Edward’s army marched north towards Scotland in February 1296, with the intention of teaching his rebellious vassal kingdom a painful and lasting lesson for its defiance of his rule and its impertinence in allying 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 began their campaign by sending 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 north-east 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, which would live long in the memories of song-writers and chroniclers on both sides of the national divide.
It took place on Friday 30 March 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 pre-battle fashion, the sea’s grey horizon was daubed all at once with thick smoke. It was 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.
From this beginning, the battle raged on with fierce violence. The streets of the harbour town were painted with blood as Edward’s army, captained by Robert, Lord Clifford, 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 around the town, 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 to a hideous and terrible massacre. The chronicler Walter of Guisborough estimated that 11,060 were slain before the clergy of the town managed to plead successfully for mercy.
If it was bleak for the Scots, it was highly satisfactory for the English. After the battle, the English diggers who built a large defensive ditch around the captured town were very cheerful. The ditch they dug was 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep, and the king had wheeled the first barrow of earth himself. It was a symbol of English strength and victory over the Scots, 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 30,000 strong and he marched it through the northern kingdom wreaking death on all that opposed him.
Mockery and insults flew between both sides. The Scots called the English ‘tailed dogs’, since it was common knowledge in the Middle Ages that Englishmen had tails. But the English had something less fictitious: 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 supposedly repaid English atrocities by burning 200 schoolboys alive in a church.
A point was fixed for the next engagement of the campaign when three prominent Scottish earls seized the castle at Dunbar – an ancient stone fortification that perched on a rocky outcrop on the east coast and 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 all captured, along with numerous barons, bannerets and knights. Peter Langtoft wrote that: ‘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 processional 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 defence must be ascribed to the weakness of John Balliol, who was strung out by Edward’s efforts to undermine his authority and the subsequent confiscation of state power by the council. In a process that was split over two dates and four locations – 2 and 10 July 1296 at Kincardine, Stracathro, Brechin and Montrose – Balliol was publicly and ceremonially humiliated. His coat of arms was ripped from his tabard, 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.
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. The heir and namesake of old Robert Bruce, who had confronted Balliol in court for the kingship, had fought in Edward’s army, hoping that an English victory would place him on the throne in Balliol’s place. 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 centre of English power, beginning with a parliament held in the town, at which thousands of Scots travelled 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 that ‘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.