The sea routes across the English Channel and along the Atlantic coast of France were major trading arteries during the thirteenth century, as merchants from the wealthy countries of Europe ferried goods between far-flung territories, risking rough conditions and the peril of the open seas to make profits in port towns and markets from Flanders to the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. Mercantile activity was constant, and traders of all nationalities rubbed regularly alongside one another. During the early 1290s, however, a fierce trade war broke out among various shipping merchants of England, Normandy, Flanders, Gascony, and Castile. It resulted in running battles and pirate raiding from the Cinque Ports to Lisbon, in Portugal. The seaways and estuaries turned dangerously violent as banners of war were raised and private naval battles spilled the blood of all nations into the sea.
The causes of the shipping war are now obscure. Trouble began with a scuffle in Normandy in 1292. It escalated during the following year until on May 15, 1293, a series of skirmishes were fought between private armies flying English and Norman banners. At this point the seriousness of the disorder demanded government intervention. Edward, who had little desire to be drawn into a national conflict by the activity of pirate traders, made every effort to appease. An English embassy was sent to France with the aim of arranging peace with Philip IV, who had acceded to the French throne at seventeen when his father, Philip III, died in 1285 after contracting dysentery during an invasion of Aragon.
Philip IV viewed Edward from much the same lofty position that Edward viewed the new king of Scotland. He was a handsome young man whose popular epithet—Le Bel (the fair)—he shared with Geoffrey count of Anjou, the founder of the house of Plantagenet. But this handsome demeanor masked a cold, inflexible personality. Dante called him “the Pest of France,” and the bishop of Pamiers wrote: “He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue.” During the course of his reign, Philip would persecute numerous groups and subjects that offended his authority. He tortured Knights Templar and suppressed their order. In 1306 he rounded up and expelled the French Jews (although they were invited back by Louis X in 1315 and remained in France until another expulsion under Charles VI in 1394). And in the notorious Tour de Nesle affair he had three of his daughters-in-law imprisoned for adultery while their supposed lovers were tortured to death in public. This was a man whose intransigence and capacity for ruthless cruelty exceeded even Edward’s, and although Edward paid homage to Philip for Gascony in a lavish ceremony in 1286, France would once again prove too small for a Plantagenet and a Capetian king to cohabit peacefully.
It was ironic that Edward should be attempting to stamp his feudal lordship on John Balliol at the same time as Philip sought to humiliate him in Gascony. Using the shipping war as a pretext, Philip demanded that he be allowed to pass judgment on a number of Gascon citizens and officials who had been involved in violent attacks. When they were not delivered to him, he summoned Edward to appear before a French parlement shortly after Christmas 1293. Edward sent his brother Edmund earl of Lancaster to negotiate on his behalf. But Philip negotiated in bad faith. He told the English that if Edward publicly professed to renounce Gascony and hand over towns and fortresses, sealing the bargain by marrying Philip’s sister, the eleven-year-old Margaret of France, the French would then hand back their Gascon gains and drop the summons for Edward to appear before the French parlement.
The English were spectacularly gulled. Why Edward or his envoys would be so naive as to trust in the unlikely promises of a new French monarch who was brazenly aggressive and expansionist is puzzling. Indeed so marvelous was it to the chroniclers of the time that they concluded the English king must have been so consumed by lust for the young French princess that like his grandfather King John, who had fatally undermined his Continental possession by his decision to seize the prepubescent Isabella of Angoulême, Edward was prepared to ignore his better judgment. But this explanation fails to allow for the fact that Edward was a hard-bitten politician, keen to explore any political position that would free up the diplomatic channels for his new crusade. Whatever the motivation, the English were fooled. The summons to the parlement was not withdrawn but rather renewed and repeated. When Edward refused to humiliate himself before Philip in precisely the fashion that he himself had recently humiliated John Balliol, England and France found themselves once again at war.
Marriage plans were shelved. Edward dragged out the old thirteenth-century war plans: he formed alliances and coalitions with princes to the north and east of France and plotted a direct invasion to defend and consolidate territory in the south. His diplomats, under Anthony Bek, began to negotiate with the king of Germany and the magnates of the Low Countries and Burgundy. Cash payments and marriage alliances were promised in exchange for cooperation against Philip. Meanwhile the muster went out for an English invasion force.
This plan had worked for Richard I but conspicuously failed for John and Henry III. It would prove little more successful for Edward because like many a ruler before and after him, he had grown dangerously overstretched. In October 1294 a force was sent to Gascony under the king’s inexperienced nephew John of Brittany, but it was smaller than had been intended. Troops that were needed in France had to remain at home to keep order in Wales.
A month before John of Brittany set sail, a massive Welsh rebellion broke out under Madog ap Llywelyn, a distant relative of Llywelyn the Last’s. Madog claimed to be the successor to Llywelyn’s titles, but in reality he led a tax revolt against a heavy duty that had been levied on movable property in 1292. The final installment of the tax was being collected from Wales in September 1294, and it came along with a demand for Welshmen to go and fight in Gascony.
Madog joined forces with other minor Welsh princes. Cynan ap Maredudd, Maelgwyn ap Rhys, and Morgan ap Maredudd were not prominent native magnates, but Edward had effectively wiped out the top layer of Welsh nobility after the 1282 invasion, and there were few other choices. Madog’s men attacked the new English castles across Wales. All the major new constructions held out, but it was still necessary for Edward to divert a great portion of the Gascon invasion force to Worcester, so that they could deal with the Welsh. This was a severe drain on his resources. Edward might be the most powerful man in Wales, but even before the French hostilities began, his hopes of mounting a swift and robust defense of his lands on the Continent were choking on the fruits of his mastery in the British Isles.
Edward’s third Welsh invasion, which began as winter set in, was the largest of the reign. His men marched into Wales in December 1294, sticking to the old tactics of large assaults from Chester to Conwy by the royal army, while royalist lords launched semi-independent attacks through the marches in the south. There were minor setbacks during the invasion. The Welsh managed to capture a good portion of the English baggage train, and Edward was besieged during the winter in Conwy Castle, which was cut off from reinforcement by heavy floods. Here he was said to have refused his small ration of wine, insisting that it be divided equally among his men while he drank water sweetened with honey. It was a safe gesture to make because when the floods receded, the siege was easily relieved.
The spring brought victory for the English. On March 5 troops commanded by the earl of Warwick defeated Madog’s men in a battle at Maes Moydog. “They were the best and bravest Welsh that anyone has seen,” wrote one observer in a newsletter preserved in the Hagnaby chronicle. But faced with an English war machine confident in its methods and secure in its infrastructure, they had little chance of succeeding. After Maes Moydog, Edward felt comfortable in venturing out from Conwy to lead a tour of Wales; he mopped up the collapsing insurgency in a three-month journey around the principality. By mid-June 1295 Wales had been subdued and the rebel leaders captured.
Victory had once more come with very little serious opposition. But Edward had been forced to spend in excess of £54,000 on the campaign, with a further £11,300 spent on building Beaumaris Castle on Anglesey between 1295 and 1300. He had also lost precious time in his war for Gascony.
Time and money were now running pitifully short. Gascony desperately needed reinforcement, and the southern coast of England was attacked by French ships in August 1295: Dover was burned, and several people were killed. But when the king addressed his noblemen at parliament in Westminster that month, he encountered a maddeningly familiar attitude: about a quarter of the English magnates declared themselves completely unwilling to serve the Crown on an overseas invasion. The thirteenth century’s great complaint rang as loudly in 1295 as it had in 1214: Gascony was the king’s business, not England’s.
Edward was furious. He imposed harsh financial sanctions against those who would not help him pay for the campaign in Gascony and ordered a fleet of new fighting galleys to bolster his coastal defenses. But panic was spreading. Rumors began to circulate that a full French invasion of England was already under way. A knight of the household, Thomas Turberville, was discovered to have been spying for the enemy. Watches were kept the length of the south coast, from Kent to Cornwall, as anxious men and women scanned the horizons for the flags and sails of a French fleet come to destroy the realm.
In desperation, Edward turned to a tactic that had always served him well in the past, concessions and consultation. At the end of November he called a vast assembly of barons and bishops, knights and burgesses, men of the shires, and representatives of the towns and cities to a parliament. It was the largest political gathering Edward had convened since he had plotted the Welsh invasion, and he came in a conciliatory mood, promising that no one should end up out of pocket on account of campaigning with the king. The writs that summoned the men to what was much later called the Model Parliament appealed to a sense of national danger: “The King of France, not satisfied with the treacherous invasion of Gascony, has prepared a mighty fleet and army for the purpose of invading England and wiping the English tongue from the face of the earth.”
The whole of England, then, was called upon to come protect the kingdom from the perfidious French. But by the time the country answered the king’s summons and parliament met, the Gascon cause had once again been overtaken by a crisis closer to home. No sooner had Edward restored his rule in Wales than his puppet king John Balliol was stripped of power in Scotland. War with France had once more to be postponed as Edward turned his attention elsewhere.
The war with Scotland sprang from many causes. Chief among them was the king’s pride. Edward’s desire to put his mark on the affairs of the northern kingdom went a long way beyond the assertion of his legal right. As the muster for war in Gascony began in the summer of 1294, he had issued a summons to John Balliol and eighteen other Scottish magnates to provide feudal military service against the French. The war with Wales prevented the summons from taking effect, but it was another example of Edward’s rigor in applying his royal rights in Scotland rather than allowing their simple theoretical existence.
As Edward grew more belligerent, John Balliol’s position in Scotland grew weaker. A man who could not resist Scotland’s neighbor, the magnates concluded, was simply not a king. In 1295 they stripped Balliol of power and reestablished a twelve-man council to rule the country in his name.
It was a glaring failure on Edward’s part not to realize that by bullying the Scottish king he would fatally undermine the entire office of Scottish kingship. Perhaps he really could not see the analogy between his treatment of Balliol and the demands being made on him by the French Crown in Gascony. Edward’s inability to empathize with the pressures brought to bear on his opponents was the cause of most of the rebellions and crises of his reign. In 1295 he managed to drive together two enemies that were to remain in each other’s arms for the following 365 years. In February 1296 the Scottish government ratified a treaty of friendship with France. The Auld Alliance was born.
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Edward’s army marched north toward Scotland in February 1296, with the intention of teaching his rebellious vassal kingdom a painful and lasting lesson for its impertinent alliance with the French. The king’s arrival brought fuzzy border allegiances into focus. The boundary between Scotland and England was a political and not a cultural one; in a zone of changeable loyalties there was no clear and lasting border at which one crossed from one kingdom to another. But if the border was vague, the bloody consequences of war were very real.
As Edward approached with his army, the Scots sent raiding parties into Northumberland, terrorizing and destroying villages around Carlisle. The English preferred to wait until Easter’s festivities were complete before joining battle. Their first assault was on Berwick-upon-Tweed, a border town in the northeast of England that had been endlessly disputed between the two kingdoms, partly because it was an excellent base from which to launch attacks either north or south, depending upon who held it. The battle of Berwick, like the short, decisive, and violent campaign it began, was a savage and bloodthirsty affair that would live long in the memories of songwriters and chroniclers on both sides of the national divide.
It took place on Friday, March 30, 1296, a month to the day after Edward had arrived in the Scottish borders, and it did not start well. As the tall, white-haired King Edward, not far from his sixtieth birthday, was busily knighting some young men in the customary prebattle fashion, the sea’s gray horizon was daubed all at once with thick smoke belching from three English ships that had begun the battle prematurely when one ran aground near the town and was stormed and burned by jubilant Scots.
The streets of Berwick were soon painted with blood as Edward’s army, captained by Robert Lord Clifford, a highborn soldier with extensive experience in the border region, advanced to the sound of trumpets. They slaughtered the men of Berwick in their thousands and were later accused by their enemies of having killed women and children too, including a pregnant woman who was said to have been hacked to pieces. The Scots had mocked the English as they made their preparations for war, but they did not mock them once the fighting began. They were ripped to shreds in the streets, the bodies too numerous to bury. Corpses were thrown down wells and tipped into the sea as the town fell victim to a hideous and terrible massacre. The chronicler Walter of Guisborough estimated that 11,060 people were slain before the clergy of the town managed to plead successfully for mercy.
After the battle the English diggers who built a large defensive ditch around the captured town were very cheerful. The ditch was eighty feet wide and forty feet deep, and the king had wheeled the first barrow of earth himself. It was a symbol of English strength and victory, and the workers sang a gleeful song as they worked. The chronicler Peter Langtoft recorded fragments of their verse:
Scattered are the Scots
Huddled in their huts
Never thrive will they:
Right if I read,
They tumbled in Tweed
That lived by the sea!
This was the manner of Edward’s conquest of Scotland. Edward’s army numbered around thirty thousand strong, and he marched it through the northern kingdom killing all who opposed him.
Mockery and insults flew. The Scots called the English “tailed dogs” because it was common knowledge in the Middle Ages that Englishmen had tails. But the English had something more powerful than gibes: a sophisticated war machine that the Scots failed utterly to match. After the rout of Berwick, Edward received a message from John Balliol renouncing his homage in bitter terms. News reports came from other parts of the border region of burning and slaughter in the fields of Northumbria. Scottish raiding parties apparently repaid English atrocities by burning two hundred schoolboys alive in a church.
A point was fixed for the next engagement when three prominent Scottish earls seized the castle at Dunbar, an ancient stone fortification perched on a rocky outcrop on the east coast of Scotland that had been a castle site since Roman days. Edward sent the earl of Surrey north to besiege it. When Surrey was attacked by forces sent by Balliol, the result was another humiliating rout for the Scots. The three earls in the castle garrison were captured, along with numerous barons, bannerets, and knights. Peter Langtoft wrote: “The Earls [were] sent to the Tower of London. . . . Others [were] sent to different castles two by two, mounted together on a hackney, some with their feet fettered in carts.” It was a dismal way for prisoners to be transported and a potent symbol of the crushing defeat that Edward was inflicting on the Scots.
After Dunbar, Scottish resistance melted. The short and largely unhindered English campaign lasted twenty-one weeks. Edward paraded ceremonially about the kingdom, taking his troops as far north as Elgin and Banff. Much of the Scots’ brittle defense must be ascribed to the weakness of John Balliol. In a process that was split over two dates and four locations—July 2 and 10, 1296, at Kincardine, Stracathro, Brechin, and Montrose—Balliol was publicly and ceremonially humiliated. His coat of arms was ripped from his tabard (or short overcoat), for which he earned the Scottish nickname Toom (empty) Tabard. He was sent to join the captive earls in the Tower of London. And most devastatingly of all, Edward’s men took the government records from Edinburgh and all the Scottish royal regalia, including the sacred enthronement stone from Scone, and brought them to London.
The Stone of Destiny was carried south to Westminster Abbey and incorporated into a special Coronation Chair. Plantagenet power would henceforth be transferred through a piece of furniture containing Scottish kingship’s most revered relic. Instead of installing a new king in Scotland, Edward decided that he would rule directly, as he did in Wales. Hoping that an English victory would place him on the throne, the heir and namesake of Robert Bruce, who had confronted Balliol in court for the kingship, had fought in Edward’s army. Now he was contemptuously dismissed. “Do you think we have nothing better to do than to win kingdoms for you?” Edward asked him.
A gloriously reconstructed Berwick was to be the center of English power, beginning with a parliament held in the town, at which thousands of Scots traveled south to swear their fealty directly to Edward. A new network of English governance and administration was imposed under the direction of the earl of Surrey. As he handed over the seal of Scotland to Surrey, Edward joked: “A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd.” The Scots had been clinically disposed of. At last, after two years of firefighting, Edward was once more ready to take the fight to France.