Bannockburn E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 318

Beschreibung

As 8,000 Scottish soldiers, most of them spearmen, faced 18,000 English infantrymen, archers and mounted knights in June 1314 near the Bannock Burn, many would have thought that the result a foregone conclusion. But two days later, the English were routed, Edward II fled to the coast and took ship for home, and few English and Welsh soldiers escaped from Scotland unhurt. This emphatic victory was the moment that enabled Scotland to remain independent and pursue a different destiny. In this book, best-selling author Alistair Moffat offers fresh insights into one of the most famous battles in history, yet one which is surprisingly little understood. Where exactly was it fought; and what happened at the Scottish council of war the night before the second day to persuade the Scots to attack at dawn? This book follows in detail the events of those two days that changed history, and captures all the fear, heroism, confusion and desperation as he describes the tactics and manoeuvres that led to a stunning and unexpected Scottish victory.

Leseprobe

BANNOCKBURN

The Battle for a Nation

This eBook edition published in 2014 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2014

Excerpt from A.A.M. Duncan’s translation of ‘The Bruce’ by John Barbour reproduced by permission of Canongate Books

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78027-218-4 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-799-8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For my son,ADAM MOFFAT

and his fiancée,KIM MCALLUM

2014 is also their year

Bannockburn

How can I sing of so much blood?

Great battles loom over our childhoods. We name them With mountains and seas. We copy out their cause.

But a banner is not a battle. This soft landscape too Has become forgetful – wildflower, woodlight, fresh snow.

Yet once, beneath peat and clay here, the vaulted hull Of a whale sang in waves to its mate. And once flesh

Gave beneath foot here, over park, carse and burn. Below a clear summer sky, blood-flecked linnets

Flit between the mouths of the dead and dying, While they sing of the mercilessness – the pity of it all.

TOM POW

(Epigraph from The Battle of Bannockburn by Robert Baston, translated from the Latin by Edwin Morgan. Commissioned by the National Trust for Scotland as one of ten poems to mark the renovation of the Rotunda at the Bannockburn site in 2014)

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements1The Night Before the Morning2The Muster3The Tor Wood4The March Against Time5Bloody Sunday6Black Monday7A Kingdom Won8A Battle LostBibliographyAppendix 1 MapsAppendix 2 Dramatis PersonæAppendix 3 The SourcesThe Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346The ScalachronicaThe Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as Recorded by Sir Thomas GreyThe Bruceby John Barbour, with a translation by A.A.M. DuncanIndexAlso Available

Preface

2014 sees the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, one of the few events that genuinely changed the direction of Scotland’s history. Its outcome was far from inevitable, indeed it was a remarkably unlikely victory. Defeat for King Robert and his famous captains might have seen a union of the crowns three centuries before James VI became James I. And instead of a Scots king riding south to rule in England, an English king may have come north to be crowned at Scone, or may have simply adopted the title without any ceremony. The consequences of that dynastic traffic could have been far-reaching in the shaping of modern Scotland. Wales had been brutally absorbed by Edward I and his successors as it became England’s first colony. If the English cavalry and their deadly archers had broken the ranks of the Scottish schiltrons in 1314, Scotland may well have become a second colony, and as happened in Wales, few of its distinctive institutions would have survived.

2014 is more than the anniversary of a battle, it is also the year of Scotland. With the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, images of Scotland and the joy and drama of sport will be broadcast all around the world. In September 2014, the eyes of the world will again be on this small nation as its people decide on its future. The question posed in the referendum offers a stark choice: do Scots wish to remain in the union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or do they wish to live in an independent country? Seven centuries ago a very different sort of campaign on the issue of Scotland’s independence came to its climax at Bannockburn when, as one chronicler put it, ‘After the aforesaid victory Robert de Brus was commonly called King of Scotland by all men, because he had acquired Scotland by force of arms.’ For many reasons 2014 seems an appropriate moment to remember how he did it.

That was certainly the view of Hugh Andrew of Birlinn. This book is his direct commission, and what an excellent choice of subject. Like most Scots, I knew a little about Bannockburn but until I began to read in some depth, I had no idea what a remarkable, genuinely stirring story it is. Throughout my research I continually referred to the work of a very great scholar. G.W.S. Barrow’s Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland is a masterpiece as it deals with Bruce’s reign and his extraordinary rise from a guerrilla fighter in the Galloway Hills to become the victor of Bannockburn. This book deals only with the battle, but if what follows stimulates a thirst for more, then G.W.S. Barrow’s great work is unsurpassed.

In addition to Hugh Andrew, I want to thank the team at Birlinn: Jan Rutherford, Andrew Simmons, Jim Hutcheson, Liz Short and Anna Renz are all a joy to work with and all absolute professionals. And my agent, lovely David Godwin, came up to Edinburgh to pilot this and other projects through a very cheery and creative dinner. Sitting at a desk in the pool of anglepoise light on a dark, stormy morning at the end of December 2013, working alone in my office, it is more than a comfort to know that David and all at Birlinn are working alongside me to convert myriad sheaves of scribbled and badly typed pages into very good-looking books. Thank you to all for your many kindnesses and great forbearance.

Finally I want to record my thanks to one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary poets for allowing me to begin this book with his superb poem about Bannockburn. It sparkles with sharp observation, is concise and simply written. It warms my heart to see our work in the same book and the poem catches much of the spirit of what I hoped to convey.

Alistair MoffatSELKIRK 27 December 2013

1

The Night Before the Morning

Vigils, the Feast of St John the Baptist, in the Year of Our Lord, 1314, the Sixth Year of the reign of Edward, Second of that name, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Aquitaine and Lord of Scotland.

As the midsummer sun dipped behind the ridges of the Ochil Hills, a brief, grey gloaming crept down their southern slopes and edged across the land below. While the red-gold colours blazed behind the summits of King’s Seat, the Law, Ben Cleuch, Blairdenon and Dumyat, updraughts carried eagles high into the blue of the night sky, the rays of the dying sun glowing russet on their wingspreads, tilting and swaying. As the great birds hunted, searching the heather and bracken for movement, fires twinkled and crackled on many hilltops. The Feast of the Nativity of the Baptist was also the solstice, the turning of the year, the beginning of summer, a time for farmers and their families to climb to the high places and light fires just as their ancestors had done since time out of mind. Even 1,314 years after the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the old gods had not yet fled entirely and the needfires of midsummer licked into the night air to remember ancient beliefs.

At the western end of the Ochils, Dumyat was a fire-hill and also once a place of power. Its unusual name is from the Dun or Fortress of the Maeatae, an early Pictish kindred whose kings defied the might of Rome. In 208AD the warrior-emperor Septimius Severus marched north with a vast army of 40,000 legionaries and auxiliaries to destroy them and devastate their homelands. It was and remains the largest army ever seen beyond the Tweed, but it failed to humble the Maeatae. The name of the western summit, Castle Law, recalls the defiance of the Pictish kings and the traces of their fort can still be clearly seen.

From the eastern summit of Dumyat proper, an immense vista opens to the south and east. In the half-dark of the night of 23 and 24 June 1314, those who gathered around the needfire will have been able to make out the distant glint of the River Forth as it looped and meandered across the flat carseland on its way to the widening horizon of the firth and the North Sea beyond. On the far side of the lazy river, the Roman road that brought the tramp of Severus’ legions runs from the line of the Antonine Wall northwards past the foot of Dumyat to the outpost forts of the Gask Ridge and on to Bertha, Perth. In 208 and 1314, it was a vital artery, threading a way between the Forth and its marshy floodplain on one side and the wild hill country to the west.

Now marked on a modern map as the Gargunnock and Fintry Hills, the watershed ridges of the Carron Water and the Bannock Burn, this range of rolling hills across the waist of Scotland was seen as a frontier for many centuries. Known as Bannauc, it appears in the tale of the sixth-century wanderings of a mystical Welsh monk, St Cadoc, and in the roll of British Celtic warriors mustered for battle with the insurgent Angles in the south in 600AD, men came from ‘beyond Bannauc’. Composed by the far-famed bard Aneurin in Edinburgh for the kings of the Gododdin, the epic poem sang of the rumble of war below Dumyat and the jingle of Dark Ages cavalry moving along the road by the Forth.

Legionaries and the warriors of half-forgotten kings passed below the glowering rock of Stirling. Singular and dramatic, it rises above the flat carseland like a sentinel. Flanked by the flood-plains to the east and the Bannauc and the treacherous Flanders Moss to the west, the fortress on the rock guarded the north road, the only road to Scotland beyond the Forth.

Watchers on the fire-hill of Dumyat could see something else, something that will have hollowed their bellies with fear. Far in the distance, they could make out the clustered pinpricks of hundreds of fires beyond the dark silhouette of Stirling Castle rock. None had been lit to celebrate the solstice. On either side of the Bannock Burn, as it slid through the carse towards the Forth, a vast army was attempting to make camp. Perhaps the echoes of thousands of voices, the shouts of sergeants, the creak and squeal of cartwheels and the shrieking neigh of horses carried as far as the dark heads of the hills.

Having marched more than 80 miles from Wark on the English side of the Tweed in only seven days, the soldiers of Edward II of England were exhausted, hungry and thirsty. Wearing full armour or the thick padded jackets and steel helmets of spearmen, they had sweated in the warmth of the midsummer sun and desperately needed to rest. The army had followed the metalled surface of the Roman road from Falkirk and the ruins of the old wall fort at Camelon but could not continue on to Stirling Castle. The way had been blocked by their enemies, the soldiers of the traitor, Robert Bruce, the usurper who claimed to be King of Scots. His dogged formations of spearmen had stood in their way.

Edward II and his commanders had been forced to wheel their huge, dispersed and unwieldy army to the east, towards the Forth, to a place where they could avoid the deep gorge of the Bannock Burn and cross at its lower reaches. Between it and the steep sides of the Pelstream Burn to the north, they reluctantly decided to make camp on what a later chronicler reckoned to be completely unsuitable ground.

Sir Thomas Grey’s father had fought at Bannockburn and had passed on his vivid memories. In the Scalachronica, a history of the reigns of Edwards I, II and III, the Northumberland knight recorded an account of what happened and it carries the unmistakable ring of authenticity:

The king’s host left the [Roman] road through the woods and came to a plain in the direction of the River Forth, beyond Bannock Burn, an evil, deep marsh with streams, where the English troops unharnessed and remained all night in discomfort . . .

In the spring of 1314, the English king had sent out writs calling for the muster of an enormous, powerful force and had been answered with about 15,000 infantry and archers and approximately 2,500 armoured knights. At Wark and Berwick, soldiers had joined his host from England, Wales, Ireland, Gascony, France, Germany – and Scotland. Strung out in a long, vulnerable and slow-moving line on the Roman road, the army was not only exhausted but difficult to command effectively. When the vanguard of mounted knights reached the Bannock Burn, a column of infantry, archers and supply wagons stretched several miles behind them. The nature of the terrain and the tactics of the Scots king were already compressing them, compromising their tremendous superiority in numbers.

It appears that most of the heavy cavalry, the elite strike force of all large medieval armies, some archers and some infantry were able to cross the Bannock Burn late on Sunday evening, 23 June 1314. Much of Edward’s expeditionary force, probably the bulk of the infantry, were left on the far side by the time the sun had dipped behind the Ochils. This would prove to be determinant. And if those who did succeed in crossing hoped to find a dry place for some much-needed rest, they were to be disappointed. Much work still needed to be done.

‘The Bruce’, John Barbour’s poem in early Scots, was composed some considerable time after the battle but it relied on testimony from survivors. Here he describes the English army’s attempt to make camp:

They bivouacked there that night, down in the carse, and made every man clean and prepare his weapons and armour to be ready for battle in the morning. And because there were pows [sluggish streams] in the carse, they broke down houses and roofing and carried it off to make bridges by which to cross [the streams]. There are also some surviving who say that nearly all the men in the [Stirling] castle, knowing the difficulty the English army was in, came out after dark [about midnight], taking with them doors and windows. In this way the English had before daylight bridged the pows, so that everyone crossed over and had taken up a position on horseback on the hard field.

The makeshift bridges may have kept soldiers dry-shod but, as Barbour implies, their more important purpose was to safeguard Edward II’s most effective and fearsome weapon, the English war-horses. Known as destriers, more than 2,000 had been led across the Bannock Burn in half-darkness to a restricted and treacherous terrain where at worst the heavy horses could have sunk to their hocks in cloying mud, or at best spooked and panicked if the earth seemed to suck at their hooves. And even well-trained horses will refuse to go near, far less cross, black water that seems to them bottomless. More problematic for knights and their squires was the fact that all warhorses used to be entire, stallions bred to be aggressive in the ruck of battle, biting and kicking out with their metal-shod hooves. Destriers were meant to be dangerous and corralling more than 2,000 in such a tight space was asking for trouble. And no doubt some men and animals were badly hurt before a blow had been struck in anger.

Throughout the short night, many of the destriers were kept bitted, harnessed and armoured. This made them easier to control but many will have pawed the mud-churned ground, knowing what wearing their war-gear meant, snorting, whinnying, itching for the gallop into the charge. Tense at the best of times, the atmosphere of the night before the morning will have been electric, and further charged by the reputation of the Scots for surprise attacks. Armed pickets will have been posted on the carse, peering into the gloaming, searching the edge of the treeline, the woods where the Scots were waiting.

Reserved and fenced on the instructions of King Alexander II in the mid thirteenth century, the New Park had been allowed to revert to a tangled wildwood. To give cover for deer and other prey, foresters had not managed the trees and undergrowth but let them seed, spread and thicken. It was also good cover for men, and King Robert Bruce knew that the park would protect his soldiers from cavalry and archers, the twin threats posed by the English army.

In what is known in Scots as the hindnight, when the midsummer sun had slid behind the Ochils to dim the carseland after midnight, the canopy of the trees made the tanglewood much darker, a place of shadows lit only by the campfires of Bruce’s men. Having mustered his army at the Tor Wood, immediately to the south of the New Park, the king had reconnoitred the surrounding ground carefully and his men had been given time to set up camp in the shelter of the woods. And to prepare. Between 7,000 and 10,000 men had come to Stirling to fight. Most were infantry, spearmen who had the strength to wield long pikes in disciplined battlefield formations. There were archers, many of them from the Ettrick Forest, and about 500 light cavalry or skirmishers commanded by Sir Robert Keith. Scotland did not grow enough winter fodder to breed destriers and had not the wealth to afford squadrons of armoured knights.

Instead, Bruce and his commanders had probably summoned only chosen men, preferring them to those farmers, weavers and burgesses who joined a feudal host as an obligation. These were spearmen who would be resolute, who would remember their training in the heat and confusion of battle, men who would stand steady as the English roared their warhorses into the earth-shaking thunder of the charge. Men whom Bruce had often led.

Divided into four brigades, the Scots army had been marshalled into retreat order. From the muster at the Tor Wood, Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, had led the vanguard north up the Roman road into the New Park. He had been followed by two brigades commanded by Edward, the king’s brother, and James Douglas. They halted in the midst of the park, facing the open carseland to the east. Bruce brought up the rearguard and stationed his men across the road at a place known as The Entry, where the old road cut through a stand of trees at the edge of the hunting reserve. Cautious, very unwilling to risk all he had achieved since 1307, the king had readied his army to march north or west and abandon Stirling Castle to the English. But he decided to wait, for the moment.

The days immediately before the Feast of St John the Baptist were dry and sunny and long. On the morning of Saturday, 22 June, lookouts almost certainly climbed the crumbling drystane walls of Tappoch Broch. Built some time around 500BC, its still substantial remains sat on a prominent hilltop in the Tor Wood that looked to the south-east, to where the English would come. Only four miles away stretched the line of the Antonine Wall and the grassy ruins of the forward fort at Camelon. From its ancient gateway the Roman road snaked north towards Bannockburn and Stirling Castle. The lookouts searched the southern horizon for the signs of the march of a vast army, perhaps a dust cloud, perhaps even the distant rumble of wagons and horsemen, almost certainly outriders scouting ahead.

Below the broch, captains had been shouting orders to their men to break camp, take up their weapons and fall into marching order. Bruce had mustered his host in the Tor Wood from late May onwards and now, as the front of battle loomed, they had withdrawn to his chosen deployment in the New Park, three miles to the north-west, moving up the Roman road, probably late in the morning. Meanwhile the lookouts on the broch sharpened their gaze to the south. No doubt Bruce’s mounted scouts had galloped back with the news that Edward II’s men were marching, having broken camp at Edinburgh early that Saturday morning.

With 20 miles to cover before they crossed the banks and ditches of the Antonine Wall and forded the River Carron at Camelon, the English must have set a brisk pace in the summer heat. It was a march forced by a timetable neither Bruce nor Edward II had set. A year before, the Scots king’s impetuous brother, Edward, had agreed a truce with Sir Philip Moubray, the garrison commander of Stirling Castle. Although a Scot, he held Stirling for Edward of England, and it was one of the last strategic strongholds in enemy hands. Edward Bruce had laid a siege, an affair that was bound to be protracted since the Scots had few effective siege engines and the castle rock is even more forbidding and impressive than Edinburgh’s. In addition, a waiting game did not suit the king’s brother’s hotheaded temperament and so, without consultation it seems, he concluded an agreement with Moubray. The Scots would withdraw – and use their forces more profitably elsewhere, Edward Bruce no doubt argued – on the condition that Moubray consented to surrender the castle if it was not relieved by an English army by midsummer 1314.

King Robert was apparently furious. His brother had virtually committed him to a pitched battle against what would unquestionably be a much larger force. And Moubray, perhaps more sensibly, had also committed the English king to an invasion. If Edward II’s claim to be Lord of Scotland were to mean anything, then he would have to muster an army and march north before midsummer 1314. Bruce would then have a decision to make. Did he risk all on one encounter or did he retreat before the English king, scorching the earth and waiting for the invaders to starve, forcing them to turn back south? As the lookouts on the drystane walls of Tappoch Broch waited to see the flutter of English pennants on the horizon, the pieces set on the board in the summer of 1313 were at last moving, the great game was beginning. And the king of Scotland had not yet decided.

By the evening of Saturday, 22 June, the Scots army had settled down to bivouac under the trees of the New Park. Once cooking fires had been lit, pikes, axes, dirks and shields safely stowed near at hand and brackens pulled so that they could be laid down to soften the hard ground for a bed, the Scottish commanders met. Scouts had reported that Edward II had made camp at Falkirk, about 14 miles to the south-east. That intelligence set out a timetable and suggested a battle plan to Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, James Douglas, Edward Bruce, Walter Stewart, Aonghas Og MacDonald and their leader, Robert Bruce.

King Robert was an impressive, brave and regal figure. These adjectives were routinely attached in the flatteries of chroniclers, but in his case, they were probably no more than the truth. When Bruce’s tomb was accidentally rediscovered at Dunfermline Abbey in the nineteenth century, the skeleton sealed in a lead coffin was that of a man who stood six foot, one inch tall. This contrasted with the average height of medieval Scotsmen at about five foot, six inches, and it made the king seem a giant to contemporaries. If Bruce’s bearing was regal, even heroic, his attitudes almost certainly matched it. He came from a line of men who would be king.

Known as the Competitor, Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale and grandfather of the king, contended all his long life for the throne of Scotland. When Alexander II was growing old and seemed unlikely to father an heir, the Great Council decided in 1238 that Bruce should succeed. He was of royal blood, directly descended from Earl Henry of Northumberland, the eldest son of David I. But the Competitor’s hopes were thwarted when Alexander II remarried and his queen duly produced the future Alexander III. When the king’s horse carried him to his death over the cliffs at Kinghorn in 1286, Robert Bruce competed once more, at the ripe age of 76. In 1292, he formally passed on his regal claims to his son and his heirs. And king at last, the Competitor’s grandson believed absolutely in his right to rule, a confidence that never deserted him.

The Bruce, de Brus or de Bruis family probably originated in the Cotentin, the Cherbourg peninsula of north-western France and, like the Stewarts and others, Robert’s ancestors arrived in Britain at the time of the Norman Conquest. A Scottish connection was soon established. In the early twelfth century David macMalcolm, the sixth son of King Malcolm Canmore, was forced to flee south to take refuge at the court of Henry I of England. The young Scot was raised in a thoroughly Anglo-Norman milieu and when his sister, Maud, married Henry to become queen of England, his status rose steeply. David was created Earl of Northampton, and then on the death of his brother, Alexander I, he unexpectedly succeeded to the throne of Scotland. Having forged personal and political relationships amongst the Anglo-Norman elite, David brought some of them north. The Bruces were given the lordship of Annandale and through marriage eventually became great landowners in the south-west of Scotland.

In England and Scotland the links forged between the men of the Norman elite were strong and they often transcended any fledgling sense of national loyalty. King Robert had relatives in the English army that had made camp on the night of 22 June at Falkirk, and old loyalties to others who would fight for Edward of England. Lords often changed sides in this and other medieval conflicts and those who fought alongside each other usually shared more than any notion of national attachment. Even as late as 1314 there was a powerful sense of a French-speaking Norman elite trading national loyalties in the furtherance of family fortunes.

Bruce and his captains were comrades in arms. Not only had they fought alongside each other through many campaigns and sieges, they had achieved much since King Robert was crowned at Scone in 1306. With patience and determination they had won back every important castle in Scotland, except Stirling. Perhaps Bruce’s most accomplished soldier was also the least exalted. Until he was knighted before Bannockburn James Douglas held no title, yet his daring and ruthlessness did earn him something less formal – he was known as the Black Douglas. And for good reason.

In the winter darkness of Shrove Tuesday, the night of 19– 20 February, Douglas led a remarkable assault on Roxburgh Castle, a huge fortress whose sparse ruins stand near Kelso, where the Teviot meets the Tweed. It is very formidable. Atop an oblong mound, partly man-made, its eastern flank slopes steeply to the banks of the Teviot and a weir built a little way upstream once diverted water into a moat that protected the equally precipitous western side. At the southern end the remains of a heavily defended gateway can still be clearly seen, while at the north end stood a barbican which was probably reached by a wooden bridge. This led out of the castle and into the streets of the town of Roxburgh, a prosperous marketplace for Borders wool. The burgh saw the beginning of urban life in early twelfth-century Scotland but now it has completely disappeared, not one stone stands upon another.

Under cover of the February darkness, Douglas and his men cloaked themselves carefully so that no glint of mail, armour or sword steel could be seen by the sentries on the ramparts. One fanciful account insists that the Black Douglas and his feral force disguised themselves as black cattle, crawling on all fours towards Roxburgh. Thoughtful as well as courageous, he planned the attack for the night of Shrove Tuesday because in the old sense of the term it was a carnival. Literally meaning a ‘farewell to meat’, a medieval carnival was held before the denials and privations of Lent and the date meant that most of the garrison of Roxburgh Castle would be in the great hall feasting and drinking. A few resentful sentries patrolled the wall walks, no doubt cocking an ear to the carousing, looking inwards not outwards, grumbling to themselves or perhaps even taking a sly bite or a consoling cup of something warming.

Below the walls, men who would spoil the party were edging ever closer. Douglas always tried to enlist local intelligence and as his men crept up the steep banks of the castle mount under their black cloaks, they were led by a Borderer, Sim of the Ledhouse. They carried an invention. Light and flexible rope ladders had been used by Bruce’s captains since 1312 and the idea behind their design was simple. Men standing unobserved at the foot of a castle rampart could hoist the end of a rope ladder on the point of a long pike and attach a grappling hook onto the wall-head. It was usually quieter and more accurate than flinging a hinged hook over the defences. But at Roxburgh, the scrape of the grappling iron on the stonework brought a sentry running. He was quickly silenced by Sim of the Ledhouse, who ‘stekit upward with ane knyff’. Scrambling over the ramparts, Douglas’ men swarmed into Roxburgh, startling the men who were feasting and drinking, and achieving a tremendous triumph. Closest to the frontier with England, Roxburgh Castle was important to Edward II – and to the Scots. Once the castle had been secured, Douglas and his men did what they to slight the stone walls and towers in order to make the fortress difficult to defend if it were retaken by the English.

Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, commanded a brigade in Bruce’s army and as he sat down with Douglas at the council of war in the shadows of the New Park, he could also reflect on a military triumph. Three weeks after the fall of Roxburgh, Moray’s men broke into Edinburgh Castle in spectacular fashion. Again using the specialist knowledge of a local man, William Francis, he took an apparently impregnable stronghold from the English. Francis’ father had been a soldier in the Edinburgh garrison and when the young William needed to sneak out unobserved to meet his girl in the town, astonishingly, he climbed down the near-sheer cliff-face of the castle rock. She must have been beautiful. But young Francis’ youthful ardour helped conceive a plan.

While Moray’s main force attacked the East Port of the mighty castle, still its only entrance, to create a diversion, William Francis led a group up the north face of the rock in darkness on the night of March 14th, 1314. Not only did these intrepid men climb successfully to the foot of Edinburgh’s walls, they also carried the light rope ladders with them. Having pulled themselves up over the wall-head, they overpowered the sentries. And there must have been a substantial number of these extraordinary rock climbers because they raced to the East Port, attacked the defenders and got the gate open to let in Moray and his men.

None of these remarkable achievements would have been the subject of discussion between Bruce and his commanders as they talked in the circle of firelight under the trees of the New Park on the night of Saturday, 22 June. They sensed that their long and dogged campaign had come to its climax. The Scots army had been mustering in the Tor Wood for weeks and they will have ridden and walked the ground between it and Stirling more than once. They knew that in an open landscape with good ground for cavalry and room for archers that their spearmen would be thinned by volleys of arrows, outflanked, scattered and cut to pieces. The weight of numbers would tell. Instead it was better to choose and use the terrain to their advantage. One of the few positive elements of Edward Bruce’s truce was that the Scots knew that the English had to march to Stirling and more, that there was only one route suitable for such a large army and its wagons and horses – the old Roman road. And where it entered the New Park, it might just be possible to gain a decisive advantage.

Such a stratagem had worked before. On 10 May 1307, Bruce chose to fight a much larger force of English cavalry and infantry at Loudoun Hill near Kilmarnock. Near the rocky knoll, he carefully chose ground where he could not be outflanked, rolled up and surrounded by a much more extended attack line of armoured knights. And then his men set to digging three sets of lateral trenches in front of their position, which they then covered over with branches and brackens. Led by the English governor of Scotland, Aymer de Valence, an army of 3,000 faced Bruce’s 600 spearmen. They must have reckoned victory would be quick, but when the knights roared their destriers into the charge, peering through the slits in their steel visors, none could see what lay in their path. With lances couched and levelled, leaning forward in the saddle, the front rank of the English cavalry suddenly hit the trenches. More than 100 heavy horses went down in a moment, some catapulting fully armoured men into rotational falls, others screaming as their forelegs snapped. The second rank will have blundered into this appalling mêlée and those behind will have been pulling hard on their reins, swerving, skidding to avoid the churning mess of horseflesh and injured knights. To add to the murderous confusion, Bruce had left a narrow track open between the lateral ditches and as they slowed, hesitating as their comrades fell on either side, the few who reached the Scottish lines were beaten back as the spearmen advanced in formation.

At the New Park Bruce believed that he could achieve a similar effect and, no doubt at their council, his commanders agreed to set their men to work the following day. At The Entry, where the Roman road entered the trees of the New Park, pits or ‘pots’ were dug in what John Barbour described as a honeycomb pattern on either side of the metalled surface. Sharpened stakes were set in the bottom of each and the pots were then hidden just as the trenches had been at Loudoun Hill. In a twist of history, Roman soldiers had done something similar near at hand, 1,200 years before. To the north of the Antonine Wall, the direction from which trouble would come, they dug ‘lilia’ at Rough Castle, near Falkirk. There were ten rows of pots, offset, arranged like the black squares of a chessboard, and with sharpened stakes at the bottom of each one. They are still clearly visible.

Bruce’s men left only the road untouched so that the English cavalry would be funnelled into a narrow front of only three or four mounted knights abreast at most. This sort of containment in a narrow space had worked well in 1297 at Stirling Bridge for William Wallace and Andrew Moray. And to limit English options ever further, all of the tracks through the New Park were closed off. Bruce then informed his council of war that his own brigade, the rearguard, would station themselves at The Entry. On the night before the morning, it seems that a limited action followed by a strategic withdrawal to the western hills may have been the consensus. But as the council of war ended and commanders returned through the woodland gloaming to their brigades, history began to stir.

2

The Muster

Vespers. The Feast of St Aurelian, the 16th day of June in the Year of Our Lord, 1314.

Towards the evening, the last of them breasted the rise at Barelees Rig and saw a sight that stopped even the hardest of their hearts. On the flat haugh-land by the banks of the River Tweed almost 18,000 men had answered the king’s summons and marched and ridden to the muster at Wark. The last to come saw a vast military camp sprawling westwards along the banks of the great river for more than four miles. Perched on a kaim in the midst of a myriad of pavilions, awnings, corrals, ox-carts and cooking fires stood Wark Castle and the latecomers could see the royal standards flying from the battlements of its squat little keep. The fortress had been built on the natural mound of the kaim as a motte and bailey by the Norman lord Walter Espec in the early twelfth century and it looked north over the Tweed to a wide panorama of a different country. The river marked the eastern frontier between the realms of England and Scotland, and watchers at Wark could see for many miles over the fertile farmlands of the Merse of Berwickshire, enemy territory.

It was not the first time that those who farmed the fertile fields by the banks of the Tweed had seen an English army make camp. Edward I had mustered an invasion force in the fields below Wark in 1296 and again in 1300 his household set up a royal court in the tower. Not only did it stand glowering at Scotland like a frontier guard, its courtyard, the old bailey, stretched down to the Tweed where there were reliable fords for an army and its wagons to splash across. Small river-islands known as annas