The Plantagenets (47 page)

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.

Crisis Point

Parliament met at Salisbury in February 1297. It met to face a king who was determined that after years of delay and distraction, his war against Philip IV of France should finally be realized. That took money, and money took consensus. ‘What touches all should be approved by all’ was Edward’s new motto when summoning gatherings of his political community. And what Edward demanded at parliaments now really did touch everyone in England.

The French situation required immediate action. After several years of diplomacy, Edward had stitched together a coalition of northern allies, which had been completed the previous month when the twelve-year-old count of Holland was married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth while the court was in Ipswich. Holland joined the king of Germany, various Burgundian lords and the counts of Guelders and Flanders in coalition, and they could not begin their action against Philip too soon. Gascony was in terrible danger, and on 30 January English forces under the earl of Lincoln had suffered a disastrous ambush and defeat between Bayonne and Bonnegarde. Urgent relief was needed.

Unfortunately for Edward the parliamentary gathering at Salisbury was hardly one of a realm hungry for further glory to match that achieved in Scotland. Rather, the mood he encountered was one of anger, exasperation and stubborn refusal to cooperate in funding yet another expensive war.

England was racked by disaffection. Every estate of the country had suffered Edward’s onerous demands for war funding, and by the late
1290s spending had run wild. Even before the Scottish campaign was accounted for, recent war costs had amounted to something in the region of £250,000. Edward had incurred debts of at least £75,000 just in assembling his northern coalition on the Continent; the actual business of campaigning in France and Gascony was going to cost far more.

Edward’s taxes had therefore been regular and extremely severe. Massive customs duties known popularly as the
maltote
(bad toll) were levied on wool, driving down the price paid by merchants to ordinary farmers and suppliers. Two heavy taxes had been raised in 1295 and 1296. Since 1294 royal officials had been seizing food and equipment in a programme of forced requisition known as the
prise
(seizure). ‘Many were the oppressions inflicted on the people of the land,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough. The financial exactions had hit the whole country hard. The clergy had been first to refuse to cooperate any further.

Since the death of Archbishop Pecham of Canterbury on 8 December 1292, the English Church had been led by a new primate: Robert Winchelsea, a top-ranking intellectual and academic with a temper and sharpness of mind to match Edward’s own. Using as his justification a papal bull issued by Pope Boniface VIII, which condemned kings who taxed the Church, Winchelsea led the English clergy into outright refusal to grant Edward any financial assistance for his French campaigns. Edward flew into a fury, declared every member of the English clergy outlawed and sent his officers across the country to seize their temporal property. ‘No justice was dispensed to the clergy … and clerks suffered many wrongs,’ wrote Walter of Guisborough. ‘The religious were also robbed of their horses on the king’s highway and got no justice until they redeemed themselves and got the king’s protection.’ It was a minor victory for Edward, but soon he was bedevilled by further resistance.

At the Salisbury parliament the king asked his magnates to go and fight in Gascony while he led the campaign in northern France. His brother Edmund, who had led an English expedition to defend the southern duchy in early 1296, had died the previous summer. He
intended to attack Philip from two points, and this necessarily required a division of his forces. It was a tactic that had been suggested twice before, in 1294 and 1295, and on both occasions there had been pockets of discontent or refusal. Barons and knights could be persuaded to fight alongside the king, but to be sent to fight in a foreign land on their own was felt to be beyond both the call of duty and their legal obligation. In 1297 Edward was faced with mass desertion. Led by Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, the magnates put it to him that he had no right to demand feudal military service of them in Gascony when he himself intended to fight in northern France. Bigod’s argument was particularly pertinent, since, as he pointed out, in his office of earl marshal he was obliged to serve alongside the king, but not independently of him. Walter of Guisborough recounted their exchange:

‘“With you will I gladly go, O King, in front of you in the first line of battle as belongs to me by hereditary right,” he said.

‘“You will go without me too, with the others,” Edward replied.

‘“I am not bound, neither is it my will, O King, to march without you,” said the earl. Enraged, the king burst out, so it is said, with these words: “By God, O Earl, either you will go or you will hang!”

‘“By the same oath,” replied Norfolk, “I will neither go nor hang.”’

Bigod had touched the heart of the matter: for all the king’s might and will, he was bound by his own law, which stated clearly that his barons were not obliged to serve without him. Edward was furious, but he pressed ahead with his attempts to send aid to Gascony and plan a campaign in northern France. He impounded clerical property and called in all debts owed him by the lay magnates. For their part, some of the clergy and four of the most important nobles – the earls of Norfolk, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick – dug in their heels and refused to cooperate with war preparations.

Parliament broke up in March 1297, and was recalled to meet in Westminster in July. By then Edward had made peace with Archbishop Winchelsea and some of the earls. It was agreed that he could levy a lay tax in return for a reissue of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. On Sunday 14 July the king stood on a wooden stage outside Westminster Hall and spoke to large crowds of his subjects. He pleaded his case, acknowledged that he had made mistakes, but insisted that he acted only for the good of the country. The chronicler Peter Langtoft reports that he told his listeners: ‘I am castle for you, and wall, and house.’ Archbishop Winchelsea stood beside the king in tears, as Edward proclaimed that he was going to France to fight and asked everyone present to swear allegiance to the thirteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon in his absence.

Not everyone was convinced, and the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, who had been dismissed from their pre-eminent military offices of state of marshal and constable of England, remained intransigent. They began to compile a list of grievances, known as the Remonstrances. In August Edward, in belligerent desperation, ordered another harsh tax on the Church and a general levy of an eighth of movable income, and sent out orders for the seizure of £50,000 worth of wool sacks from the country. He claimed that the measures were justified in parliament; his opponents snorted derisively that this ‘parliament’ amounted to no more than ‘the people stood about in his chamber’. On 22 August the opposition earls burst into the exchequer at Westminster, forbidding the collection either of wool or of the eighth and raging against a king who they said was tallaging them like serfs. The country was slipping rapidly towards civil war.

Yet with the realm seemingly on the brink of chaos, Edward left for the Continent. It was an extraordinarily bold move, but he was not prepared to wait at home while Gascony slipped from his grasp. He sailed for Flanders to begin the northern part of his French invasion on 24 August 1297.

His campaign, long anticipated, turned out to be a futile mess. Despite repeated promises, some of his expensive allies proved less
than willing to fight. The king of Germany failed to send help, and Edward’s sailors from East Anglia and the Cinque Ports proved happier to fight among themselves than to fight the enemy. Those Flemish allies who did play a part had been defeated by Philip IV at the battle of Veurne the week before Edward arrived. Soon after arriving on the Continent, Edward was pinned down in Ghent, where there were riots against his leadership. Not long after that, word came from the east that the king of Germany was abandoning the cause altogether.