Bannockburn 1314: A New History E-Book

Dr Chris Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Bannockburn 1314 is a history of the most celebrated battle between Scotland and England, in which a mere 7,000 followers of Robert the Bruce defeated more than 15,000 of Edward II's troops. The Battle of Bannockburn, fought over two days on 23 and 24 June 1314 by a small river crossing just south of Stirling, was a decisive victory for Robert, and secured for Scotland de facto independence from England. It was the greatest defeat the English would suffer throughout the Middle Ages, and a huge personal humiliation for Edward. Chris Brown's account recreates the campaign from the perspectives of both the Scots and English. Through an in-depth investigation of contemporary narrative sources as well as administrative records, and with a fresh look at the terrain where the battle was fought, he is able to come to firmer conclusions as to exactly what happened, and why, and thereby to rewrite the traditional history of the battle.

Leseprobe

BANNOCKBURN

1314

BANNOCKBURN

1314

A New History

CHRIS BROWN

First published 2008

This edition published 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Chris Brown, 2008, 2009, 2013

The right of Chris Brown to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9671 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

1The Story So Far: The War of Independence, 1296–1313

2What Did the Combatants Fight For?

3Lions and Leopards: The Careers of Robert I and Edward II

4Sources and Interpretation

5Brave Companies: The Armies of the English and the Scots

6Going to the War: October 1313–May 1314

7Locating the Battle

8Muster and March to Battle: 17–22 June 1314

9The First Clash: The Entry, Evening of 23 June 1314

10The Second Clash: St Ninians and Cambuskenneth Abbey, Evening of 23 June 1314

11The Night of 23 June 1314

12The Great Battle at Stirling, 24 June 1314

13After the Fight

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

Why write a book on Bannockburn at all? We can never hope to achieve a complete and undisputed understanding of any historical event, let alone a battle.

Bannockburn was only one battle in a very long war, or rather, a long series of wars, though all of them have the same issue at stake – the conquest or independence of Scotland as a political entity. The rarity of major battles of manoeuvre is such that none of the larger battles of the Wars of Independence can be considered ‘typical’, so Bannockburn is not really ‘representative’ of the general course or nature of the conflicts. Bannockburn was far from being typical in scale; in the half century between 1296 and 1346 there were only a handful of general engagements that involved more than a few thousand men – Stirling Bridge, Falkirk, Halidon Hill and Neville’s Cross – and the latter is, arguably, not really a battle about the survival or otherwise of the Scottish kingdom, so much as a facet of the Hundred Years War. Even the capture of King David did not really pose a threat to the independence of his realm. Despite their defeat, the Scots seem to have had no shortage of confidence in their ability to withstand Edward III, and Edward himself seems to have taken little or no interest in restoring the short-lived administration which had held much of southern Scotland in the 1330s for the English crown.

Operationally, Bannockburn was far from being typical of the general conduct of the war. There are examples of a similar tactical policy in action at the battle of Loudon and elsewhere. Myton1 and Culblean,2 on the other hand, are battles in which mounted cavalry played no part at all. The majority of the actions that took place in Scotland between 1296 and 1314 – most of which are unknown outside the academic community – were encounters between rather modest bodies of heavy cavalry3 or sieges of the towns and castles4 which formed the focal points of local political, commercial, social and judicial activity.5

The battle occurred nearly seven hundred years ago, and so it should come as no surprise that the evidence tends to be limited, both in terms of quantity and quality. Even when studied in relation to the terrain, the material is often less informative than we might hope, indeed, study of the site may actually bring other factors into mind which might otherwise have escaped us. Relating written accounts to modern maps can be a frustrating – and not necessarily a rewarding – exercise. We may be confident that the burn we find on a map is the one referred to by this or that writer, but is it still in the same place? Has its course, width or current been affected by the construction of roads, railways or housing? Were its banks more treacherous in the past than they are today? Crucially, even if we are utterly certain that ‘this’ is the burn that a given force crossed on a given day, we cannot be so certain that it did so at any particular point in the water’s course.

Maps or diagrams of battles often present difficulties of their own. The symbols used to denote formations on the battlefield seldom bear any inscale resemblance to the size or shape of those formations. To some extent this is obviously a matter of ensuring that the reader can identify the formations; a product of showing the course of the battle in a map that is too small to allow the unit symbols to be depicted in the same scale as the geographical features. This is not a problem unique to battle diagrams; the symbol used to denote churches by the Ordnance Survey is not related to the physical size of the church in question. The combat elements of medieval armies were little more than specks on the landscape; they were not large and the majority of the men fought in very close order – something approaching one square metre per man for close-combat infantry, and perhaps six to eight square metres for every man-at-arms. It is quite possible that the entirety of Edward II’s army at Bannockburn could have been seated in Wimbledon’s Centre Court, which has a capacity of 16,000 and that all of King Robert’s spearmen could – at a pinch – have stood on one full-size rugby pitch.

Further, we cannot rely on maps to show all of the features which might affect manoeuvre. A low mound or long ditch might have a dramatic influence on the course of a fight, but be too insignificant to appear on a map.6 More importantly, few people spend enough time reading maps to really appreciate the extent to which visibility is limited by terrain. This is a matter of considerable importance. In an age when the fastest mode of transport was the horse, the advantage conferred on the army with the upper hand in reconnaissance was considerable. The commander who could obtain a position that allowed him to observe the approach of the enemy, whilst keeping his own forces hidden from view, could deploy his troops to their greatest advantage in the light of observations and deductions made from the enemy’s order of march. If he could keep his own troops out of sight until the last moment, he could be reasonably confident that his enemy would not be able to redeploy his units in the most appropriate manner without considerable time and trouble.

The conduct and progress of medieval engagements once battle was joined is often, though not always, a good deal easier to follow if one has a reasonable understanding of the nature of the troops – their equipment, their approach to combat and, in many cases, some understanding of that crucial tool of medieval life, the horse. Without that knowledge it is easy to make deductions that do not stand the test of rational examination. There is, for example, a widely accepted mental picture of Sir William Wallace as a large man, clad in plaid and wielding a two-handed sword from the saddle. Putting aside the fact that two-handed swords were not the weapon of the day in the late thirteenth century, a moment’s thought about the practicalities of using such a weapon on horseback, should be enough to dispel the suggestion instantly. Nonetheless, the image persists.

The purpose of this study is to relate the information contained in the contemporary sources to what we know of the military practice of the day and, so far as is possible, to the nature of the terrain. An obvious problem lies in the fact that we cannot precisely identify the sites of the different actions that took place on the 23rd/24th June 1314, but this is not so much of an issue as one might expect. Whether an engagement occurred a thousand metres to the west or east of a specific spot is only significant if aspects of the terrain would conflict with the existing body of evidence. The action that occurred in the vicinity of St Ninians would, for example, have been radically different had it occurred at a particular distance to the east, south or north of the chapel, due to the nature of the location. All of the relevant source material puts the action on flat, hard ground, therefore it clearly was not fought two miles to the northeast of Kirkton of St Ninians – unless it was fought in the waters of the fast and powerful River Forth. Moreover, battles are not, as a general rule, static events.

Armies manoeuvre for position; they advance to contact, they retire or advance during combat. This in turn presents problems for archaeological interpretation, particularly in instances where ‘finds’ are few and far between.7 The discovery of a weapon fragment – even if the fragment can be indisputably attributed to the action in question – tells us no more than the fact that at some point the weapon was lost or abandoned. It need not even have been lost at the location in which it is found, and even if it was, the fragment is not evidence that a formation of either army passed that way; it may have been lost by a man escaping from a fight that was actually taking place at some considerable distance. Even the most assiduous study of the sources, the terrain and the archaeological material cannot, therefore, give us a complete and incontrovertible account of all the different aspects of this battle, nor for most others of the period.

On the other hand, the general sequence of events and the nature of the engagements can be readily understood from the source material if we relate that information to the practices of the day. It is certainly true that the sources contradict each other to some extent; indeed, if they did not do so, we should be suspicious that they all stemmed from one common account. However the degree of inconsistency is not great and, as we shall see, the discrepancies between sources are – to a considerable extent anyway – matters of perspective in the sense that the deployment for battle and the progress of the fight may have looked very different from the points of view of the Lanercost chronicler’s witness and that of Sir Thomas Grey – both of whose accounts of the battle are reproduced in this volume.

Contemporary accounts, however carefully written, are of limited value unless we make a real effort to understand the nature of the armies and their nature of approach to battle. Failure to do so can lead to very serious misconceptions which, in turn, can lead us to very questionable conclusions. This is, perhaps, less of an issue for the army of Edward II than for that of Robert I. There are two reasons for this. One is that English armies of the fourteenth century have been studied in far more detail than Scottish ones, which is itself a matter of source material. Not only is there a great deal more in the way of record evidence – payrolls and horse valuations records, for example – but the material has been thoroughly examined by many very talented historians for the better part of one hundred years – particularly, though not exclusively, J.E. Morris, Professor G.W.S. Barrow and Doctors Michael Prestwich, Andrew Ayton and Andy King.8

Study of the armies and actions of a particular time and place is, of course, somewhat redundant without gaining some understanding of the political, social, economic and cultural conditions which brought about war between the nations concerned. Many fine scholars have devoted themselves to these aspects of medieval England and Scotland, and there are a number of volumes which are simply indispensable to the student who wishes to get to grips with the societies from which the political and military leaders of the day were drawn – those which provided the manpower, finance and political will to wage war. Professors Barrow and Prestwich have already been mentioned, but there are many others worthy of praise: Professors Nicholson, Keen and Duncan, and Drs Fiona Watson, Michael Brown, Norman Reid, David Ditchburn, Alexander Grant, Michael Penman and Colm McNamee, to name but a few.

There is no particular shortage of ‘Bannockburn’ books on the market, and one might question the value of writing another. No new source material has come to light, so perhaps it could be argued that there is nothing new to say. In a sense, this is true. There is nothing new to add to the existing body of evidence; however, there are a great many issues to be considered in relation to the interpretation of that evidence. To that end, I have chosen to cite and discuss all of the significant narrative sources, both in relation to one another and in the light of what we know of the military realities of the early fourteenth century as practiced in Scotland. I have endeavoured to keep endnotes to a minimum; the bulk of the significant material is contained in the chronicle accounts. I have devoted no space whatsoever to the authorship of those accounts; in this context it is the writing that is significant, not the writer. The one exception is Sir Thomas Grey, whose personal experience as a career soldier cannot be ignored.

No medieval battle can be perfectly understood; there is no-one alive today who has experienced the terror of an arrow-storm or the ferocity of a full-blooded charge by armoured cavalry, but I hope that the material contained in this book will give the reader a reasonable practical understanding of this remarkable battle which, despite modern claims to the contrary, was very much more than a clash between medieval gangsters. For Scottish people at least, it was an expression of the political preference of the majority of the community for independence.

Without the active support of a very wide segment of Scottish society, from labourers to lords, King Robert would never have been able to restore the sovereignty of his nation. The war was not, however, a simple matter of allegiance to a king, but a subtle and complex combination of issues of national and regional identities, traditions of support for, or opposition to, local leaders, perceptions of the political realities of the day, resentment of domination by a foreign power, personal ambition and ties of familial and social relationships. All of these factors, and probably many others which defy identification at a distance of seven hundred years, were instrumental in persuading many thousands of men to risk their lives at Stirling in the summer of 1314.

As ever, there are several individuals whose interest, information and encouragement demand recognition. In the academic sphere, these include Professor Mason and Dr Reid of the Scottish History Department at St Andrews University, who brought a much needed degree of ‘raddure’ to my PhD studies, repairing the damage and demoralisation caused by a long period of desultory and incompetent supervision. I cannot thank them enough for reawakening a passion for medieval Scottish history that had come very close to being utterly extinguished. I am also indebted to the unfailingly helpful – and cheerful – archival staff at East Register House and Kew. I also owe a great debt to the many scholars who have written about Scotland, England and France during the fourteenth century, and in particular to the small group of scholars who, since the 1960s, have brought the study of medieval Scotland out of the murk of romance and myth and into the mainstream of medieval historiography – Professors Barrow, Duncan and Nicholson.

I am also grateful for the patience and understanding of my wife, Pat, and my children and their partners – Robert, Colin, Christopher, Charis, Alex and Juliet. They have all had to put up with endless ramblings about the nature of medieval society and war. I have no idea how they have coped, but they have.

I would like to point out that my understanding of the battle is a product of how I see the source material, the terrain and the practice of war at the time of writing. It is perfectly possible that developments in archaeological techniques, a spate of new ‘finds’, or even a previously unknown piece of source material may yet emerge which might compromise or confirm the evidence on which all of the existing studies of this battle have depended.

Chris Brown

Kennoway, 2008

1

The Story So Far: The War of Independence, 1296–1313

An extensive body of books, articles and essays on the wars of King John, Robert I, Edward I and Edward II has been published over the last hundred years or so, but the extent to which many of these works has contributed to our understanding of the 1314 campaign is questionable. Even the most cursory survey of the secondary material currently most accessible to the public – entries in encyclopaedias, general histories, Internet sites and dictionaries of battles – shows the enormous influence of the works of S.R. Gardiner1 and C.W.C. Oman.2 Both of these men still enjoy very positive reputations for their efforts in different fields; Oman’s account of the Peninsula campaigns against Napoleon is still an invaluable piece of work after a century.3 For Oman and Gardiner the battle took the form of an opposed crossing, one of the most hazardous approaches to battle. The challenge of forcing a passage over the deep muddy-banked stream that divided the armies was further complicated by the fact that the Scots had dug innumerable pits along the bank of the Bannock Burn. These inflicted many casualties on the English cavalry, who exhausted themselves in repeated attacks on the serried ranks of the Scots before eventually giving up the contest and abandoning the field to the enemy. None of this bears very much resemblance to any of the contemporary or near-contemporary accounts, but the fame of the writers has ensured that their interpretations and maps have gained a very real currency – so much so that they still have an influence on academic understanding of the events of June 1314 today

Undermining the Gardiner/Oman interpretation is not a modernist ‘debunking’ exercise. In 1913 Rev. MacKenzie published his study of the battle – still one of the better works on the topic. MacKenzie’s volume was not simply a counterblast to Oman and Gardiner; it was an attempt to consider all of the sources in relation to one another and in relation to examinations of the terrain. One might make a number of criticisms of MacKenzie’s conclusions and of his preference for some medieval writers over others, but he certainly examined all of the significant material from the relevant contemporary accounts – Barbour’s Bruce, Thomas Grey’s Scalacronica, Fordoun’s Chronicle, the Lanercost Chronicle, Bower’s Scotichronicon, and Vita Edwardi Secundi.4

MacKenzie was not the only Scottish historian of his time to examine Bannockburn in some detail. Evan MacLeod Barron’s work, The Scottish War of Independence,5 still exerts an influence on Scottish medieval history nearly a century after its first publication. There are numerous weaknesses to Barron’s understanding of Bannockburn that have been explored in detail by Professor Barrow.6 Barron’s contribution to the topic largely revolved around his conviction that the contribution of Highland communities to the cause of independence had been obscured by a concentration on Lowland magnate politics, and that the viability of the patriotic cause had been continually undermined by the capacity of lowland nobles and gentry to defect to the English. Barron could certainly provide many examples of serial defections among the Scottish magnates – Robert Bruce, for example, changed sides in 1297, 1301–2 and again in 1306. In the view of Barron, the southern nobility were less committed than their northern counterparts, a reflection of differing values between what he saw as two distinct Scottish cultural, social and political entities, the ‘Teutonic’ (southern/lowland) and the Celtic (Gaelic/northern). This aspect of Barron’s interpretation has been thoroughly discredited by Professor Barrow, but continues to exert a considerable influence on the popular perception of the Battle of Bannockburn and of the war in general. Barron’s intention was to redress what he saw as a tendency on the part of historians to focus on the activities of the southern magnates. His view was not without validity, but he exaggerated some pieces of evidence and marginalised others to make his case. He was not the first writer to draw attention to this perceived north-south imbalance. In 1909, John Shearer, in his Fact and fiction in the Story of Bannockburn,7 wrote:

… there is nothing in Barbour that even gives a hint that the chiefs, with their men, from the hills and glens of Loch Lomond, Loch Katrine, Loch Tay, Loch Ness and Loch Shin, were fighting at the Battle Bannockburn. This is surely a great omission on the part of Barbour, and a terrible injustice to the Celts of Scotland.

Popular perception is one of the barriers to understanding the battle at all. Scottish romantic tradition tends to see the action as a struggle between impoverished Scottish peasants – unarmoured and ill-equipped – against endless hordes of armoured English knights, a triumph of the peasants over the nobility – a myth greatly enhanced by the popularity of the film Braveheart. There is also the question of the extent to which the Wars of Independence can be seen as a ‘civil war’ between Scottish factions rather than a war of aggression and conquest inaugurated by Edward I.8 There was certainly an element of domestic political strife before 1291 which revolved around the question of whether Robert Bruce or John Balliol should have inherited the crown – an issue that led to the presence of the Bruces and others in the English camp. The objective of the Bruces was to acquire Scottish kingship, not to subject themselves to the authority of Edward I.

The ‘civil war’ theory, however, does have some validity in the sense that many Scots, for a variety of reasons and at different times, did align themselves with the Plantagenet cause, but that in itself is a long way short of proving that the War of Independence was a ‘civil’ war as such. There was no sense in the entirety of a series of conflicts – which lasted intermittently from 1296 to 1328 (and resumed in 1332) – when the war was exclusively, or even primarily, a conflict between Scottish political factions. Even Edward Balliol’s invasion depended on the resources of English lords with Scottish ambitions. The presence of English garrisons9 and field armies was always the most significant aspect of the military dimension of the struggle and, with the exception of the period between the death of Wallace and the inauguration of Robert I, there was always a part of Scottish society, from the labourers to the great lords, which was prepared to unite across barriers of class and culture in defence of the independence of their country. As the chronicler Guisborough wrote of the Scottish aristocracy, their bodies might be with the King of England, but ‘their hearts were always with their own people.’

Despite assertions such as –

the misery and bloodshed in the wars between England and Scotland lies at the door of those rebellious Scots who adhered neither to their King, nor to their oaths of fealty to their supreme overlord, Edward10

– the basic cause of the Wars of Independence was the ambition of Edward I. It is of course true that without Edward’s involvement in the period after the death of the young Queen Margaret on her voyage from Norway,11 there would almost certainly have been a genuine civil war in Scotland between the Bruce and Balliol parties. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that both Robert Bruce and John Comyn were prepared to join forces against Edward in a joint Guardianship despite their very real political differences.12

Although the two men were far from being happy allies, it was not the prospect of military defeat at the hands of the English that made Robert Bruce defect to Edward I, but the increasingly strong possibility that King John might be restored to his throne, thus compromising any possibility that Robert might eventually become king himself. Again, this was a matter of domestic Scottish politics, but the key issue which had united Bruce and Comyn in the first place was that of political independence.

It is also true that Robert had to wage campaigns against powerful Scottish interests in the early part of his reign, primarily against the Comyn and MacDougal families, but it is misleading to see these campaigns simply as aspects of ‘civil’ war. After 1304 each of these groups had been drawn into an English administration of Scotland;13 they were not assets of an alternative Scottish government acting in opposition to the Bruce party.

This, however, does not mean that either the MacDougals or the Comyns would necessarily have remained in English allegiance regardless of political developments. King Philip of France had been forced to abandon the Scots in the wake of the Battle of Courtrai,14 but circumstances do change. If Philip had felt that it was in his interests (and within his capabilities) to deploy a significant force to Scotland in an attempt to restore King John after the collapse of the Balliol party in 1304, it is quite possible, even probable, that the Comyns would have reverted to their traditional role of supporters to the Scottish crown, a role from which they – and the crown – had profited greatly over a period of more than one hundred years. In practice, of course, this was not an option that the French could pursue; they had problems enough already. Diplomatically it suited Edward I and Edward II to depict their Scottish campaigns as a purely domestic matter; lawful kings exercising their right to discipline recalcitrant subjects in rebellion against their liege-lord. That they enjoyed some success is apparent from the tendency for English – and sometimes Scottish – historians to describe men like Comyn and Bruce as ‘rebels.’

Naturally, the commitment of the Comyns to the Plantagenet cause was enhanced by their opposition to the Bruce party – hardly surprising given Robert’s murder of John Comyn of Badenoch in February 1306.15 But it was also encouraged by their defeat at Robert’s hands in his Buchan campaign of 1308.16 Once they had been driven out of the northeast, their only hope of recovering their property and, with it, their position of political power, was the hope that Edward II might defeat and destroy the Bruce party. By the close of 1313, this must have seemed increasingly unlikely, unless Bruce could be brought to battle on a grand scale. In terms of territorial control, King Robert was close to winning his war. He had gained control of all Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde, his armies were able to pass through those areas which were still in Plantagenet hands in order to mount operations in England, and the remaining assets of Edward II’s administration were increasingly isolated and vulnerable – even Berwick had nearly fallen in 1312.17 The commitment of a field army does not seem to have brought much progress. The campaign of 1310–11 had achieved little in the way of recovered ground for the expenditure of a very considerable sum – essentially a failure for the English and therefore a major propaganda coup for King Robert. The position of the Comyn family, and others who had remained in Plantagenet allegiance, became precarious throughout the military successes of a Scottish rival – Robert Bruce – however the Comyns were fighting not for an alternative Scottish kingship, but for the King of England. This is also true of Robert’s western enemies, the MacDougalls and McCans. Their rivalry with the MacDonalds gave Robert an ally, but the MacDougalls – like the Comyns – were fighting to preserve Plantagenet kingship, not to bring back King John. Their conflict with the Bruce party had a ‘civil’ element, but was still the operational expression of a war between English and Scottish kings.

As a conflict between nations, it is hardly a surprise that nationalism – in all its guises – is a factor in itself. As we shall see, both Scottish and English people were perfectly aware of their nationality, but nationalism is also an issue within some of the source material. We need only compare the Lanercost chronicler’s generally hostile views of the Scots with those of Sir Thomas Grey, who spent the greater part of his professional life in Scotland. Nationalism and concepts of national destiny were already an important part of English historiography by the time of the Wars of Independence. To a great degree, this was bound up with a view that the King of England was the rightful and acknowledged superior of the whole of the British Isles. One need look no further than Geoffrey of Monmouth’s assertion that Scotland was a dependency of England, which Professor Mason calls the ‘Brut tradition’.18 The ‘evidence’ on which Monmouth’s case depended was that Brutus the Trojan, having escaped from the fall of Troy, had travelled to Britain and divided the British Isles between his sons, with the eldest, Locrinus, enjoying the kingship of England and superiority over his brother-kings, Albanactus of Scotland and Kamber of Wales.

The Trojan legend was supported in more recent times (by medieval standards) by the ‘fact’ that Arthur had been king of all Britain and, more cogently perhaps, the fact that at different times a number of Scottish kings had accepted the superiority of their English counterparts, the most recent being William the Lion in December 1174. In practice, William’s acceptance of Henry II’s feudal superiority was given under duress and was, in any case, soon traded away by Richard I of England for ready money under the terms of the Quitclaim of Canterbury in 1189.19 It has been suggested that the terms of the Quitclaim were sufficiently vague to mean anything to anyone, however the key cause is very straightforward:

…We (Richard of England) have freed him (William of Scotland) from all compacts which our good father, Henry, king of the English, extorted from him by new charters and by his capture.

More generally, the popular view of the society and economy of the northern kingdom has been shaped by what Dr Fergusson20 called:

the peculiarly English Victorian Gothic version of early medieval Scotland in which Gaels and Norse and Anglians and even Britons live in different parts of the country, separated by geography, culture, language and pretty much tribal kingdoms in themselves…not to mention Northumbrians and Galwegians.

There has also been something of a tendency for English historians to view any action contrary to English interests as being a threat to good practice and desirable outcomes. May McKisack21 saw the development of a strong political alliance between Scotland and France in 1294–7 as being ‘among the most sinister developments of the war of independence,’ rather than being the only practical response to the ambitions of an aggressive and predatory neighbour. Few reputable English medievalists of recent times would choose to see Edward’s behaviour in Scotland as the reasonable and lawful actions of a well-intentioned and benign neighbour, however the prevalence of that attitude in the past still exerts an influence on ‘popular’ history. One need look no further than John Harvey’s book The Plantagenets, which clearly makes the Scots the villains of the piece. According to Harvey, the judicial murder of Sir William Wallace was a fate he brought upon himself:

Had his offences been merely political he would have found the same mercy that Edward’s other opponents never sought in vain; but Wallace was not the hero of romantic legend, but a leader of well-organised criminals in an assault upon society. For three hundred years the Borders suffered cruelly for this one man’s misdeeds.22

In reality, Wallace was executed because his death suited Edward’s own political purposes on a number of levels. The high-profile public execution and dismemberment of Wallace did more than provide a spectacle for Londoners, it gave a superficial veneer of ‘closure’ in the wake of the Strathord armistice. The execution was popular at home and, to some extent anyway, politically practical in Scotland. Edward could not afford to execute any of the men who had until recently been the leaders of the Balliol party since he needed their influence and military power if he was to make his conquest effective. If Wallace had been a great and powerful magnate, Edward would probably not have had him killed, but, since his defeat at Falkirk and his resignation from the Guardianship in 1298, Wallace had ceased to be a figure of any real importance in the Scottish political community. He was, however, very famous, so his capture and execution could be presented – in England at least – as a triumph.

In fact, Wallace’s murder was probably a serious mistake on the part of Edward and for the future of his Scottish administration, since it ‘raised the political temperature in Scotland.’23 Wallace may not have been a great favourite of the senior aristocracy in Scotland, but he was still a popular figure in wider society. Wallace is a heroic figure to Scots – and others – and hero-worship can get in the way of a realistic appraisal of his career; the same applies to King Robert and Edward I as a hero to the English. To cite Harvey again:

… it is impossible not to regret that the peace-lover, the arbitrator, the fountain-head of his country’s prosperity and justice, should have exhausted himself in constant war.24

But in reality Edward’s wars in Scotland and in Wales were problems that he brought upon himself, and the various financial and political crises faced by the English crown at the end of the thirteenth century were in fact products of Edward’s military ventures. Edward’s reputation as an outstanding soldier is something of a barrier in itself; had he lost the battle of Falkirk it is hard to see how that reputation could ever have flourished. Edward cannot have assumed that his 1296 campaign had really finished the Balliol cause, but presumably he did expect that the manpower and money he committed to the project would be adequate to the task of quickly overcoming any residual resistance and erecting an occupation administration. His strategic and tactical expertise failed him on both counts.

Traditionally Scottish historians have shied clear of describing Edward’s rule as an ‘occupation’, partly perhaps for fear of giving offence, but chiefly because of the number of Scots who were involved in Edward’s government, particularly in the period after the Strathord armistice of 1304. This is something of an over-simplification. There were certainly a great many Scottish men and women who accepted Edward as their king, some through conviction, some through duress. No doubt there were quite a few who were not really terribly concerned about who was king, so long as they could maintain their own position in society and either felt that Edward was too strong to resist or that he offered the best chance of stability.25 There would probably have been some who felt that the country had been failed by the Bailiol monarchy and who were prepared to accept Edward – at least temporarily – for want of any other source of political leadership. To assume that Plantagenet kingship was the preferred option for all of these people is to do them a considerable injustice, comparable to assuming that men and women who retained their posts under the Germans or the Japanese during World War Two had embraced Nazi or Japanese imperial ideologies. Accepting authority for the sake of keeping one’s job or one’s business is not tantamount to being a collaborator.

On one level there was the question of avoiding forfeiture, imprisonment or even death for failing to accept Plantagenet rule, but there were also many internal Scottish political issues. Just because someone did not accept the Bruce party does not mean that they wholeheartedly endorsed the Plantagenets. Aryeh Nusbacher,26 referring to the example of the Earl of Angus who responded to the summons to fight for Edward II in 1314, points out that, with him,

…were a number of Scottish knights who had decided that their allegiance to their English sovereign was more important than their allegiance to the claimant of the Scottish throne.

Though typical of the conventional English view of the wars of independence articulated by Oman and others, there is an implication here that cannot go unchallenged. Scottish ‘knights’ might choose to support Edward II because they believed that his cause was legally sound or because they believed that the Plantagenet administration offered the best prospect of peace. They might, alternatively, choose Edward II’s lordship for no better reason than that they rejected the Bruce party. Robert’s conduct over the previous two decades had not been consistent in the sense of supporting the ‘patriotic cause’; he had murdered his chief political rival and he was most certainly a usurper so long as there was a legitimate heir of the Balliol family. Further, many of the Scots who served as men-at-arms in the English army of 1314 were the tenants, relatives and associates of men who had firmly rejected the Bruce party and had lost their estates as King Robert extended his rule.

Some, no doubt, served Edward II (as they had served Edward I) for fear of losing their estates in England, though in reality these are likely to have been few in number since only a handful of Scots held estates of any great significance outside Scotland. The converse is true as well; some of the gentry and nobility who joined the Bruce cause, particularly after the defeat of the Comyns in 1308, surely did so because their properties, or at least their most significant estates, lay in areas dominated by the Bruces. As the Bruce party gained ground the chances of retaining those properties without accepting Robert’s kingship must have seemed increasingly remote. This applied equally to great lords and minor gentry. The Earl of Ross, a Balliol supporter in 1291–2,27 was firmly in the Plantagenet camp in 1306 when he captured King Robert’s queen, Elizabeth de Burgh28 and dispatched her to Edward I as a prisoner, but by 1308 his earldom had become very isolated and he was obliged to accept a truce with the Bruce party until June and then entered King Robert’s peace on 31 October. Without the armed support of Edward II’s forces to help him resist the Bruce party, the Earl was doomed to defeat and forfeiture unless he accepted Robert’s kingship and authority. William of Ross’s circumstances were, perhaps, particularly difficult. His earldom was vulnerable, not only to Robert’s land-based forces, but also to raids mounted from the Hebrides by Robert’s allies. The Earl of Angus, on the other hand, presumably felt that he was more likely to retain his earldom through giving his allegiance to Edward II. As it turned out he was mistaken and by the time of Bannockburn had already been an émigré for some time.

Individual Scots aligned themselves with the Bruce party for a wide variety of reasons, some political, some personal. Many people believed – rightly – that the legitimate King of Scotland was John Balliol or, after John’s death in 1313, his son, Edward. The collapse of the Balliol cause in 1304 did not mean that all of the Balliol supporters defected to the Plantagenet cause, merely that the leaders of the Balliol party had come to the conclusion that, abandoned by the French29 and by John himself,30 their cause was no longer militarily viable. It does not, of itself, imply a preference either for the Plantagenets over the Bruces or a general preference for the occupation government. Clausewitz’s observation that a nation might see defeat – even overwhelming defeat – as a ‘temporary misfortune’ that might, in due course, be reversed through a resumption of hostilities, is most appropriate here.31

Acceptance of the rule of the government of day did not imply political sympathy so much as a matter of keeping one’s job and one’s head; accepting that this or that party offered the best hope of stability and security and that it could provide ‘good lordship.’32 Similarly, people might be dissuaded from giving overt support to their favoured party because they doubted the ability of that party to impose its will on the country as a whole. As Barrow has shown, King Robert enjoyed support from nobles across the country from his inauguration as king.33 Some of Robert’s early supporters fell away through Plantagenet pressure in 1306–7, but many more joined as he began to look more credible, particularly after his campaigns of 1308.

Naturally, some Scottish landholders would have been deterred from joining the Bruce cause by the military power of the occupation government. Other than those periods in which Edward I and Edward II lead or despatched major filed armies to Scotland the power of their administration depended on the resources of Scottish lords in English allegiance and the garrisons. A good many Scots served in these garrisons; some through the attractions of wages and the potential for career advancement, others for political reasons. Recruiting Scottish men-at-arms and archers was an attractive proposition for the Plantagenet government; partly because it was often difficult to recruit adequate numbers from elsewhere, but also – particularly after 1308 – because there were increasing numbers of men whose properties lay in territory dominated by the Bruce party. Having been disadvantaged for their loyalty, these men could hardly be abandoned; they needed to be supported financially until such time as their heritage could be recovered. This was all well and good as long as the prospect of an English recovery in Scotland seemed a viable proposition. By mid-1314 this must have seemed an increasingly unlikely prospect unless the decay of Plantagenet government could be reversed by a major military initiative, however there were, by this point, relatively few Scots in English allegiance other than associates of the Comyn and MacDougal families. Although there were still several garrisons at the close of 1313, they had largely lost the capacity to impose lordship in their localities. Increasingly, the surviving garrisons were becoming – if they had not already become – assets of an ‘outpost’ policy rather than a genuine attempt to provide secure government.

This had come about through the increasing ability of the Bruce party to deploy greater numbers of men-at-arms at critical locations at given moments. In order to contain the garrisons the Scots did not necessarily have to find a general superiority in heavy cavalry, just local superiority of an order that would prevent the garrisons from venturing too far from their stations. This is a matter of some importance, since the purpose of the garrisons was not, at least until 1313, to guard the castles themselves, but to impose the will of Edward II, ensure the collection of rents and other issues, to be a visible political presence in the community and, of course, to prevent the Scots from extending their area of influence.

That the ability of Robert to attract the support of the people without necessarily having the support – overt or otherwise – of the aristocracy added to the problems of the administration, is clear from this letter from the commander of the Plantagenet garrison at Forfar Castle to an English courtier at Carlisle. It is dated May 1307 and relates recent events and current situations:

I hear that Bruce never had the good will of his own followers or of the people generally so much with him as now. It appears that God is with him, for he has destroyed King Edward’s power both among the English and Scots. The people believe that Bruce will carry all before him, exhorted by ‘false preachers’ from Bruce’s army, men who have previously been charged before the justices for advocating war and have been released on bail, but are now behaving worse than ever. I fully believe, as I have heard from Duncan of Frendraught and Gilbert of Glencairnie, who keep the peace beyond the Mounth and on this side, that if Bruce can get away in this direction or towards the parts of Ross he will find the people all ready at his will more entirely than ever, unless King Edward can send more troops; for there are many people living loyally in his peace so long as the English are in power.

May it please God to prolong King Edward’s life, for men say openly that when he is gone the victory will go to Bruce. For these preachers have told the people that they have found a prophecy of Merlin, that after the death of ‘le roy coveytous’ the people of Scotland and the Welsh shall band together and have full lordship and live in peace together to the end of the world.

This is Professor Barrow’s translation, published in ‘Robert the Bruce and the Community of the realm of Scotland’, p.245. The letter is listed and described in CDS ii, No. 1926.

This letter, probably from Sir Alexander Abernethy, a staunch officer and supporter of the Plantagenet government, is worth examining in some detail. It is clear that the writer was convinced that Robert enjoyed a good deal of popular support in both the northeast and the northwest – neither of them regions with a strong tradition of Bruce lordship. Moreover there were strong, well-established local political leaders who were adamantly opposed to the Bruce party; Duncan of Frendraught and Gilbert of Glencairnie were men of some prominence, and the Earl of Ross, the most significant mainland magnate in the northwest, was definitely still a member of the Plantagenet camp. Clearly the author of the letter hoped to encourage the deployment of more English troops (Bain’s presentation of this letter refers to men-at-arms in particular), which is in itself an indication that the leaders of the local administration were feeling the strain of confronting Bruce sentiment. The most significant assertion, however, is that Bruce would find the people ‘ready at his will more entirely than ever.’ The letter dates from May 1307, while Edward was still alive and at a time when Bruce’s kingship, though more than a year old, had largely been passed in exile or in hiding. Robert had had little opportunity to show himself in the far north, so it is surprising that he should have had the support of any significant proportion of the common people. This is quite at odds with traditional views of local political leadership in the later Middle Ages, which tends to be heavily focused on the behaviour of the nobility and gentry to the exclusion of the balance of the community. Kings were certainly only too well aware of the power of the magnate classes, and of their capacity to defy the crown if pushed, but they could also demonstrate an awareness of the importance of popular political opinion. Edward I issued at least one document in which he attempted to enlist the support of the wider community for his kingship by accepting that his government had been too harsh. He hoped to secure their support, but also to deny that support to the enemy. It would seem that Robert was convinced of the importance of popular support, since he clearly went to some effort to ensure that the people were informed of his actions. The prophecies of Merlin, among other aspects of Arthurian legend, were widely held to be significant, and were evidently sufficiently well-known to provide a propaganda vehicle for the Bruce cause. Identifying Edward I as the Roy Coveytous (greedy king) would have been a reasonably easy prospect to ‘sell’ to the people given Edward’s general behaviour in Scotland. The prospect that the Scots and the Welsh would enjoy ‘full lordship’ (political independence) after Edward’s death would also make an attractive and credible ambition, given that Edward was now an old man (by the standards of the fourteenth century) and was not in the best of health.

Had there been an accommodation between the Comyns, traditional leaders in the northeast, and the Bruce party, we might expect that Comyn political alignment would find an expression among the people at large, but of course the opposite was the case; the Comyns were utterly opposed to Robert’s kingship – the murder of John Comyn had made sure of that. It is possible, though there is no evidence to support such a possibility, that the Comyns had lost the support of the wider community of the northeast through their support of the Plantagenet cause, or through their abandonment of King John in 1304. This would still be a demonstration of popular political sentiment. If the men and women of Buchan, Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire rejected the leadership of the Comyns because the Comyns no longer represented the interests of Scottish kingship, then the people were making a political choice between independence and integration into the domain of English kingship. It is difficult to see any motivation other than national sentiment for the assertion that the people would be willing, even eager, to adopt the Bruce cause in 1307, particularly when we bear in mind that Robert could not yet impose his authority effectively in areas of strongly established Bruce lordship.

Accepting Bruce kingship did not necessarily mean that an individual was utterly convinced of the merits of Robert’s claim to the throne. In 1306–7 Robert’s campaign cannot have looked very promising, so one might assume that early commitment to the Bruce cause was a product of a conscious political decision. This was no longer the case by the close of 1308. By that time, Robert had brought a considerable swathe of territory under his sway so, in much the same way as Plantagenet lordship continued to be acceptable in the far south, acceptance of Bruce lordship in the far north was probably – to some extent at least – a matter of accepting the de facto government of the day regardless of personal preference. Once again, there may be an element of national consciousness underlying the growth of the Bruce party in the north of Scotland after 1307–8. Alignment with Bruce may, for some, have been no more than the product of rejecting Plantagenet rule. Men and women who had given their support to King John between 1292 and 1296 may have accepted the settlement negotiated by the magnates in 1304, but they were not obliged to like it. They may not have needed any great sympathy with the ambitions of King Robert, but still accepted him on the basis that any ‘home grown’ king was preferable to any foreigner.

The existence of the garrisons may have been a factor in encouraging support for the Bruces in the northeast. Between 1297 and 1304 the north had been little affected by the activities of English field armies and most of the garrisons installed by Edward I after the campaign of 1296 had fallen to the Balliol party within a matter of a year or so. There is no reason to suppose that the garrisons installed after 1304 were particularly harsh or even obtrusive, but they were still a visible demonstration of the will of a foreign power. Even if the men in the garrisons were largely Scots, a garrison as an institution was an instrument of an alien king, and therefore may well have been an irritant to the communities of the region. The same is true of the rest of Scotland inasmuch as there were garrisons scattered throughout the realm. About forty castles were held by Plantagenet garrisons in the later years of Edward I’s reign, but there were also several baronial castles held by men in Edward’s employ or sympathetic to his cause. By 1306, many of these, particularly in the south and east, had been in place for a decade. The local communities may not have liked the garrisons, but they must surely have become accustomed to them over the preceding ten years.

National sentiment is one of the factors that continue to make Bannockburn so prominent in Scottish opinions of the War of Independence to the present day; another is class sentiment. There is a rather romantic view that the Scots at Bannockburn represent the people in arms whereas the English army represents the power of kingship. Neither of these propositions bears examination. King Robert was well aware of the importance of attracting and retaining the support of the noble class as a political tool and as the source of military power. The men who served in his army of 1314 were far from being the ‘common husbandmen and tribesmen’ beloved of Scottish romance – and, unfortunately, of several historians. The popular mental picture of plaid-clad peasants armed with sharpened logs – and possibly blue face paint – prepared to risk their lives in a perilous, desperate trow of the dice against the rich and finely-mounted English, cannot be taken seriously. The rank and file of Robert’s army consisted primarily of the more prosperous farm tenants (as opposed to farm labourers), burgesses and other townspeople34 and he had access to men from the West Highlands and Western Isles for whom soldiering was a normal part of life. The rest – possibly as much as 10–15% of the total – were men-at-arms who, almost without exception, were drawn from the nobility. In terms of class representation, there would have been little social difference between the English and Scottish armies other than the contingents from the Western Isles and the northwest Highlands.

Another reason for the prominence of Bannockburn is of course the scale of the victory. In Scottish romance Bannockburn tends to figure as one of only two Scottish victories, the other being Stirling Bridge in 1297. This tradition steadfastly ignores several very important engagements – Roslin, Myton and Culblean, to name but a few. Similarly, this view tends to inflate the importance of various English victories, primarily Falkirk and Halidon Hill. In practice, Edward I derived very little benefit from his victory at Falkirk and in the long term his grandson gained nothing from his 1333 victory at Halidon, since his administration in Scotland had dwindled to a handful of increasingly isolated fortresses by 1338. To a certain extent, the same applies to Bannockburn. Victory allowed Robert to confirm his hold on the southeast and gave him a very enviable martial reputation but, contrary to popular perception, Bannockburn did not give him the political victory he sought. Edward II may have been roundly defeated, but he was not prepared to have peace on the basis of accepting Robert as King of Scotland. He did not even accept that he had actually lost his war irrevocably, but mounted fresh invasions. He did not do so simply in the hope that he would destroy Bruce, though that would have been highly appreciated; he did so to recover what he saw as part of his heritage from his father. Edward II was not the brightest man ever to wear the English crown, but he was not an imbecile. If he was prepared to make the financial and political effort to raise an army for service in Scotland he clearly believed that conquest was not beyond his means. His army had been destroyed in 1314, but his will – and that of many English magnates – to bring Scotland under his rule was still strong and would remain so until his death. It was not Edward II who eventually acknowledged Robert’s kingship in 1328, but the government of Edward III.

In the century and more that has passed since Gardiner, Oman, MacKenzie and several others have made their contributions to the study of Bannockburn, most historians have followed the template provided by one or the other. The actual process of any battle is not really that important in relation to the general march of events. Whether the outcome of the battle was decided by this or that incident, by this or that practice, by this or that feature in the terrain is, arguably, a trivial question in comparison to the effects of that outcome. Had Edward II been victorious at Bannockburn, the political consequences might have been far more interesting to historians than the means by which he achieved that victory, unless he had done so through a dramatically innovative approach to battle.

It would be rash to assume that victory at Bannockburn would have brought the War of Independence to a conclusion. Had Robert I and his brother Edward both been killed in action, the Bruce party would probably have come to an end since there was no legitimate male heir to pursue the Bruce claim to kingship, but that does not mean that the cause of independence would not have been taken up by another candidate, specifically Edward Balliol, son of King John, who had been deposed in 1296, and who would mount a serious challenge to the Bruce party a generation after Bannockburn.

The Nature and Extent of the Evidence

The body of contemporary and near-contemporary documentary evidence relating to the battle of Bannockburn is not extensive, and none of what there is can really be considered as a full account of the action.

More positively, none of them really contradicts any of the others in any material sense, though Barbour pretty certainly ‘invented’ an extra Scottish formation for the main battle in order to provide a role for Sir James Douglas and for Walter the Stewart, the father of Barbour’s patron, Robert II. This can serve as an example of the sort of thing that could influence medieval writers to include material that causes confusion for generations. Barbour wrote his epic poem half a century or more after the events that he described. This was close enough to prevent wholesale invention if the narrative was to have credibility. The account was written to entertain members of the noble class, men who saw themselves as the inheritors of a great military tradition. On a practical level, they were well aware of the nature of battle and well aware of the physical and emotional stresses of active service, but they were also aware of the tales of their fathers and grandfathers – men who had served in the Wars of Independence and who had known Douglas, Randolph and King Robert himself. If Barbour strayed too far from the realities of fighting, his audience would be unimpressed; on the other hand, he had every incentive to raise the profiles of his heroes and, indirectly, the prestige of Robert II.

Further, from Barbour’s perspective in the 1360s/70s it would have been unthinkable that so great a figure as Douglas had had no prominent role in the greatest battle of the age. In 1314, Douglas had yet to attain great political stature. He was, no doubt, already the possessor of a serious reputation as a man-at-arms, but was still only a baron, and a fairly minor one at that. This does not imply that barons were not men of some substance, but they were not a homogeneous group in terms of influence and wealth. John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, was a baron of the very highest order, a man of enormous power – so much so that he was acceptable to the political community as a national leader, serving as Guardian of the Realm from the aftermath of Falkirk to the appointment of Sir John de Soulis as sole lieutenant of King John. However the barons were not, as a rule, the class of society that provided the most senior political level of leadership. The sheriffdom of Lothian, for example, had at least thirty baronies within its bounds in the early fourteenth century. Obviously none of these Lothian barons enjoyed the status of John Comyn, whose wealth and power were sufficient to make him a major player on the national political stage, but their leadership and influence at a more local level was a vital part of the administrative, judicial and military structures that enabled kings to pursue their objectives.