INTRODUCTION:
Late in the summer of 1306 the English King’s vassals smashed their way with siege engines into Dunaverty Castle on the west coast of Scotland,1 only to find that their quarry, Robert Bruce, self-proclaimed King of Scots, had taken flight for Ireland over the perilous western sea. But though he had escaped with his life, it seemed he had lost all else. Within months of a makeshift enthronement he had been routed in battle; his leading supporters hanged or imprisoned; his wife and sisters sent as captives to Edward I of England. His bid to revive the kingship of Scotland lay in ruins; and with it the prospects for a Scottish kingdom independent of England. But only the man who loses everything is free to make a new beginning, and therein lay the saving grace of his situation.
Robert’s flight from the clutches of Edward I makes a poignant vignette, for which his verse biographer borrows a selection of epithets from Virgil: the strong swell, the swift current, the high waves. Another source describes Robert as ‘another Aeneas, fleeing alone from the captivity of Troy’; and a third sets his solitude starkly against the great emptiness:
. . . the aforesaid king was cut off from his men and underwent endless woes, and was tossed in dangers untold, being attended at times by three followers, at times by two; and more often he was left utterly alone without help. Now passing a whole fortnight without food of any kind to live upon but raw herbs and water; now walking barefoot; when his shoes became old and worn out; now left alone in the islands; now alone fleeing before his enemies; now slighted by his servants, he abode in loneliness.2
Robert’s island odyssey has excited curiosity out of all proportion to its historical importance. Rathlin, Orkney, Norway and the Hebrides have all been suggested as his possible places of refuge.3 The passionate interest in the fugitive king ‘going on foot through the mountains and from isle to isle’4 endures because Robert in that moment has seemed to embody the identity of the Scottish nation, as Aeneas was thought to embody that of Rome. In abandoning his homeland, Robert becomes free to abandon dependence upon conventional sources of strength. Henceforth the success of his cause appears to depend not upon the usual sinews of war: gold and iron; but upon intangible qualities and resources: time and space; tradition and patriotism; loyalty, revenge, and his own inspired leadership. In some versions of the story the direction of his flight has an added significance, in that Robert carries in his own person the identity of the Scottish nation from danger of extinction at home to safety in the legendary Irish homeland of the Scots. In the imagination of generations his escape to the west has appeared as an appeal from a brutal feudal present to an heroic, archaic past in an uneven struggle against the most powerful of medieval kingdoms. The voyage mends Robert’s personal fortune, and also redeems the Scottish nation. It is a nadir which marked the beginning of a personal and national recovery unparalleled in the history of these islands.
APPROACHING THE WARS OF THE BRUCES
The wars of Robert and Edward Bruce have an obvious importance in historical terms. They embrace much more than seizure of kingship by Robert Bruce – Robert I as he is properly known to history. They constitute a unique episode in the history of the British Isles, during which England’s hegemony, so vigorously established by Edward I, was dramatically overturned. Robert returned to Scotland, drove out the English and succeeded in winning the support of the Scottish aristocracy and in identifying his own cause with that of Scottish independence. The war thus unleashed spilled far beyond the borders of Scotland. Robert mounted successive and devastating raids on the north of England; and at Bannockburn he inflicted on the English their greatest defeat since Hastings. His depredations in northern England are well documented (much more so than the ravages of civil and patriotic war in Scotland). For the best part of a decade he held one fifth of the kingdom of England in tribute. And while Robert conspired with disaffected English aristocrats, and sought overseas alliances to isolate England, Edward his equally ambitious brother invaded Ireland, was acclaimed king of that country and occupied Ulster for three years. Even in Wales the Bruces threatened the hitherto unchallenged ascendancy of the English, raiding Anglesey and threatening to stir up general revolt. As never before, and seldom since, the political development of these islands was ‘in the melting pot’.
This is of course Scotland’s heroic age; and from earliest times it has never wanted for storytellers. From the later fourteenth century there survives the most remarkable narrative of these events, an alliterative poem of 13,000 lines of rhyming couplets written in 1375 by John Barbour and entitled The Bruce.5 Barbour celebrates the life of the hero king, the epic quality of events, the high deeds of great men. He revels in the telling of dramatic episodes: the ‘Great Cause’, an international tribunal as to who was the rightful King of Scots; the terrorising of Scotland by the garrisons of Edward I, England’s brilliant and aggressive king; the murder by Bruce of ‘the Red Comyn’, his leading rival; and the grand dénouement of the battle of Bannockburn. It is courtroom drama, historical romance and murder mystery combined, and with battle sequences on the scale of a Hollywood epic. Like present-day screenwriters and authors of historical fiction, Barbour gloried in the romance and pageantry, the noble and chivalric aspects of the conflict. The social and economic effects of the conflict did not of course concern him; and even down to the present, historians have tended to neglect these dimensions, in favour of biographies of the principal characters involved in the conflict. Excellent biographies of Robert Bruce and Edward I dominate the recent historiography.6 This book is intended to focus upon the relationship between war and society; yet it is impossible to ignore the roles of personalities, for the whole period derives its identity from the ambitions and designs of Robert and Edward Bruce and their opponents. It seems only just to call these years of the Scottish Wars of Independence the Wars of the Bruces; for they were inflicted on the British Isles by the consuming ambitions of the Bruce brothers, in reaction to the aggressive expansionism of English kings.
Nevertheless the jealous documentation of the English king’s revenues places in context the actions of individuals; and, in England at least, allows us some grasp of the material and human costs of war, in terms of harvests ruined, barns destroyed and cattle driven off. Financial accounts of manors ‘in the king’s hand’ afford occasional glimpses of tides of refugees; of banditry flourishing in the wake of war; and of the activities of scavengers, speculators and opportunists for whom war to the death provided a way of life. Administrative records also reveal many details of how military science was developing. Despite the central importance of a few setpiece battles, this was not on the whole a war of contests between serried ranks of armoured knights, but a barbarous affair of mounted raids on civilian populations.
Since they were so much wider than other Anglo-Scottish conflicts, the Wars of the Bruces belong properly to the history of the whole of the British Isles.7 To writers of ‘national’ history an overall understanding of the conflict will remain elusive; it demands rather an integrated approach, spanning the whole of the archipelago. Reliance on the archive of the English monarchy for documentary sources is unavoidable; but an Anglocentric interpretation of documents and events will distort any understanding of relationships. The war in Scotland has been the subject of intensive study.8 But the narrative of war from 1314 is dominated by spectacular devastating raids into England by Robert’s lieutenants, Thomas Randolph and James Douglas; and historians of England have abandoned the north of England at this period, much as the English government of the time abandoned it.9 To historians of Ireland the Bruce invasion provides an unusual distraction from the long-term decline of the Anglo-Norman colony.10 But until recently events in Ireland had been studied largely in isolation from the war in Britain and this cannot be right. Robert I intervened personally in Ireland on at least four separate occasions, and apparently considered Irish affairs integral to the success of his struggle. Other theatres of war too require to be integrated into an overall picture: bitter struggles took place in the Isle of Man and on the Irish Sea; on the North Sea the Scots found allies in the Flemish and German traders; and an equally furious battle for influence was waged in diplomatic terms at papal and French courts.
LOCAL AND EUROPEAN CONTEXTS
The need for a cross-national approach is evident from the family background of the Bruces and from their position in local society. The de Brus lords of Annandale were an Anglo-Norman aristocratic dynasty, one of many encouraged to settle in Scotland by the Scottish kings of the twelfth century in order that they might provide knights in support of the monarchy.11 Robert the first of the name came from Brix in the Cotentin peninsula. For services to King Henry I of England this Robert was granted Cleveland in Yorkshire; and he also received a grant of Annandale from King David I of Scotland. The Bruces had therefore been established in Scotland for two hundred years before Robert Bruce, the seventh of the name, seized the throne.12 Annandale was adjacent to Gaelic-speaking Galloway, and the grant of Annandale to the Bruce lords had been intended to strengthen that march against incursion by Gaelic lords. But as often happens on a frontier between warring cultures, each side began to adopt some of the customs and traditions of the other. Over time the Bruces developed associations with the native Gaelic aristocracy.13 Robert Bruce the sixth, the father of the future king, married the daughter of the last Gaelic earl of Carrick. Marjory, the mother of Robert I, was therefore a scion of Gaelic rather than Anglo-Norman aristocracy. The family may have adopted some Gaelic social customs. In particular, the children may have been fostered in the households of Gaelic aristocrats for training in social graces. Barbour mentions Robert’s foster brother; another source suggests that Edward Bruce was also fostered with a Gaelic lord.14 Associations with their peers of ‘Anglo-Norman’ origin were probably of greater importance to the Bruces. Among their traditional allies were their neighbours on the western seaboard, the hereditary Stewarts of Scotland, and their neighbours across the North Channel, the de Burgh Earls of Ulster.15 The Bruces also continued to hold lands in England to a rather greater extent than any of their Scottish peers, namely the manors of Tottenham near London, Writtle in Essex and Hart in what was then the Bishopric (now the county) of Durham.16
In cultural terms the Bruce Lords of Annandale remained very much a part of the chivalric, aristocratic and largely francophone milieu of medieval Christendom that was in many respects enjoying its heyday in the late thirteenth century. The great enterprise of Christendom, crusade against the infidel, was only just beginning to flag. Robert Bruce the fifth had accompanied Edmund, brother of Edward I, on his expedition to the Holy Land.17 Philip the Fair, the autocratic King of France, was able to arrange for the dissolution of the Knights Templar at the Council of Vienne in 1311. Popes, broadly recognised as the leaders of Christendom, still strove to assert the supremacy of their spiritual authority over that of kings. Edward I clashed repeatedly with Boniface VIII on issues touching his authority; but the removal of the papal court into the shadow of the French king at Avignon by 1316 indicates that the emphasis was now on accommodation rather than confrontation with secular powers. Knighthood remained the aspiration of gentilclasses, even if they now occasionally deferred the honour to avoid costly and irksome social duties with which it was associated.18 Pride was taken in the display of armorial devices. The ‘Song of Caerlaverock’ describes the colourful heraldic devices borne by knights and squires who followed Edward I on campaign in 1300; the drinking cup known as the Bannatyne mazer preserves the armorial bearings of Scottish aristocrats.19 Tournaments were much in vogue, providing opportunities for displays of martial valour, pretexts for factional fighting and frequently some looting of the surrounding countryside.20 Arthurian literature and pageant were in fashion; Edward I was a great enthusiast, and twice held ‘Round Tables’ to entertain his court.21 Right across Europe Latin prevailed as the language of ‘official’ documents, while French was the language which nobles had in common, even if it was not spoken in everyday life in Scotland or Ireland. This francophone aristocratic culture is generally labelled ‘Anglo-Norman’, in recognition of its eleventh-century origin in the Norman conquests. By the fourteenth century, this aristocracy had almost nothing to do with Normandy; but the anachronistic term is tolerated as it serves to distinguish the broadly similar English, Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish culture from the distinctive aristocratic cultures of Gaelic Scotland and Ireland and Wales.
LORDSHIP, KINGSHIP AND GOVERNMENT AT THE END OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Whether in the Hebrides or the midland shires of England, early fourteenth-century lords competed bitterly with neighbours and peers for prestige and territory, in courts of law or in combat, and often in both simultaneously. They also sought alliance with families of similar standing in an effort to gain security for themselves and advantage over rivals. Marriage was one of the chief means of cementing such alliances. The family connections of one lord deeply involved in the Bruce Wars may be used to illustrate the web of aristocratic relationships which bound together lordly interests far distant in geographic terms. Richard de Burgh, Red Earl of Ulster, married his eldest daughter Elizabeth in 1304 to Robert Bruce, the future king, then Earl of Carrick and already a widower and father of a daughter. Earl Richard’s sister Gelis was married to James the hereditary Stewart of Scotland, Bruce’s traditional ally and neighbour. The Red Earl’s second daughter, Matilda, was married to Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and lord of Kilkenny; and his second son was married to Gilbert’s sister. Other children of the Red Earl were married into important Anglo-Irish families: Catherine married Maurice fitz Thomas (later Earl of Desmond); Joan married Thomas fitz John (later Earl of Kildare); and Aveline married John de Bermingham, later to become Earl of Louth. Richard’s fourth son Edmund married a daughter of Turlough Ó Briain, Gaelic Irish king of Thomond; while his youngest daughter Alicia married a lord of the English west march, Sir Thomas de Multon. Thus the children of the Red Earl brought him allies right across the British Isles.22 While it was quite rare for one lord to build such a variety of wide-ranging connections, transmarine and cross-cultural marriages were not uncommon. These alliances could bear fruit of a material kind. In 1286 the Red Earl and another Irish magnate, Thomas de Clare, both campaigning in Connacht, were promised the support of four powerful Scottish magnate groups: the Bruces, the Stewarts, the Dunbars, and the MacDonald lords of Islay.23
Personal relationships among the ‘Anglo-Norman’ aristocracy were often framed within concepts of lordship and hierarchy. Lordship was expressed in many forms, but some generalisations may usefully be made. Rents were paid by tenants for use of the lord’s land, mills and other facilities; and aids or subventions were paid to a lord by his vassals, either in coin or in kind, on set occasions. A lord frequently required vassals to attend at his court in practical acknowledgement of his jurisdiction. Frequently too, he required from them military service. This often took the form of ‘knight service’, provision of mounted armed warriors for so many days in the lord’s army; but it could also involve provision of contingents of lesser warriors such as archers. In the western isles, provision of galleys (‘ship service’) was common. Lesser lords in pursuit of patronage and security tended to associate themselves with a greater lord and to attend him personally, and so a ‘retinue’ (or ‘meinye’ in Scotland) would form about the figure of a great magnate. In England terms of service could be specified in a written indenture; in Ireland the retinue of Anglo-Irish lords often included a Gaelic following or ‘kern’. In terms of social and geographic influence lordships overlapped, the lord of the manor or locality acknowledging a hierarchy of superior lordships. Whereas modern society is occasionally characterised as stratified in terms of social class, the different strands of medieval aristocratic society were woven together by personal bonds of lordship and landholding, and by the economic and social influence which these relationships could command.
Over and above all other lordships in the British Isles was the kingdom of England, under the firm rule of Edward I.24 Its strength lay in its size and consequent wealth of landed resources, in its central position with respect to the lordships which surrounded it, and above all in its unity. In England over three centuries Anglo-Saxon and Norman institutions had blended to produce a lordship peculiarly centralised and powerful. An Anglo-Saxon concept of monarchy lifted kingship far above and beyond ordinary lordship; the need for taxation advanced the development of administrative institutions; and the Norman institution of knight service required the aristocracy to furnish the king with heavy cavalry, regarded still in 1300 as the ultimate weapon of war. The King of England dispensed justice from an itinerant household, which was the principal source of royal patronage and access to high office. In time of war the royal household increased in size to provide the king with a powerful retinue of paid knights, the nucleus of the royal army. It also included both the king’s closest councillors and his administrators. Formal institutions of government were overshadowed, controlled and staffed by household personnel: these formal institutions included the king’s privy council, the Great Council, the exchequer (or accounting office), the chancery (or writing office) and parliament. This last-mentioned body had arisen largely in response to royal demands for taxation from his subjects, essential to pay for the king’s wars. Parliament was a formal occasion, a concentration of all aspects of royal power in a single court, in which the most important laws and royal pronouncements were made. Through the presence of all the main lords of the land, spiritual and temporal, and also from time to time of elements representing knights, townspeople and lower clergy, parliament mustered assent to the king’s government. It sanctioned (and occasionally withheld) financial subsidies from the laity. A ‘lay subsidy’ took the form of a grant of a stated proportion – a fifteenth for example – of the moveable wealth of the laity. Subsidies were also granted to the king by the clergy of the realm, assembled in convocation.
Within England there were many lordships or ‘liberties’, which enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy and privilege. Among the greatest territorial liberties was the Bishopric of Durham, within which the bishop had a very high degree of autonomy, even to the extent of minting his own coins. But on the death of a lord holding directly from the king, his lands and liberties would pass into the king’s hands, and revenues would be collected for the king’s use until the payment of a ‘relief’ by the heir. If the heir was a minor, his inheritance stayed in the hands of the king, exploited by royal officials or escheators until he came of age. Similarly on the death of a bishop, episcopal estates and revenues were managed by royal officials until a new bishop was consecrated. These windfalls, known as escheats, are important. While the royal archive has largely survived, we possess only chance survivals from the records of other great lords. For the duration of seigneurial minority or episcopal vacancy, therefore, accounts of escheats preserved in royal archive provide a window on the condition of estates about which we would otherwise know nothing.
Ten earls dominated the English aristocracy, and in their hands most of the landed wealth of the kingdom was concentrated. Below them in the social hierarchy were lesser lords, bannerets and barons; and below them the gentry, composed of knights, squires and substantial landowners. All the above-mentioned classes – the gentil classes – had the right to bear armorial devices on their personal seals and on shields, a badge of ‘gentility’; but it was upon the gentry that the king depended to fill public office as sheriffs, coroners and justices. The whole edifice of lordship rested upon an English-speaking peasantry, whose produce, rents and services sustained the gentil classes.
It was upon the mobilisation of this wealth that England’s ascendancy in the British Isles depended. Cash, as distinct from landed wealth, was generated by the towns, and especially by the export of wool for which England was famous. The early fourteenth century saw English wool exports at an all-time high of 36,000 sacks of wool; and although this had fallen somewhat by 1324, it was estimated that in that year the royal customs duties payable on wool and hides would bring in £13,000.25 Customs revenue amounted to some 40 per cent of the English king’s normal, regular income in that year. On top of this, the king could call for taxation, in the form of either lay or clerical subsidies. Yields from subsidies varied enormously, depending upon how they were collected. On top of this, the king could rely on revenues from his other territories. Gascon revenues were important, almost equal to those of the customs; revenues from Ireland, however, had declined to almost negligible proportions. But warfare was such an enormous drain upon the resources of the monarchy that, except towards the end of Edward II’s reign, the king was always in financial difficulties, and he relied heavily upon Italian bankers.
Edward I was refining an already sophisticated legal system, and was continuing a process whereby the kings progressively arrogated to themselves the jurisdictions of lesser lords. For the purposes of royal taxation and administration England was divided into counties; yet lordships, which often transcended county boundaries, remained fundamental to the exercise of political power in the localities. Earls, though they bore a title associated with a particular county or district, often held lands in many parts of the kingdom; and when the county court was summoned to discuss local issues, its business was dominated by the stewards of the great lords’ estates, who would protect their lords’ interests. The area of England of special significance for the Wars of the Bruces was of course the north. Although the area had long been fully absorbed into the kingdom of England, a number of regional peculiarities persisted.26 It was a very distinct region of the kingdom. Still referred to as Northumbria in memory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it was poorer than the south, at a distance from the centres of royal power and regarded by southerners as mountainous, windswept, cold and rainy. In ecclesiastical terms it possessed its own metropolitan, the Archbishop of York; in legal terms, a separate escheator was appointed for the north. A northern consciousness was reinforced by a sense of inferiority to the wealthy and privileged south.
Separate kingdoms they may have been, but Scotland and England were nonetheless bound together in that ‘aristocratic web that was broken neither by the Irish Sea nor the Anglo-Scottish border’.27 Aristocracies of both countries intermarried and were bound to one another by common culture and common interests. In terms of aristocratic and governmental institutions, the Scottish kingdom greatly resembled its southern neighbour in miniature.28 The ‘Anglo-Norman’ aristocracy had been transplanted into Scotland, as Norman, English, French and Flemish knights and ecclesiastics settled there by royal invitation in the twelfth century. Though the facility to speak French endured among the Scottish nobility, their predominant language in 1300 was probably a Scots form of northern English. Scotland too had earls, who attended a parliament on great occasions; lords (or lairds) who supplied heavily armed mounted knights in time of war; and a king. But whereas in England the Anglo-Saxon language and customs had in most respects been long banished from aristocratic life, Scotland had still a powerful Gaelic aristocracy. Consequently Scotland was rather less of a unity than England, and western lordships tended to enjoy considerable independence from the monarchy. Two cultures were present in the Scottish kingdom: the mainly English-speaking lords, peasants and townsmen of the eastern coastal plains; and the Gaelic-speaking lords and peasants of the Highlands, the Western Isles and Galloway. Although there is no evidence at this stage that there was any significant tension between these cultures, they must to some extent have been in competition, and the Gaelic culture and language were probably in slow retreat. Many social institutions in Scotland, though outwardly ‘Anglo-Norman’, had a Gaelic origin. The Scottish earls were successors to the mormaers, or sea-stewards, the great officers of the Gaelic kingdom. Scottish kingship too was an indigenous development rather than an ‘Anglo-Norman’ import. The rites of royal inauguration contained elements unchanged from remote antiquity. Coronation was not the custom in Scotland or among Gaelic rulers in Ireland or Scotland; instead the Scottish enkinging ceremony involved the placing of the new king on a sacred stone, the Stone of Destiny at the Abbey of Scone. A period of English overlordship had existed in the late twelfth century, and in the 1160s a Scottish king had given military service in person in the army of Henry II of England. But there had been no recurrence of this; and Scotland had by 1296 enjoyed independence for over a century. The Anglo-Scottish border had been precisely defined by the early thirteenth century; there was as yet no Debateable Land where England merged or shaded into Scotland.29
Gaelic Scotland, in addition to being a part of the Scottish kingdom, was also a part of a wider Gaelic world, the Gaeltacht. This Gaelic-speaking area lay to the west of the English and Scottish kingdoms, and to the west of England’s colony in Ireland, a great crescent of cultural homogeneity which spanned the northern seas, ruled by a multiplicity of unstable lordships.30 Here successions to titles and lordships were unpredictable and warfare endemic; the Irish Gaeltacht was characterised by English settlers as a ‘land of war’. After the Norwegian kingdom withdrew from the Western Isles in the 1260s the Scottish monarchy had enjoyed some success in drawing Gaelic lords into the sphere of its court. At this time too the de Burgh earldom of Ulster, by expanding into Donegal, threatened to sever the Scottish Gaeltacht from the Irish. Elsewhere in Ireland the ‘Anglo-Norman’ colony was in retreat and the ‘land of war’ spreading at the expense of the colony.31 But since land in the Gaeltacht tended to be poor and the area an unpromising source of revenue generally, Gaelic lords – kings to their own people – were largely abandoned to their own devices by English and Scottish monarchies; until during the Wars of the Bruces it appeared to both protagonists, but especially to the Bruces, that advantage might be had from intervention. In open letters to Irish chiefs and Welsh magnates, Robert and Edward Bruce based appeals for support on what might be described as ‘national’ or ‘racial’ grounds32 – common language and culture, and the common experience of oppression by the English. The Wars of the Bruces may then be interpreted as the violent reaction of the periphery against the imperialism of the centre, though to accept this view uncritically is to fall for the Bruces’ propaganda hook, line and sinker.
AGRARIAN ECONOMY IN THE NORTHERN BRITISH ISLES, C. 1300
Alternatively, in economic terms the conflict may be interpreted broadly as one of highlands versus lowlands. The wars appear to have taken precisely this form, of hordes from the highlands and islands of Scotland swooping down on the plains of Lothian and Northumberland, Meath and York. There are strong indications that the Western Isles and the north of Scotland supplied the manpower for the Bruces’ recovery of Scotland in 1307–14 and probably for the invasion of Ireland too; but in later years Scottish armies can only have been drawn from the most populous regions of the country, namely Lothian, the south-east and the eastern coastal strip. It is true, however, that the Wars of the Bruces originated in, and were at first contained in, parts of Britain that were relatively upland. They were by no means poor or bad lands; but on the whole arable farming in these areas survived under unpromising conditions.33 Heavy annual rainfall and acidic soils necessitated a reliance on the cultivation of oats, which were tolerant of high rainfall, rather than on wheat. They were predominantly pastoral areas, and cattle husbandry tended to be commoner than the management of sheep flocks. Seasonal movement of cattle between summer and winter grazings appears to have been common to all of these regions.34
The fifty-year period leading up to the Black Death of 1347–50 has attracted great attention from economic historians.35 At some point in the period c.1290 to c.1330, the population of medieval Britain reached its apogee, and thereafter began to decline. The great bulk of economic data derives from English estate and manorial records, and it is largely by extrapolation from the English evidence that educated guesses may be made as to conditions in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Nevertheless what is broadly true of England seems to hold good for conditions over the whole of the British Isles.36 For two and a half centuries the population of England had been expanding, and in response to the consequent land hunger, so too did the area under cultivation. Rises in both rents and food prices were largely symptoms of this land hunger; but other factors also contributed to the rise in prices, most notably the boom in the wool export trade which increased the amount of bullion in circulation and raised the prices of commodities.
Within a decade of 1300, however, the population of England began to decline. Trends are uneven and it is difficult to generalise, but it seems clear that ‘wasteland’ begins to figure more prominently in manorial accounts, indicating a reduction in the area under cultivation, and that rents and entry fines began to fall. Exactly what caused the change is still unclear. It used to be thought that soil exhaustion was chiefly responsible; the implication of which is that population was being forced down by long-term starvation. More recently it has been argued that weight must be given to the social context too; that lordship in particular was sufficiently powerful to influence economic and thus population trends. Diminishing rates of human fertility are likely to have resulted in a much more gradual alteration of population trends. Whatever the precise explanation, the corn-growing heartland of England was suffering from a crisis originating within the economy in the last decade of the thirteenth century and the opening decade of the fourteenth. Very soon afterwards, however, the whole of the British Isles and parts of Europe were reeling under the impact of a crisis inflicted by a wholly external factor: a series of crop failures which began in 1315 and lasted until the harvest of 1318, and in some places to 1321. This was caused by torrential rainfall in consecutive summers and it produced a widespread and prolonged food scarcity, causing food prices to soar.37 It made the population more vulnerable to disease and, in places, caused actual starvation. It is known as the Great European Famine.
In the north of England (and possibly in Ireland and Scotland) the effects of crop failure may not have been quite so devastating as in midland and southern England. In these areas the evidence of land hunger is comparatively slight. Cultivation was on a much smaller scale than in the south; and there was an abundance of high grassland which could be used to supplement the cropping area for a year or two and then be abandoned. There was therefore more scope for grain production on poor-quality soils, and more land to offset the effects of soil exhaustion. Greater reliance upon pastoral farming rather than cultivation may also have cushioned the effects of crop failure. Yet northern Britain was far from immune to the economic crisis. Pastoral farming was as prone to natural disaster as arable. In 1315 chronicles report a disease affecting sheep; in 1319 a ‘murrain’ of cattle.
The economic background to the Wars of the Bruces is thus characterised by climatic change, crop failures, animal disease and growing misery for the mass of the population, certainly in the corn-growing heartlands of the British Isles; and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent in northern Britain and Ireland. The relationship between famine and war is intriguing. The Wars of the Bruces involved the desolation of much of Scotland, Ireland and northern England, and so greatly exacerbated the effects of natural disaster; Scotland may have been compensated to some extent by the influx of bullion, grain and livestock, the fruits of extortion and robbery during successful war in England and Ireland. Did harsh economic conditions in northern Britain engender war? It is not really possible to say. Superficially there is a correlation between what chroniclers record as ‘bad years’ and escalations in the war: this seems to occur in 1311 and again in 1315–18. But on closer examination the sources will not sustain any such sweeping generalisation. Where comparison can be drawn, chroniclers’ reports of dire hardship often conflict with more reliable evidence of grain yields and bailiffs’ accounts.38 So while it may be tempting to represent the Bruce brothers as riding the whirlwind of economic distress, the picture of starving Scots driven southwards by hunger to plunder the lowlands of England and Ireland remains substantially unsupported.39
THE ENGLISH AND THE OTHER PEOPLES OF THE BRITISH ISLES
In the late thirteenth century, as today, the peoples of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales were self-consciously separate identities. Today we call them nationalities; but the terminology of ‘nationality’ and ‘nationalism’ is not entirely appropriate to the middle ages.40 For one thing, these identities were impaired by the much more pressing and immediate demands for loyalty to the lord, to the kin-group; for another, they were subordinated by the existence a universal church. It is safer to speak of ‘peoples’, or ‘solidarities’ bound together by common customs and law, common myths of origin and descent. But there was a fundamental difference between the peoples of Scotland and England, on the one hand, and those of Ireland and Wales, on the other. The monarchies which existed in Scotland and England, and the institutions upon which monarchy depended, provided a focus, a definition and an affirmation of the people’s identity. They had achieved a match between people and polity, ‘regnal solidarity’ as it is currently expressed; but in Ireland and Wales, where society was divided between natives and settlers, no such match existed.
Individual kings might aspire to govern several peoples; to do so was testimony to their power and greatness. The English claim to suzerainty over the whole of the British Isles has its roots in the aspiration of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex to the bretwaldaor kingship of all Britain. In the 990s Aethelred II called himself ‘ruler of the English and governor of the adjoining nations round about’, and elsewhere ‘emperor, by the providence of God of all Albion’; while in a display of overlordship, King Edgar in 973 was rowed on the River Dee by six or eight sub-kings of Wales and Scotland.41 Only after the Norman conquest did kings of England apply themselves to making this claim a reality. Native principalities in Wales came under pressure from Norman adventurers, who succeeded directly in asserting their own lordship over the south of the country. Norman military intervention in Ireland commenced in 1169; before long virtually all the native rulers gave notice of submission. Norman lords from England and Wales carved out great lordships; and a colony, peopled predominantly by English-speaking farmers, developed on the lowlands in the south and east.42 In both Ireland and Wales, however, the conquests were unco-ordinated, piecemeal, and driven by the opportunist instinct of the Norman aristocracy. Because the territorial interests of the Norman conquistadors were spread throughout Britain and other lands, they were not given to concentrated or intensive interference in any of their acquisitions. Norman conquests in Ireland and Wales were therefore not subjected to intensive colonisation. Scotland, of course, was not conquered. But her rulers had been obliged to acknowledge for a time the overlordship of the King of England. From 1093 to 1124 the Kings of Scots were his vassals; and from 1174 to 1189 that subjection was formalised. After this time Scottish kings continued to do homage to each new king of England, though only for lands which the Scottish king held in England, the chief of these being the liberty of Tynedale and the Honour of Penrith.
As the thirteenth century progressed the relationship between the ‘Anglo-Normans’ and the subject (though hardly ‘conquered’) peoples of the celtic lands began to alter. Professor Davies offers a number of explanations as to why it became sharper and more confrontational.43 The spirit of the early conquests, characterised by mutual recognition of interests, intermarriage, and ‘a relatively easy-going tolerance of other peoples’ norms’, was replaced by a growing discrimination between English and subject peoples on grounds of race and language. English overlordship became more demanding and aggressive. One explanation advanced to account for this change is that after England lost Normandy to France in 1204 the celtic countries attracted the attention and interference which had previously been directed at the continental possessions of kings of England. A second factor was the growing power, self-assurance and belligerence of native polities. Partly as a result of copying the methods and approach of Anglo-Normans, native rulers became more belligerent. Briain Ó Néill attempted in 1259 to form a federation of native princes in Ireland and Scotland to resist the Anglo-Normans; and the power of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd threatened the stability of the English position in Wales until his death in 1282.44 Simultaneous with these ‘political’ endeavours of the late thirteenth century there was a well-attested cultural renaissance in the celtic world, which in Ireland was tending to undermine the vigour and extent of the Anglo-Norman colony.45 A third reason offered for the increasing conflict between English and celtic peoples is the expansion of English government and the administrative mentality which supported it.46 An increase in the power of the kings of England was made possible by the growth of taxable wealth; and the growing competence of institutions of government (parliament, exchequer, chancery, courts and the institutions of local government) also contributed to their capacity to dominate. In Ireland and Wales Edwardian royal officials were on a mission to civilise, to regularise, to order and improve. English institutions and English law were perceived by settlers as civilising and productive of an ordered society. This perception encouraged intolerance of social institutions that were not English. By 1300 there were exchequers on the English model in Berwick, Dublin, Caernarfon and Carmarthen; in Dublin there was also a parliament, similar to that in England, but petitions from all over the English dependencies were heard at the English parliament. On the continent Gascony still remained to the King of England; and revenues from that duchy were accounted for at Westminster. In all the dependencies of England, justiciars, escheators, seneschals and other royal officers issued writs and collected revenues just as in England itself. The similarity between the system based largely at Westminster and the satellite administrations in the dependencies was often more superficial than real (‘a thinnish coating over a very un-English set of political facts’47); nevertheless these bureaucracies gave Edwardian England the administrative capability to intensify English lordship in each of these countries.
By the late thirteenth century, the stage was set for this intensification of English lordship, driven not by fragmented aristocratic efforts, but by the centralising monarchy of Edward I. It was less tolerant of native institutions than its predecessors, and markedly more uniformist. It was less compromising with local law and custom, and more insistent upon the written record, particularly upon the system of financial accountability that was developing at Westminster. In Ireland this tightening of control took the form of an increased respect for the king’s writ; a trend towards smaller administrative units; and a more regular supervision of the Dublin administration by Westminster. Irish laws were declared ‘detestable to God and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed law’.48 Even so, Edward’s interest in Ireland was confined to maximising revenues. Other aspects of the colony’s well-being were ignored; and this intensification of royal lordship actually coincided with the diminution of the colony’s geographical extent. In Wales the Edwardian reconquest took an altogether harsher form. Deploying manpower and money on a scale unparalleled, Edward achieved a thoroughgoing conquest of the north and west of the country in three great campaigns, 1277, 1282 and 1295.49 He completed the encirclement of the country by building a spectacular series of stone castles along the northern and western coast. By the Statute of Wales, 1284, the laws and customs of Wales were overhauled and the country ‘annexed and united’ to the English crown. During the Welsh campaigns Edward perfected the bureaucratic and military machine which he was shortly to unleash upon Scotland.
NOTES
1 CDS ii, nos. 1833, 1834; CDS iv, p. 488; CDS v, nos. 457, 465.
2 Barbour, The Bruce III, 675–724; Vita Edwardi II, p. 13; Fordun ii, 335.
3 Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 166–70.
4 Scalacronica, p. 35.
5 Barbour’s Bruce, ed. M.P. McDiarmid and J.A.C. Stevenson (3 vols.) (Scottish Text Society, 4th series, 1980–85).
6 Barrow, Robert Bruce; Duncan, RRS; Prestwich, Edward I; Maddicott, Lancaster; Phillips, Aymer de Valence; and also I.M. Davis, The Black Douglas (London, 1974).
7 For the purposes of this study the phrase ‘British Isles’ is taken to embrace Ireland and her associated islands.
8 Recent work on Scotland is usefully summarised in a review article by B. Webster, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1296–1389: Some Recent Essays’ SHR lxxiv (1995), 97–108.
9 Notable exceptions are: Scammell, ‘Robert I’; E. Miller, War in the North (University of Hull Publications, 1960); and three articles by J.A. Tuck, ‘Northumbrian Society in the Fourteenth Century’, NH vi (1971), 22–39; ‘War and Society in the Medieval North’, NH xxi (1985), 33–52; ‘The Emergence of a Northern Nobility’, NH xxii (1986), 1–17.
10 O. Armstrong, Edward Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland (London, 1923). Recent work is referred to on p. 199 below, n.1.
11 A.A.M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 368–71.
12 A.A.M. Duncan, ‘The Bruces of Annandale, 1100–1304’, TDGNHAS lxix (1994), 89–102.
13 Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, pp. 70–76.
14 Barbour, The Bruce VI, 579–82, 651; VII, 294–95; Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, p. 72; Phillips, ‘Documents’, Appendix, pp. 269–70.
15 G. Barrow and A. Royan, ‘James, Fifth Stewart of Scotland, 1260(?)–1309’, Essays on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland, ed. K.J. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 166–94; T.E. McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster: The History and Archaeology of an Irish Barony, 1177–1400 (Edinburgh, 1980).
16 CDS ii, nos. 1776, 1837.
17 Duncan, ‘The Bruces of Annandale’, p. 98.
18 P.R. Coss The Knight in Medieval England, 1000–1400, (Stroud, 1993), pp. 113–21.
19 The Siege of Carlaverock, ed. N.H. Nicholas (London, 1828); A.A.M. Duncan, The Nation of the Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) (Historical Association, 1970), p. 2.
20 M. Keen, Chivalry (London, 1984), pp. 203–12; Coss, Knight in Medieval England, pp. 53–56.
21 Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 120–21.
22 McNeill, Anglo-Norman Ulster, Appendix I; J.A. Watt, NHI ii, 353. It is not possible to say which Thomas de Multon (de Egremont or de Gilsland) Alicia married.
23 The document is known as the ‘Turnberry Band’, Stevenson, Documents i, 22–23.
24 The best short survey is Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance, especially pp. 41–66. It is described in greater detail in The English Government at Work, 1327–1336, eds. J.F. Willard, J.R. Strayer and W.H. Dunham (3 vols.) (Cambridge, Mass., 1940–50).
25 W. Childs, ‘Finance and Trade under Edward II’, Politics and Crisis in Fourteenth Century England, ed. J.Taylor and W. Childs (Gloucester, 1990), p. 27. The wool export boom of the early fourteenth century is evident from the graph of wool exports from Newcastle upon Tyne, Chart 7, p. 226 below.
26 H.M. Jewel, ‘North and South: the Antiquity of the Great Divide’, NH xxvii (1991), 1–25.
27 R. Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles 1100–1400 (Oxford, 1990), p. 63.
28 Surveys of the medieval Scottish kingdom are available in Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom, pp. 595–615; and R. Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), Chapter 1 and especially pp. 21–23 on the institutions of government; M. Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London, 1991), Chapter 5, pp. 53–73.
29 G.W.S. Barrow, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Border’, NH i (1966), 21–42.
30 Frame, Political Development, Chapter 9. I will use the term Gaelic in Irish and Scottish contexts, reserving the term Celtic to include aspects which also relate to Wales.
31 Lydon, NHI, ii, Chapter IX, ‘A Land of War’, pp. 240–74.
32 For the pitfalls of applying this terminology to medieval politics, see S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford, 1984), esp. pp. 250–56.
33 E. Miller, ‘Farming in Northern England During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, NH xi (1976 for 1975), especially pp. 3–7; and in AHE ii, 247–59.
34 J. McDonnell, ‘The Role of Transhumance in Northern England’, NH xxiv (1988), 1–17.
35 B. Harvey’s introduction to Before the Black Death: Studies in the Crisis of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. B.M. Campbell (Manchester, 1991), pp. 1–24. Also important is E. Miller’s Chapter 7, ‘Long Term Movements’, in AHE, pp. 716–55.
36 Price evidence in Scotland has recently been subject to detailed investigation in E. Gemmill, and N. Mayhew, Changing values in medieval Scotland: A study of prices, money and weights and measures (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11–16, where Scottish price fluctuations are shown to be closely related to well-documented trends in England.
37 Chart 1, p. 111 below incorporates a rough guide to changes in wheat prices over the period, and gives an indication of prices during the famine years of 1315, 1316 and 1322.
38 See Table 3 of E. Hallam, ‘The Climate of Eastern England, 1250–1350’, Agricultural History Review xxxii (1984), 130.
39 See p. 75 below.
40 Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, pp. 254–56; R.R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400, i Identities’, TRHS 6th series iv (1994), 11, 16–20; R.R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400, ii Names, Boundaries and Regnal Solidarities’ TRHS 6th series v (1995), 9–16.
41 Frame, Political Development, p. 16.
42 The conquests of Ireland and Wales are compared and contrasted in R.R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990).
43 Davies, Domination and Conquest, pp. 112–24.
44 Lydon, NHI ii, 244–46; D. Walker, Medieval Wales (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 111–33.
45 Lydon, NHI ii, 240–71.
46 Davies, Domination and Conquest, pp. 114–123.
47 R. Frame, ‘Power and Society in the Lordship of Ireland 1272–1377’, P&P No. lxxvi (1977), p. 5.
48 Lydon, NHI ii, 271; Frame, Political Development, pp. 144–51 and ‘ “qLes Engleys Nès en Irlande”: The English Political Identity in Medieval Ireland’, TRHS 6th series iii (1993), 90, 92–94.; Foedera i (II), 540.
49 J.E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford, 1901).