the southern and western ports of England. In February 1335, ships were being requisitioned in Bristol, Falmouth, Plymouth and Southampton to search for them. But the supplies got through, and must have contributed greatly to the morale of the Scots.⁴⁵

Help of a more effective kind could be given by creating diversions further south, additional demands on Edward’s stretched resources which might force him to unhand the Scots. In the spring of 1335 French and Scotch privateers were permitted to use the Channel ports of France, a grave threat to the small, unwalled and barely defended towns of the south coast of England as well as to their shipping. On 20 April 1335 an English ship, the Little Lechevard of Southampton, was attacked in the estuary of the Seine by a Scotch privateer, called John of St Agatha, with a mixed crew of Scots and Frenchmen. They killed the ship’s master and some of the crew, took the cargo off at Honfleur and then scuttled her. It was not unknown for the seamen of the Norman ports to pursue their private vendettas by attacking English and Gascon shipping. But the sequel of this incident suggested official tolerance if not support. The baillis of Rouen and the Pays de Caux seized the plundered cargo at the request of its English owners, but John of St Agatha defended his conduct as a legitimate act of war. The baillis accepted this defence and returned the goods to him. Their actions were endorsed by Philip VI. John was thus enabled to pursue his career of plunder until later in the year when he was killed in a brawl with some Newcastle men in the Flemish port of Sluys. There was no shortage of others to take his place.⁴⁶

In the middle of July 1335, as Edward was about to enter Scotland, he received a report that raiding parties of Scotch and other foreign troops were gathering in the ports of Normandy and Flanders. Warships and transports were being requisitioned by royal officers in the French Channel ports from Sluys to Mont-Saint-Michel. This intelligence was almost certainly provided by spies who had been sent to Calais at the beginning of June 1335. Even allowing for the fact that spies must earn their pay, there had plainly been naval preparations in France too extensive to have been financed and organized by the unaided efforts of the Scots. The prevailing view, which had geography and common sense in its favour, was that there would be an attempt to land in southern England, closer at hand and far away from Edward’s army. Castles were ordered to be surveyed and repaired throughout southern England and Wales, and especially in the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands, vulnerable targets for smash-and-grab raids launched from the French coast. Beacons were prepared on hill tops to warn the towns and villages of the coast. Although there had already been heavy recruiting for Scotland, the barrel was scraped for fresh recruits for the defence of the realm against the new threat. During August 1335 a scheme of national defence was proposed. The country was divided into three sections: north of the Trent (including Lincolnshire); south of the Trent; and Wales and the Marches. Assemblies of local notables gathered in each sector to plan their response to a French invasion. Special captains were appointed in each to see to the requisitioning of shipping, and keepers of the coasts organized for sea watches.⁴⁷

In spite of these measures about eight ships penetrated the Solent during August. Three of them succeeded in landing soldiers ashore who burned some coastal villages. At least two of the ships were taken by men of Southampton and their stranded landing parties killed or captured.⁴⁸ It was not a great campaign, but it brought the communities of southern England closer to the rancours of war than the periodic visits of tax assessors and recruiting officers could do. Edward made the most of his opportunity for propaganda. ‘Because it is easier to win hearts by flattery than by threats,’ Edward wrote to the Welsh bishops, ‘we desire that our subjects should have evidence of our favour and affection for them, that their hearts should be fired with loyalty to ourselves and enthusiasm for the defence of our realm.’ In breathless and repeated instructions from the north his subjects were told about the foreign allies who stood behind the Scots. In some quarters it was believed that Philip VI had more than 700 ships ready to fall on England.⁴⁹

*

Edward himself was still marking time in Perth awaiting events which never happened. The Scots remained quiescent, a mixture of disorganization and policy. The government which had formed itself in the aftermath of the rising of 1334 finally ceased to exist. In early August 1335 the Earl of Moray, who despite his youth was the most level-headed of the Scotch leaders, was captured near the border in a skirmish with a party of English garrison troops.⁵⁰ This left as the effective leader of the Scotch cause David of Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl, an ambitious and unscrupulous trimmer who had fought with Balliol at Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill and then deserted him when his star waned; and the courageous but immature Robert Stewart. Strathbogie, true to his equivocal past, submitted to Edward III at Perth, bringing after him some two dozen Scotch noblemen. Robert Stewart submitted rather later at Edinburgh. On the face of it these were notable political successes, but it was the dissensions of the Scots and not Edward’s armies which had produced them.⁵¹

Edward’s long-awaited Irish contingent left Dublin at least a month late in the last week of August 1335. The object was almost certainly to capture Dumbarton Castle. But the Irishmen never reached it. Instead they landed on the Isle of Bute and lost much time attempting to take Rothesay. In the middle of September, threatened with the onset of the northern winter, they returned home. In eastern Scotland, the main army was already on its way south to be paid off and disbanded. Public opinion was not impressed. It was certainly a poor return for the ‘immense labours and hardships’ which Edward had told the King of France that he was expending in the cause of peace.⁵²

At the end of September 1335 the surviving leaders of the Scotch resistance gathered at Dumbarton, still the most secure Bruce stronghold, and chose Sir Andrew Murray as Guardian of Scotland. This formidable warrior, a brother-in-law of Robert Bruce, was one of the very few Scotch magnates who had never even briefly submitted to Edward Balliol. He proved to be the first Scotch leader with ruthlessness and force of personality to match Edward’s own. Closely associated with Murray was a guerrilla leader of genius, Sir William Douglas, the future ‘Knight of Liddesdale’ a man of strong, undying antagonisms who had never found it easy to get on with those such as David of Strathbogie whose support for the Scotch cause was intermittent and self-serving. The two men had one interesting point in common. They had both been captured in the opening months of the war and had passed some time in English prisons. Douglas had been held in irons in Carlisle Castle for a year. Edward had allowed them to ransom themselves in 1334. Later he learned to be more cautious in the matter of prisoners, irrespective of the conventions of the knightly class.⁵³

The new Scotch leadership inherited a disastrous legacy, a country without a king, partly occupied and laid waste in its richest regions. Nevertheless, they almost immediately re-established the Scotch cause and won for it the first significant victories since the start of the war.

Murray began by dividing his enemies. In mid-October he made contact with Edward III and suggested a truce so that negotiations could be begun. A truce was duly granted until 12 November and extended from time to time until Christmas. In the first week in November 1335 there were talks between the two sides at Bathgate, not far from Edinburgh.⁵⁴

Edward Balliol did not participate in the talks, and his supporters were not protected by the truce. Shortly after they had begun, David of Strathbogie, one of Balliol’s few allies in Scotland, embarked upon a ruthless campaign of murder, destruction and eviction in the coastal lowlands between Perth and Aberdeen designed, he said, to reduce the Scots to obedience. The news was brought to Murray at Bathgate that Strathbogie had laid siege to his castle at Kildrummy in the Don valley. His wife, Lady Christian Bruce, was making ‘stowt and manly resistance’ there. Murray withdrew from the conference at Bathgate and marched north. His forces were absurdly small, his own retainers and those of his friends including Douglas, about 800 men at the most. Strathbogie was warned, presumably by the English. He raised the siege of Kildrummy, marching south to meet the approaching troops with his own men. On St Andrew’s Day 1335, Murray and Douglas fell upon them by the River Dee in the forest of Culblean and routed them. Strathbogie’s troops fled into the forests. He himself took his stand by an oak tree and fought until he was killed, the end of an eventful and self-serving existence. He was twenty-six years old.⁵⁵

It was a major reverse for the English cause. In addition to intangible losses, the boost which it gave to Scotch morale at an important moment, Murray’s victory left Balliol with virtually nothing north of the Tay. Moreover, it was followed up by attacks on other enclaves of Balliol’s power. David of Stratbogie’s widow had fled after the battle to the island fortress of Lochindorb, leaving her money and most of her wardrobe behind her. There she and ‘other ladyis that were luvely’ were besieged by the Scots. Murray himself crossed the Tay and laid siege to Cupar, the strongest castle in Fife.⁵⁶

By grinding persistence Edward III could have reduced Scotland to obedience as completely as his grandfather had reduced Wales. But his main concern now was to hold the eight counties which Balliol had ceded to England. These were being transformed into huge military regions governed by English barons from strong reconstructed fortresses: Percy at Jedburgh, Montagu in Peebles and in the forests of Ettrick and Selkirk, Bohun at Lochmaben at the head of the Solway Firth. A strong garrison and an army of masons and carpenters were in the process of rebuilding Edinburgh Castle from the stumps which Robert Bruce had left of it.⁵⁷ Any ambitious enterprises beyond the eight counties would serve only to set Edward Balliol a little less precariously on his throne. This seemed an increasingly pointless objective. Balliol had no significant support in Scotland except in eastern Galloway and among the survivors of the ‘disinherited’ who had brought him there. He had no resources with which to build a following or sustain himself by force, because he had had to cede the richest part of his kingdom to Edward III. Not only were the ceded counties relatively rich, but they contained most of the anglophone population of Scotland, among whom Balliol’s quest for friends would ordinarily have begun. In northern and western Scotland, even after the government of the Guardians had collapsed, the government of Edward Balliol remained part of the baggage train of successive English armies. When the English returned to Berwick in the autumn of 1335, Balliol returned with them and passed the winter with his companions in the security of Holy Island off the Northumberland coast, running up large bills which he was unable to pay. In the chronicler’s phrase, he ‘did not possess a place in Scotland where he could live in safety’.⁵⁸ This must have been as clear to Edward III and his advisers as it was to Balliol himself. In future, English policy north of the Forth was to consist in defending the pools of ground controlled by English garrisons, and in launching punitive raids against Balliol’s enemies with small forces and for short periods at unpredictable moments. In strictly military terms there was no other way of dealing with an enemy who never showed himself at an appointed time.

Edward’s exchange with the French King in August marked a change of priorities. He was becoming concerned about the intensifying hostility of France and about Gascony, concerns which are reflected in a growing volume of memoranda from his experts warning him of the circumstances in which the French King might feel able to seize the duchy without too gross a violation of his own law. Edward cared more about Gascony than he did about Scotland, and if this seems a perverse defiance of historical logic it would have seemed obvious to him: the natural preference of any medieval nobleman for the lands which belonged to his family by inheritance over those which he held by the operations of force or fortune.

NOTES

1 Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents, ed. E. L. G. Stones (1965), 161–70; Nicholson (1), 54–6; Brut, 251 (tears).

2 Fordun, Chron., i, 354.

3 Nicholson (1), 72–90.

4 Chron. Lanercost, 267; Chron. Melsa, ii, 362–3; Baker, Chron., 49; Brut, 275; Cap-grave, Liber, 167–8; RF, ii, 833, 847–8.

5 RP, ii, 66–7; Nicholson (1), 92–4, 96–7.

6 RF, ii, 847–8.

7 Illustrations of Scottish History, ed. J. Stevenson (1834), 50–4; Gray, Scalacronica, 161; RP, ii, 67.

8 Nicholson (1), 103–4.

9 RP, ii, 69; Gray, Scalacronica, 162.

10 CCR 1333–7. 109. 113, 129–30, 173–4, 294–5; Tout (1), iii, 56–63.

11 Nicholson (1), 119–38.

12 Murimuth, Chron., 68.

13 Wyntoun, Cron., ii, 404.

14 RF, ii, 876–8, 888; Murimuth, Chron., 71; Nicholson (1), 162.

15 Nicholson (1), 139–40.

16 Minot, Poems, 1; Ann. Paulini, 358–9.

17 Viard (12); Déprez (1), 99; Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient, i (1886), 86–102; Nangis, Chron., ii, 130–1, 134–5, 144, 145.

18 RF, ii, 860. The first letter was presumably received at York in January 1333, for a messenger (probably bearing the reply) left for Paris on 7 February 1333: PRO E372/178, m. 42 (Corder).

19 *Déprez (1),91n; RF, ii, 860.

20 Nangis, Chron., ii, 139–40; DCG, ii, no. XXIX.

21 PRO SC1/37/134; Grandes Chron., ix, 134.

22 Ann. Paulini, 359; Exch. R. Scot,, 449, 464; Grandes Chron., ix, 140–1; Nangis, Chron., ii, 141–2.

23 RF, ii, 883; PRO E372/179, m. 34 (Stratford); Grandes Chron., ix, 142–3; Chronographia, ii, 23; Cal. Pap. R. Letters, ii, 584.

24 Exch. R. Scot, i, 449, 450, 456, 464, 465, 466, 479, 506.

25 Baker, Chron., 55–6; Grandes Chron., ix, 143; Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 90.

26 Cuttino (1); Cuttino (2), 101–10. New commissioners: PRO C47/28/3(11), C47/30/3 (15); RF, ii, 887.

27 RF, ii, 609–10; PRO C61/46, m. 2, C47/30/3(10–12), C47/32/15; cf. PRO C47/27/13 (40) (Sept. 1335).

28 *Déprez (1), 407.

29 CRP 1330–4, 94. Earlier restraint: PRO C47/30/2(4), C47/28/3(3).

30 Wyntoun, Cron., ii, 414–17; Chron. Lanercost, 278; Gray, Scalacronica, 164.

31 RS, i, 276; Bridlington Chron., 119–20; Chron. mon. Melsa., ii, 372; Gray, Scalacronica, 164; Fordun, Chron., i, 357–8.

32 CFR 1327–37, 342, 354, 355, 365 (duties); CCR 1333–7, 7, 51; Nicholson (1), 115; Harriss, 224.

33 Lay subsidy: RP, ii, 447; Ann. Paulini, 362; CPR 1334–8, 38–40; Willard (2), 345; Willard and Morris, ii, 205–6. Clerical subsidy: ibid., ii, 229–30. Bardi: CCR 1333–7, 345, 446, 456–7.

34 Chron. Lanercost, 223, 278–9; Chron. mon. Melsa., ii, 373; Ann. Paulini, 361–3; Bridlington Chron., 120–1. Reinforcement: RS, i, 296, 304–5, 316, 321. Numbers: Nicholson (1), 174–81.

35 Chron. mon. Melsa, ii, 374; RF, ii, 899; *Nicholson (1)., 240–1; Cal. doc. Scot., v, no. 734. Bp Avranches: Cazelles (1), 137–8.

36 Bridlington Chron., 121; Fordun, Chron., i, 358; Baker, Chron., 56; RS, i, 322–3, 327, 334; RF, ii, 904.

37 Fordun, Chron., i, 358; Wyntoun, Cron., ii, 421; Exch. R. Scot., i, 435 et seq.

38 CCR 1333–7, 468, 469–70; RS, i, 352–4.

39 RS, i, 350; Fordun, Chron., i, 358.

40 Bridlington Chron., 122; Baker, Chron., 56; RF, ii, 908.

41 Nicholson (1), 196–206.

42 Cazelles (1), 93–4, 115–22, 412–3.

43 Chron. anon. Par., 164–5; Nangis, Chron., ii, 145–8; Grandes Chron., ix, 148–50

44 Benedict XII, Reg. (France), no. 90 (col. 55); CPMR, 92–3; Chron. anon. Par., 164; Bridlington Chron., 124–6.

45 Exch. R. Scot., i, 449, 464. Grants: David II, Acts, nos 23–4. Supplies: RS, i, 320–1, 322; CCR 1333–7, 414, 425.

46 RF, ii, 912–3; CCR 1333–7, 462, 484–5, 620.

47 RS, i, 363–7, 371–4; RF, ii, 911–2, 915, 917, 919; CCR 1333–7, 411, 426, 434, 435, 521; CPR 1334–8, 163, 206, 208.

48 Chron. Lanercost, 283.

49 RF, ii, 920; RS, i, 378; Chron. Lanercost, 283.

50 Bridlington Chron., 123–4; Fordun, Chron., i, 359; Chron. Lanercost, 282–3; RF, ii, 923.

51 Avesbury, G. Edwardi, 298–300; Chron. mon. Melsa., ii, 376; Gray, Scalacronica, 166; RS, i, 381, 388.

52 Nicholson (1), 218–24.

53 Fordun, Chron,, i, 357, 359–60; Wyntoun, Cron., ii, 398, 417; RF, ii, 856.

54 RS, i, 384–7; RF, ii, 925, 928, 930, 930–1, 933.

55 Fordun, Chron., i, 359–60; Wyntoun, Cron., 422–7; Chron. Lanercost, 284

56 Fordun, Chron., i, 360; Wyntoun, Chron., ii, 428, 436; RF, ii, 930–933.

57 RS, i, 280–1; RF, ii, 924; Nicholson (1), 223, 225–6.

58 RS, i, 409; Chron. Lanercost, 284.