Under the Hammer

This is a review of a new revised edition of Under the Hammer by Dr Fiona Watson, first published in 1999 and based on a PhD thesis.

Harsh experience has taught me the folly of broaching Edward I and Scotland, especially on social media. Seven hundred years after the old brute turned up his toes, and the subject still has the power to provoke and enrage (although not titillate, alas). Much of it is bound up with modern politics, in which a clear red line is drawn between the medieval wars of Scottish independence and the current Holyrood vs Westminster storm. For those seeking useful villains, Edward Longshanks might have been cooked up in a laboratory.


Fiona Watson's books on Scottish history, and this era in particular, are a welcome refuge. Watson is a 'proper' historian i.e. one who leaves her prejudices and preferences at the door, and always places the subject first. She is also one of the few to have made an in-depth study of the towering piles of surviving contemporary evidence for Edward I's Scottish wars. Virtually all this material, as she acknowledges, was churned out by the English administration. Inevitably, this gives us a rather lop-sided view of events.


These records, by their nature, are a little dry. Those who seek an adrenaline-fuelled tale of glorious battles and patriotic heroes with lovely eyes may look elsewhere. Indeed, they are spoiled for choice. It is to Watson's credit that she manages to weave the dusty old rolls of supply and finance, prise and purveyance, wage rolls and whatnot into a compelling narrative.

This is the actual stuff of medieval warfare; the endless flow of wagons creaking northward, bowed under the weight of foodstuffs and chests of money (usually late); bored soldiers on garrison duty, wondering if their wives are playing away from home; teams of harassed, overworked clerks, staring glumly at the latest impossible demand from their royal master, who was apparently under the impression that fresh soldiers grew on trees. In this respect Edward's attitude resembled that of the Roman emperor, Justinian I, who was once advised by an unusually brave secretary to sow dragon's teeth in the soil. That way, an army might just pop out of the ground.


In a subject dominated by hyperbole, Watson is also a voice of common sense. This is a thankfully linear narrative, point A to point B, starting with the death of Alexander III in 1286 and ending in 1305, when it seemed that Edward had finally imposed his will on the Scots. He had not, of course, but like every good historian Watson is careful to point out the dangers of hindsight. We can all judge, and have a good old sneer at the ancient dead and their mistakes in life, from the comfort of our armchairs. Very few of us – hopefully – will ever have to deal with such challenges.


To begin at the beginning. In the immediate aftermath of Alexander's death, Edward showed no particular interest in Scotland. Then, the Guardians invited him to act as arbiter in the Scottish succession crisis. Alexander had left no male heir, only a young daughter, the Maid of Norway. Without outside intervention, civil war loomed. The main threat to the peace came from the Bruce faction, who had already started to attack their fellow Scots.


Edward was also the natural choice. He was not only Scotland's nearest neighbour, and the greatest power in the British Isles, but Western Europe's foremost statesman. Watson might have made a little more of this latter point. Ironically, for a king regarded these days as a war-monger, Edward was seen by many contemporaries as a mediator; one who could be relied on to pour oil on troubled waters. For instance, he had previously acted as a disinterested arbiter in Savoy, Sicily and the empire. Given Edward's status, and his record to date, the decision of the Guardians becomes more natural still.

Military conquest was not Edward's first choice, or even his second. If the Maid had lived, and married the future Edward II, the union of the two crowns would have taken place long before 1603. The Guardians, it should be said, had no objection to this plan. Alas, the girl died, and it was at this point that Edward crossed the Rubicon (or the Tweed).


The late Archibald Duncan, in his brilliant, extensive, migraine-inducing history of the kingship of Scotland, exposed Edward's tactics. Watson synthesises Duncan's argument with admirable clarity. The crucial point was the difference between arbitration and judgement. Essentially, an arbiter had to remain neutral. To act as judge on the succession, however, required Edward to first have possession – or 'sasine' – of the Scottish kingdom. As Watson states, Edward grasped this point long before the Scots did. One by one, the various claimants to the throne were coerced into accepting Edward as judge.

Even here, the king did not gain everything he wanted. Some years later, in 1296, Edward was obliged to put his case for Scotland before the pope. That case, Edward knew, looked weak on parchment. Without going into the excruciating details, the king ordered his clerks to doctor the paperwork. This was intended to show the Scots had agreed to Edward's sasine and overlordship in early June 1291, when they had not. Thus, his entire claim to Scotland was based on a tissue of lies and legal half-truths, backed up by threats and menaces.


One may condemn Edward for his disgraceful behaviour, but also deal in context. Watson points out that his conduct was not untypical. Kings and popes all over medieval Europe dealt in the same low methods. The eventual victor of the Scottish wars, Robert I, was no innocent; indeed, given what King Bob and his family got up to, he could be seen as the greatest PR man in British medieval history. As for Edward, his experience was paradoxical. At the same time as he chose to deceive the Scots, he was deceived by his overlord, Philip the Fair, over the duchy of Gascony. Watson is not the first to point out that the one situation almost reads like a sick parody of the other. There is no morality in high politics, then or now.


The war, when it came, was an avoidable tragedy. Edward at first sought to control Scotland via a puppet king, John Balliol. Poor Balliol, remembered as 'Toom Tabard' (Empty Coat) due to his alleged weakness, was caught between two fires. In other circumstances he might have made a fine king; as it was, he had to cope with Edward's constant meddling on the one hand, and the fractious magnates of Scotland on the other. His main rival was Robert de Bruce, known as the Competitor, grandfather of the victor of Bannockburn. Having done their best to start a civil war, the Bruces were prepared to do absolutely anything to seize the crown. That included dealing in forged documents – hello, this sounds familiar – and clambering into bed with Edward.


One key piece of evidence, not included here, is an astonishing letter from the Competitor to Edward, dated 1291. Bruce advised Edward to put aside all previous treaties and agreements between the two kingdoms, and simply take Scotland for himself. Come and get it, big boy. Having lost out to Balliol, the Bruces showed Edward a flash of thigh, in the hope he would come north, impose his overlordship, and plant a Bruce on the throne. It may be that his policy from 1291 was driven by this secret invitation, so Watson's decision to omit the letter is a flaw.


After several years of Edward's bullying, the Scots could endure no more and forged a secret alliance with Philip. This dragged Scotland into the pre-existing state of war between England and France (and, for that matter, Norway and Germany). The utter mendacity of everyone involved is a thing to behold. Another of Philip's allies, King Erik of Norway, pledged to send fifty thousand Danish soldiers to invade England. In the event, not a single Danish tourist set foot on English soil: Erik had already come to a secret understanding with Edward, and was simply trying to screw money out of Philip. It worked, too, so fair play.


Edward's reaction to the Franco-Scots alliance, when he learned of it, was one of utter fury. In summer 1296 he gathered a massive army, burst into Scotland and flattened Balliol's army inside a few weeks. The Scots had no chance: as Watson points out, they had not fought a proper war in decades, while Edward's ranks were packed full of veterans of Wales, Gascony and the Holy Land, as well as the civil wars in England. Here, again, more context would have been helpful. There is no doubt that Edward regarded this as part of a much wider campaign against his chief enemy, Philip: at the same time as he overran the Scottish Lowlands, his brother Edmund was leading a separate English army against the French in Gascony. That said, there is a danger of losing focus.


From this point, the book is really a blow-by-blow study of Edward's military campaigns in Scotland. Watson shows that the king fatally underestimated the depth of Scottish resistance. This was not simply due to his contempt for the Scots – though he had plenty of that to spare – but his concerns elsewhere. Watson refuses to indulge in the commonly held fantasy that Edward was 'obsessed' with Scotland, excluding all else. In reality he was far more compelled by the recovery of Gascony, the last substantial fragment of the Angevin Empire. To that end Edward had spent oceans of gold on stitching together a vast anti-French coalition in Germany and the Low Countries. By 1296, hampered by revolts in Wales and Scotland, he was two years late in joining his allies on the continent. Every moment he spent on Scottish soil was a costly distraction.


The problem of Gascony explains Edward's hastily cobbled-together administration in Scotland in 1296. Less explicable is his decision to ride roughshod over Scottish laws and customs, which virtually guaranteed rebellion. Yet, with her usual fairness, Watson points out that Edward was not entirely deaf to Scottish systems of government. For instance, he appointed three justiciars via the traditional Scottish format. By and large, however – with a few notable exceptions, such as the Earl of Menteith – he stuffed his new colonial government with Englishmen, then raced off south to grapple with cousin Philip.


What happened next is well-known. William Wallace raised his head, as did a great many fellow Scots who objected to the new English taxes and demands for military service. Those demands were also causing serious unrest in England, although here Watson leans on some outdated assessments. The notion that England was on the edge of civil war in 1297 has been seriously challenged in recent times, notably by Andy King. As King has shown, Edward's envoys had already come to agreement with the king's critics in late August. This was before the battle of Stirling Bridge in September. Thus, the argument that Wallace's victory ironically united the English political community is questionable.


Edward's victory at Falkirk in 1298, however much it soothed English pride, did little to re-establish his control over Scotland. In fact his position deteriorated, until by late 1299 things were looking seriously fragile. This, as Watson shows, was due to several factors. English supply lines were too extended, the money kept running out, and the Scots launched devastating counter-raids into the northern counties. Instead of confronting Edward's massive armies in the open, the Scots cut his supplies, terrorised the peasantry over the border, harried his garrisons in Scotland. Those garrisons were perpetually short of money and supplies, often little more than outposts in the middle of hostile territory.


This is a very different picture from the traditional 'Hammer of the Scots' image, in which the mighty Plantagenet warlord swept all before him. On this evidence, Edward's Scottish campaigns between 1298-1303 were a series of administrative snarl-ups, defined by crippling expense, bumbling ineptitude and multiple betrayals. Not that his Scottish enemies were always pulling up trees either. In 1301, their combined field army in the south-west failed to take a single castle. The English, meanwhile, apparently couldn't march five steps without going bankrupt. Their futile conflict wheezed and spluttered to a halt in September, mainly because both sides had run out of ideas.


Both sides suffered from variable leadership. Edward himself, while no Alexander, was no Redvers Buller either (a particularly useless British Boer War general). He was, at any rate, a more formidable prospect than the men under him, such as Earl Warenne and the Earl of Lincoln. In Warenne's defence, he was old and ill, and would have preferred a stint in Hell to Scotland. Edward's most able captain was a former seneschal of Gascony, John de St John. The king moved heaven and earth to get St John out of a French prison and into Galloway, where English fortunes notably improved under his stewardship.


The roll-call of Scottish commanders, away from the flagship figures of Wallace and Bruce, doesn't exactly gleam with talent either. Step forward the Earl of Buchan, whose attempt to ambush Edward at the River Cree ended with his entire army high-tailing it across the glens. Then we have Sir Herbert Morham, who abandoned his men at Stirling so he could ride off in pursuit of Joan de Clare, widow of the Earl of Fife. He later got himself captured and thrown into Edinburgh prison, which placed his father in an interesting position: Morham senior was serving in the English garrison of Edinburgh castle. Quick, a statue to the Morham boys! Let it be fifty feet high, I say, and garlanded with blazing saltires. The best of them all was Sir John Comyn of Badenoch, a remarkable figure, victor of the battle of Roslin and consistent defender of Scottish liberty. That is, until Bruce stuck a knife in him.


In spite of all his problems, and the pressures elsewhere, Edward kept pounding away. The main battleground in these years was the south-west, which could be described as a state of civil war. Galloway was not yet fully absorbed into the kingdom of Scotland, something Edward appreciated. A number of the local dynasties supported the English and continued to do so for many years, long after it became clear the war was lost (or won, depending on one's point of view). Edward attempted to exploit these divisions by digging out Thomas of Galloway, who had spent fifty years in a Scottish prison, and packing the bewildered old coot off home, armed with a charter of liberties. Here Watson might have included a comparison with Wales: after 1297, Edward sought to gain the support of the Welsh by doling out charters of liberties to local communities. The policy was effective, which might have influenced Edward's attempt to repeat it in Scotland.


This leads onto the (in my opinion) best section of the book, which deals with the crux year of 1302. Up until this point, despite the defeat at Falkirk, the Guardians had been doing rather well. Despite repeated invasions, Edward could not claim to have control of Scotland beyond the south-east, and a toe-hold in Galloway. The Scots were also holding their own on the diplomatic front. A vital factor was the threat of the return of John Balliol, backed by a French army.

1302 marked the turn of the tide. First, Robert de Bruce – later Robert I – defected to the English camp. Then King Philip chose to renege on the Treaty of Asnieres, whereby he was supposed to take custody of much of south-west Scotland. The deadline for this transfer was 16th February, which came and went without a Frenchman in sight. Edward, who had shrewdly guessed that Philip would ditch his Scottish allies, carried on stocking his garrisons. Watson describes all this, without speculating as to why Philip broke his own agreement. The answer may lie in the final peace between England and France, whereby Edward once again became Philip's vassal. That in turn meant Philip could summon Edward to do military service in Flanders. He did just that, and the term of service just happened to coincide with the broken treaty. Not for the last time, a French king had used the Scots as useful collateral.


The real shock came at Courtrai in July, where the French army crashed to a stunning defeat at the hands of Flemish citizen-militia. Faced with his very own Stirling Bridge, Philip was obliged to hurl all his resources at Flanders. This meant reaching an agreement with Edward, which in turn meant the restoration of Gascony to the English. After the final treaty was agreed at Paris in early 1303, Edward was free – at last – to deal with Scotland.


That final push, as Watson describes it, was nothing short of monumental. After years of grinding warfare and high taxes, Edward somehow galvanised his stuttering war-machine for one last tilt at the Scots. Even Watson, with her detailed knowledge of the nuts and bolts, admits defeat here. Edward's last charge into Scotland, given the tattered state of his finances, was, on the face of it, impossible. Yet somehow he got the thing done, and Watson admits to a certain baffled admiration. One does not have to 'like' this particular Plantagenet to acknowledge his strengths. Among these, to judge from Watson's narrative, was an almost sublime ability to bulldoze through any problem.


The last third of the book is taken up by the Strathord agreement of 1304, and Edward's subsequent Ordinance for the government of Scotland. At Strathord, the Guardians finally agreed to surrender. This was far from unconditional, however, and in return Edward had to agree to a complex set of terms. Watson is cautious here. In terms of the military situation, Edward had succeeded in crossing the Forth, for the first time since 1296, and driven a wedge between the Guardians and their eastern sea-ports. Their only hope now lay in French support – fat chance, even though Philip kept making noises – or defeating Edward in a pitched battle. Nobody, Edward included, wanted to roll that particular die.


At the same time, while Edward had clawed back the initiative, he only had a limited window to exploit it. His coffers really were bare, now, and he could only pay for the war by deferring on loans and relying on tithes extracted from the papacy. How long he could have maintained his army in Scotland is a moot point, but in any case the Guardians went for settlement.


Whatever his flaws, Edward was not stupid. He had learned his lessons: in contrast to 1296, the king and his advisers spent eighteen months carefully drawing up the new ordinance for Scotland, in consultation with Scottish magnates and clergy. From the English perspective, this was intended to be a permanent settlement. As for the Scots, we should not make assumptions based on that dratted hindsight. At the very least, their renewed oaths of allegiance to Edward were meant to hold good for as long as he lived. After he died – and everyone could see that Edward was on his last legs – the oaths would have to be re-sworn to his successor. That, whatever one makes of Edward II, was an entirely different kettle of fish.


Watson also discusses the moral aspect, as the Guardians would have understood it. Up until 1303, they had been fighting for the restoration of their king, John Balliol. When it became clear Balliol was not going to return, that meant there was no king to fight for. This presented a dilemma. It may seem strange to us, but in the fourteenth century the state was very much linked to the individual. Put simply: no king = no state = no motive. The notion of the homeland as a thing worth fighting for in itself was not yet crystallised. At least, not to everyone who mattered.

Equally, we should not lavish too much praise on the brilliant foresight of the Guardians of Scotland. Whatever concessions he made, Edward had (temporarily) won the main point. Here, Watson quotes Bruce's biographer, the late GWS Barrow:

'There was no escaping the fact that Scotland was once more what she had been in 1296, a conquered country, occupied by foreign garrisons and governed by the foreign officials of a foreign king'.
​

And there Watson leaves it, pretty much. Neither Edward nor his banged-together empire would last much longer. The Scots soon found a new leader in Robert de Bruce – a curious case of gamekeeper-turned-poacher – and the war started up all over again. Edward's fate was to die in a barren Cumbrian outpost, within sight but not within reach of Scotland. Bruce's road to Bannockburn is pretty well-worn, and goes beyond Watson (and Edward's) remit.

As my somewhat windy review has hopefully demonstrated, this is not an easy subject. Partisan arguments will rage forever, probably, even after this sceptic isle has sunk beneath the waves. Pleas for calm are probably futile, but it may be worth quoting the author's final statement:

“War is, and no doubt always will be, expensive, tedious, horrifying, but, above all, complex”.