Someone hereafter may perhaps wonder how the Scottish people had the boldness to resist, and why the courage of the English should so suddenly have failed them
The Scottish military supremacy in the British Isles which lasted from 1311 to 1333 was made possible principally by the coincidence of two special circumstances. These were: an economic catastrophe that seems to have affected England, the more populous, more corn-dependent country, much more severely than Scotland; and the absorption of England’s aristocracy in domestic disputes of peculiar bitterness. The Scots however encountered enormous difficulty in translating their temporary military supremacy into political and diplomatic triumph. Forcing the English to the negotiating table involved a further five years of diplomatic manoeuvring and processes at the papal court; a fresh wave of Scottish invasions of northern England including another attempt to capture the English king; revival of the plan to involve the Irish and the Welsh in containing England; and a final assault on the castles of Northumberland. Even then it took one further special circumstance to give to Scotland even the illusion of victory: the emergence in England of a new regime, unstable enough to need peace at any price.
MANOEUVRING FOR SECURITY: ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND FRANCE, 1322–27
In war English armies had been unable to bring the Scottish hobelars to battle, but in diplomacy, the Scottish king could not bring the English to admit defeat. During the winter of 1322–23 truces were extended to allow for prolonged negotiations,1 but it was not at all certain that a lasting peace was yet on the horizon. Aspects of the Middleton rebellion and the Harclay episode are suggestive of a groundswell for peace among the northern English gentry; but although the north of England was exhausted, devastated and largely disaffected, the English king and aristocracy were determined to fight on. English magnates who stood to lose forever titles to land in Scotland included Henry Beaumont, Henry Percy, Thomas Wake and David de Strabogie, Earl of Atholl. English preparations for a fresh campaign had been interrupted early in 1323 by the Harclay incident; afterwards, they recommenced against a background of uneasy truces with the Scots and alarms of imminent raids. The Scots were thought to be preparing to raid in March of that year and again on the lapse of a truce in May. On this last occasion it was ordered that cattle on the west march should be evacuated to Yorkshire and that civilians should take shelter in walled towns and castles ‘so that the enemy if they invade the county, may not have any sustenance’. Almost 10,000 Welsh infantry were summoned in April to appear at Newcastle on 1st July 1323; other infantry were to arrive equipped with heavy armour, aketons, bascinets and palettis.2 Although negotiations were conducted through the French knight Henry de Sully (who had been captured at Bylands), Edward II still refused to address Robert as king, and addressed his remarks only to the Scottish people.3 In April he was assessing the cost of raising troops in Gascony for a new Scottish campaign.4
Robert claimed with considerable justification that he had consistently desired ‘always to negotiate with the king of England . . . in the form of a final peace’.5 As time wore on, his anxiety to secure lasting peace increased. Though he was still only 48 years old, he must have been aware that Scotland’s safety depended upon his own personal leadership. His health may already have been declining and he had as yet no direct heir. More pressing than either of these considerations however was the re-emergence of a dormant threat to the Bruce monarchy. Although all indications of an alternative to Robert I’s kingship have been expunged from the narrative sources, Professor Duncan has shown that sections of the Scottish aristocracy remained sympathetic to the idea of a Balliol revival. It seems to have been this potential for instability more than any other factor that prompted Robert to make peace. At the Scottish parliament of 1318 it was ordered that conspirators and spreaders of discontent be imprisoned, suggesting a degree of domestic dissatisfaction.6 Then in 1320 a shadowy conspiracy came to light.
The occasion for this conspiracy was the making of the Declaration of Arbroath, the famous letter from the people of Scotland to Pope John XXII, which sought papal intervention to persuade Edward II to make a final peace with Scotland. A masterpiece of nationalist rhetoric, it was intended to be interpreted by the pope as a spontaneous expression of outrage from the community of the realm at English machinations against Robert at the papal curia. The letter was of course concocted by Robert’s chancery. Seals were collected from individual magnates named in the prologue (and from others besides), and appended to the document.7 The process of collecting personal seals and their use on such a spirited justification of Bruce kingship seems to have aroused the rancour of magnates and stirred up latent Balliol sentiment. Robert’s diplomats, carrying the Declaration to the curia by way of the French court, discovered contacts between French magnates and pro-Balliol elements in Scotland. The leader of the mission, Patrick Earl of Dunbar, hurried back to Scotland to warn Robert;8 and his warning resulted in the trials of conspirators at the Black Parliament of 1320. One of the plotters, the Countess of Strathearn, turned king’s evidence. David Brechin and William Soules were convicted of treason; and the same verdict was pronounced on the corpse of Roger Mowbray, a conspirator who had died before the trial. Brechin was hanged as a traitor; Soules and Strathearn were imprisoned for life. According to the chronicles, the object of the conspiracy had been to install Soules as king; but this is most unlikely, as he had no claim to the throne and his life was spared by Robert.9 The plot can only have made sense if it supported the Balliol alternative.
The Soules conspiracy and the executions following the Black Parliament were profoundly unsettling, and explain why long-term security became Robert’s priority. In negotiations at Bamburgh in 1321 a truce of 26 years had already been suggested by the Scots.10 By 1323 Flemish support for the Scots had evaporated, making it yet more desirable for Scotland’s security to be guaranteed. But a major obstacle to peace with England was those English magnates who had been granted lands and titles in Scotland and who refused to contemplate any settlement that would make permanent their loss. They were to become ‘the disinherited’, lords who felt cheated of rights in Scotland and a powerful force for war with Scotland. In April, when the earl of Moray was granted safe conduct to come to Newcastle to continue negotiations, Henry Beaumont, Thomas Wake, William Ros of Hamelak and Ralph Graystoke, who were among the most prominent intransigents, were selected to go to Scotland as hostages for Moray’s safety.11Whoever made this selection recognised the threat that they posed to a settlement and hit upon this device to sideline them for the duration of negotiations.
On 30th May 1323 Edward II agreed to the Truce of Bishopthorpe with Scotland.12 This temporary settlement saved Edward’s blushes by shelving the issue of the title to the Scottish throne and providing for a 13-year truce, binding on the successors of each king. Occupied territory was to be surrendered by 12th June 1323, a provision probably intended to apply to the Scottish presence in Tynedale. No fortifications were to be built between the border and the line of the Tyne and South Tyne, or in the sheriffdoms of Berwick, Roxburgh and Dumfries, but those in the making (for example, the new castle at Dunstanburgh which Edward II had garrisoned) were allowed to remain. Subjects of either king were forbidden to have any dealings with those of the other, and neither king was to receive the enemies of the other. Finally, Edward II undertook not to prevent the Scots from obtaining absolution and an end to the excommunication from the papal curia, a promise he flagrantly breached.
This agreement was fair, balanced and ought to have provided a basis for a permanent peace. Yet it was only just sufficient to win acceptance in England. At a royal council in 1323 Henry Beaumont showed the depth of his disgust at the agreement to suspend hostilities with Scotland, as an account of council debate on the truce reveals:
And when the king enjoined each of those present, singly, including Henry, to give their advice, the said Henry, with an excessive motion and irreverent mind, answered the king frequently that he would not counsel him in this behalf. The king being moved by such an answer ordered him to leave his council, and Henry in leaving the council said, as he had said before, that it would please him more to be absent from the council than to be present.13
Edward II then forced this sensible arrangement upon intransigent magnates, but he was compelling them to accept precisely what he himself was not prepared to stomach, loss of ‘title’ or ‘right’ in Scotland. Royal power in England was now at its height; the ‘tyranny of Edward II’ was in full swing. Harclay’s defeat of Thomas of Lancaster and the king’s cowing of opposition from the lords of the Welsh marches left no effective opposition.14 Royal coffers were suddenly filled by the revenues of confiscated estates, and swollen further by a streamlining of exchequer procedures. The administration was controlled by a narrow, avaricious clique of royal favourites, led by the two Hugh Despensers (father and son), Robert Baldock (a clerk of Hugh the younger), the king’s half-brother Thomas Edmund of Woodstock earl of Kent, and the earl of Arundel. ‘Contrariants’ were persecuted vindictively, and few were prepared to put their heads above the parapet. The leader of opposition on the Welsh marches, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, was detained in the Tower of London. In a daring escape from the Tower in August 1323, he cheated the hangman and fled to France where he worked to undermine the regime.15
With respect to the peace, there may also have been considerable opposition in Scotland. For Scottish lairds war on England must have been infinitely more lucrative than agriculture, and it is not surprising to find that a report to Edward II of 29th April 1323 maintained that ‘the nobles and commons desire war more than peace’, and furthermore in a letter to Edward paraphrased in the Vita Edwardi II Robert protested his inability to ‘withhold the fury of a raging throng’.16 In spite of the lack of statistical evidence from Scotland, there are a few indications of enrichment as a result of the wartime robber-economy. Fordun asserts that the reign of King Robert was a time of prosperity; and the fact that Flemish, German and even English merchants defied Edward II’s blockade to trade with the Scots might suggest that Scots could pay higher prices.17 When Scottish commodity prices become available to the historian after 1327 they are high, suggesting a relatively large amount of bullion circulating in the country, fruits of a buoyant wool export trade and recent successful war.18
Nevertheless two factors arose the following year which might have paved the way for lasting peace between England and Scotland. The first was the birth of an heir to Robert I in March 1324. The arrival of David Bruce lent a new urgency to Robert’s quest for lasting security; and negotiations commenced for a final settlement in July 1324 at Robert’s instigation and carried on through the autumn.19 The second factor, the collapse of the Anglo-French understanding, prodded Edward II in the same direction. Tension between France and England had escalated following Charles IV’s succession to the French throne in January 1322. The eventual outbreak of the War of St. Sardos between England and France in the autumn of 1323 exerted pressure on Edward to come to some arrangement with the Scots. Edward may have been hoping for military service or assistance from Scotland, and there was talk of his leading an army of English and Welsh, Irish and Scots to save Gascony from French invasion.20 But Scottish terms had been raised in order to take advantage of Edward’s difficulty in Gascony, and now included a claim to ‘perambulation of the Anglo-Scottish march’. Exactly what is meant by this is unclear; the only source is the Vita Edwardi II whose author is outraged at the suggestion, as though it amounted to a territorial claim over parts of northern England: ‘they demanded by right of conquest and lordship that the whole land that they had perambulated should be free as far as the gates of York’.21 Perhaps a ‘buffer’ or ‘security zone’ was envisaged; not a huge step from the restrictions under the current treaty on the building of castles in border areas. But ultimately the negotiations foundered on the question of Edward II’s right in Scotland, on which the English had never contemplated concession.
The Truce of Bishopthorpe might have run its full course had not English domestic politics taken a dramatic turn, transforming relations with Scotland. The administration of Edward II began to look increasingly unstable, the price of a ruthless exploitation of the privileges of kingship, and woeful management of royal patronage. It dispatched an expedition to Gascony, but Edward dared not leave England to lead it for fear of a coup against his hated favourites the Despensers.22 In March 1325 Queen Isabella left her husband’s court for that of her brother’s in Paris, the formal purpose of her visit being to conclude on Edward’s behalf a peace to end conflict over Gascony. But having executed this task, Isabella refused to return to England while the Despensers were at court. She became a focus for discontented exiles in France; English dissidents collected around her and Roger Mortimer, the foremost of them, formed an open liaison with her. Although Isabella and her coterie of supporters moved to Hainault early in 1326, Edward II continued to expect further war with France.
There was much in Edward’s behaviour over the period 1323 to 1326 to provoke the Scots; apart from his continued refusal to recognise Robert’s title, he had sent a powerful delegation to Rome in an effort to bring further ecclesiastical sanctions to bear on Scotland.23 His policies were responsible for driving Robert I into the arms of the French, and in April 1326 Robert concluded an alliance with France culminating in the Treaty of Corbeil. This treaty was designed to increase pressure on Edward II to come to a final agreement, but it specifically allowed for the Truce of Bishopthorpe to run its course. If there was to be an Anglo-French war, Scotland would join the side of France, but only when the Anglo-Scottish truce had ended.24 Robert had not therefore despaired of wringing a final peace out of Edward II; but at about the same time he seems to have orchestrated surprise attacks on the key northern castles of Carlisle, Norham, Alnwick and Dunstanburgh.25 The capture of just one of these strongholds might have given Robert sufficient leverage to wring a final settlement from the increasingly vulnerable Edward II. In the event Robert may have had to disown these attempts; at any rate the English chose to overlook these violations of the truce, a clear sign that Edward now needed the truce more than Robert. Thus by diplomatic and military means Robert hoped to force Edward to give priority to the issue of a final settlement with Scotland. Stubborn to the last and isolated at home and abroad, Edward decided to trust that the Scottish truce would hold, and to take on the French. By summer 1326 he was openly at war with France; and in September Isabella and Mortimer landed in England, their army spearheaded by 700 men-at-arms led by John of Hainault.26 Significantly Isabella was joined by two northerners who had much to lose if a permanent peace were concluded with Scotland, Henry Percy and Thomas Wake. Edward’s oppressive regime crumbled; and he fled London on 2nd October, making for Wales.
There was no sympathy among the English lords of the Welsh march for Edward II , who had oppressed them since their abortive rising of 1321–22. Mortimer’s tenants and retainers would have been particularly hostile. But Edward could rely upon the loyalty of the native Welsh, particularly upon Gruffydd Llwyd in North Wales and Rhys ap Gruffydd in the South. Both had assisted him against the marcher lords in 1321, and both had led infantry contingents during the invasion of Scotland in the following year.27 But aware that he would need greater military assistance to effect a restoration, Edward may at last have contemplated the surrender of his claim to Scotland. In its last months his regime had softened towards the Scots.28 Robert preferred to deal with Edward II (withwhom he had a truce and perhaps now something of an understanding) rather than the new regime supported by the warlike disinherited lords. Contact with Edward was maintained through Donald Earl of Mar, a nephew of Robert I who had been brought up at the English court, and who had shown great personal attachment to Edward, refusing to return to Scotland after Bannockburn.29 Lanercost alleges that Edward wrote to Robert I surrendering his right in Scotland and ceding to him a part of northern England, but there is no evidence to substantiate this.30
In England meanwhile, Mar assisted in the elder Despenser’s desperate defence of Bristol against the army of Isabella and Mortimer. When the city fell, he escaped (or was spared) and, accompanied by Rhys ap Gruffydd, returned to Scotland, from where he continued to plot for Edward’s restoration.31 Edward and his dwindling band of courtiers meanwhile continued to flee westwards. They were pursued by Mortimer and John of Hainault who feared
that if the king could reach Ireland he might collect an army there and cross over into Scotland, and by the help of the Scots and Irish together he might attack England.32
Thus Ireland was seen as a locale for a reserve royalist army, as it was to be centuries later in the 1640s. But Edward II was captured on or about 16th November 1326, and in January 1327 he was tried before an assembly, representative of the realm but of dubious legality and summoned in the name of Edward Prince of Wales. By this assembly Edward II was deposed. The articles of his deposition are chiefly taken up with the king’s domestic misrule. They include the allegation that he had been personally responsible for the loss of Scotland; but no particular stress is put on the old king’s failures in Scotland and in the same breath he is accused of diminishing the lands of the crown in Ireland and Gascony.33 The Prince of Wales was crowned as Edward III on 2nd February and the old king remained in prison, an embarrassment and a challenge to the new regime. But Donald of Mar did not despair of Edward II’s restoration. Returning in July and August 1327 to the Welsh marches (perhaps to the vicinity of Edward II’s prison at Berkley), Donald began rousing the people to resist the new regime.34
THE WEARDALE CAMPAIGN OF 1327
Robert I continued his attacks on border castles, warning the new regime in England that he expected his demands for a final settlement to be met. A Scottish attack on Norham Castle occurred on the very day the young Edward III was crowned.35 Isabella and Mortimer, now firmly in control of the English administration, did not retaliate but instead ordered strict observation of the truce. They also took a number of defensive measures, chief of which were commissions to Antony Lucy to keep Carlisle, and to Henry Percy to serve as chevetaigne in the north with 100 men-at-arms, 100 hobelars and as many of his own men as he wished. Both commissions were to run until Whitsun (31st May).36
In the meantime both sides negotiated at York for peace and both prepared for war. It was not until after 10th June that the English administration had decided definitely for war, for on that date letters for the use of envoys were drawn up.37 The first Scottish raid occurred on the English west march on 15th June, in response to which the militias of Lancashire and Yorkshire were summoned to York. Edward III left York for the north on 1st July with a large English army and accompanied by Hainaulter mercenaries. While the English prepared to invade Scotland en masse by the eastern march, the Scots raided the west. By 3rd July they were marauding in the vicinity of Appleby and Kirkby Stephen. Antony Lucy wrote on 12th July to warn Edward III that they would invade on the following Tuesday 14th; they would either attack Carlisle or make straight for the new king wherever he should be.38 There may be an implication here that they intended to capture him; previous encounters suggest that the Scots’ best hope of winning the war rapidly was to capture a prisoner whose ransom might add to their leverage in extracting a permanent settlement. Lanercost states that the Scots entered England in three columns (commanded by Moray, Douglas and Mar),39 and this may mean that they entered England at three separate locations. Some of the Scots crossed into England on Tuesday 14th (as Lucy had predicted) and made for the Bishop of Carlisle’s manor of Rose. This same force may have traversed the Pennines. Following the account in Fordun, Barrow suggests that Moray came by the Kielder Gap and down the valley of the North Tyne. Either way, the Scots were riding towards the English in order to divert them from invading Scotland. A great deal of risk was involved in this tactic, for King Robert was in Ulster at the time and thus unable to defend Scotland should the English invade.40
On 18th July the Hainaulters at Durham could see smoke from smouldering fields and buildings, and the chase was on.41 Jehan le Bel provides an eyewitness account of how the cavalry pursued the raiders.42 With the painful remembrance of a participant he describes how the heavily encumbered English knights and men-at-arms hopelessly pursued Moray’s lightly armed hobelars at breakneck speed for two days across moors and bogland, vainly attempting to bring them to battle. But they lost contact. It seems that the Scots evaded pursuit by lying low for a time in the valley of the River Gaunless.43 Then the English resolved to cut off the Scots’ retreat, and waited for eight miserable, hungry, rain-sodden days at Haydonbridge on the Tyne. They had no idea where the Scots might be; and a proclamation was made promising a knighthood and a hundred pounds of land to whoever could lead the host to the Scots. At last one Thomas de Rokeby located them in Stanhope Park on the south bank of the Wear.44 On 30th July the English moved to confront them; but the Scots refused to fight, moving twice under cover of night from one position of natural strength to another. On a night raid into the English camp James Douglas, now a living legend of chivalric daring-do, almost captured the young king. But having failed in this, the Scots withdrew through mosses and rough country where the English could not follow. It was a humiliating failure for the English host, superior in numbers and in all the paraphernalia of war. The young Edward III ‘wept tears of vexation’ at the defeat; so too might Isabella and Mortimer have wept at the cost of the campaign. Their Hainaulter mercenaries had to be paid both for this expedition and for that of 1326, and the bill came to £55,000, leaving their government desperate for money.
ROBERT I IN ULSTER, 1327
In 1326 the Red Earl of Ulster breathed his last.45 One may doubt that he had ever fully regained control of his extensive territories in Ulster, and the Scots maintained their influence, and perhaps some military presence there, at least until 1322.46 A letter from her council in Ireland to Elizabeth de Burgh, mother of the heir, reveals the damage that decades of war had wrought in the earldom.47 During his last years the Red Earl’s control of the lordship had been lax, and comital authority in Ulster was on the point of collapse. The lands of the earldom lay burnt and destroyed; the tenants had mostly fled. The suggestion was made (but apparently rejected) that settlers from England and Wales should be encouraged to settle in Ulster, and it was alleged that 3,000 immigrants could find sufficient lands there. Unless the heir arrived soon with sufficient force to restore his authority, the men of Ulster would ‘choose some other lord’.48
Robert I was already moving into the power-vacuum. His arrival in Ulster in 1327 was anticipated; at a date unspecified Brother Roger Outlaw was paid £10 ‘towards expenses which he incurred in going to Ulster to treat with the men of Ulster and to scrutinise their hearts on resistance to the Scots, enemies, and rebels of the said lord king, and on curbing their malice, if it should happen that they land there’. But Scottish intervention in Ireland may not have been unwelcome to sections of the Dublin administration, for the justiciar was in communication with the Scots. In February 1327 the justiciar, John Darcy, sent the Franciscan clerk Henry Cogery as special messenger to Scotland ‘to further certain confidential business touching the lord king’.49 The objective of his mission is unknown; but the administration in Ireland was still loyal to Edward II at this time, and with the about-turn in policy towards Scotland in the last desperate days of Edward II’s reign, Cogery may have sought some Scottish intervention, in Britain or Ireland, on that king’s behalf.50 Speculating further, it is even possible that Robert was offered the earldom of Ulster as a quid pro quo.
At any rate, Robert is said to have made the crossing to Ulster at Eastertide (12th April) and may therefore have been in Ulster for some considerable time before 12th July 1327, when he made an indenture with Henry Mandeville, steward of the Earldom of Ulster. Threatened by the Scots on the one hand (recently a Scottish attack on Rathlin had been beaten off) and the Gaelic Irish on the other, the men of the earldom bought off the Scottish king.51 A copy of this document was sent to Elizabeth de Burgh; and according to this the people of Ulster bought from Robert a truce to last for one year from 1st August 1327, in return for a hundred chaldrons of wheat, and a hundred of barley, payable at Larne.52 This was not a punitive peace; Robert allowed for deductions in the payment as compensation for damage caused to Rathlin. As already stated, none of the sources actually justifies the conclusion that Robert claimed the earldom as his own; but besides making logistical provision for the coming war, Robert was marking out his very personal interest in the earldom as husband of the last earl’s eldest daughter. The one glimmer of hope reported to Elizabeth de Burgh was that the health of the King of Scots was deteriorating. He was at this stage virtually paralysed, and described as
so feeble and so weak that he will not last much longer from this time, with the help of God, because he cannot move anything except his tongue.53
While Isabella and Mortimer had enjoyed effective control of the English administration from January, they gained unchallenged control of Ireland only when Edward II’s justiciar, John Darcy, fled the country in May 1327. Thomas fitz John, earl of Kildare, took over on 12th May, and the reign of Edward III was not proclaimed in the lordship until the following day. Throughout Ireland the summer of 1327 seems to have witnessed an escalation of the ‘low-intensity’ war between the Gaelic Irish and the Anglo-Irish colony. In July the English government ordered that funds in the Irish exchequer be conserved for defence, and that justiciar, chancellor and chief justice of the colony confer as to how the Irish might be repulsed.54 Whether Robert was behind this general revolt is impossible to tell; but in the same month, he tested in a much more direct fashion the loyalty of the new administration in Dublin to Isabella and Mortimer. An inquisition (ordered in 1333) into the good services of John son of William Jordan in 1327 reveals that letters passed between the King of Scots and the justiciar of Ireland, the earl of Kildare.55 The return states that Robert had come to Ulster to gather support for the landing of an army in Wales with the ultimate aim of invading England. The justiciar’s response to this was to send a message to Robert through John Jordan; and as a result of this message Robert returned to Scotland. John Jordan’s mission is confirmed in the account of Robert de Cogan, treasurer of Ireland, in which Robert Cruys and John Jordan were both paid 100s. by the justiciar and council ‘for going to Ulster to expedite certain matters touching the business of the King and his land of Ireland’, and John Jordan is paid £4. 6s. 8d. for ‘good and praiseworthy action’.56 John Jordan’s ‘praiseworthy action’ appears to have been delivery of the justiciar and council’s rejection of Robert’s overtures to join him in resisting the new regime in England. Events described in the Laud Annals and associated with Robert’s final visit to Ireland with the heir to Ulster in 1328 seem to be mistakenly attributed to that year, and to relate instead to the mission of John Jordan. The entry states that Robert
sent to the Justiciar of Ireland and to the Council that they should come to Greencastle to draw up a peace between Scotland and Ireland, and because the said Justiciar and Council did not come as he wished . . . he returned to his native land after the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (15th August).57
This exchange is more likely to relate to Robert’s visit of 1327 than to that of 1328. In 1328, when he had just succeeded in making the English come to terms, and promised not to intervene in Ireland, Robert would not have risked the destruction of that peace by making such an overt attempt to detach Ireland from its allegiance to the crown of England. Equally remarkable events were happening in England. At some time in the summer of 1327 (though it is not certain precisely when) Edward II was rescued by his supporters for a short time from his prison in Berkeley Castle.58 News of the old king’s escape (or equally, news of his recapture) may have had a bearing on the decision of Kildare’s Irish administration to reject Robert’s overtures, and things in Ireland might have turned out very differently. As it was, Robert could only return to Scotland, relinquishing for the last time the idea of a western alliance against England. It is interesting that during his interventions of 1327 and 1328 Robert seems to have sought co-operation from Anglo-Irish magnates much more actively than between 1315 and 1318. This impression may be created by dependence on Anglo-Irish sources; by the text of his agreement with Mandeville Robert demanded that they be included in the treaty; and Robert may have been behind general Gaelic revolt. But the fact that Gaelic sources are silent on his visit, and that he strove to woo the Dublin government tends to support the view that he now considered the Anglo-Irish colonists more useful allies.
Robert was back in Scotland probably by mid-August.59 After the English army had disbanded, and in spite of debilitating illness, he entered the field on a final chevauchée into the English east march, accompanied by Moray and Douglas, in a striking demonstration of Scottish power. So confident were the Scots that they now concentrated on besieging major castles, entirely abandoning their former hit-and-run tactics. Robert besieged Norham with engines, assisted once again by the Flemish engineer John Crabbe; Moray and Douglas attacked first Alnwick, then Warkworth, then rejoined the king for a determined attempt to capture Norham.60 Fortalices were built in England and lands were granted out.61 Professor Nicholson interpreted these activities as a new departure in Scottish policy, a threat to annex Northumberland. In fact Robert had previously granted out lands of living English lords and constructed peels in Northumberland and Cumberland.62 Much more threatening were his attacks on border castles, which, as a means of forcing the English to negotiate, had been tried successfully in 1322 and 1326. Nicholson is surely correct in detecting a terrifying escalation of the war which must have panicked the English administration. The area taken into Scottish suffrancewas enlarged to include not only Durham, Cumberland and Westmorland, but also Richmondshire and Cleveland (which amounted to the whole of the North Riding of Yorkshire); and the border castles which had withstood the Scots for centuries seemed on the point of falling. The threat to dismember the English kingdom had never seemed so real, and the unstable regime of Isabella and Mortimer was in no position to sustain further military catastrophes.
THE TREATY OF EDINBURGH/NORTHAMPTON
On 9th October 1327 Henry Percy and William de Denum were appointed to treat of a final peace with the Scots.63 As Professor Stones observed, both sides show desperation to achieve a settlement in 1327–28: the English selling their rights even though Robert I was on his deathbed and a four-year-old child was shortly to ascend the Scottish throne; the Scots prepared to pay cash for recognition on parchment of a victory they had already won in the field.64 By 30th October the basis for a peace was outlined. Edward III (under the influence of his mother and Roger Mortimer) was prepared to surrender to Robert I all his right in Scotland. Robert, for his part, had committed himself to pay £20,000 for the peace, and to a marriage settlement which would bind together the royal families of Scotland and England. It would appear that the £20,000 was to indemnify the Kings of England for the loss of legal title in Scotland, but the official documents describe the payment simply as ‘for the good of the peace and concord of the kings and of the kingdom of Scotland’. This then was the measure of Robert’s anxiety to secure a permanent peace for his infant son. The English, for their part, seem to have been most anxious to secure the royal marriage, between Joan, sister of Edward III, and Robert’s son David, the future David II. If the marriage project were to fail, Scotland undertook to pay further the impossible sum of £100,000 when David reached the age of 14, the legal age of consent.
In October 1327 Robert I seems to have been determined to resist claims to restoration by the disinherited, and there is no indication that provision for restoration of their titles was discussed as part of the treaty negotiations. Certainly there could be no question of ‘restoring’ to English magnates the grandiose Scottish titles (including earldoms) granted them by Edward I and Edward II. But Queen Isabella was authorised to renew discussions on this point and she seems to have prevailed upon Robert to allow a partial restoration, lifting forfeitures of war and giving these lords leave to pursue claims in the Scottish courts. In 1330 Henry Percy is reported to have had his claims satisfied; and there is record of letters patent by Robert, granting ‘relief from forfeiture of war’ to Thomas Wake, Henry Beaumont and William de la Zouche. The English for their part made some restoration to ‘disinherited’ Scots, including James Douglas and Henry Prendergast.65 Another stipulation of the treaty was that the English should renounce any claim over the Isle of Man, and undertake to cease their interference in the isles of Scotland; in return for which Robert undertook not to assist enemies of the English king in Ireland. Narrative sources specify certain other conditions which do not appear in the official texts.66 The Stone of Scone was to be returned to Scotland according to one report, but there is no evidence that this was agreed, and the Stone was definitely not delivered. There was no agreement either to return that most sacred of relics stolen by Edward I, the Black Rood; but the Rood was returned to Scotland at some time before 1346, for in that year the Scots lost it once more to the English at the Battle of Neville’s Cross.
THE LEGACIES OF THE WARS OF THE BRUCES
I have taken the Treaty of Northampton–Edinburgh to mark the end of the Wars of the Bruces, but in history a clean break is a rare occurrence. The Treaty marks no fundamental change in relations between Scotland and England; and as pointed out previously, the Bruce monarchy survived for a generation yet under David II. The Anglo-Scottish war was renewed in July 1332 when Edward Balliol son of King John, enjoying the tacit support of Edward III and the active support of the ‘Disinherited’, invaded Scotland in quest of his father’s throne. With the Battle of Halidon Hill in July 1333, Berwick fell once more to the English; and changed hands four times in the two centuries following. The north of England suffered Scottish incursions in 1333, 1342, 1346, 1388, and intermittently throughout the fifteenth century as the war continued, a ‘weary cycle of desultory warfare and uneasy peace’. For the next three centuries, England and Scotland were locked into a war which neither could win. The principal factor driving this cycle was the threat posed to England by alliance between Scotland and France, and the Anglo-Scottish wars became inextricable from the Hundred Years War, grinding painfully on, sporadic, destructive and enduring, each side endowed with the potential to inflict enormous damage on the other, but neither able to win decisive victory, to conquer or occupy the other permanently. England’s superiority over Scotland in terms of population, wealth and resources allowed her the upper hand; yet she was unable finally to defeat the Scots, who could retreat into an infinite wilderness of moors, mountains and islands. Each time either country was weakened by royal minority or rebellion, the other seized the opportunity to attack.
Nevertheless the Treaty, or ‘Shameful Peace’ as it was termed by the English, does at least mark the end of a supremacy which the Scots had enjoyed from 1307 to 1327 and which had no subsequent parallel. The two circumstances which enabled the Bruces to dominate the British Isles during this comparatively brief period would never again occur simultaneously: an English king with a gift for alienating his magnates to the extent of provoking civil war; and crop failure and animal pestilence that paralysed the movement of large armies, annihilating the advantage of the larger kingdom. The treaty also marked the passing of a generation. The main players of this drama had all died by 1328. The ambivalent and brooding figure of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster had been removed by his execution following revolt in 1322; Richard de Burgh, Red Earl of Ulster died in 1326; King Robert did not live long to enjoy his triumph, and died in his house in Cardross, in June 1329, of ‘leprosy’.67 His faithful lieutenant James Douglas was cut down in Spain in 1330, carrying Robert’s heart in a silver casket in battle against the infidel. Doubt lingers over the fate of Edward of Caernarfon, but the chances are that he died a brutal and degrading death in 1327 at the hands of his captors; and soon afterwards, in October 1330, the regime of Isabella and Mortimer was toppled in a coup d’état by the young Edward III, after which Mortimer was executed. The generation which had waged this particular phase of the Anglo-Scottish wars was passing; and the compromise which it hammered out did not long survive it.
FROM BORDER TO FRONTIER: THE TRANSFORMATION OF NORTHERN ENGLAND
Even for the victors the Wars of the Bruces appear to have produced little in the way of lasting economic benefit. The temporary enrichment of Scotland in cattle and in coin was short-lived. Robert I was prepared to repatriate large quantities of bullion to England in return for the peace; and war had seriously damaged the mainstay of the Scottish economy, which was not wool export, but agriculture. Furthermore it is now considered that the war had increased Scotland’s dependence upon imported manufactures, and eroded the skills-base upon which many sectors of the economy depended.68
The main legacy of the Wars of the Bruces to Britain was the transformation of the Anglo-Scottish border from boundary line into frontier zone. War had fundamentally altered life in the border regions. It had broken out at the climax of medieval economic activity in the north of England; and the Scottish raids certainly contributed to the long-term decline in arable productivity, the growing emphasis on pastoralism and perhaps also the retreat of human settlement. But just how far warfare actually caused the long-term economic decline of northern England, and how far its effects were reversible, is a difficult question. Evidence that the Scottish raids of the period had a significant long-term impact is presented in the ‘Inquisitions of the Ninth’ compiled in 1341, an assessment of agrarian incomes for taxation. In this source exemption from or reduction of taxation is sought on a variety of grounds. In Yorkshire land is said to have reverted to waste on account of ‘sterility of the ground’, ‘default of tenants’, ‘the impoverishment of parishioners’ and ‘the drought’.69 Raids of the Scots are blamed for the declines in four parishes of north-western Yorkshire, which allege that arable acreage had receded dramatically since 1291; 355 carucates were said to have been lost in the archdeaconry of Richmond alone.70 In the returns for Lancashire Scottish raids are blamed for declines in arable acreage in Lonsdale, Amounderness and part of Blackburnshire.71 These indications of the lingering effects of war damage are corroborated by two documents. The first is a complaint to the Prior of Durham in 1337 by Robert de Herrington, Vicar of Dalton, that his parish was wasted and depopulated by the Scottish War; that in Dalton there used to be 15 husbandmen who had draught animals, but now there were only five poor men who had no stock; and that the parishes of Morton and Hesilden were in a similar condition.72 The second is a licence granted by Fountains Abbey in 1336 to convert nine of their granges into vills and to demise them to lay persons. The Scottish raids were cited as one of four reasons why they had fallen into decline, pestilence of animals and the weather being among the others.73
However, one might expect the returns to the Inquisitions, as assessments for taxation, to have painted as bleak a picture as possible; and in any case the Inquisitions and the other sources mentioned all offer other explanations besides warfare: animal pestilence, climatic fluctuation, soil exhaustion and plague. Dr. Lomas demonstrated that the pattern was not one of unremitting economic descent as a result of constant warfare, but rather of decline and partial recovery. Examining the sale of tithe corn from the border parishes of Norham and Islandshire and Ellingham, he concluded that the effect of warfare to 1328 was that grain production in this area was permanently reduced by not much more than 20 per cent of what it had been prior to 1314.74 Lomas also showed that a decade after 1328 the corn tithe sales of townships in these border parishes had made a stronger recovery than townships 80 miles to the south in the Bishopric of Durham, an area which was protected from Scottish raids for much of the period by payments forsuffrance.75 For those who would use the evidence of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Inquisitions of 1341 as a measure of the impact of the Scottish raids, the lesson of the Durham evidence is surely that much of the decline had nothing to do with warfare. Further evidence for a swift recovery of agrarian incomes from the effects of raiding may be garnered from the records of the keeper of the Honour of Penrith, where raids in 1322 and 1327 failed to prevent a steady rise in rental income.76 Given the simplicity of the medieval economy, it may have been relatively easy, after an isolated raid, to start over again. Even in Ireland, it is surely significant that large quantities of grain could be purveyed for dispatch to Carlisle within five years of the end of Edward Bruce’s attempted conquest.77 It would therefore appear that animal pestilence, climatic fluctuation and soil exhaustion had a more permanent impact than warfare in the long-term economic decline of northern England.
It is however probably true to say that the Wars of the Bruces assisted a trend towards pastoralism in the northern economy. Here again, Lomas has shown that income from lamb and wool tithes of Norhamshire grew from around £30 before 1314 to about £50 in the 1330s. There is no body of evidence comparable to the Norhamshire and Islandshire tithe records for the western march; but it is accepted that warfare and more casual raiding accentuated the trend towards pastoralism.78 The reasons for this are fairly clear: fields of standing crops, barns and mills presented permanent fixed targets for raiders, whereas cattle and sheep could be driven off to safety.
But although their economic impact was less permanent than natural forces simultaneously at work, the wars brought about lasting developments in northern English society. This phase of Anglo-Scottish warfare created the conditions for that deterioration in law and order which became characteristic of border areas until the seventeenth century. Border unrest was not a new phenomenon; Tynedale and Redesdale had long been the haunt of bandits taking advantage of the refuge offered by the wilderness, and the prospect of escape to separate jurisdictions.79 Yet by 1328, with widespread purveyancing, demands for military service, the chevauchées of hobelar warfare, and allegations and counter-allegations of treachery, the Wars of the Bruces had multiplied the opportunities and pretexts for lawlessness and local terrorism on the borders. Both Antony Bek and Edward II had utilised the military potential of the outlaws of the marches.80 In obvious ways the schavaldores of the 1310s, products of the Wars of the Bruces, anticipate the ‘riders’ and ‘reivers’ of the early modern era. Many features associated with the border reivers of the sixteenth century had still to appear by 1328. The ‘riding surnames’ used by later reivers were unknown until at least 1400; there is no evidence of feuding between kinship groups at this stage; and the oldest of the border ballads commemorates no events prior to the Battle of Otterburn in 1388.
Twenty years of intermittent warfare had an important psychological impact on the North of England. By 1330 there is a sense that war had become endemic in the region. This can be inferred from the number of minor fortifications springing up either side of the border during the first quarter of the fourteenth century, each peel or tower representing a considerable investment by local families or communities.81 In 1328 the northerners were already ‘dug in’ for continuous conflict. A mentality of permanent, low-intensity warfare had taken over. It appears from a petition of the prior and convent of Durham dating from 1344 that a custom, whereby the armour of the deceased was given in mortuary to the vicar, had been prohibited for some considerable time to facilitate defence.82Provision for war damage began to be written into property transactions. In a Cumberland lease of 1317 the tenant undertook to keep a messuage (or building-plot) in good condition, though with due allowance made for ‘burning and destruction by the Scots’. Similar provisions can be found in Yorkshire deeds. In the 1320s when the Chapter of Ripon leased the tithes of the chapel of Nidd, they conceded that whatever losses the tenant might incur through the agency of the king or ‘the coming of the Scots’ might be assessed and allowance made to him. Another Cumberland lease, this time of 1334, also reveals an expectation of permanent war: the abbot of St. Mary’s leased his manor and tithes of Bromfield for six years, but allowed indemnification for war damage only if war had been publicly proclaimed, or if the manor house was destroyed and burnt down. The tenant was therefore to expect occasional ‘peacetime’ raids and to cover these losses himself, and the abbot would consider his claims only in the case of declared war or serious damage.83
Warfare also helped to bring about drastic changes in lordship and the pattern of landholding.84 The rift with Scotland and the war brought about the removal of several leading northern English families: Clavering, Ros, Umfraville and Clifford. The extinction of these families coincided with the natural extinction of others, notably Vesci of Alnwick and Multon of Gilsland. During the rest of the fourteenth century the Percy and Neville families rose to positions of dominance in the north through service to the crown, and their fortunes depended upon the successful prosecution of war with Scotland. Percy and Neville lords were a new kind of over-mighty subject, warlords with absolute control over a wide region. These regional dynasts became indispensable as buffers against Scotland; and in the future they were to exercise immense power in the politics of the realm. By the late fourteenth century, the marcher lords on either side of the border had become powerful advocates of war.
THE LESSONS OF WARFARE
Other legacies of the Wars of the Bruces lie in the military sphere. In twenty years of warfare the Scots had refined a survival strategy for small and relatively weak lordships faced with aggressive and powerful neighbours. Few if any of the elements in this strategy were novel. There is one aspect of Robert’s strategy which may have been completely innovative: there appears to be no exact precedent for Robert I’s systematic slighting of castles to render a territory invulnerable to occupation and at the same time to ensure the susceptibility of magnates to royal discipline.
Mounted raids or chevauchées had been used by Edward I’s commanders to destroy the agricultural capacity in areas of Scotland hostile to his occupation. Light cavalry, highly mobile and able to live off the land, must have predominated in disputed border territories throughout Europe; certainly they existed on the borders of Wales in the thirteenth century, in the shape of the muntatores of Oswestry. These were mounted raiders, equipped with iron helmet and hauberk, who had the capacity to inflict surprise raids on the Welsh. The similarity with the hobelars however cannot be carried too far, for muntatores held land by specified tenure on set terms of military service,85 whereas the hobelars were simply turbulent mercenaries who often had no respect for property of any kind. Use of mounted infantry as raiders, with the capacity to strike deep into the heart of enemy territory and to fight a battle on foot there if necessary, was another refinement which can be credited to Moray, Douglas and Robert I, and this does appear to have been deliberately emulated by the English. Andrew Harclay, who employed Irish and local hobelars and organised mounted raids on Scotland, is said to have deployed a phalanx of infantry spearmen to defeat the earls of Lancaster and Hereford at Boroughbridge in 1322 ‘in the Scottish fashion’.86 It has also been pointed out that Edward II recognised the value of mobility and the devastating capacity of the Scottish raiders but was diverted by the need (as he saw it) to occupy Scotland with large armies of heavily armoured infantry.
In a broader sense, the Scottish tactic of plundering raids deep into enemy territory formed the basis of English strategy in the first phase of the Hundred Years War. Faced with the task of defeating a country much larger and richer than their own, the English, led by the Black Prince, adopted the chevauchée.87 In 1355 and again in 1356 he led great looting expeditions, cutting a great swathe of devastation across southern France. The analogy is far from exact, for England was protected by sea from France whereas Scotland was open to retaliation by land. There was also a difference of scale: the Black Prince had forces at his disposal far greater than those which might have been available to Moray and Douglas. On his first expedition the Black Prince is believed to have been accompanied by a thousand men at arms and a thousand horse-archers, besides a company of foot.88 The chevauchées allowed the English to transform the Hundred Years War from a potentially disastrous clash with a stronger kingdom into an opportunity to plunder and enrich England at the expense of her enemy.
AULD ALLIANCES: THE ‘CELTIC ALLIANCE’ IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Throughout Scottish history, the ‘auld alliance’ between France and Scotland tended to have an effect more moral than practical. Its impact upon contemporary perceptions and motivations was often out of all proportion to its impact upon military and even diplomatic events. While it is clearly the case that France often used Flemish ports during the middle ages to bolster Scottish resistance to England, the Bruces enjoyed no such advantage. In the summer of 1315 when France actually dragged a reluctant England into confrontation with Flanders, it is clear that the two great kingdoms were in alliance against their troublesome smaller neighbours. Hence the bitter complaint (cited by Duncan (Nation of Scots, p. 36)) to Pope John XXII about the conduct of England and France:
Then rouse the Christian Princes who for false reasons pretend that they cannot go to the Holy Land because of wars they have with their neighbours. The other reason that prevents them is that in warring on their smaller neighbours they anticipate a readier return and weaker resistance.
Until 1326 Robert I had to survive in the teeth of an Anglo-French understanding, which, though far from solid, was sufficient to keep France from intervening with energy in the affairs of the British Isles. As an alternative to alliance with France he could rely upon assistance from the traders of Flanders and Germany to the east; and to the west, he summoned into existence an understanding with certain principalities of the Gaeltacht. Using both these sources of support, informal and unreliable as they were, he succeeded in asserting the independence of Scotland.
When war loomed once more in 1326, Flanders and France were once more in harmony and Scotland was able effectively to enjoy alliance with both on its eastern flank. On the west, however, the situation was more complex. Robert’s solicitude for the earldom of Ulster in 1328 appears to contrast with his aggression of the previous year. But this was a change of style, rather than of attitude, brought about by the conclusion of the peace. While his expedition of 1327 gained for him effective control of the earldom in the absence of the heir, that of 1328 was intended to prolong his influence in the earldom through the installation of the legally recognised earl. He was actually forbidden by the terms of the Treaty of Edinburgh/Northampton to interfere in the affairs of Ireland.89However, Robert appears to have been anxious, without endangering the peace, to establish the earldom of Ulster as a client-lordship of the Scottish crown. The earl’s council in Ireland had been insistent that the heir, William de Burgh, grandson and heir of the Red Earl, should come in person to take charge of Ulster. Earl William had been granted custody of Ulster (including the castle of Carrickfergus) in February 1327; but after the Scottish invasion of that year, the English council reversed its decision and withheld the castle, apparently to ensure its safe keeping.90 To regain his patrimony in Ireland, William accompanied Queen Isabella to Berwick to attend the marriage of David Bruce with Joan. After the royal wedding, in August 1328, Robert I, on his last journey out of Scotland and accompanied by Murdoch Earl of Menteith and other Scottish magnates, crossed ‘in peace’ to Ulster with Earl William. There the young earl was installed in his lordship.91 This was not an infringement of the provisions of the peace, for Robert had undertaken not to assist the enemies of the English king in Ireland, and the ‘Brown Earl’ as he is known remained a liegeman of Edward III. The traditional alliance between de Burgh and Bruce was thus restored; and security on this flank was purchased for Robert’s infant heir.
To a large extent the interests of the English and Scottish kings coincided in Ulster, where the strong earldom had kept at bay the Gaelic subjects of both. Robert’s concerns for Ulster were justified by subsequent events. In 1333 Earl William was murdered, and the earldom of Ulster thereafter was held by absentees, ceasing, in effect, to exist as a lordship.92 In memorable terms Edmund Curtis described the effect on the geo-politics of the North Channel:
. . . the sea was thrown open, the northern chiefs could draw from the Scottish Isles unlimited galloglasses, and so was knitted again the old Gaelic world of Erin and Alba, severed for a time by the Anglo-Norman wedge driven in it by de Courcy and his successors in eastern Ulster.93
Although Scottish intervention in Ireland on the scale of the Bruce invasion was never repeated, Robert’s preoccupation with Ireland and the western approaches proved to be well founded. Not long after Robert’s death John MacDonald of Islay felt sufficiently confident to rebel against the government of David Bruce and began the process of founding the autonomous Lordship of the Isles. For the remainder of the middle ages kings of Scotland were obliged to intervene in Ulster, often as a check on the MacDonalds and other Scots-Gaelic lords, or simply to stir up trouble for the English government. In 1404 a force of Scots assisted Gaelic-Irish chieftains in devastating the Anglo-Irish colony in Ulster, burning Inch Abbey, Downpatrick and Coleraine; and in 1433 a large fleet from the Scottish isles arrived to assist Eoghan Ó Néill against Niall Ó Domhnaill. Following a long-standing tradition, Ireland continued to provide safe-haven for English and Scottish political exiles. In 1425 James Stewart fled to Ulster from the wrath of James I of Scotland and threatened to use it as a springboard for the recovery of his position in Scotland. There was every danger that James would find military support from disaffected elements in the Western Isles, just as Robert I had done a hundred years previously, and a Scottish fleet is said to have arrived to take him home ‘that he might be king’.94 Fear of ‘celtic alliance’ continued to haunt the dreams of the English royal officials and political classes. The Welsh leader Owain Glyn Dûr received material support by sea from the Scots and he appealed for military assistance to the Gaelic Irish in 1401;95 and the Libell of Englishe Policye in 1436 gave lurid expression to the dread of pan-celticism, warning that England controlled a dwindling proportion of the land of Ireland ‘which if be lost, as Christ Jesus forbid, farewell Wales’. It was stressed that if such a circumstance arose an alliance of Scotland, Spain and other powers could encircle England.96 As late as 1522 the Anglo-Irish government in Dublin feared the possibility of a Scottish invasion.97But increasingly the English and Scottish governments ceased to consider the Gaeltacht as an arena where each sparred with the other through little wars fought by proxy; increasingly they began to envisage the Gaeltacht as a common problem, and one best addressed by co-operation.
CONCLUSION
From the early sixteenth century the development of common interests binding together England and Scotland, as Protestant kingdoms sharing the one island and menaced from the continent by the forces of counter-reformation, began to render less galling the old antipathies. After the union of the crowns in 1603, the fury and passion that had fed the Wars of the Bruces began to subside, and receded eventually into a past too remote, too obscure, to be taken seriously by any but antiquarians. In the whig interpretation of British history, the struggle for an independent Scottish kingdom appeared as a temporary and unfortunate deviation from the destiny of political unity for the British Isles first conceived by the perspicacious and far-sighted Edward I.
From a modern point of view, the most striking aspect of the episode is undoubtedly the potential that was briefly created for the development of alternative relationships between the peoples of these islands. Between 1307 and 1328 there were briefly thrown open possibilities for radical departures from the course of actual history. Seen in this light, the Wars of the Bruces are a sharp reminder that nothing in history is inevitable. Had the Bruces met with wider co-operation in Ireland, for example, it is possible that Ireland, under a cadet line of the Bruce dynasty, might have achieved ‘regnal solidarity’, that ‘match between people and polity’ which was the magic ingredient of medieval state-building. Had events turned out differently again, it might have come to pass that the north–south partition which existed in Ireland from 1315 to 1318 might have been perpetuated, mirroring the partition which existed already in Britain and foreshadowing that of modern Ireland. It is even possible, had both the Gaelic Irish and the native Welsh accepted the overlordship of Edward Bruce, that there might have arisen a transmarine ‘Irish Sea’ kingdom.
Any such solution might have been entertained by the Bruces up until Edward’s disaster at Fochart. It is difficult to regret the failure of Edward Bruce, in view of the comments of contemporaries. Irish annalists characterise Edward’s three-and-a-half year reign as a time when ‘falsehood and homicide filled the country’. Certainly the chroniclers were unanimous in their approval for the slaying of Edward Bruce:
Never a better deed was done since the banishing of the Formorians than the killing of Edward Bruce, the common ruin of the Galls and the Gaels of Ireland in general . . .98
The disappearance of Edward Bruce from the scene, however, reduced the possible outcomes of the wars. For the Scots the conquest of Ireland ceased to be an end in itself. Interference in Ireland became purely a means of extorting from England recognition of the Bruce monarchy. Edward Bruce’s regality depended upon a permanent separation of Ireland from England; similarly Robert’s kingship depended upon separation of Scotland from England. Yet in both cases independence was only a means towards recognition of kingship. In both the settlements which Robert formulated, the Treaty of Edinburgh and the earlier abortive treaty with Andrew Harclay, provision was made for intermarriage between the royal families of England and Scotland. This intermarriage was intended to lead to, or at least to create the possibility of, dynastic union of the kingdoms. From this one can gather that Robert by no means ruled out the emergence of a pan-British kingdom in the future. In fact his vision for the British Isles may not have been so very far removed from that originally entertained by Edward I in the Treaty of Birgham of 1290. The preservation and recognition of his own royal title had been Robert’s supreme objective; and despite the anti-English rhetoric to which he resorted on occasion, the preservation of Scottish independence only served this objective. As far back as 1304 it looks very much as though Robert had been prepared to compromise the independence of the Scottish monarchy to win from Edward I recognition even as a vassal king. Accident alone forced him to adopt a grander design.
But however the coup of 1306 is interpreted, no historian will deny that the brothers Bruce were driven, not so much by magnate self-interest as by a consuming ambition for kingship, born of a passionate belief in the regality of the blood they shared. The claim articulated on behalf of Scottish magnates in the Declaration of Arbroath that ‘we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom’ could hardly have been advanced with any sincerity by Robert and Edward. Robert was prepared to unleash a terrible war on the defenceless communities of northern England in order that his right be vindicated; Edward Bruce had such craving for royal dignity that he sought offers of kingship from the magnates of Ireland, Wales and even perhaps of the Western Isles as well. Both were manipulators of patriotism and xenophobic sentiment. Yet it is scarcely just to consider the Bruces more responsible for these wars than ‘King Edward’s covetousness’.
However much their actions were informed by self-interest, the brothers were upholders of rights and customs threatened by the Edwardian super-kingdom. Their claims to be protectors of threatened peoples and identities, articulated in the Declaration of the Clergy, the Remonstrance of the Irish Princes and the Declaration of Arbroath, were self-serving but far from hollow. Robert’s seizure of the kingship, and the brothers’ twenty years’ resistance to a powerful enemy rescued the Scottish monarchy from oblivion. They preserved for Scotland an identity of king and community, and saved Scotland from endless wars between natives and colonists. In effect they saved her from the fate of Ireland and Wales. This was the great achievement of the Wars of the Bruces, and it is for this that they deserve to be remembered.
NOTES
1 RRS v nos. 222, 448.
2 CPR 1321–24, pp. 261, 264, 274, 288–89. The term palettis indicates plate armour of some sort.
3 RRS v no. 222, pp. 490–91, translated in Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 244–45.
4 CPR 1321–24, pp. 268, 271; CDS v no. 686, p. 253.
5 RRS v no. 222, pp. 490–91.
6 RRS v no. 139, p. 412, [xxi].
7 The text is translated in A.A.M. Duncan, The Nation of Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath (Historical Association, 1970), pp. 34–37.
8 Duncan, ‘War of the Scots’, pp. 129–31.
9 Fordun ii, 341; Barbour XIX, 1–72; Scalacronica, p. 59.
10 Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, no. 38(h), p. 152.
11 CPR 1321–24, p. 277.
12 RRS v no. 232, pp. 499–503.
13 CCR 1318–23, p. 717; Fryde, Tyrrany and FalI, p. 159.
14 Fryde, Tyrrany and Fall, pp. 49–57 and M. Buck, Politics, Finance and the Church in the Reign of Edward II (Cambridge, 1983), Chapter 7.
15 Fryde, Tyrrany and Fall, pp. 160–61.
16 CDS v no. 687, p. 254; Vita Edwardi II, pp. 131–32.
17 Fordun ii, 340; W.S. Reid, ‘Trade, Traders and Scottish Independence’, Speculum xxix (1954), 213–18.
18 E. Gemmill and N. Mayhew, Changing values in medieval Scotland: A study of prices, money and weights and measures (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 15–16, 147, 163, 181, 190, 222–23, 235, 251, 259, 268, 280, 286.
19 CDS iii nos. 845, 846, 848, 851, 852.
20 P. Chaplais, The War of St. Sardos (1323–1325): Gascon Correspondence and Diplomatic Documents (Camden 3rd Series lxxxvii, 1954), nos. 57, 79, 151. These are calendared in CDS v nos. 692, 694, 698.
21 Vita Edwardi II, p. 132.
22 Fryde, Tyrrany and Fall, pp. 145–6; Vita Edwardi II, pp. 138–39.
23 Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 251–52.
24 RRS v no. 299, pp. 556–59, sealed by Robert I on 12th July.
25 CDS iii nos. 882, 883; CCR 1324–27, p. 476.
26 Fryde, Tyrrany and Fall, pp. 185 - 92.
27 D. Walker, Medieval Wales (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 150–51; J.G. Edwards, ‘Sir Gruffydd Llwyd’, EHR xxx (1915), 589–601.
28 CDS iii nos. 888, 889.
29 Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 274; R. Nicholson, ‘The Last Campaign of Robert Bruce’, EHR lxxvii (1962), 234.
30 Lanercost, p.253.
31 Nicholson, ‘The Last Campaign of Robert Bruce’, p. 234.
32 Lanercost, p. 253.
33 B. Wilkinson, The Constitutional History of Medieval England, 1216–1399 (London, 1952), ii, 170–71.
34 CCR 1327–30, pp. 157, 212; CPR 1327–30, p. 139.
35 Lanercost, p. 256.
36 Nicholson, ‘The Last Campaign of Robert Bruce’, p. 234.
37 E.L.G. Stones, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Negotiations of 1327’, SHR xxx (1950), 29–30. Nicholson’s account of this campaign, Edward III and the Scots, pp. 13–23 has recently been revised by Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 252–53.
38 Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, p. 23; CDS iii nos. 920, 924.
39 Lanercost, pp. 356–57.
40 SC1/34/110 calendared in CDS v no. 606, p. 240; Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 252, 372. Places mentioned in the following paragraph are marked on Map 11, p. 150.
41 Le Bel, pp. 46, 49.
42 Lanercost, pp. 257–58; Le Bel, pp. 49–71.
43 Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 252–53.
44 Foedera ii (II), 717.
45 Date given by Sayles, Affairs of Ireland, p. 127 as 29th July 1326.
46 See above, p. 186.
47 Sayles, Affairs of Ireland, no. 155, pp. 126–29. Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, p. 137 states that the author was Thomas Chedworth, an official of the lady de Burgh.
48 R. Nicholson ‘A Sequel to Edward Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland’, SHR xlii (1963–64), p. 34; Duncan, RRS v Introduction, p. 155.
49 E101/239/5.
50 R. Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 1318–1361 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 139–42.
51 Sayles, Affairs of Ireland, no. 155, pp. 126–29.
52 R. Nicholson, ‘A Sequel pp. 40–41, Appendix II; RRS v no. 332, pp. 574–75; see above p. 131.
53 Sayles, Affairs of Ireland, no. 155, p. 128; Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 323.
54 CCR 1327–30, p. 145.
55 Printed in Nicholson, ‘A Sequel’, Appendix II, pp. 39–40.
56 E101/239/5.
57 Chart. St. Mary’s Dublin ii, 367.
58 Fryde, Tyrrany and Fall, p. 201.
59 Duncan, Introduction, RRS v, p. 155.
60 Nicholson, ‘The Last Campaign of Robert Bruce’, pp. 242–44.
61 Raine, Northern Registers, pp. 344–46; Rot. Scot. i, 221–22; Barbour, The Bruce XX, 1–26; RRS v no. 324, pp. 575–76 is a note of a grant of Belford in Northumberland to Nicholas Scrymgeour.
62 See above p. 79.
63 Rot. Scot. i, 223.
64 Three articles by E.L.G. Stones are vital to the understanding of the peace settlement: ‘The English Mission to Edinburgh in 1328’, SHR xxviii (1949), 97–118; ‘The Anglo-Scottish Negotiations of 1327’, SHR xxx (1951), 49–54; ‘An Addition to the Rotuli Scotiae’, SHR xxix (1950), 23–51.
65 RRS v nos. 353, 457; Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, pp. 58–59.
66 Stones, ‘An Addition to the Rotuli Scotiae’ , 32–33.
67 Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 322.
68 A. Stevenson, ‘Trade between Scotland and the Low Countries in the Middle Ages’, (Aberdeen Ph.D, 1982), pp. 219, 248–51.
69 Nonarum Inquisitiones in Curia Scaccaria ed. G. Vanderzee (Record Commission, London, 1807), pp. 243, 224, 228. The Inquisitions are discussed by A.R.H. Baker, ‘Evidence in the Inquisitiones Nonarum of contracting arable lands in England during the early fourteenth century’, EcHR 2nd series xix (1966), 518–32.
70 Ibid., 233–34
71 Ibid., 35–40.
72 Surtees, Durham, i, II, 2–3.
73 Memorials of the Abbey of St. Mary of Fountains, ed. J.R. Walbran and J.T. Fowler (Surtees Society xlii, 1863), pp. 203–5. A similar combination of circumstances is recorded for the inquisition in the parish of Easingwold, E179/206/46b, m. 3.
74 R. Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 59.
75 Ibid, pp. 60–61.
76 See Chart 2, p113.
77 See Charts 5 and 6, p. 127.
78 Lomas, North-East England, p. 59; H. Summerson, ‘Crime and Society in Medieval Cumberland’, CWAAS 2nd series, lxxxii (1982), 116.
79 Cattle rustling had always been common: JUST 3/10A, m. 1d; JUST 3/53/1, mm. 1, 5; JUST 3/53/2, mm. 3, 4. NCH xii, 312; CDS i, no. 1244, p. 227; Barrow, ‘Northern English Society’, pp. 13–14; Fraser, Ancient Petitions, no. 87, pp. 112–13.
80 C.M. Fraser A History of Antony Bek (Oxford 1957) p. 143; and see pp. 155–57 above.
81 Of 18 licences to crenellate granted in the North of England in the period 1296–1328, 16 were for minor fortifications, CPR 1296–1327.
82 Raine, North Durham, p. 268.
83 Cumbria Record Office D/Mus/Medieval Deeds/Edenhall, Bramery 19; Memorials of the Church of SS Peter and Wilfred, Ripon, ed. J.T. Fowler iv (Surtees Society cxv, 1908), p. 52; W. Dugdale, Monasticon Angicanum (London, 1846) iii, 567–68, Num. LXVII. Northumberland Record Office ZSW 4/77 contains a clause to the effect that if lands are destroyed in war with the Scots, the tenant will not be held for payment of rent (Northumberland, 1332).
84 J.A. Tuck, ‘War and Society in the Medieval North’, NH xxi (1985), pp. 33–52.
85 F. C. Suppe, Military Institutions on the Welsh Marches: Shropshire, A.D. 1066–1300 (London, 1994), pp. 63–87.
86 Lanercost, p. 232.
87 H.J. Hewitt discussed the nature of the chevauchée in The Black Prince’s Expedition, 1355–57 (Manchester, 1958), pp. 46–49 and in The Organisation of War under Edward III 1338–62 (Manchester, 1966),pp. 93–99.
88 Hewitt, The Black Prince’s Expedition, p. 21.
89 RRS v no. 342, pp. 591–94.
90 Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, pp. 141–42 and note 19.
91 Chart. St. Mary’s Dublin ii, 367; Ann. Loch Cé, ii, 607; Nicholson, ‘A Sequel’, p. 36.
92 Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, pp. 144–46; Chart. St. Mary’s Dublin, ii, 378–79.
93 E. Curtis, A History of Medieval Ireland, (2nd edition, 1938), p. 211.
94 NHI ii, 574–76.
95 R.A. Griffiths, Conquerors and Conquered in Medieval Wales (Stroud, 1994), pp. 127–28.
96 The Libell of Englishe Policye, 1436, R. Pauli (Leipzig, 1878), p. 50.
97 B. Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 58–83.
98 Annals of Connacht, p. 253. See also Annals of Ulster iii, 433; and Annals of Clonmacnoise, pp. 281–82.