Under the Hammer

Edward I and Scotland

Fiona Watson

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781904607816
• eBook ISBN: 9781907909191
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

An "lively and challenging" study of King Edward I of England's conquest of Scotland ( English Historical Review).
War truly begins when the invading army, conquest complete, goes home. It is the relationship between the native population and those remaining behind as part of the new administration which holds the key to our understanding of not only the mechanisms of conquest, but also the fundamental elements of government desired by societies. Nowhere is this more convincingly demonstrated than in the attempted annexation of Scotland by Edward I of England, already conqueror of Wales. The Scotland of Wallace and Bruce nearly succumbed, having wrestled with contradictory desires for independence, and for stability and united government, for nearly a decade. The fact that, ultimately, she did not give in illustrates that patriotism does indeed play a central role in discussions of war and conquest.
Fiona Watson examines the process of conquest and attempted colonisation of one medieval kingdom by another, concentrating on that most vital aspect of conquest: the maintenance of garrisons. She shows how the kingdom of Scotland was able to marshal its resources and create a coherent and cohesive national front to deal with a more powerful enemy.
Under the Hammer provides a much clearer picture of medieval Scotland—its varying component parts; its sense of self, its strengths and weakness. Much of this will surprise.

CHAPTER ONE

THE LION AND THE LEOPARD

Where stood Scotland at the end of the thirteenth century? That is the question we must ask, so that we might better understand not only why Edward I went to such lengths to add his northern neighbour to his portfolio of acquisitions, but how resistance to his conquest proved so successful (up to a point).

Then, as now, Scotland was a land of formidable contrasts, ancient seismic forces having created great mountain barriers, particularly between Highlands and Lowlands. Soils were often poor for growing crops, but there was good arable land in the south and east and the uplands can sustain sheep and cattle and all manner of wild beasts. There was coal, lead, silver and gold in the ground, as well as valuable commodities like timber and salt above it. The short winter days were largely bereft of the sun’s goodness and those with the power to entertain through the long nights must have been highly prized in the past when there was little to do at this unproductive time of year. Long before the Roman legions arrived in the first century AD, the tribes of northern Britain had become hierarchical and warlike, with architecture reflecting the power and authority of their chiefs.

Partly in, but mostly out of the Roman Empire, even tribes some distance away from the walls built to keep them at bay enjoyed the benefits of imperial trading networks. And once the Romans finally left in the fifth century, continental trade continued, though it looks as if there was a degree of social collapse even in areas not actually part of the Empire. Nevertheless, a number of kings (in Argyll in the west; Atholl in the central Highlands; and the area around Inverness in the north) soon emerged, consolidating their power and control of resources by military might and the attractive tenets of Christianity, which spread across these nascent kingdoms from the sixth century.

Scotland itself first comes on record in 900 AD. Sharing the Gaelic language with the inhabitants of Ireland, the Scots laboured under threats from the recently arrived Norse. But the new kingdom survived and even expanded into English territory beyond the River Forth which had marked the kingdom’s original southern boundary.

After William of Normandy’s conquest of England in 1066, Scottish kings copied what they fancied from the well-organised Normans, introducing innovation in agriculture, religious institutions, trading frameworks, royal administration and military organisation. But they were happy to keep traditional practices where it suited, the nation’s story still bound up with an ancient connection to Ireland whose Gaelic language was spoken (along with Norman French) by many nobles and probably the king too. Scotland’s racial make-up was ‘complicated’ (as is that of most nations), most obviously because its boundaries extended into other kingdoms, but also because its kings had encouraged a considerable influx of useful foreigners. Officially it encompassed Scots, Anglo-Saxons, Britons and Normans, the kingdom’s social and political culture still tending to privilege local power structures and customs. Nevertheless, by 1200 Scotland had coalesced – according to its leaders at least – into a single Scottish people bound together by the comparatively undemanding, but nonetheless unifying, figure of their king.

It had certainly not all been plain sailing. Conflicts within the royal family and with powerful nobles, never mind outsiders, were a blight on political and cultural life almost from the moment Scotland was born, and continued into the thirteenth century. And by that century too, a fundamental divide had already opened up between Highlanders and Lowlanders. In part it was a recognition of the very different topographies of each region (broadly speaking), with settled peaceful farmers minding their own business in the Lowlands and lawless cowmen causing havoc in the Highlands. (This point of view was articulated from an unapologetically Lowland perspective and so must be treated with much caution.) But in the thirteenth century, royal authority started to become more forceful, more inclined to speak for the whole kingdom, even if the king himself ruled ‘with the consent, testimony and acquiescence of my bishops, earls and barons.’ He also worked hard, seeing and being seen regularly across the core of his kingdom from the Tweed to the Tay, collecting and disbursing royal revenues, giving justice and managing disputes.¹

It no doubt helped that this was a time of general prosperity at the end of a comparatively warm period. A roaring trade in wool, bought up sometimes years in advance by the cloth-makers of Flanders in particular, brought wealth in the form of the great customs on trade into royal coffers and into the pockets of landowners great and small. Berwick, based on its peninsular site between the River Tweed and the North Sea and right on the border with England, grew into a port of great strategic and commercial importance. By the later thirteenth century, it was by far the most prosperous town in Scotland, primarily as the conduit through which the wool exported by the great Border abbeys flowed. Both the Germans and the Flemings probably had merchants’ halls there.

This, then, was a time of peace and, so far as we can tell, prosperity. Though Alexander III had far less revenue at his disposal than the rulers of the more centralised kingdoms of England and France, he was easily the richest man in Scotland and, since his government was less intensive and his military activities negligible (give or take the tussle with the Norwegians in 1263), his outgoings were much less too.² It certainly helped that, despite perceptions to the contrary, the relationship between England and Scotland – the two kingdoms of the island of Great Britain – was, from the later thirteenth century, characterised by the very opposite of the fierce animosity that erupted after the outbreak of war in 1296. Indeed, war was one of the least likely scenarios that political pundits might have predicted in the aftermath of Alexander III’s untimely death a decade earlier.

This is not meant to imply that there hadn’t been problems in relations between the two kingdoms, up to and including the intermittent outbreak of overt hostilities; nor that racial taunting of the type well-known in modern sporting arenas was alien to thirteenth-century Scots and English.³ Abuse and suspicion certainly existed, but among those whose responsibility it was to shape and steer the destinies of each kingdom – the lay and ecclesiastical élites – there was a deep-seated and fairly comfortable relationship based on shared kin, language (Norman French for the nobles and Latin for the churchmen), and values.

Indeed, it has been pointed out that a constant fixation on borders and distinct kingdoms ‘can obscure as much as it illuminates. This was an age when local and trans-national political associations were often paramount, the national hesitant and fragile.’⁴ Both in peace and in war, the interests of the thirteenth-century Scottish and English monarchies, together with the landholding class immediately beneath, flowed across and diluted the effects of the border; indeed, ‘it has been calculated that, at some stage during the thirteenth century, nine out of thirteen Scottish earldoms had English property, while seven out of twenty-two English earldoms had Scottish interests’.⁵ Intermarriage meant, to take only one example, that Edward I of England was brother-in-law to Alexander III of Scotland, and therefore great-uncle to the young Margaret of Norway, Alexander’s granddaughter and heir presumptive to the Scottish throne from 1284; King John Balliol, who reigned from 1292, was son-in-law to John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, who defeated Balliol’s army at Dunbar in 1296 and then became Edward’s lieutenant in Scotland.

But there was one important bone of contention that had long threatened good relations between the two kingdoms and which consistently exposed the Scots as the aggressors. Scotland’s kings had had a tendency to view Northumbria and Cumbria – parts of the once-powerful kingdoms of Northumbria (Anglo-Saxon) and Strathclyde (British) – as fair game for conquest. Indeed, they had acquired the northern tip of Northumbria from the River Forth to the River Tweed as early as the tenth century and saw no reason to stop there. They were often to be found south of the Solway or Tweed pursuing these claims as belligerently as possible, particularly in times of English weakness, such as the civil war following Henry I’s death in 1135.

The English claim to overlordship was even more long-standing, becoming a consistent expression of the superiority of the West Saxon kings over all other rulers in the British Isles in the tenth century. With the Norman conquest, the concept of an overarching British kingship vested in the kings of England was readily inherited. In 1072 Malcolm III of Scotland became King William of England’s man – the formal feudal method of accepting another’s lordship – after the latter led an army deep into Scotland; this had only become necessary, however, because Malcolm had wrongly presumed that William’s difficulties in the north of his kingdom in the aftermath of his conquest of England in 1066 provided an ideal opportunity for promoting his own ambitions in the area.

This encapsulates the basic relationship between the two crowns: English kings remained uninterested in Scotland so long as the border stayed where it was and peaceful; Scottish kings continued to exploit potential English weakness but were usually brought round to an understanding and acknowledgement of the military superiority of the English crown. A resolution of the problem was not forthcoming until 1237, when Alexander II of Scotland agreed to abandon his claims to Northumberland in the Treaty of York in return for lucrative English lands. Now that this long-standing issue had been resolved, there was little to hinder good relations.

Whatever the legal arguments, English claims to superiority were really a practical expression of the imbalance of power vested in the two crowns, given the resources available to each. Such an imbalance did not challenge the effective sovereignty of Scotland’s kings or the independence of the northern kingdom, especially as most English kings had far more pressing issues to deal with when it came to their own extensive landed possessions in France. Even the Treaty of Falaise (1174), which permitted Henry II to garrison three Scottish border castles after the Scottish king, William I, managed to get himself captured in Northumberland, was not an attempt to interfere with Scottish government, but an extension of the usual (largely ineffectual) methods of guaranteeing Scottish good behaviour.

But times did change and centuries of acceptance of this big king/little king relationship (grudging or otherwise) became challenging after 1200. In the first instance, the loss of Normandy and Anjou loosened the English crown’s connections with the continent (though they still held Gascony), prompting an increased interest in British affairs, particularly after 1259 when these losses were formally recognised. Secondly, developments in legal definitions of rights and jurisdictions were beginning to make it more difficult to maintain conflicting positions within the hierarchical structure of western European society.

By the mid-thirteenth century the kings of Scots had no problem with paying homage and fealty to the English king for their English lands. But they would no longer tolerate the idea that their kingship might be dependent in any sense on a greater earthly authority: kings were kings and sovereignty was not relative. The kings of England, of course, maintained the opposite view – the admissions of superiority which had accrued over the years could not be undone and might even acquire greater definition as legal rights became more refined. Technically speaking, the issue of holding land of another king and the implications for sovereignty were quite separate, but the two were often interlinked. The issue of the status of the kingdom of Scotland, for example, was only brought up when the king of Scots went to pay homage and fealty for his English lands. Both Alexander II and Alexander III categorically refused to accept that they were bound to do so for the kingdom of Scotland; equally, Henry III and Edward I, while not pressing the point, reserved the right to demand acceptance of their overlordship in the future.

The clash of these conflicting interpretations of rights was not restricted to Scotland and England; indeed, the king of France, Philip IV (who came from a line of kings who pointedly ‘upheld the doctrine that they themselves did homage to no man’⁶) energetically challenged Edward I’s understanding of his own sovereignty by interfering in the latter’s dukedom of Gascony. However, in the case of Scotland and England, no-one thought these technical difficulties would lead to war; indeed, both Henry and Edward had no desire to strain the relationship between the two kingdoms, however much they believed in their own rights. There was far too much to be gained from peace to warrant its deliberate sabotaging. But history is littered with moments when circumstances conspire to give one point of view a practical advantage over another and it would be an unusual leader indeed who failed to take advantage of them.⁷

And certainly the unthinkable did happen. In one of history’s little ironies, Alexander III, aged only forty-four, brought his dynasty to an end by making a fatally romantic dash to attempt to perpetuate it with his new young second wife. All the children of his first marriage had already predeceased him, leaving as heir presumptive his granddaughter, a young Norwegian princess. The Scottish élites had only reluctantly accepted this Margaret as a potential ruler of Scotland in 1284, after the death of Alexander’s two sons, no doubt agreeing primarily because choosing a male heir from the fringes of the dynasty was far too daunting a task; it was easier to assume that the king still had plenty of time to produce another boy. However, the Scottish political community’s reaction to the latter’s untimely death and the eventual arrangements made for the Maid and her future as queen of Scots (she was not formally accepted as heir till October 1286, when Alexander’s queen probably gave birth to a posthumous stillborn child) reflected both the maturity of the Scottish political system, and the close relationship that England and Scotland now enjoyed.⁸

Margaret of Norway’s great-uncle, Edward I of England, was in the prime of his life, and his reign. In his late forties, he had ruled the southern kingdom for nearly fifteen years and had already laid down the foundations of the conquest of Wales and the reformation of English finance, adm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Map
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction: In Praise of Fact and Fiction
• 1 The Lion and the Leopard
• 2 The Resistible Rise of Edwardian Government
• 3 A Kingdom Divided
• 4 Stalemate
• 5 Turning the Screw
• 6 Checkmate
• 7 ‘Edward the Fair’? The Settling of Scotland
• 8 Lessons in Conquest
• Plates
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index