The result was similar to Stirling Bridge. Hemmed in and unable to deploy their heavy cavalry, the English were defeated.
Two months later Longshanks was dead at Burgh on Sands on the English side of the Solway Firth, en route to inflict another punishment on the rebel Scots. Bruce’s decisive victory over his internal enemies came in 1308 at Inverurie, where the Comyn forces were defeated. What followed was a bold and heroic conquest of one stronghold after another, with the Bruce, for instance, personally leading a night assault on Perth in January 1313 when he forded the icy moat and was first to mount the ramparts.15
That year Bruce’s nephew Sir Thomas Randolph took Roxburgh Castle and, by clambering up the rock and over the ramparts, Edinburgh Castle. The other outstanding commander was Sir James Douglas, who also led daring attacks on English-held fortresses.
Having already convened a Scottish parliament and invaded northern England, Bruce was effectively king of Scotland. His brother Edward agreed with the English commander of one of the last castles to hold out, Stirling, that if he was not relieved within a year he would surrender. That deadline ended on 24 June 1314.
In the history books this was why Longshank’s successor and son, Edward II, had to come north with his army. Just as likely was Bruce’s declaration that if his noble opponents did not surrender by October 1314 they would lose their lands. Edward II had to act or his allies would be forced to surrender.
Bruce chose well as to where the Scots would make a stand at Bannockburn. It was a good defensive position, ideal for the Scottish pikemen. Before the battle he rode out on a pony to review his troops. An English knight, de Bohun, took the chance to ride out to attack him. Facing de Bohun, Bruce skilfully avoided the attack and struck the knight dead with an axe. That did no harm to the morale of the Scots army.
As the battle swung in Bruce’s favour, the ‘small people’, his camp followers, sensing booty, charged forward. To the English this seemed to be fresh reserves, and tired and on the back foot, they broke. It was one of the few occasions in medieval history where the common people were credited with any role in a military success.
Bruce was now king of Scotland, and in 1329 the nobility and bishops gathered at Arbroath Abbey to acknowledge him as sovereign. What came out of that was the Declaration of Arbroath, which rousingly declared: ‘For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honour, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.’16
These words reflect the fact that the War of Independence had ultimately involved a section of the common people, but it should not obscure the fact this was a nobles’ document, and it was their independence that was being asserted. There was little in the way of ‘freedom’ for the ordinary folk over the coming centuries.
In other words, it was a warning to the king of England to stay away, but also to Robert the Bruce not to overstep the mark by attacking feudal rights.
Were those who fought at Bannockburn fighting for Scotland? The taxes imposed by the English occupiers and their press-ganging of people to serve in their army, including in France, led to ordinary people rising up. Others simply had to follow their lord if he decided to resist. The national anthem, ‘Flower of Scotland’, is nearer the truth when it says they were fighting for their ‘wee bit hill and glen’. Most had no choice, having to fight for their feudal lord. As one historian argues: ‘In Scotland it is surely unlikely that many people, at least below the class of magnates, saw their primary loyalty as being to the crown as opposed to their village, burgh or province.’17
It was only in 1328 that the English recognised the Bruce as king of Scotland. The new English king, Edward III, was an infant, the country was facing civil war in which the Scots might intervene and, powerless to do much else, the English authorities had to recognise independence. Nevertheless, when Edward III came of age he would renew the war to conquer Scotland. What saved the kingdom was the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Once more the attention of English monarchs was focused on the richer gains to be had across the Channel, and Scotland was left to itself. Yet some notion of freedom flickered in the memory. So the poet John Barbour wrote in 1375 in ‘The Bruce’:
A! Fredome is a noble thing!
Fredome mays man
to haiff liking;
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He levys at ese
that frely levys!
Those words of Barbour carry greater weight because he wrote them long after Bruce’s death in order to idolise Bruce as the ideal warrior king and his lieutenant, Sir James Douglas, as the ideal knight and loyal vassal. The stress of the poem is loyalty to one’s superior.18
In reality the kingdom of Scotland’s independence was not guaranteed. English armies, often allied with Scottish noble allies, would repeatedly invade over the next two centuries, not with the aim of occupying the country but to force the Scottish kings to acquiesce to the wishes of the king in London. Bruce’s successors would find that their power was limited by a nobility keen to maintain their control over their territories.
The Unstable House of Stewart
For much of the fifteenth century England was gripped by civil war, the War of the Roses, as two aristocratic factions, the houses of Lancaster and York, fought for the throne. It was only with the victory of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth, where Richard III was killed and Henry took the Crown, that Scotland became the target of English dynastic ambitions. The English kings were determined to secure their northern border from any incursion by the Scots, who were allied by now with the French. The result was virtual permanent war during the first half of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII was also ambitious, and he was determined to annexe Scotland through dynastic marriage or military means.
Elsewhere in Europe the crisis of the late Middle Ages was resolved in two ways. In France, Spain and Austria monarchs arose who maintained the nobility in their positions of wealth but ended their right to rule as semi-kings and domesticated them by bringing them to the royal court, where they had to compete for favours and office.
The monarchs of these kingdoms also relied on the growing wealth of the towns to offset that of the nobility, for example by borrowing heavily from them. The nobility and the top churchmen retained, though, a monopoly of the top political and military positions. They were absolute monarchs, proclaiming the divine right of kings to rule, but in reality balancing different class forces, though ultimately tied to the old feudal order. As a result the monarch failed to impose control and the country effectively became governed by warring nobles.
This was especially true in Scotland. Robert the Bruce died in 1329 and was succeeded by his son David II, who suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the English, being captured and eventually ransomed. He died childless, and was succeeded by Robert II, who was effectively removed as a ruler by rebel nobles. Next up was Robert III, whose reign was marked by wars with England and between rival nobles. When his younger brother seemed set to take the Crown, the king’s son James was sent to France, but was captured en route and spent eighteen years at the English court before being allowed to return to Scotland.
James I proved a capable ruler, which ensured his assassination by nobles. James II died at the siege of Roxburgh Castle when one of his cannons blew up. James III died in battle against rebel nobles. His son took the throne as James IV and was able to break the power of the Lord of the Isles, the semi-independent realm of Clan Donald, but in order to police the Highlands had to rely on magnates, the Earls of Argyll and Huntly, heads of the Campbell and Gordon clans.
James married an English princess and tried to balance England and France, but when those two states went to war he invaded England in 1514, but was defeated and killed at Flodden Field. His infant son was crowned James V, and when he assumed control, he allied Scotland with France only to be defeated and killed in battle with the English. His heir, the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, was dispatched to France for safety and then
married to the French heir, the Dauphin. Her mother, the French princess Mary of Guise, ruled in Scotland with the help of a French army.
In these years Scotland was thrust into chaos. For two centuries no Scots monarch succeeded to the throne in adulthood. For much of that time the country was ruled by a regent until the infant monarch came of age. The regency was in turn fought over by the great nobles. This crisis of royal control led to the fragmentation of power throughout Scotland. This fragmentation continued longer in the Highlands, which remained free of royal control, and it was during this time that the clan system, feudal rule which used supposed kinship to reinforce its control, was created.19
In the course of this chaos the nobility acquired great power from the Crown, including the right to administer law as they saw fit through their own courts. The Borders, the front line with England, was relatively free of royal rule, as were the Highlands. Nobles seized hereditary control of sheriffdoms (supposedly the agents of royal control) and implemented the law through their own courts.
Such independence extended to the upper echelons of the peasantry. The churchman and historian John Major wrote in 1521 that they had a remarkable spirit of freedom and were more ‘elegant’ than their French counterparts, by which he meant they tried to match the dress and arms of the lesser nobility. They were quick to draw those weapons if they felt slighted and would follow their lord anywhere if he had their respect. War and feuding were a feature of their lives, along with poverty.20
As Stewart kings reached maturity they would try to establish control but would often meet bloody ends in battle with the English or at the hands of noble opponents. The descendants of the Norman nobles settled in the north by the Canmores adopted the customs of the Gaelic chiefs as royal control weakened, allowing them to grasp the opportunity to manage their own affairs. By the late Middle Ages these chiefs held their land under feudal charter from the Crown or another chief.
In the Highlands, clan chiefs were able to force military service from lesser landlords who had previously held their land from the Crown. They relied on ‘bonding’, whereby lesser men agreed to serve them in return for protection, and they claimed seniority in real or, more usually, imagined kinships.
The runrig system of agriculture is sometimes cited as a collective form of agriculture, but it was nothing of the sort. The strips of land farmed by the peasants were allocated annually not through collective decision-making but by the landlord. The system was hierarchical.
This social stratification was fixed by the belief in kinship with the chief and the legend that the clan had some collective right to the land. While the chiefs needed military service they encouraged this belief, but after 1746, when there was no need for this, the reality of who owned the land quickly hit home. Membership of a clan could cut across a feudal lordship – so MacLeans or Camerons lived on land owned by the Duke of Argyll and were subject to his baronial courts. They paid rent to Argyll and gave service and sometimes tribute to their chief. As Neil Davidson argues: ‘Clans, far from being opposed to feudalism, were representative of its most extreme form.’21 Whether in the Highlands or Lowlands, Scotland remained a militarised society where war was commonplace and life short and brutal even for the elite.
Thus far we have heard little from the ordinary people. In a feudal society they counted for little, and the records we have are those written by churchmen for the glory of God, the king and their temporal lord.
In the course of the fourteenth century, however, climate change created cooler and wetter conditions, squeezing fertile land and acting to reduce the population. Plague arrived in 1349, which further cut the number of the living. The result – as elsewhere in Western Europe – was to create a shortage of labour, and the peasantry were able to use the leverage this gave them to improve their own conditions. Rent, usually in kind, replaced labour services.22
Change was coming, and with it ordinary people would begin to tread the stage of history, even if hesitantly at first.
THREE
Reformation and the War
of the Three Kingdoms
Reformation
In 1549, a Dumfries priest, Robert Wedderburn, anonymously published ‘The Complaynt of Scotland’, which gives an impression of ordinary life in sixteenth-century Scotland, living on the front line of an almost permanent conflict with England:
I labour night and day with my hands to feed the lazy and useless men, and they repay me with hunger and the sword. I sustain their life with the toil and sweat of my body, and they persecute my body with hardship until I am become a beggar. They life through me and I die through them. Alas, oh my natural mother, you reproach me and accuse me of the faults my two brothers commit. My two brothers, nobles and clergy, who should defend me, are more cruel to me than my old enemies the English. They are my natural brethren, but they are my mortal enemies.1
In his disillusion with his ‘betters’, Wedderburn calls for unity against the invader and an end to divisions that saw some Scots nobles side with the English. Rather than wait for divine help or some turn in the wheel of fortune, he also implores ordinary Scots to rise up. This was Wedderburn’s prescription to cure the affliction besetting Scotland.
At the time, the nation was in the hands of the Stewart dynasty. In 1542, after military defeat by the English, James V died in shame, uttering the final words ‘it came wi a lass, it’ll gang wi a lass’. The Stewarts had succeeded to the throne through marriage to Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce, and now James’s only legitimate heir was his infant daughter Mary. Though James V obviously had no high hopes for his daughter, Mary would not be the last of the Stewart monarchs, though not through want of trying.
Scotland had been at war because James had refused the command of England’s Henry VIII, his uncle, to convert to Protestantism. Now Scotland would be ruled by his widow, the French Mary of Guise. England and France were at war and both viewed Scotland as the back door. Henry demanded that the infant Mary be married to his son, and when diplomacy failed, his troops invaded, winning the Battle of Pinkie outside Edinburgh but failing to take the city, although occupying much of southern Scotland. In response, the infant Queen of Scots was spirited off to France to marry the king’s eldest son, the Dauphin. Mary of Guise brought over a French army to protect her from the English, and Scotland was now caught up in a great power conflict.
Mary of Guise, backed by the French troops, became an effective ruler, something the Scottish nobility always disliked. Because France and Mary of Guise were Catholic, the religious question became a national imperative. The Catholic Church was a feudal institution that demanded rents from its tenants and levied taxes. Throughout Scotland the Church had fallen increasingly under royal and noble control. Kings appointed their bastard sons to bishoprics and nobles ran monastic lands as their own. James V had secured five of the richest religious houses for his bastard sons while they were still infants, and none would grow up to lead a celibate life.
Consequently, the Catholic Church had few defenders. The nobility who had watched Henry VIII seize its lands south of the border were already salivating over that possibility in Scotland. Lesser gentry resented paying tithes to a church known for its wealth. Meanwhile, in the towns Protestantism had spread quickly. It already had martyrs burnt at the stake and one failed rebellion in 1546, when a gang of Protestants had murdered Cardinal Beaton then held out in St Andrews Castle for a year.
A former priest, John Knox, had been among them, and when the castle fell he was punished by being sent to work as a galley slave in the French navy. Knox stood for the purification of worship and believed that out of duty to God it was right to revolt against the Catholic religious and political establishment. But from his experiences on the Continent he was also concerned by religious radicals who had gone as far as to challenge the existing political and social order. In particular, the Peasants’ War in Germany (1524–1525) had seen Thomas Munzer lead the lower orders against the nobility, preaching a
form of primitive communism.
On 11 May 1559, Knox, fresh from studying in John Calvin’s Geneva, preached a revolutionary sermon at St John’s Church in Perth, after which the congregation rushed to attack the town’s monasteries. At the time, Knox described the mob as his ‘brethren’ but later termed them ‘the rascal multitude’.
Knox had been summoned back to Scotland by some great nobles, including the heir to the earldom of Argyll and an illegitimate son of James V, Lord James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, who had supposedly taken part in the sacking of the monasteries in Perth. Knox was prepared not just to ally himself with these nobles but, in future, to allow them substantial influence within the emerging Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
The French regent, Mary of Guise, mobilised her troops to crush these ‘heretics’ but similar riots followed in Dundee, Scone, Stirling, Linlithgow and Edinburgh. Knox could now call on powerful friends to raise an army for the new Protestant religion. England, fearing its northern neighbour would become a province of France, acted. In 1560, Queen Elizabeth sent her fleet to take control of the Firth of Forth, cutting off Mary’s supply line to France. The subsequent peace treaty ended French involvement in Scotland’s affairs and the Scottish Parliament voted to make Calvinism the new state religion. This was a decision made up of landowners, the landed nobility and the richest men from the royal burghs.
The Reformation effectively destroyed Catholicism outside of a few pockets in the Highlands and the north-east, and brought Scotland closer into England’s orbit. But it was largely brought about by a revolt of the nobility, and not by a popular movement. At the beginning the ‘mob’ had been useful, but very quickly it became a power struggle between rebel lords backed by Queen Elizabeth of England, and Mary of Guise and the French.
A People's History of Scotland Page 4