William Wallace: The Man and the Myth E-Book

Dr Chris Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 341

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

William Wallace of Elderslie, younger son of a country knight, came to fame through his active opposition to the aggressive imperialism of England's King Edward I. From political and social obscurity he seized control of the reins of government and became the first leader of his people in a war of liberation against a far larger and richer enemy – England – that would last for more than sixty years. With little or no experience in the business of government or of war, William Wallace was able to achieve command, but proved unable to retain it in the face of battlefield defeat. In this updated edition of his groundbreaking work, Chris Brown cuts through the myths still perpetuated today to produce a biography driven by contemporary medieval records rather than Victorian legends and present an accurate portrait of the life and career of Scotland's greatest hero.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As ever, pride of place goes to my wife Pat, who has suffered the life and times of William Wallace with a stoical grace, and to my children – Charis, Christopher, Colin and Robert – and my parents Peter and Margaret, who have also been subjected to more ‘Wallace’ than is fair to ask of anyone. Yet again, Robert has rescued me from self-inflicted computer disasters. Friends at St Andrews University Scottish History Department have given me a great deal of their time – Dr William Knox, Mr Alex Woolf, and others too numerous to mention – I am grateful to them all. To the staff of Easy PCs of Kennoway for their help in making the manuscript file printable, and to the late Kay Urquhart, good friend, good company and the mainstay of my babysitting in the days when I was a single parent. I am particularly indebted to Professor G.W.S. Barrow, who very kindly read the unedited manuscript of this book and made many valuable corrections and suggestions. This was my fourth book. I had expected that I would have found an effective and reliable means of blaming others for my mistakes … it is a tragedy that I have still not yet been able to do so, but hopefully I have managed to remove the majority of them now.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the Second Edition

1

William Wallace, Knight of Scotland

2

Of Noble Kin: the Society of William Wallace

3

The Roots of the War

4

From Gangster to Governor

5

The Battle of Stirling Bridge

6

From Victory to Ignominy

7

Exile and Defiance

8

But What Was It All For?

9

Death and Immortality

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

Since this is a revised edition I have taken the opportunity to correct a number of mistakes and make some clarification, but also to reduce the size of the volume by removing the examination and analysis of the source material which took up a great deal of space and was only of any interest to those of a scholarly inclination, which is a courteous way of saying ‘total history anoraks such as myself’. All of the record and narrative material is available in printed form and should be accessible through any local authority or university library, through the inter-library loan scheme.

The purpose of this book is to provide a context for Sir William Wallace, one of the most remarkable men of medieval Europe. It concentrates on the themes that were most significant to Wallace and his contemporaries – service and allegiance. These issues were inextricably linked to status, landholding and political activity. In the environment of Scotland in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the chief focus of that activity was war, and therefore a great deal of this book is about the nature of military service, campaigning and battles. Nobody chose to make a detailed study of the Scottish military structure in Wallace’s lifetime, so some of the material is drawn from the much greater – though by no means complete – data we have for the armies and practices of Robert I, but there is no reason for us to think that these were significantly different. Without the conflict brought about by Edward I, Wallace would almost certainly have never come to prominence; he would have been no more significant and no better known than any of the thousands of younger sons of obscure minor landholders who only appear very fleetingly – and most of them not at all – in the surviving records. Although there is very little information on any particular one of Wallace’s contemporaries and social equals, there is a good deal of material about a large number of them scattered through narrative and record evidence; by looking at these as a whole we can get a picture of the rights and responsibilities of these men, and the issues that they had to deal with if they were to preserve themselves and their heritage through very challenging times. If this book can help the reader toward a better understanding of William Wallace and the society in which he lived it will have served its purpose.

1

WILLIAM WALLACE, KNIGHT OF SCOTLAND

Perhaps the ultimate Scottish hero, Wallace has been dear to the hearts of Scots and others, of all ages, classes, political and religious persuasions, for seven centuries. His determination has been used to inspire soldiers, athletes and political movements. His life has inspired novelists, poets, songwriters and film-makers. A brief survey of the World Wide Web indicates a vast interest in the man, with more than one million entries for Sir William Wallace. By the same measure, it could be argued that the public interest in Braveheart is rather stronger, since there are more than twice as many websites dedicated to the Mel Gibson portrayal of the Guardian’s political career.

Wallace has been the subject of a great many Victorian statues of questionable artistic value, several novels, at least one stage play, a film, a strip cartoon book and a number of popular, if somewhat fanciful, ‘biographies’. All of these have been the work of people who have been enthused and inspired (understandably) by the life of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of Scotland’s heroes. Novels, films, plays and cartoons share a common factor: nobody expects them to be strictly realistic portrayals of personalities, events or conditions – they are fantasies devised for entertainment. It could be argued, with some justice, that the latter statement also applies to the bulk of the ‘biographies’ of William Wallace that have appeared in recent years.

For several writers the starting point, mainstay and – in at least one example – the entirety of their primary research has been the study of Blind Harry’s TheWallace epic. Whether the poem is a great work of fifteenth-century literature or nothing more than sheer hagiography in doggerel verse is open to debate; whether it is a generally useful record of the life and work of William Wallace is not. Harry’s claim to have used an existing biography of Wallace written by his chaplain, Blair, may be true, but that does not mean that the Blair manuscript, assuming that it ever existed, bore any great resemblance either to Blind Harry’s eulogy or the life of Wallace. The shortcomings of The Wallace as a historical record have been demonstrated many times and need no rehearsal here; what is more of an issue is the manner in which Wallace’s life has been approached. Since few, if any, of the Wallace biographers have made any serious examination of the social, cultural, economic, political or military conditions of the lesser nobility in either Scotland or England in the late medieval period, they have been prone to assumptions – and perhaps a spot of wishful thinking – about the nature of the society in which William Wallace grew up and in which he made his career.

It has, for example, become an article of faith among Scots that Wallace was a man of the common people, separated from a privileged, foreign and oppressive noble class by language and social ethos. Nothing could be further from the truth. William Wallace was a product of the Scottish noble class, not an enemy of it, and not distanced from it in any cultural or political sense.1 Like the other members of his class he grew up in Scottish communities, among Scottish people, speaking Scots,2 but that does not have the same romantic appeal as the struggle of a man to overcome the prejudice and ineffectiveness of a class of aristocratic ‘chancers’, which is, broadly, the view offered in several recent biographies. The origin of the recent spate of Wallace books is, to a considerable extent, a product of the success of the Braveheart film – it is, as they say, ‘an ill wind …’ However, there has been a steady rise in interest in medieval Scotland among historians over the last forty years and much of the credit for that must go to Professors Geoffrey Barrow, Ranald Nicholson and Archibald Duncan, very much the architects of current thinking relating to Scotland in the later Middle Ages.

In 1965 Professor Barrow published the first scholarly examination of the life and reign of Robert I. Entitled Robert the Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, it was revolutionary in that it was a formal political biography of a Scottish king, not a collection of tales and traditions. In the same year, Professor Nicholson published Edward III and the Scots, the Formative Years of a Military Career, a detailed study of the final attempt of Plantagenet kings to bring Scotland directly under their sway. Both Barrow and Nicholson discovered that a great deal of light could be cast on affairs in Scotland through the study of English state records. In a sense this had been long recognised. In the late nineteenth century the Reverend Stevenson and Joseph Bain published collections of material connected with Scottish affairs. These volumes, Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland and Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, have provided medievalists with a wonderful resource for over 100 years. Neither Bain nor Stevenson was an analytical historian so much as an antiquarian, and Bain’s lengthy introductions to each of the four volumes he compiled have not lasted the test of time so well as the body of the work. There is no such thing as a perfect work of history and both Bain and Stevenson misdated or misinterpreted the significance, or sometimes the origin, of the odd document here and there, but their scholarship and industry have been a boon to anybody and everybody with an interest in medieval Scotland.

There have, then, been two significant strands of inspiration driving the growth in medieval studies: the romantic – Braveheart and many attractive and romantic volumes from one direction; and scholarship – Barrow, Nicholson, A.A.M. Duncan, Norman MacDougall, Bruce Webster, Stephen Boardman and many more. There has been a good deal of academic research into a very wide range of social, economic and political activity in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scotland in recent years and a great deal of fine work has been published. Unfortunately, as any academic will be only too ready to tell, new work does not necessarily make much impact on the perceptions of the public. It is forty years since Barrow’s Robert the Bruce was published and it is only in very recent times that his findings have started to make any impression on the kind of material that is easily available to the public.

Any book in print is, of course, easily available to the public, but generally the public will not be aware of its existence. If moved to take an interest in history, they are inclined, naturally enough, to look for information at the point of easiest access. In the past this has generally been a matter of consulting the encyclopedias or the sort of general histories of Britain that are familiar to most English and Scottish people from schooldays. ‘British’ histories are very frequently ‘English’ histories with, sometimes, a nod in the direction of Scotland, very often at Scottish heroes, including William Wallace – what we might reasonably, if a trifle uncharitably, call the ‘Myth and Legend’ school of learning. This has led to a historical problem in itself. In the main, English/British histories have indicated that Scotland has been essentially the same as England at any point in history, just a slightly poorer and more primitive version. This is simply not the case. There was a great deal of similarity in certain aspects of social and commercial practice in both countries, but an English traveller was just as much ‘abroad’ in Scotland as they would have been in France or the Netherlands.

The difficulty is that a great many Scottish people have had to ‘unlearn’ that sort of accidental conditioning before they can make any real headway in the study of their past. This is not an area in which there has been any great improvement in recent time. Scotland is the only country in Europe where there was, until very recently, absolutely no legal requirement for schoolchildren to be taught the history of their country. The fact that there is no adequate history textbook for Scottish schools compounds the problem, but in any case the teachers, mostly the product of Scottish education themselves, have little or no grasp of their country’s history – the problem is circular. Sadly, until very recently, neither the Scottish government nor Scottish education authorities seem to have had any interest in doing anything very practical toward improving the situation, so Scottish schoolchildren have continued to be denied proper access to the history of their country.

The popular view of Scottish society in the Middle Ages has been strongly coloured by the Braveheart image and bolstered by many recent writers. A picture of a community that lived in mud and stone shanties, wore animal skins and conducted such trivial business as they had either by barter or by violence, under the heel of an uninterested, greedy and largely foreign aristocracy which imposed its authority with the noose. None of this is supported by evidence, but is widely accepted nonetheless. How such a crude and primitive society as twelfth-, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scotland managed to maintain commercial, cultural and political ties with every other country in northern Europe, build wonderful cathedrals, monasteries and castles, produce writers, scholars and soldiers of outstanding quality and survive a sixty-year series of wars of acquisition launched by a massively more powerful neighbour without effective and sophisticated administrative, judicial and above all fiscal systems does not seem to have inspired popular histories to the same degree as tales of gallantry and treachery.3

Fortunately, the ‘Braveheart Scotland’ tendency has been offset to some degree by the remarkable wave of high-quality research that has been published over the last three decades. The first two volumes of the Edinburgh History of Scotland, though a little dated due to archaeological and historical developments in the 1980s and 1990s, between them provide a first-class introduction to the institutions and practices of medieval Scotland. Professor Duncan’s Scotland. The Making of the Nation explores the development of Scottish society from what we misleadingly call the ‘Dark Ages’ to the close of the reign of Alexander III; Professor Nicholson’s Scotland: The Later Middle Ages takes the reader from the demise of Alexander to the death of James IV at Flodden in 1513, though it is arguable whether or not Scotland was still truly a ‘medieval’ society by that point. Duncan, Nicholson and Barrow were instrumental in providing a framework from which other historians could develop the various strands and themes of Scottish society. Several of these are important contributions to the theme of this book, William Wallace, not so much because they examine his life and actions, but because they examine the structures of the society in which he lived. Dr Fiona Watson’s Under the Hammer, a study of the invasion and occupation of Edward I, is an invaluable guide to the practices of the Edwardian administration, its effectiveness, its procedures, its effect on Scottish society, and the challenges that it faced.

Any consideration of the career of William Wallace would be redundant without giving some thought to the great figures of his time, most obviously his chief adversary and eventual nemesis, Edward I. There are many biographies of Edward available, but few, if any, that compare to Edward I by Michael Prestwich. There is, at present, no modern scholarly biography of Alexander III which could give the reader an introduction to the society of Scotland during the youth and early manhood of William Wallace; however, there is a collection of essays ranging across economic, ecclesiastical, political and military issues in later thirteenth-century Scotland edited by Norman Reid entitled Scotland in the Reign of Alexander III, which cannot be too highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the life and times of William Wallace.

The political leadership of lords is an important factor in medieval history, whether in France, England, Scotland or Spain. Lordship was a rather more sophisticated relationship than we might expect and will be examined elsewhere in this book, but the interests and actions of the great magnates call for detailed study if the reader is to understand the values, benefits and problems of lord–tenant relationships. Alan Young’s The Comyns, Robert the Bruce’s Rivals and Michael Brown’s The Black Douglases each provide an illuminating view of Scottish noble families at work. The Comyns shows the growth in status of a relatively minor family, who, through consistent service to the Crown and careful management of their interests, came to be one of the foremost interest groups in the country in the course of little more than 100 years. The Black Douglases looks at the spectacular growth of the Douglas family in the fourteenth century, in particular the meteoric rise to prominence of the ‘Good Sir James’, also known as ‘The Black Douglas’, and the means by which his personal advancement became a vehicle for the elevation of the tenuously linked Douglas families in Lanarkshire and Lothian from minor barons and lairds to membership of a vast and powerful affinity. Like the Comyns, James Douglas made his career in Crown service. Although a close associate of the king, Douglas did not join the ranks of the magnates (the greatest and most powerful and influential lords) until the death of Edward Bruce in Ireland made a gap in the Bruce party leadership that needed to be filled by a man with martial talents.

The social and economic history issues of medieval Scotland have not yet been so carefully examined by historians as the political arena, but there are useful volumes to be found, in particular Elizabeth Ewan’s Town Life in Fourteenth Century Scotland, David Ditchburn’s Scotland and Europe and Geoffrey Barrow’s Scotland and Its Neighbours in the Middle Ages. Although the history of later medieval Scotland is dominated by war, there has been surprisingly little in the way of military history; though there have been a great many political histories which, for obvious reasons, can hardly avoid the topic of warfare, there has as yet been no adequate work published on the nature and practice of military service in medieval Scotland. It is not clear why this should be the case; the material is reasonably plentiful, much of it from English state records that have been available in print for 100 years and more. The absence of such a volume has led to a general perception of medieval Scottish war that almost completely fails to coincide with any of the evidence. In general terms, there was no great distinction in military dress or normal military practice between Scotland and England, or for that matter France or the Low Countries. Fortunately there have been several good studies of particular events of a military nature. There are no modern scholarly examinations of the battles of Stirling Bridge or Falkirk, but C.J. MacNamee has made an excellent survey of William Wallace’s 1297 campaign in Cumbria, Westmorland and Northumberland, published in vol. 26 (1990) of Northern History.

Not unnaturally, Scottish historians have expended a great deal of ink on the subject of Sir William Wallace, but can hardly be expected to provide an objective view of, arguably, Scotland’s greatest hero. For English historians, Wallace is a mixed bag. Many English historians, from Charles Oman (if not before) to David Starkey, have taken the view that the success of the house of Wessex in achieving dominance in southern Britain was both inevitable and desirable, and that the extension of the rule of that house, or at least its successors, to a place of superiority throughout the whole of Britain was therefore, to use a technical term from Sellar and Yeatman’s masterly survey of ‘memorable’ English history, 1066 and All That, a ‘good thing’. From that perspective, Wallace, like Robert I, Prince Llewellyn or Owen Glendower, inevitably represented an obstacle to their preferred optimum outcome – the British Isles united in one (English) kingdom under one (English) king. The chief problem with achieving a unitary English state in medieval Britain before Edward I’s reign was that no one felt particularly strongly about it; the problem after 1296 was that interest among the English generally was not so well-developed or so consistent as it was among English kings.

At various junctures, generally under threat of military force, Scottish kings had accepted the suzerainty of English ones, though the exact extent of that suzerainty was never clearly defined – an indication, perhaps, that the realpolitik relationship between Scottish and English kings was that both parties were involved in face-saving exercises. The Scottish kings may have resented the implications of homage to English kings, but the demands made, when they were made at all, seem to have been gestural rather than practical, indicating that English kings were unsure of their capacity to conquer Scottish kings, but that Scottish kings doubted their capacity to successfully confront their English counterparts.

Although the obligations of Scottish kings may have been nominal, they felt strongly enough about it to fork out 10,000 merks to Richard I in 11894 in exchange for a full discharge from all and any obligations due from Scottish to English kingship. There would seem to have been no resistance to this measure in the political community of England – no sense that Richard was selling off the assets of English kingship, no sense of national pride injured. The inevitability and desirability of a unitary English kingdom stretching from the Channel to the North Sea does not seem to have strongly motivated English political society at the close of the twelfth century. By the close of the thirteenth century the unification of Britain had become, arguably, the most significant political issue in both England and Scotland. This matter was driven chiefly, if not entirely, by Edward I’s personal ambition. If it were at all possible, he intended to make Britain one kingdom under his kingship. If we assume that his goal was laudable, then William Wallace must surely be seen as little more than a political vandal.

Remarkably, Wallace has not, to any great extent, been the target for opprobrium from Unionist or English nationalist historians, perhaps on account of his outstanding heroic reputation. Like Robert E. Lee or Erwin Rommel, for some historians his reputation has stood higher than his cause. This was not the case in his own lifetime. The popularity of Mel Gibson’s character from Braveheart among the cinema-going English of the late twentieth century was not a reflection of the popularity of the prototype among his counterparts at the close of the thirteenth century. Wallace was, to medieval English observers, a barrier to the settlement of the ‘Scottish problem’. As such, it is hardly surprising that English chronicles and state records describe him as a ruthless revolutionary. Of course, one person’s terrorist or gangster is another person’s freedom fighter or partisan; the distinction is very much in the eye of the beholder.

It is only fair to bear in mind that there was not exactly a ‘Scottish problem’ in the first place. If one great barrier to British unification through English expansionism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was disinterest in the project among the English, the great barrier to unification after 1296 was the determination of enough Scots, enough of the time, that there should be no unification at all. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the chief obstruction to that unification was the attitude of the Scots to what they saw as subjugation by a larger, wealthier, more populous neighbour. The importance of William Wallace to that cause cannot be questioned. His significance lies not only in his military and political successes of 1297–98, but in his commitment to his chosen cause over the next seven years. Although he never recovered the power and influence he lost after the Battle of Falkirk, his adherence to the Balliol party and the political independence of his nation never wavered. Unlike several more prominent figures, Robert Bruce among others, Wallace was absolutely steadfast in his allegiance and, like his colleague Andrew Murray, he has enjoyed a certain reputation for constancy that is shared by only a very small segment of the Scottish noble classes during the Wars of Independence.

Notes

1 John of Fordoun, Andrew of Wyntoun and Walter Bower all take pains to ensure the reader is aware that William Wallace was the son of a noble knight, a member of the aristocratic and political community of Scotland.

2 The term ‘Scots’ is used throughout this volume to indicate the form of northern Middle English spoken in southern and eastern Scotland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

3 The scarcity of Scottish state records from the thirteenth and fourteenth century is, obviously, a problem for Scottish medievalists. However, there are several sources which indicate the general practice of the king’s chapel (chancery). See the introductions to Regesta RegumScottorum (RRS), vols 5 and 6, Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, vol. I and the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, vol. 1.

4 G. Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh 1970) pp.29–30.

2

OF NOBLE KIN: THE SOCIETY OF WILLIAM WALLACE

Over the centuries, Scots and others have developed a picture of William Wallace as a man of the people – not perhaps quite a farm worker, but certainly one of the ‘common people’ of thirteenth-century Scotland rather than one of the lords. In fact, Wallace was a member of the nobility, minor and obscure nobility perhaps, but nobility nonetheless. This is a matter of considerable importance in any assessment of Wallace’s career and his impact on the political sensibilities of the Scots, both in the medieval period and, to a remarkable degree, thereafter as well.1

The society of thirteenth-century Scotland in which Wallace grew up was essentially a feudal one – it was not identical to that of England or France, but it bore many resemblances to both. The word feudal conjures up that familiar, if misleading, schoolbook illustration image of a pyramidal structure of society. The king sits at the top; below him is a small group of major lords; below them lesser lords; then knights; then squires; then farm tenants and finally serfs. Although such a depiction of medieval society makes for a very nice illustration, it does little to actually show the nature of rank and status relationships in medieval societies, and it is worth giving some thought to the realities of feudal society in Scotland to achieve a better understanding of the community in which Wallace lived and made his career. The king was certainly the top bough of the feudal tree, and to a great extent kings did depend on the support of the great lords or magnates, or at least on their acceptance of or acquiescence in his rule. The magnate class included the earls and the bishops, clearly denoted by their titles as superior members of the community, but it also included some great barons and heads of religious houses who did not, in any legal sense, enjoy a greater status than other barons or prelates, but whose wealth, influence or extent of property brought them into the magnate group (or they were the heads of families that enjoyed traditional status in a particular locality). In a sense, each of these men had a personal relationship with the Crown. Most of the temporal magnates held their property from the king in exchange for a variety of judicial and administrative obligations and for military service.2

For great lords like the Comyns or the Bruces, military service obligations were not particularly heavy, given the extent of their properties. Even for an earldom the service owed seldom exceeded ten knights, and it is believed that the customary duration of service was generally – perhaps almost universally – a period of forty days. It is clear that the ‘knights’ in such arrangements were frequently – in fact generally – not men who actually bore that title. In operational terms there was no real difference between knights and men-at-arms, save that a knight might be expected to fulfill a command function and that the title carried an extra shilling a day in wages. Each was obliged to equip himself to the same given standard. A man might make a lengthy career as a man-at-arms and never aspire to becoming a knight, and the fact that a property was held for the service of one knight did not mean that the tenant either was a knight himself or that he would employ a dubbed knight to discharge his obligation. Apart from anything else, there would be an obvious difficulty if the landholder happened to be a woman – the service owed for the property would still have to be provided, though there would be no question of a female landholder ever being knighted.3

Self-evidently, no landholder could discharge a burden of ten knights personally. Service of forty days for each ‘unit’ of knight service owed would come to 400 days a year out of 365. The chief means of providing for knight service was subinfeudation. A person holding land from the king might in turn grant land to a relation or associate in exchange for military service. The need for landholders to provide property or cash settlements for their children led to a degree of fragmentation of both properties and service obligations, to the extent that there are instances of landholding for fractions of knight service, generally a half or a quarter, but sometimes as little as a twentieth of a knight’s service.4 Quite how such fractions of service were discharged is unclear. Major portions of service, such as a half, could have been given on a pro rata basis, the service of twenty days rather than forty, but the service of a twentieth of a knight would only provide a man-at-arms for two days, an enlistment of limited value. There is some evidence to suggest that there was an accepted relationship between the service of men-at-arms and of other troops, specifically archers and the lighter-armed cavalry troopers known in Ireland and England as ‘hobelars’, allowing the substitution of lighter troops for men-at-arms. It is clear that there were alternative mechanisms which were acceptable to, or at least accepted by, both superiors and vassals, which allowed the discharge of military service obligations by a greater variety of methods than simply personal service in the field or at the castle.

Military responsibility was not limited to the individual arrangements between superior and vassal. All men were obliged to serve in the army as required in defence of the realm. Tenure for military service was an additional burden, one that depended, at least in theory, on the financial capacity to bear it; only men with a substantial income could afford the necessary investment. An act of Robert I in 13185 is the earliest extant statement of the extent of military responsibility for Scots, but it should not be assumed that army service was not defined from an earlier date, by custom if not through legislation. The 1318 act was primarily concerned with the arming standards of men whose landed status was not sufficient to draw them into tenure agreements. The burden was not a particularly heavy one. The poorest men in the kingdom were obliged to provide themselves with no more than a spear or a bow and some arrows. The role of such men would largely be limited to responses to invasion.

The bulk of the large armies raised by the Scots throughout the Wars of Independence would be drawn from wealthier classes of men. Those with rents worth £10 or goods worth £40 per annum were expected to equip themselves with a spear, an aketon (a padded jacket), a ‘good iron’ and armoured gloves. A ‘good iron’ was probably a steel cap. Men equipped to this sort of standard were in fact typical of the infantry element of all European armies. The chief difference between a Scottish soldier and his counterpart from elsewhere lay in his language and cultural background, not in his appearance. Although such men were recruited by the thousand when required, large field armies were something of a rarity. Wallace and Murray raised considerable forces for Stirling Bridge and the force that Wallace led at Falkirk seems to have been a strong one, but as a general rule the Scots tended to avoid major formal confrontations.

As a younger son from a modest estate, William Wallace might conceivably have served in the infantry had he not made a career of military leadership. However, his social status would more likely have led him to serve as a man-at-arms. Although the rank and file of major armies consisted of close combat infantry, the majority of warfare, in Scotland as elsewhere, was conducted by heavy cavalry. The reasons for this are wide-ranging. Partly it was a matter of economics. Although men-at-arms were expensive to train and support, even a modest force of them, particularly one with possession of the local castles, could dominate a relatively large area and provide a reasonably imposing presence in the community.6 Being mounted, men-at-arms could respond to situations quickly, whether to intervene or to escape a larger force, but the social factors are perhaps the most significant. The men who were wealthy enough to support themselves as men-at-arms were also the men whose lifestyle afforded them the time and opportunity to learn and maintain the relevant skills. Further, since these men provided a focus of political administration and therefore of allegiance in their localities they were, in a sense, representative of the will of the community.

No doubt Scotland, like any other country, experienced a degree of class resentment before the Wars of Independence, though there is little, if any, evidence to indicate it, but it does not seem to have been a feature of politics during the war, which would surely have been an excellent opportunity for the disadvantaged classes to further their position. This may in fact have occurred to some extent in a gradual and piecemeal fashion. Before the Wars of Independence most Scots were ‘attached’ to the land. They might have tenure rights on that land, but they themselves were owned by the landholder.

The terms most commonly used to describe these people – rustici, nativi, bondi and servi – all indicate a degree of servile status. The terms may have held a distinction that is lost to us, but they were all, in the loosest sense, serfs. By the middle of the fourteenth century serfdom would seem to have disappeared as a condition in Scotland. Throughout Europe servile status was in something of a decline, but not to the degree apparent in Scotland. To what extent the change can be attributed to the war is impossible to say, but it would seem unreasonable to think that the war was not a factor. Professor Nicholson has suggested that the rapid recruitment of Wallace’s army in 1297 was fuelled by widespread social discontent;7 however, it is not clear what evidence there is to support that observation. There is little or no trace of class resentment tending toward violence in later thirteenth-century Scotland, nor were there any events to compare with the Peasants Revolt in England or the Jacquerie disturbances in France in the fourteenth century. This does not mean that medieval Scotland was free from class conflict, or that the Scots of the day all existed in a companionable consensus, but it does suggest that class envies and insecurities were not of sufficient moment to bring about any event of great significance.

To some extent, the war itself was probably a factor in reducing the potential for social unrest within Scottish society, as opposed to unrest between interest groups. From the opening of hostilities in 1296 until the release of David II there was only a very short period, August 1305 to February 1306, when there was no party active in the cause of either King John or Robert I. The demands of the war required co-operation against a common enemy if the Scots were to succeed where the Welsh and Irish had failed in resisting the encroachment of English kings. On a more personal level, the war also made opportunities for advancement. The rate of attrition among the minor nobility was painfully high, but such men needed to be replaced if they were lost or if they were forfeited.

Several minor nobles made spectacular careers in the service of Balliol, Plantagenet and Bruce kings; we should not doubt that more obscure men improved their fortunes in the same way. Gilbert Harper,8 a man of very obscure origins, served Edward Bruce as a man-at-arms in Ireland. Although he was considered to be of too low a station to be made a knight, he could afford the very finest in arms and armour and the men who found his body apparently thought that they had recovered the corpse of Edward himself. It would seem unlikely that Gilbert Harper’s adoption of the military and (to a great, though not unlimited, extent) cultural status of a man-at-arms was the product of service in war.

There was almost certainly some degree of resentment of the Plantagenet government, by virtue of its foreign nature, if nothing else. Although there is little evidence to suggest that Edward I’s government imposed heavier taxation or demanded service of any kind beyond the customary limits, there must clearly have been some issues at work to persuade thousands of Scots to risk their necks in war against an obviously powerful enemy. It is possible that the Scots thought it likely that the occupation would lead to higher taxes, perhaps even to compulsory military service abroad. Possibly the garrisons and administrators Edward put in place were heavy-handed – Edward himself seems to have thought this was a possibility, since he issued a writ declaring that in future his officials would be more accommodating.

A motivational factor that is sometimes belittled and often ignored in medieval history is nationalism. A number of twentieth-century historians have seen European nationalism as a product of the wars of Napoleon, arguing that prior to the nineteenth century the bulk of the populace in most countries were not concerned about national identity. In England and Scotland, at least, this is simply untenable. Thirteenth-century Scots were perfectly well aware of their nationality, as were their counterparts in England. The extent to which nationalism formed a vehicle for the careers of William Wallace and Robert Bruce and the extent to which they constituted vehicles for nationalism is a moot point. Scots who accepted the rule of either may have done so not out of a fondness for the Balliol or Bruce cause, but because they believed that those parties represented the most effective opposition to the English.

This does not mean that the non-noble classes of Scotland were united in opposition to Plantagenet government. A group of tenant farmers on royal estates (‘King’s husbandmen’) approached Edward I in the hope of securing the same tenurial rights as their counterparts in England.9 Apart from demonstrating the willingness of Scots of all classes to accept Edwardian rule when it took their fancy to do so, their action shows that even Scots of a very obscure status could be aware of themselves as a political entity, could compare their conditions with their counterparts in another country, and were prepared to approach the king to seek an improvement in their status. At all levels of society, the extent to which the communities of Scotland accepted Edwardian government varied according to the prevailing political and military situation. No doubt a very large proportion of the population would have been more than happy to be simply left in peace – a common, and rational, reaction to war on one’s doorstep. Even so, on the occasions that Scottish leaders called for widespread military service they do not seem to have toiled for recruits. In the weeks before Bannockburn, when, admittedly, Scotland had been at war for most of the preceding twenty years and had presumably become a rather militarised society, Robert I could afford to turn men away because they were inadequately equipped.10