At the time of Alexander III’s death in 1286, Scotland and England had enjoyed a long tradition of, essentially, good relations. Intermittent attempts by English kings over the preceding two centuries and more to procure a degree of sovereignty over their Scottish counterparts had never really taken root; indeed, it is questionable whether any English king had ever seriously believed that they would. William the Lion (reigned 1165–1214) was obliged to give homage for his kingdom after he was captured in 1174 as part of his ransom arrangements, but fifteen years later he paid a large sum to ensure that he and his successors would be free of any feudal obligation to the English Crown in the future. A century later, when Edward I came to the throne in England, the Scottish king, Alexander III, made a trip south to give homage for his various properties in England. Edward made a rather half-hearted attempt to have Scotland included in the homage ceremony, but this was robustly rejected by Alexander, who told him that the Kingdom of Scotland was held ‘from God alone’1, which Edward accepted and there the matter rested.
3. The coronation of Edward I. Edward only commanded one Scottish action in person, the Battle of Falkirk, 1298. His death in 1307 was a major blow to the fortunes of the English occupation forces, however the tide of the war had probably already started to turn in favour of the Scots.
Relations between the two countries were largely based on social relationships – cross-border landholding was fairly commonplace, but almost all of the properties were relatively modest. Although a Scottish lord might own several properties in England (or in France or Ireland), or vice versa, nobody was a top-ranking noble (or magnate) in both kingdoms. Naturally, any level of landholding automatically meant a degree of obligation to the Crown and therefore anyone who held land in both countries had a range of responsibilities to both kings, but this was never really a very serious problem before the English invasion of 1296, and its significance thereafter has been rather exaggerated by historians. The number of individuals involved was not terribly large in either kingdom and the properties concerned were mostly quite modest. No individual held a property of greater significance than a barony in more than one kingdom. Contrary to the claims of many writers in the past, neither Robert Bruce, nor John Comyn or even Alexander III, was considered a magnate in the English political structure, though all three of them did hold valuable English properties.
4. A sixteenth-century English artwork, depicting a fictitious parliament of Edward I attended by Llewellyn, Prince of Wales and Alexander III. Artworks and forged documents were an important weapon in the propaganda arsenals of medieval kings: the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ is not a modern innovation.
There was surprisingly little economic activity between the two countries. England’s trade lay mainly with France and Scotland’s mainly with the Baltic and the Low Countries – the Netherlands and Belgium. Both countries depended on wool as the chief export crop and there was therefore little point in exporting wool from one to the other. There was, however, a considerable degree of cultural overlap. Both kingdoms had adopted the political and military ethos of France that we now call feudalism. In England this had come about through the Norman Conquest of 1066; in Scotland it had come about through a mixture of exposure to the practices of her southern neighbour, a considerable degree of intermarriage between the two royal families and the senior nobility, and the general adoption of ‘feudal’ practice across Northern and Western Europe. In short, that was how a ‘modern’ nation functioned in the later Middle Ages. Long before the outbreak of the wars of independence there was precious little practical cultural, military or political difference between most of Scotland and most of England. There were some very clear regional differences within both countries, but little or nothing to distinguish the social ethos of Brechin from that of Bedford, save that the average ‘parish gentry’ landholder in Bedford might be more likely to speak French – or at least be able to speak French – than his northern counterpart.
A form of landholding, baronies came in all shapes and sizes. Possession of a barony gave limited local government powers to the baron. The barony would be ‘held’ from the Crown in exchange for various obligations, usually an annual sum of money, though this was often a nominal payment. The chief responsibilities of the baron focused on maintaining law and order and the provision of a set number of men-at-arms for the king’s army, and often, though not universally, providing infantry service as well. The baron would have the right to hold local courts, occasionally for capital crimes, and would collect rents and other sums (collectively known as the issues of the barony) from his tenants. Portions of the barony would generally be granted to other men who would, in exchange, provide the baron with the knight service he needed to fulfil his obligations to the Crown.
The generally cordial relationship between England and Scotland started to unravel with the death of Alexander III in March 1286. Alexander’s two sons by his first marriage had already died, and his granddaughter Margaret (daughter of Erik II of Norway) had been recognised as his heir. There is a possibility that Alexander and Edward were planning a dynastic union of the two countries, which would be achieved by the marriage of Margaret to Edward’s eldest son (the future Edward II), but Alexander, still only in his forties, married Yolande de Dreux in 1285 and clearly hoped to produce a direct heir. Alexander’s death did not cause an immediate crisis. The Scottish political community was supportive, though the prospect of a female heir, especially one that was still a child, was certainly an unusual thing in medieval Europe. The political situation did, however, become a major issue when Margaret died en route to Scotland in 1290. There were now two serious claimants to the throne, John Balliol and Robert Bruce (grandfather of the man who would become Robert I), and a number of others who might make claims of more dubious validity. Since the death of Alexander, Scotland had been administered by a council of ‘guardians’ representing the major political groups in the community. This system had worked well for the intervening four years but the question of the succession was too momentous to be decided by a council of lords and clerics, and there was no prospect of reaching a unanimous agreement since the council contained supporters of both of the significant candidates. The council approached Edward I for advice, for which they have attracted a great deal of criticism from historians, but their actions were perfectly rational: Edward had had a good relationship with the late Alexander III; he was known to have a real interest in jurisprudence; he was powerful enough to impose the final decision if necessary; and he was acceptable to both of the main contenders. As the King of Scotland’s only neighbour and a major player on the European political stage, he simply could not be ignored and if the process degenerated into a civil war – a real possibility – Edward might well allow the two sides to exhaust themselves and simply march into Scotland at the head of a great army and take over, as he had in Wales.
5. John Balliol, from a Scottish amorial illuminated between 1581 and 1584. The king is surrounded by the broken symbols of his rule.
Edward was more than happy to take on the role, correctly identifying it as an opportunity to further his own interests in Scotland. The council did everything they reasonably could to ensure the future security of the realm, but Edward was an astute politician and would clearly have a strong negotiating position. He was not invited to arbitrate on the question of the succession. His role was to conduct a court of inquiry, ensure a fair and equitable process, and then oversee the installation of the successful candidate. In due course, a grand jury of 104 auditors was assembled. The auditors included forty chosen by John Balliol and forty chosen by Robert Bruce – a clear indication that none of the other candidates really had a serious case to present, but were simply making a demonstration of their interest in the event that both the Bruce and Balliol lines failed to produce heirs in the future. Edward was able to manipulate all of the candidates into accepting his overlordship as a condition of having their bids for the crown recognised at all. There was some resistance to this from various barons, but their position was undermined by the acceptance of Edward’s demands by the different candidates. The case ran for over a year, but in November 1292 a decision was finally reached and John Balliol became King of Scotland, but was obliged to give homage for his realm to Edward.
Almost immediately, Edward’s actions became increasingly overbearing. He asserted a right to hear appeals against John’s court judgements and generally set about undermining John’s authority at every opportunity. John was not in a position to challenge Edward’s action and his political credibility suffered accordingly. Edward hoped to provoke John into open resistance and the opportunity arose when Edward issued writs demanding military service from John and various prominent members of the Scottish nobility for service against France.
At around this time, the majority of the Scottish political community had taken power out of John’s hands. Initiatives of this nature were – to say the least – rare in medieval politics, but the process was eased by the fact that a committee of guardians had ruled effectively during the years between the death of Alexander III and the death of his granddaughter Margaret: a period of four years. The Scottish political community had acquired some experience of governing a kingdom without actually having a king; experience that would prove invaluable in the years between 1297 and 1304.
6. Illuminated capital from an English medieval document depicting a scene from the siege of Carlisle.
The new council made a treaty of mutual defence with the King of France. And from 1295 there was, in theory at least, a state of war between England and Scotland. In practice, very little happened. Edward was already busy with his war in France and was unable to pursue operations in Scotland until the spring of 1296. Both sides raised armies, but the Scots simply had no idea about how to conduct a war. There had not been war in Scotland for more than thirty years, and that had been a relatively short affair that had been dealt with by the county communities of the south-west. Edward, on the other hand, was an experienced commander who pursued his campaign with purpose. The Scots made some rather purposeless raids into northern England, but Edward approached the town of Berwick, stormed it and sacked the community with enormous loss of life. The town – in those days one of the most significant commercial centres in the British Isles – was largely destroyed, but Edward effectively sent a signal to every other town in Scotland: resistance was not only futile, since hardly any Scottish towns had defences of any kind, let alone serious fortification, but would also result in the utter destruction of the community. There was only one action in the rest of the 1296 campaign. A body of Scottish men-at-arms encountered a similar English force near Dunbar and were completely routed. Only one fatality is recorded, but in the fighting and the subsequent surrender of Dunbar castle more than 200 members of the Scottish nobility and gentry were taken prisoner. The main body of the Scottish army, now bereft of leadership and purpose, simply dissolved and made their way home without ever seeing action.
7. The obverse and reverse of the seal of Edward I.
The Scottish government had not enjoyed the full support of the political community. One, Robert Bruce (grandson of the man who had sought to become king in 1291–92), had sided with Edward I in the hope that his father (his grandfather had died in the interim) would now be installed on the throne at the hands of Edward I. He was quickly disabused of this; Edward had no plans to make anybody King of Scotland, least of all Robert Bruce. Instead, Edward marched northwards demanding homage and the surrender of castles and towns, all of which was easily accomplished, given the events at Berwick. By July he had captured John, forced his abdication and packed him off to London as a prisoner. Assuming – perhaps understandably – that the war was won, Edward left the consolidation of an occupation administration to his lieutenants and returned to the more pressing affairs at home.
The Scots had certainly been defeated and Edward had obliged a great number of Scottish nobles and towns to give homage, but recovery was rapid. Within a matter of months, Edward’s officers reported that the Scots were in the process of forming a government and were appointing officials in many areas, and that only two counties – Berwickshire and Roxburgh – were under occupation control and they ‘only lately’2. Any hopes that Edward had of imposing his own rule quickly and securely disappeared in early 1297. One of the prisoners taken the previous year, Sir Andrew Murray, escaped from captivity, made his way back to the north-east of Scotland and raised a force which set siege to strongholds. Robert Bruce had decided to jump ship and was assembling a force in the west, while William Wallace, youngest son of an obscure Ayrshire knight, was conducting operations in central Scotland.
Bruce was now fighting for King John, though he had been conspicuous by his absence the previous year. In practice, if he ever wanted to be king himself, Bruce had to be seen as espousing the cause of independence. For Wallace and Murray the matter was more clear-cut: they were simply fighting to get John restored to the throne. Due to his commitments elsewhere, Edward was unable to take to the field himself and entrusted operations in Scotland to his lieutenants. The ‘noble revolt’ of Bruce and others was resolved through negotiations at Irvine, though there was a strong suspicion that he dragged the discussions out as long as he could to allow Wallace and Murray more time to gather and train their troops. True or not, by the time Sir Hugh Cressingham – Edward’s treasurer for Scotland – was able to get to Stirling, he found that Murray and Wallace had combined their forces on the north bank of the river. Confident that his force was more than a match for anything the Scots might have to offer, Cressingham tried to cross the river and was soundly defeated.
Wallace and Murray were now effectively masters of Scotland north of the River Forth and throughout much of the south. They acted as guardians in the name of King John, but Murray died a few weeks after the battle – possibly of wounds incurred in the action – leaving Wallace in sole charge. It was rare indeed for someone of such lowly political status to acquire so much power, but there was something of a political vacuum. Some of the more prominent lords had already been neutralised at Irvine; some simply wanted a quiet life and were prepared to accept Edward’s lordship; some – particularly in the south-east, where they were most vulnerable to English military power – were hesitant to resist; but, most significantly, a large number were still prisoners of war following the debacle of the 1296 campaign.
At about this time, Edward freed a number of senior figures – notably Sir John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch – to serve in his army in Flanders in exchange for their liberty, only to have them defect and escape to France at the earliest opportunity and then return to Scotland to continue the fight.
Clearly Edward had to act if he was to achieve his goals in Scotland, but he was unable to bring an army to the field until the late summer of 1298. By this time most of Scotland was under Wallace’s control and initially Edward struggled to come to grips with his opponent. Just as he was on the verge of running out of money and supplies to keep his army in existence, Edward was able to steal a march on Wallace and inflicted a major defeat on him at Falkirk. Since Wallace’s political authority had depended entirely on his military credibility, he was swiftly ousted from the position of guardian and his place was taken by Bruce and Comyn. This was not a happy arrangement. The Comyns had an excellent track record as servants of the Crown and were closely associated with King John, but Bruce had been on the English side in 1296 and clearly had royal ambitions of his own. Despite their differences, Comyn and Bruce managed their campaign reasonably effectively. In the aftermath of Falkirk, Edward had been obliged to leave Scotland once again to tend to concerns elsewhere and may even have believed that the Scottish situation was now largely settled and could be left to his subordinates.
This was clearly not the case. In 1299 – at the behest of the pope and as part of negotiations with France – Edward had released John Balliol, and by 1300 there seemed to be a real possibility that he might be restored to the throne. This was not an attractive proposition to Robert Bruce, who now made his peace with Edward, abandoning the Balliol cause. Despite his defection, the Scots continued to make headway, but Edward could not make an opportunity to take matters into his own hands until he had reached a satisfactory conclusion in France. Eventually he was able to force a peace treaty which specifically excluded the Scots and secured a statement in which King John rejected any further involvement in Scottish affairs.
The loss of France as an ally was a body blow to the Scots, and since John was no longer interested in his own restoration, it was now difficult for his supporters to be clear about what they were fighting for. Additionally, Edward now brought a large army to Scotland, but also made it clear that he was prepared to negotiate terms. In February 1304, an agreement was reached at Strathord and the war came to an end. For Edward this was a very important achievement. Aware that he was nearing the end of his life, he was eager to finish his Scottish business, but it is not at all clear that he really believed he had secured his authority. At least a proportion of the Scots seem to have seen the Strathord Agreement as more of an armistice than a final settlement, and a few prominent figures – notably William Wallace – were specifically excluded from the terms and were thus still active in the field. In August 1305, Wallace was captured, subjected to a travesty of a trial and executed.
The exclusion of Wallace and a few others was, to some extent, a matter of public relations. The garrison of Stirling castle – which had also been specifically excluded from the Strathord terms – held out for some time, declaring that they were not fighting for Balliol’s kingship, but for ‘The Lion’ (the heraldic symbol of the nation), but with no prospect of relief their resistance was probably more to do with seeking honourable terms than anything else. Wallace was a different matter. The Scottish war had been a heavy burden on Edward’s kingdom and someone had to carry the can and satisfy English public opinion for ‘rebellion’. Overall, the execution of Wallace – and the manner of it – was an unwise move on the part of Edward. Wallace was, by this time, politically insignificant, but deliberate persecution made Edward look petty and the elaborate executions were not part of the general ethos of medieval Scotland. Had Edward simply imprisoned him, Wallace would probably have fallen out of public consciousness along with the other men who had resisted the occupation and are now known only to a handful of medieval scholars and enthusiasts.
Although he felt a need to make an example and perhaps demonstrate a degree of closure to his Scottish wars, Edward could not afford to impose too heavy a settlement on the Scottish magnates and the wider political community. If he was to rule successfully he needed their support to run the country. It was clear that he could not simply execute all of the nobles who had fought against him and replace them with English lords. There were not enough candidates and such a policy would inevitably breed hostility; moreover, he could not possibly execute all the sons, cousins and nephews of Scottish lords who might at some point rebel to recover their lost heritages, and who would very likely be able to gather support from the community quite easily. Edward had not made sweeping changes to administrative or legal practices in Scotland – the only law he abolished was the ‘law of the Scots and the Brets’ which had been in desuetude for generations – but his occupation government was seen as oppressive and, inevitably, foreign. It is important to remember that in the Middle Ages England and Scotland were as much different countries as Portugal and France. This may have been rather lost on Edward himself, since there was a good deal of common practice in both kingdoms.
His general intention toward Scotland is less than clear. He made no effort to incorporate Scotland formally into England, nor did he arrange to have himself officially declared as king. It is possible that he hoped to achieve a situation in which Scotland would be a spate lordship owned by the English Crown, but not subject to interference by the English parliament, and he seems to have had no intention of calling a Scottish parliament. Instead he set up a council of magnates – mostly Scottish – and entrusted administration to them. Edward may have genuinely believed that the death of Wallace was the final act in the conquest of Scotland, though that would have been a rather optimistic assessment. Realistically there were at least two possible sources of contention. One was Robert Bruce, who was certainly in Edward’s peace but is most unlikely to have given up on his regal ambitions at any point. The other was Edward Balliol, son of the deposed King John. John’s deposition and abdication had been forced at the point of the sword and was therefore easily recognisable as an act of coercion by a greater military power. Medieval legal practice understood the concept of duress and John’s abdication was thus invalid in itself. In 1303 he had surrendered all his rights in Scottish matters, but it was, at best, questionable as to whether he could legally discard the claims of his legitimate heir. Edward Balliol was still young and in due course might well attempt to restore the family line. The Scottish political establishment was rather conservative and if Edward Balliol could bring any sort of a force to Scotland there was every chance that he would be able to gather widespread support since he was, after all, the legitimate heir to the throne.
Edward I constructed a number of peels in the late 1290s and early 1300s. A peel was not really a castle, but was more purely a military establishment. Most of the peels were major installations with powerful garrisons containing a mobile striking force of several scores of men-at-arms who could be committed to actions in support of castles in the vicinity, though the peel at Linlithgow was a very small affair with only a handful of archers and men-at-arms.
Through the autumn and winter of 1305/06, there seems to have been no serious opposition to Edward’s rule in Scotland. The royal castles, and some baronial ones, were garrisoned and work continued on the construction of a number of peels, though not with any great sense of urgency. The garrisons were mostly quite small and, all in all, there was a brief period of peace, but the situation was far from settled. Robert Bruce was still determined to acquire the throne and in February 1306 he met with his chief political rival, John Comyn. According to the poet John Barbour, writing more than half a century after the event, Bruce offered to grant all of his property – most significantly the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale – to Comyn in exchange for unequivocal support for Bruce’s kingship. Alternatively, Bruce would give his support to Comyn in exchange for all of the great Comyn lordships of the north-east. Barbour’s account is, at best, suspect in this regard. The Bruce claim to the throne was weaker than that of the Balliols, but he would certainly be the next legitimate heir to the throne if the Balliol line was excluded; the Comyn family, however, had no legal claim to the throne at all. Regardless, the two men met at Dumfries for some purpose, and it is almost certain that they were planning to take action against the occupation. The Comyns’ long tradition of loyal service to the Crown would suggest that John Comyn favoured a coup that would, in due course, put Edward Balliol on the throne, but that might be a threat to the Bruce family, since they had not supported John’s kingship in 1296 and had only fought for him intermittently thereafter.
8. Significant towns and castles in late medieval Scotland.
Whatever the motivation and whatever offers were made, the meeting was a disaster for the Bruce party. Robert – or one of his supporters – killed John Comyn at the altar of the Greyfriars and thereby started a ferocious blood feud between the two families. It is a reasonable assumption that Bruce was planning to make a move anyway, but the death of Comyn forced his hand. He tried to communicate with Edward, but was rebuffed, and on Palm Sunday 1306 he had himself inaugurated as King of Scotland. Less than a year after the end of Wallace’s resistance to Edward, there was war once again. Robert would probably have preferred to wait for a better opportunity. Edward was old and ill, and could not be expected to live much longer; furthermore his heir – Edward of Carnarvon – was seen as being less assiduous than his father and not such a potent adversary.
Robert’s campaign started badly. He was able to gather a considerable degree of support from the political community, but this was offset by the fact that the Comyn family and their allies were vehemently opposed to him and by the fact that he was not really the legitimate heir. By early summer, Bruce had gathered something of an army, but he was not yet a very competent commander. On 19 June his troops were attacked and scattered in a dawn attack at Methven by a force under Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke and brother-in-law to the late John Comyn. Bruce moved to the west in search of further support while sending his queen – Elizabeth de Burgh – into the north-east to take sanctuary at Tain. A second defeat at the hand of John of Lorne reduced him to being no more than the leader of a party of bandits, and for the next several months Robert disappears from record. It is generally believed that he sought and found shelter in the Western Isles; Edward ordered a party to seek him out on the island of Rathlin, off the coast of Ireland, and some writers have made a case that Robert travelled to Orkney or Shetland, or even to Norway. In his absence, Edward was able to restore his own authority across much of the country and a number of Bruce’s early supporters came to Edward’s peace, either because they were disillusioned with the Bruce cause or because they feared for their estates or even their lives.
The latter was unmistakeably a serious consideration. Robert’s queen and his daughter by his first marriage (Marjory) fell into Edward’s hands and were imprisoned, but his brother Neil was executed. The same fate might have befallen Elizabeth, but her father was the Earl of Ulster, a powerful Irish magnate and a crucial part of Edward’s Irish administration. He could not afford to alienate the earl, but equally he could not afford to release Elizabeth, lest she escape to Scotland and provide Robert with a male heir. Executing his existing heir, Marjory, would have been barbaric in the extreme, besides which she could potentially prove useful in the future. If Edward succeeded in destroying Robert Bruce, he might at some point put a favourable face on appointing a replacement Earl of Carrick by marrying her off to his new appointee.
Robert returned to the stage in February 1307. He organised two attacks in the south-west. One party under himself and his younger brother Edward made a landing at Turnberry, which was less than successful, but the other under his brothers Thomas and Alexander landed at Loch Ryan and was thoroughly defeated. Like Neil, Thomas and Alexander were executed without trial, which was a clear political statement on the part of Edward. In future, his opponents in Scotland could not expect to be treated with the normal usages of medieval warfare: there would be no ransoms or imprisonment, just death sentences. Edward adhered to this policy for a while, but it had to be abandoned some time before the close of 1308 due to the increasing number of English prisoners in Scottish custody.
Edward’s death at Burgh-on-the-Sands in 1307, when he was en route to yet another campaign in Scotland, passed the problem to his son, Edward II. The new king was not happy about the Scottish situation, but he had many other issues to deal with, not least his coronation, a major financial crisis and a difficult relationship with France, and was unable to focus his attention on Scotland. Edward’s problems helped to ease the course of the Bruce party. Despite the major setbacks of the first year and more of his reign, by the summer of 1308 he had defeated most of his internal opponents, acquired political control over much of the northern part of Scotland and was starting to make serious inroads against the occupation government. His approach differed considerably from the policies adopted by Wallace and Murray, and from the guardianship in which he had taken an active role. He made no attempt to hold on to the castles that he captured. Doing so would have depleted the strength of his field army and any castle that was later recaptured and garrisoned by the English would put a dent in his credibility, so instead he slighted them. He did not actually destroy them, which would have taken a good deal of time and effort, but he tore down gate defences and breached walls to make them indefensible without a major programme of reconstruction, for which Edward could afford neither the manpower nor the money.
In the summer of 1310, Edward II was at last able to mount a significant campaign aimed at reinstating the ground lost to the Bruce party and, if possible, bringing Robert to battle. Little, if anything, was achieved, though the cost was considerable both financially and in terms of Edward’s prestige and credibility. He failed utterly to force a major engagement and by the end of the year, having run out of money and with his army melting away through desertion, Edward had retired to Berwick, where he would spend the next six months or so. The campaign was a failure for Edward, but was inevitably a propaganda coup for Robert. Two months after Edward left Berwick to attend to his domestic issues, Robert took an army into Tynedale, where they seized considerable sums of money and vast numbers of cattle.
A month later he mounted a second expedition into Northumberland. Unlike similar raids by Wallace in 1297, Robert’s force did not indulge in looting and pillaging. Instead, Robert demanded – and received – the enormous sum of £2,000 from the community of Northumberland in exchange for a truce until February 1312. The funds gathered allowed Robert to pay his troops instead of allowing them to plunder, but the absence of destruction meant that he would be able to demand similar sums in the future and, just as usefully, demand free passage into more southerly counties which would be subjected to the same treatment in the years to come.
At the end of 1311, Robert had gained complete control of Scotland north of the River Forth with the exceptions of the towns and castles of Perth and Dundee. The first fell to a night attack in January 1312, when a visiting French knight was surprised – even horrified – to see Robert himself strip off and swim through the cold water of the Tay to take part in the operation. Dundee fell later in the year, possibly through a surrender pact.
By the end of the year Robert’s credibility had grown to the point where modest numbers of landholders in central counties like Lothian, Fife and Clackmannanshire, which were still more or less under English control, were starting to enter his peace despite the risks to their estates should he be defeated. Clearly the war had swung in his favour and there was less belief that Edward was capable of re-imposing his government in Scotland. There was greater opposition elsewhere. Many of the gentry and aristocracy of Roxburghshire, Berwickshire, Lothian and Dumfriesshire served in English garrisons; some for wages and some because they were obliged to discharge the military obligations attached to their landholding or face forfeiture. And, of course, there was still the matter of Robert’s legitimacy as king. So long as the Balliol line survived, John – and, after his death, his son Edward – would continue to be the legitimate king and Robert would continue to be a usurper.
All the same, success draws support and by the summer of 1313 even Lothian was only nominally under occupation rule as greater numbers of the political community turned to the Bruce party, in part at least because Robert was now forcing them to make the same sort of payments for peace that he had forced on the community of Northumberland, and partly because the Bruce party was increasingly seen as being in a better position to provide an environment of steady law and order. That perception was encouraged by the behaviour of some of the occupation garrisons, who had taken to seizing goods and money from local inhabitants – even those who had been supportive of the occupation government over several years.
Edward had not, however, abandoned his hopes for a recovery. In an exercise that smacks strongly of political stage management, the justiciar (chief judge) of Lothian, Sir Adam Gordon, petitioned Edward to come to the aid of his loyal subjects in Scotland. Edward’s response was to announce a major offensive for the following summer. At this juncture the great castles of southern and central Scotland were not yet seen as being at risk, though the great peel may have fallen to the Scots at about this time. Clearly Edward hoped to restore his Scottish administration by military means. If he could bring about a major battle and defeat Robert, he would have taken a major step in that direction. A similar policy had, superficially, been successful against William Wallace in 1298; however, the Battle of Falkirk – though a major victory – had really achieved little more than the replacement of Wallace as guardian. It had not brought about a collapse of the Scottish resistance, which in fact continued to prosper – even the great castle of Stirling fell to the Balliol party in 1299. In fact, Edward had little choice but to make a major demonstration, though he had problems enough at home already. Failure to have pursued the war with the Scots would have reflected badly on his own abilities as king. He would have been seen as abandoning his father’s achievements, though in reality Edward I had failed to bring his Scottish wars to a satisfactory conclusion. He had to show some commitment to those Scots who had accepted his kingship, many of whom were now pensioners of the English Crown and living in exile, as well as those who continued to support his kingship in the southern counties, especially in Lothian, Roxburghshire, Berwickshire and Dumfriesshire. He also had to support the claims of those English who had been granted lands and offices in Scotland by himself or by his father, or who – like Henry de Beaumont – had claims to estates that had been declared forfeit by King Robert.
Edward’s plans seem to have had little or no effect on the Bruce party. King Robert’s forces continued to press on with the campaign. Although the most obvious sign of their success was the capture of castles and towns, the Bruce party’s progress was really more a matter of expanding the area under Robert’s control, and by the end of 1313, even in those areas where the garrisons still held out, there was very little of the occupation to rescue. The castles were still manned, but they seem to have become isolated outposts holding out against the enemy rather than active garrisons imposing Edward’s administration in the localities. The early months of 1314 did nothing to improve the position. In February and March the castles of Roxburgh and Edinburgh fell to forces under Douglas and the Earl of Moray respectively, thus effectively compromising the ability of the remaining strongholds to support one another. By Lent the garrison of Stirling was under close siege from the Earl of Carrick, and this is what forced the hand of the constable of the castle – Sir Philip Moubray – to make a surrender pact with the earl. Criticism of both parties rather fails to take account of the reality of the situation. Given the time of year, Moubray’s supply situation must have been poor at best and perilous at worst for both the men and the horses of the garrison. His stores would have become depleted through the winter; even if he had acquired massive quantities of hay in the autumn of 1313, the horses of the men-at-arms would have consumed at least the greater part of it by March and he could not hope to replenish it whilst under siege. By making the pact, Moubray was able to ensure that his men would not be either starved into surrender or killed in a siege that he could not hope to withstand indefinitely. Equally, although it is easy to assume that Carrick was simply bored with conducting a siege, this is a supposition based on Barbour’s view of Carrick as a rather flighty sort of man. In fact, the pact allowed Carrick to conduct more immediately useful operations elsewhere. Since King Edward was already committed to a major invasion of Scotland in the summer of 1314, it made no real difference whether Stirling castle remained in English hands until starved out or stormed, or whether the garrison held out until the arrival of Edward’s army.
To some extent the threat of losing the castle possibly encouraged Edward to make Stirling his initial objective, but the key word is ‘initial’. He had to do more than simply take an army to Scotland and inflict a defeat – even a crushing defeat – on the Scots. He would have to lead his forces throughout Scotland if he was to successfully re-impose his government. If the castle fell and was then recovered after a successful battle, it would only be one fortress among many that would require extensive repair and renovation. Stirling was certainly a key location in the sense that a powerful garrison there could control movement across the Forth, but it was no more significant politically than Edinburgh in the south or Aberdeen in the north. If the occupation was to be effective, it needed to have control of the major towns and castles, but there was no value to that unless the garrisons were able to operate in the wider community. They had to be able to do more than just collect rents and taxes, control law and order and extract military service; they had to be able to prevent anybody else from competing for authority.
NOTES
1 J. Stevenson, Documents Illustrative of Scottish History
2 Ibid.