The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald
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to realise his own claim to overlordship of Scotland. Balliol, his puppet on the Scottish throne, so far forgot himself as to conclude an alliance with France, and Edward’s high-handedness and interference in Scottish internal affairs was answered by Scottish inroads into Cumberland and Northumberland in 1296. “They wrought some mischief”, and whatever the immediate damage done to the English Borderers, the consequences were dramatic.
The preliminaries to open war included, on Edward’s side, the seizure of property held in England by dissident Scots, and the massacre by the Scots of English sailors at Berwick. Edward, at Newcastle with a considerable force, demanded Balliol’s appearance in vain; while he was waiting he learned that the lord of the English castle of Wark had abandoned his charge and gone over to the Scots, “the violence of his passion for a Scotch lady … proving too strong for his bond of duty to his king”. Edward sent reinforcements to Wark, but the fugitive English lord returned unexpectedly with a Scottish raiding party and cut the reinforcements to bits in the dark. (Not a major incident in the campaign, but a perfect example of how national and personal affairs crossed and countered each other on the Border, and how Anglo-Scottish attraction could be even more powerful than Anglo-Scottish distaste. Here was the Borderer, self-sufficient and apart, using the frontier for his own ends in despite of central authority.)
Edward is said to have thanked God that he hadn’t started the war; he did not doubt his capacity to finish it. He waited at Wark with his army, which included some Scottish nobles, among them a rugged young knight named Robert Bruce.
Nor did he have to wait long. The Scots, arming on the Borders for the crunch which was obviously coming, struck first across the western march. They devastated the country north of Carlisle, burned the city’s suburbs, and stormed the walls which were England’s bastion on the north-west frontier. The city held, not for the first or last time, with its womenfolk lending assistance in hurling stones and hot water down on the besiegers, and the Scots retired over the Border again.
Edward ignored them. He had made his plan, and he carried it out with ruthless efficiency. He took Berwick, the Scots suffering dreadful loss. No one can be sure quite how extensive or callous the massacre was, yet it is of some importance, because certain historians fix on Berwick’s fall as a turning-point in Anglo-Scottish relations. The general opinion is that 7000 to 8000 Scots were killed; it does appear that Edward deliberately killed every man capable of bearing arms. One version says that later the women—and presumably the children—were sent into Scotland.
On the other hand, it has been suggested that the English slaughtered everyone in the town, regardless of age or sex. “Indiscriminate butchery”, says one historian,1 and the total of dead has been placed as high as 17,000. It is certainly not impossible that Edward ordered a general massacre, pour encourager les Ecossais; he was perfectly capable of it. If he did, then there may be grounds for the contention that this, more than anything else, bred hatred of England north of the line. I would doubt it; at least, so far as its lasting effect is concerned, it seems unlikely that Scottish reivers three centuries later were galloping south thinking “Remember Berwick”. But even if its effect has been overstated, the Berwick massacre was another strong link in the chain of Anglo-Scottish hostility.
Edward now addressed himself to bringing Scotland to heel. It was not difficult. He marched through eastern Scotland as far as Elgin, defeating the Scots at Dunbar en route, received submission on all sides, appropriated the Stone of Destiny, and so back to Berwick again. He had taken five months over the campaign, and only once had to spend a night under canvas.
But Edward, like many native Scottish kings, was to discover that it was easier to get control of Scotland than to keep it. His triumphal progress had been designed to show Scotland who was master; in the place of the abject Balliol he left only a governor, John de Warrenne, but with English garrisons in the castles, English justice, and English taxes. It was not enough for the task, as Edward should have realised. To subdue Scotland, he would have had to treat it as he had treated Berwick. Instead, he made his tour, left behind an elderly and incompetent governor, and hoped for peace. What he got was William Wallace.
The story of the Scottish revolt has been told so many times that one need not go into it again. Its political effects were enormous, not least along the Border. While first Wallace and later Bruce carried the torch, while Edward, probably the ablest soldier-king England ever had, came again and died, old and done, in the Cumberland marshes, while the battles were fought and the English gradually borne southward again, the Borders learned what it was to be a no man’s land. After Wallace’s victory at Stirling, where the Scots gave a foretaste of things to come by flaying the corpse of Edward’s detested treasurer, Cressingham, Northern England had been invaded; Northumberland was subjected to systematic plunder and devastation; to the west, Carlisle again held out, but Cumberland was laid waste as far as Cockermouth and the Lakes. The county struck back, and Clifford’s Cumbrians harried Annandale, slaughtering and burning. So it went on, to and fro, and while Scotland and England settled the great issue, the Borderland was being created in a sense that neither set of national leaders would have understood. Edward and Wallace left a terrible legacy, and to the people of the Marches it hardly mattered who had started it all. One thing the war ensured; whatever treaties might be made and truces agreed at the top, however often a state of official peace existed, there was never again to be quiet along the frontier while England and Scotland remained politically separate countries.
Bannockburn was the high point in Scotland’s fight for independence. Bruce, whatever reservations may be held about his character, was that rare combination of an inspiring leader, a good general, and a personally expert fighting man. Under his supervision, the finest army England had ever put into the field was destroyed in two days; the English chivalry broke its heart against the steel rings of the Scottish infantry, and by night on the second day England’s king was in flight, the best of his country dead or captured, and his father’s dream of a unified Britain had evaporated. Indeed, it had been easier to take a kingdom from the son than a yard of ground from his father.
It was a smashing victory, and the general dismay in England was especially strong in the north, with good cause. Scottish forces under Edward Bruce and James Douglas poured into the English East March; Northumberland was pillaged again, and Durham only escaped similar treatment by paying a mighty ransom. Yorkshire and Westmorland were less fortunate, being plundered of cattle and prisoners; Appleby was sacked and burned, along with other towns; Redesdale and Tynedale, favourite targets of later raids, were ravaged, and Cumberland was forced to disgorge tribute to the Scottish king.
Bruce had been humane to his beaten enemies at Bannockburn; it is interesting to note that the surviving invaders of Scotland probably received better treatment than the civilian inhabitants of the northern shires who had taken no part in the campaign. Not that this was inconsistent with the chivalric code; indeed, it seems to have been part of it.
A significant feature of this Scottish invasion was that it saw the levying of vast indemnities from the English Borderers; Bruce set the example, on a large scale, for those later generations of Border gangsters who made blackmail and protection racketeering systematic.
Without going into further detail of the great raids and counterraids of this period, it can be judged in what condition the War of Independence left the Borderland. It had been most brutally used; in addition to the ravages of the contending armies, there had been an unusually heavy rainfall in the year after Bannockburn; seed rotted, crops could not be got in, sheep and cattle were dying. When Edward II again marched into Scotland in 1315 “bread could scarcely be found for the sustenance of his family”,2 and the expedition was abandoned. It was as bad on one side as on the other—so bad, that another Border phenomenon emerged.
“Many of the English who dwelt nigh the Marches, wearied out with their sufferings, and despairing of protection from their own king, abandoned their country, and confederating with the Scots, became companions and guides of their incursions into England, and sharers with them of the spoils of their unhappy countrymen”.3
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