A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (64 page)

But the debate did not end there. Such was the mood in the country, and so unpopular had the Scottish war become, that even traditional service obligations based on tenure were beginning to be contested. At some point in the spring of 1300, for example, the local gentry in County Durham turned out in support of foot soldiers who had been imprisoned by their bishop for deserting the winter campaign. The people of Durham, they declared, were ‘St Cutherbert’s Folk’, and as such not bound to provide any military service at all beyond the Rivers Tyne and Tees. Later, in early June, there were similarly extraordinary scenes in Yorkshire, when knights from all counties assembled to tell Edward that they owed him no service in Scotland. In this case the knights lost the argument: the king, as was his wont, resorted to the written record, and proved from a number of twelfth-century chronicles that there was a long tradition of service north of the Border. Nevertheless, the fact that Edward was having to go to such lengths to persuade his knightly subjects to fight flies in the face of Peter Langtoft’s assertion that men marched to Scotland in 1300 ‘well-willing’. Only for those who had been granted or promised lands in Scotland can that comment have held true. Many others clearly had to be argued into fighting, and this could produce distinctly limited results. The muster roll for the 1300 campaign noted that Hugh fitz Heyr, a Shropshire landowner of little consequence, was obliged by the terms of his tenure to serve in the king’s war ‘with bow and arrow’. It also noted that ‘as soon as he saw the enemy he shot his arrow, then went home’.
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When the army eventually mustered in Carlisle at midsummer, the cavalry numbered around 1,700 mounted men – much better, that is, than the previous year, but not nearly as impressive as the 3,000 horse that had ridden into battle in 1298. The infantry situation was one of similar half-measures, in part due to the parlous state of royal finances. Having failed to obtain a grant of taxation, Edward knew he could not afford to field 26,000 foot soldiers as he had done at Falkirk. The Welsh, who had contributed 40 per cent of that impressive figure, were told on this occasion to stay at home. Officially this was their reward for ‘all the great work they have done in our service in the past’; in reality it was an ambitious experiment to balance the books. Wales, unlike England, was not subject to the niceties of parliamentary taxation, and in place of men from the valleys the king now wanted money. As Edward rode north, his commissioners were instructed to extract a subsidy from various Welsh districts, which would pay for an army of English foot soldiers – 16,000 had been ordered, though in the end only 9,000 turned up.
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Nevertheless, the king’s 10,000-strong host looked impressive enough when it set out from Carlisle in early July. A poet in their midst captured something of the splendour of the scene: the colourful banners, the beautiful pennons hanging from the knights’ lances, the horses richly caparisoned with embroidered silks and satins. Looking behind him, he saw that ‘mountains and valleys were everywhere covered with sumpter horses, and wagons with provisions, and the train of tents and pavilions. The days’, he added, ‘were fine and long’.
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As the army’s assembly in Carlisle implies, Edward’s strategy in 1300 was new. Eschewing the eastern route of his earlier campaigns, the king had chosen to concentrate on south-western Scotland, where the garrisons he had established in 1298 had latterly been subjected to repeated attack. Once his hold on this area – modern Dumfries and Galloway – had been consolidated, he would then be able to strike north into Ayrshire, and lay waste the lands of Robert Bruce.

His first target was the castle of Caerlaverock, which lay just a few miles across the Border on the opposite shore of the Solway Firth. Probably captured in the course of the Falkirk campaign, but subsequently retaken by the Scots, this castle and its small Scottish garrison had been making life miserable for their English neighbours at Dumfries and Lochmaben ever since. Their ability to resist a large army, however, was limited: Caerlaverock (which still stands today) is no Stirling. The newly built home of a prosperous local knight, it had been designed with the intention of keeping out local raiders, not repelling a wrathful English king. For a few days in July 1300 its defenders manfully withstood some showy assaults by the English chivalry, but once Edward’s fleet arrived with his heavy siege equipment, they recognised that the game was up. By the middle of the month, in exchange for life and limb, the garrison had surrendered.
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Yet even before this minor victory had been obtained, the wheels of the English war machine had started to wobble. Although only days had elapsed since their departure from Carlisle, the infantry were already beginning to desert in droves. On 15 July, as he moved from Caerlaverock to Dumfries, the king gave orders that all such fugitive foot should be arrested. But as he moved further west, the haemorrhage continued: on 27 July, orders were sent out to raise replacement contingents. The Scots, who on this occasion had wisely decided to avoid battle, were able to watch from a distance as their enemies evaporated. By the time Edward finally caught up with them on 8 August, half his army was gone. All that followed was a brief, botched skirmish on the banks of the River Cree near Wigtown, which saw the Scots running for the hills and the English, as in the past, left with nothing to do. After a week of pointless waiting, the king turned around and headed back in the direction of Dumfries.
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As the end of August approached, Edward drew up his depleted forces just south of Dumfries and encamped them in the once-serene surroundings of Sweetheart Abbey. Like nearby Caerlaverock, Sweetheart was another recent addition to the local landscape – it had been founded by John Balliol’s mother – and it bespoke a similar, sadly misplaced confidence that Border warfare would remain a thing of the distant past. Now, as a frustrated English king paused in its precinct and considered his diminishing range of military options, the abbey found itself in the middle of a war zone – a situation that made the unannounced appearance of the archbishop of Canterbury all the more surprising. Winchelsea, rather shaken from a perilous journey across the quicksands of the Solway Firth, came bearing a letter from the pope.
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Edward might well have anticipated news to lift his spirits. Boniface VIII, elected in 1294, was not only the broker of the slowly progressing Anglo-French peace but an old personal friend. The two men had met over thirty years earlier, during the last stages of the Montfortian civil war, when the then-young papal notary had been among those trapped in the Tower of London, until the then-young Lord Edward had secured his deliverance. The episode had apparently had a lasting impression on Boniface: even now, as the king was sat in Sweetheart Abbey, the pope was in his palace at Anagni, recalling it for the benefit of English ambassadors. ‘It was then,’ he said, ‘that we gave this king our par ticular affection, and formed the opinion … that he would be the finest prince in the world.’
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But Boniface’s fond memories of Edward in 1300 only made the content of the letter that Winchelsea now read out all the more ironic. The pope had written it the previous year, after discussions with an especially persuasive Scottish embassy. Although it started in affectionate terms, it soon moved on to take the king to task over his intervention in Scotland, rehearsing in the process many of the Scots’ historical arguments for their independence. Edward was accused of having ignored these arguments; of having longed to occupy ‘a realm which was then destitute of the help of a king’; and, as a consequence, of having committed numerous ‘outrages of justice’: causing heavy losses to Scotland’s inhabitants; imprisoning Scottish clergymen until they died; occupying Scottish castles and monasteries (this last charge being especially pertinent, given the king’s current location). The pope concluded by telling Edward that ‘out of reverence of God, the Apostolic See and ourselves’ he should leave Scotland alone.
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Such an unequivocal admonition from God’s representative on Earth could not be ignored, and would require a carefully considered response. In the immediate term, however, it made no great difference. The cold weather was already starting to set in, and the king’s army had crumbled away to nothing, leaving his campaign dead in the water. At the start of September, Edward dismissed those troops still with him and took ship across the Solway Firth to England.
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Outwardly, he blamed everybody but himself for this latest military failure. In an undated letter to his new chief minister, Walter Langton, the king ordered the punishment of both the deserters themselves and the officials responsible for their recruitment. He also demanded the names of any lords who had obstructed the recruitment process, and insisted that any sheriffs who had failed to provide supplies should be chastised ‘so that they may be an example for the future’. As this list of scapegoats suggests, however, the real reason for the expedition’s collapse was a lack of resources and, above all, a lack of money. The cavalry, obliged to serve at their own expense, had on this occasion stayed the course; it was the infantry, starved of food and wages, that had deserted right from the start – an exodus that, as the best-informed chroniclers attest, had ultimately scuppered the English campaign.
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Privately, of course, Edward appreciated that scarcity had been the root of his failure. He had gone to war knowing his treasury was short of funds, and embracing the desperate (not to say deluded) notion that this deficit could somehow be made good by tapping the wealth of Wales. As a result, he had succeeded merely in proving an obvious point, namely that the Welsh were insufficiently well-off to subsidise an English conquest of Scotland. What was needed, as the king had known all along, was a sum of money such as could proceed from only one source. Towards the end of September he bowed to the inevitable. Parliament was ordered to reassemble in January.
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In the meantime, Edward remained in Cumbria, where he was rejoined by his new queen, Margaret. This reunion must have brought him some cheer, not least because Margaret had recently been safely delivered of her first child, a boy, born at Brotherton in Yorkshire and christened Thomas. Yet even this event, happy as it was, highlighted the contrast between the king’s current situation and his fortunes of old. His previous son had been born in the wake of a successful conquest, rather than in the middle of a seemingly endless war. In the autumn of 1300 Edward’s last act before returning south was to recross the Border for talks with the Scots. His distaste at having to compromise with men whom he considered to be rebels and traitors was clear, and he scoffed at their offer of a permanent peace. ‘Every one of you has done homage to me as chief lord of Scotland,’ he reminded them. ‘Now you set aside your allegiance and make a fool of me as if I were a weakling.’ In the end, all the king would grant was a six-month truce, and his promise that he would return in the spring to lay Scotland waste from sea to sea.
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When parliament reconvened at the start of 1301 – in Lincoln, un accountably – Edward made no bones about the reason for the recall. ‘I am without money,’ he reportedly told the assembly. ‘I must have aid of my land if I am to recommence the war with Scotland.’ Such was his poverty, in fact, that the king now proposed that the knights and burgesses should grant him a fifteenth of their goods, rather than the twentieth they had offered the previous year. At this, says one chronicler, there was much disgruntled muttering.
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Edward, of course, knew what parliament’s price would be. The perambulation of the Forest, so long postponed, had finally been performed during the past summer, and the results were now in the king’s possession. As he had feared, they weighed heavily against the Crown. Roughly half of the Royal Forest, it had been found, was an unjust extension; thousands of acres all over England were earmarked to be returned to ‘the community’.
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Lately, by dint of necessity, Edward had started to take the demands of his subjects seriously. In the autumn of 1300, for example, he had quietly instructed his officials to ensure that Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were kept in all their points. The perambulation of the Forest, however, he continued to regard as a ludicrous affair, and not without reason. The men appointed to determine the extent of the Forest had to rely in practice on the testimony of local juries, yet the very fact that these juries were local inevitably affected the nature of their testimony. Those who lived within the bounds of the Forest were only too happy to swear – as, for instance, they had just done in Warwickshire – that once upon a time their region had contained no Royal Forest at all. And ‘once upon a time’ was the perambulation’s second laughable aspect. The Forest Charter asked jurors to recall what the extent of the Forest had been at the start of the reign of Henry II – that is, in the year 1154. Even in 1225, when the Charter had first been published, this was a question that set great store by the collective memory of local communities. By 1300, to anyone even slightly bother ed about the burden of proof, it must have made the entire exercise seem invalid.
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