A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain
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Now, in the clear light of day, it was apparent that the Scots had abandoned all thought of ambush; in the distance they could be seen arraying themselves ready for battle. To compensate for his inferior numbers, Wallace had adopted a defensive strategy. His army was drawn up on the side of a small hill, at the foot of which ran an insubstantial stream. His greatest asset, the massed pikemen of his infantry, were arranged in four great circular brigades, or ‘schiltroms’, as the Scots called them. With their bristling spears turned outwards, these giant hedgehogs would give the foot soldiers a fighting chance against a cavalry charge. Nestled between them for protection were the archers of Selkirk Forest, while the Scottish cavalry were stationed at the rear. Both these contingents, however, were tiny in comparison with their English counterparts.30
The strength of Wallace’s formation is well attested by the reaction of his opponent. Edward, when advised of it, was inclined to be cautious: superiority in numbers only counted for so much. The last time he had charged uphill at a supposedly inferior foe, the result had been a disastrous defeat. That, of course, had been at Lewes, well over three decades earlier, and was, to be fair, his first taste of battle. But when one remembers that the king’s most recent battlefield experience was the almost equally distant engagement at Evesham, the reason for his caution becomes even more apparent. Edward was now in his sixtieth year; his hair, once blond, had turned to snowy white. In general terms he was in remarkably robust health, but on this particular morning, thanks to his night-time mishap, he was nursing two broken ribs. Having arrived at Falkirk, he proposed pitching camp, and allowing his tired and hungry troops to feed themselves and their horses. His commanders, however, would have none of it: hesitation, they argued, would leave them once again exposed to attack. The king in due course agreed. The order to advance was given, and the Battle of Falkirk began.31
At first, Wallace’s strategy seemed as if it might well work. The first line of the English cavalry, led by the earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, thundered towards the Scots, but immediately ran into difficulty. The little stream they had dismissed as an insubstantial obstacle in fact fed a much larger area of boggy marsh, which halted their headlong charge and sent them veering to the left. The second line, commanded by the bishop of Durham, swerved right to avoid the same pitfall. It soon became apparent, however, that these initial diversions had done the Scots no favours. The marsh, while protecting them from a frontal assault, had merely forced their opponents to attack from the sides, and the Scots now found themselves caught in a pincer. Their schiltroms, as expected, were highly successful in deterring the English cavalry, but this simply meant that the cavalry concentrated on the softer target presented by the Scottish archers. Eventually the schiltroms stood alone, at which point the English infantry unleashed a hail of stones and arrows, which ultimately caused so many casualties among the spearmen that they broke ranks. Seeing that their enemies had lost their defensive advantage, the English cavalry rode back in, and the Scottish slaughter was complete.32
The Scottish cavalry – that is, the Scottish nobility – had fled at the start of the battle. (‘Without a sword’s blow,’ said Guisborough, derisively.) This has given rise to the pernicious but persistent myth that they secretly despised Wallace as a common upstart, and were actually in league with Edward I. As we have already seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The nobles of Scotland had from the first defied the English king and were quite ready to resist him. What separated them from the unfortunate archers and infantry at Falkirk was not their commitment to the patriotic cause, but their ability to flee when they realised that defeat was inevitable. We should not be too quick to condemn as cowards men who faced such overwhelming odds: it was massive numbers and superior firepower, not treachery, that led to the English victory. Nor should we pretend that the behaviour of the Scottish cavalry in any way divided them from their general. Wallace too escaped from Falkirk – presumably on the back of a horse.33
The decision of the Scottish nobles to flee the field, far from condemning their country to defeat, in fact proved to be its saving grace. Had they been captured at Falkirk, as they had been at Dunbar two years before, resistance would have come to a swift end. As it was, their flight meant that the recent battle, although extremely bloody, was quite indecisive. Edward had succeeded only in killing a lot of Scottish commoners (and, to judge from the sudden drop in his infantry wages, a lot of English ones as well). Irritatingly, he now had no choice but to conduct a massive manhunt. The king therefore dismissed his surviving foot soldiers and set out with his cavalry to catch the Scottish fugitives.34
His first target (after the castle at Stirling, which fell in a fortnight) was Robert Bruce. It is not known whether the young earl was among the Scottish nobles at Falkirk (frustratingly, very few of their names are known), but certainly Edward’s decision to pursue Bruce destroys the fanciful notion that he had fought on the English side. When, in August, the king and his men rode west into Bruce’s earldom of Carrick, it was with the clear hope of capturing a man whom they regarded as one of the main leaders of Scottish resistance. Once again, however, their quarry eluded them. By the time they reached the west-coast town of Ayr, Bruce had burned his castle there and disappeared. Once again, the English ran into difficulties when their fleet failed to make the appointed rendezvous. After a week of waiting in vain, the king was forced to cut short his operations. Plans to move into Galloway were abandoned, and the cavalry instead rode down Annandale, seizing the Bruce castle of Lochmaben, but heading in the direction of England.35
The flight of his enemies, the lack of supplies – these were both serious problems. But what finally crippled Edward’s campaign was an argument with his earls over the spoils of war. The English magnates had set out for Scotland excited at the prospect of acquiring new estates, but at the same time anxious to ensure that the redistribution was equitable. After the conquest of Wales the king had given a lot of land to his closest friends (for example, the earls of Surrey and Lincoln), but to others (notably Norfolk and Hereford) he had given nothing at all. For this reason, it seems, Bigod and Bohun had obtained a royal guarantee that, on this occasion, no grants would be made without their prior approval. As the army retreated from Ayrshire, however, Edward revealed how little store he set by this promise when he spontaneously awarded the Isle of Arran to an Irish adventurer called Hugh Bisset. Bigod and Bohun were stunned, and seem to have concluded that, although they had fought in the first line at Falkirk, they were once again going to be last in line for reward. At the start of September, when the army reached Carlisle, they made their excuses and left for home.36
Realising his mistake, Edward endeavoured to repair the damage. A few days after the departure of the earls and their followers, he began doling out Scottish estates to those men who still remained with him. Naturally, loyalists such as Lincoln were generously rewarded. But, says Guisborough, the king kept some land in reserve lest he should anger those who had already left, and the chronicler’s comments find echo in royal letters sent out a week or so later, in which Edward tactfully promised to put his magnates in possession of the property he had granted ‘or had intended to grant them’. But all of this smacked of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. For years afterwards, to judge from comments made by Peter Langtoft, men would go about saying that the redistribution of estates in Scotland had been unfair. An opportunity had existed to give a large number of Englishmen a vested interest in completing the conquest of Scotland, but the king had foolishly squandered it.37
The campaign of 1298 was clearly at an end, but Scotland was nowhere near subjugated. With the country’s native leaders still at large, there was no hope of re-imposing the kind of civilian administration that had temporarily held sway in 1296 and 1297. English power in Scotland was now limited to the castles captured during the summer – Edward’s last action in the autumn on 1298 was to march the remaining rump of his army along the Border to take the castle
at Jedburgh. When the king quit Scotland in October, he left behind him a military occupation of isolated garrisons, with all the danger and expense that that implies. It was his hope that this fragile structure would survive until the following summer, but within just a few weeks he was advised that his positions in Scotland were coming under renewed attack. A frustrating fortnight spent at Newcastle in November failed to get any help to the beleaguered English troops at Stirling. At the end of the year Edward rode south knowing that only another full-scale invasion would suffice.38
The king’s return to England, however, refocused attention on the solemn promise he had made at the start of the summer: namely, that he would satisfy his subjects that he was sincere in his wish to uphold Magna Carta, the Forest Charter and the other concessions he had granted the previous year. Edward might well have argued that, having ratified them in Flanders, he had already given his word. Unfortunately, though, on one particular issue, his subjects felt that he had already broken it.
The issue in question concerned the Royal Forest, which, as we have already noted, was a deeply resented institution. The term itself is misleading to modern ears, for it suggests little more than a few areas of woodland set aside for the king’s personal use: such indeed, had been the Forest’s original function. But in the twelfth century the scope of the Forest had been massively extended, to include vast swathes of the English countryside, both wooded and unwooded. It is an oft-repeated but nonetheless impressive fact that almost all of Essex was officially designated as ‘Forest’.
The reason for this expansion was financial. The Royal Forest was governed by its own law, and anyone caught breaking it – by killing a deer, for example, or by cutting down a tree – was liable to be fined. It did not matter that such infringements might be committed by individuals on their own lands within the Forest. Nor did transgressors have much in the way of legal recourse if caught. The Forest was an arbitrary jurisdiction that stood completely apart from the rest of the judicial system. The king and his foresters could impose fines, and even death, entirely at will.39
It is easy to understand, therefore, why people would wish to have the running of the Royal Forest regulated – hence the Forest Charter – and easier still to see why they would wish to escape it altogether. The very first clause of the Charter held out just such a tantalising prospect, for it promised that the extent of the Forest would be reviewed. ‘Good and law-worthy men,’ to use the Charter’s own words, would walk or ride through the Forest to determine what its original bounds had been prior to the later expansions. Contemporaries coined a name for this inspection process: they called it a perambulation.40
Having regranted the Forest Charter in 1297, Edward could reasonably be regarded as bound by the same promise. Indeed, during his absence in Flanders, his regents had gone so far as to order a perambulation of the Forest soon after they had confirmed the Charters. The king himself, on the other hand, had been suspiciously noncommittal. According to Walter of Guisborough, he had promised a new perambulation to his critics in May 1298 as part of his wider effort to quell public concerns on the eve of his march to Scotland. Since then, however, there had been a notable silence. The closest Edward had come to addressing the issue had been his appointment in November of commissioners to look into the offences committed by his Forest officials – an act that fell far short of public expectations.41
This royal procrastination was not entirely capricious. As far as the king was concerned, there was simply no need for a perambulation to take place, for the good reason that it had already happened when the Forest Charter had first been issued. In 1225 the teams of ‘good and law-worthy men’ had carried out their task, and Henry III had duly conceded that large areas of Royal Forest should no longer be classed as such. Edward was therefore happy to confirm the Forest Charter, but he regarded its opening clauses – that is, those promising a perambulation – as redundant.
Unfortunately for the king, the issue was not quite so cut-and-dried as he believed (or pretended). A perambulation had indeed been performed in 1225, and the extent of the Forest had been reduced in line with the perambulators’ findings. But, just two years later, Henry III had arbitrarily reclaimed certain areas as Forest. It was all a long time in the past, but local communities tended to have elephantine memories when it came to such executive injustices, and now believed that the moment had come to settle a long-standing score with the king’s government.42 Moreover, it was not just the inhabitants of debatable areas of Forest that viewed the issue as important. Edward’s failure to proceed with a new perambulation by the end of 1298 raised serious questions about his general trustworthiness, and this touched everyone. The king had solemnly sworn to uphold Magna Carta and the Forest Charter – documents that, seventy years after their original publication, had attained the status of semi-sacred texts. Any attempt to reinterpret their contents in the Crown’s favour, no matter how cogently argued, was bound to create a world of trouble.
Edward appears to have been blithely unaware of the storm that was brewing. When, in early February 1299, he summoned a parliament to Westminster, it was professedly in order to obtain advice about Gascony. (Happily, the pope had ruled that the duchy should be returned to English control, but the French had as yet to agree to the details.) The king might perhaps have imagined that the opposition would have been diminished by the death of Humphrey de Bohun. The outspoken earl had died on the last day of December, to be succeeded by his namesake son, but only in the tenurial sense: there is no good evidence to suggest that the new, twenty-two-year-old earl of Hereford adopted his father’s confrontational political stance.43
If Edward was counting on quiet, however, then he was quickly disappointed. When parliament met in March there was, in Guisborough’s words, ‘great contention’. The opposition, now led solely by Roger Bigod, remained strong in voice and in number, and demanded that the king honour his much-repeated promise to confirm the Charters. Edward’s unpreparedness is suggested by his uncharacteristically flustered response. After several days of fruitless debate, he guaranteed his critics an answer on the morrow, but then slipped out of the city in secret at dawn the next day. When his exasperated opponents caught up with him at Harrow, the king blamed his sudden exit on Westminster’s noxious air and again assured them of an answer if they would return to London.44
The response, when it finally came, provoked outrage. Edward reissued the Charters, but it soon transpired that he had tampered with their contents. Not only had he added a catch-all reservation, ‘saving the rights of our Crown’, he had also deliberately omitted the first five clauses of the Forest Charter – those that promised a perambulation and the reduction of the Royal Forest. At this, says Guisborough, parliament broke up, and the king’s critics returned to their own parts unpacified. Meanwhile, in the streets of the capital, Edward’s revisions came close to provoking a riot. On 2 April the city’s governors were ordered ‘to arrest, try and punish persons congregating by day and night, and speaking ill of the king’.45
Realising that he still had a major struggle on his hands, Edward ordered parliament to reassemble the following month, and in the meantime took steps to counter his critics. From the first the opposition had enjoyed the support of the citizens of London, who still resented the king’s decision in 1285 to strip them of their ancient rights of self-government. This support had been mutual: while Edward had been in Flanders, Bigod and Bohun had presumed to relax the Crown’s control of the city, and had ordered the royal warden ‘to bear himself in all things as if he were mayor’. Now, a fortnight before parliament was due to resume, the king made his own bid for London’s support. On 17 April – Good Friday – he formally restored the city’s ancient liberties. Even then, he took no chances. Although parliament had been summoned to Westminster, its deliberations in the event took place at Stepney, to the east of the city – an attempt, perhaps, to avoid a repetition of the earlier civic unrest.46
But the dissension continued. Bigod
returned to London, said one chronicler, accompanied by a thousand horse, evidently determined to hold Edward to account. The king, though, still refused to give ground, and the opposition were again ‘exasperated by his irritable and empty words and prevarications’. When the session ended a fortnight later, it seems clear that nothing had been resolved. Edward left for Dover, in order to oversee the dispatch of ambassadors to France. Bigod, meanwhile, went west to the Welsh Marches, and his great castle at Chepstow, where engineers had been working through the winter to add giant crossbows to the top of the main tower. Others evidently returned home from parliament and began to voice their discontent. Now it was not just London but the whole country that was speaking ill of the king, saying openly that he did not intend to keep the Charters.47
With his subjects everywhere railing against him, Edward had no choice but to cave in to his critics’ demands. On 25 June he issued an extraordinary propaganda letter, promising that a new perambulation of the Forest would begin in the autumn, and announcing that men had already been appointed to perform the task. Disingenuously, he blamed his opponents for the delays to date, and begged people not to believe the rumours that were circulating about his attitude towards the Charters. It was a remarkable declaration, not least for the efforts taken to publicise it, which in turn reveal the extent to which the royal credibility was felt to have collapsed. The king’s officials were told not only to proclaim the letters in towns and villages, but also to take with them ‘some worthy person of religion’ for the purpose. In Worcester, at least, the proclamation was made in English – ‘the mother tongue’, as the local chronicler called it.48