Bannockburn 1314: The Battle 700 Years On

Copyright

Introduction to the

Second Edition

It is relatively rare that one has the opportunity to construct a second edition to a history book, rarer still if the volume is concerned with medieval or military history and almost unheard of for a book on medieval Scottish military history. As we approach the 700th anniversary of the battle – and, of course, the referendum on Scottish independence – it is inevitable that there should be a growth in interest in an event that has been so significant for Scots for such a long time. It is all too easy to inflate the importance of the battle as a military and political phenomenon, and forget that King Robert’s war would not be concluded for more than a decade.

After 1314 the war was not generally conducted in Scotland, but in Ireland and England, and at one point there was a very real possibility that it would spill over into Wales as well. King Robert also had to face domestic opposition. In 1320 he was threatened by a widespread conspiracy of nobles whose intent was to replace him with Edward Balliol, son of the unfortunate King John.

Despite the political credibility gained through his military successes – somewhat diminished by failure in Ireland – Robert was not, strictly speaking, the legitimate king. Until the death of Edward Balliol in 1354 both he and his son David II continued to be usurpers, a fact that Edward III did his level best to exploit in his efforts to gain control over Scotland in the 1330s and 1340s.

Equally, there is no escaping the sheer artistry of King Robert’s victory at Bannockburn. The defeat of the English in such a great encounter gave him political credibility at home and abroad and went some way toward confirming the innate superiority of the infantry over the cavalry. Well trained, well led and well motivated, the man on foot demonstrated that he was more than a match for the armoured knight; the lessons delivered by Robert I at Bannockburn, and then developed by men such as Henry Beaumont and Edward III at Dupplin and Crécy, would have a profound and permanent effect on the practice of war right across Europe.

Preface

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

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

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

The battle occurred nearly 700 years ago, and so it should come as no surprise that the evidence tends to be limited, both in terms of quantity and quality. Even when studied in relation to the terrain, the material is often less informative than we might hope, indeed, study of the site may actually bring other factors into mind which might otherwise have escaped us. Relating written accounts to modern maps can be a frustrating – and not necessarily a rewarding – exercise. We may be confident that the burn we find on a map is the one referred to by this or that writer, but is it still in the same place? Has its course, width or current been affected by the construction of roads, railways or housing? Were its banks more treacherous in the past than they are today? Crucially, even if we are utterly certain that ‘this’ is the burn that a given force crossed on a given day, we cannot be so certain that it did so at any particular point in the water’s course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary accounts, however carefully written, are of limited value unless we make a real effort to understand the nature of the armies and their nature of approach to battle. Failure to do so can lead to very serious misconceptions which, in turn, can lead us to very questionable conclusions. This is, perhaps, less of an issue for the army of Edward II than for that of Robert I. There are two reasons for this. One is that English armies of the fourteenth century have been studied in far more detail than Scottish ones, which is itself a matter of source material. Not only is there a great deal more in the way of record evidence – payrolls and horse valuations records, for example – but the material has been thoroughly examined by many very talented historians for the better part of 100 years – particularly, though not exclusively, J.E. Morris, Professor G.W.S. Barrow and Doctors Michael Prestwich, Andrew Ayton and Andy King.⁸

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

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

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

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

Notes

1.    Myton, 20 September, 1319.

2.    Culblean, 30 November, 1335.

3.    Burghmuir, 30 July, 1335, Crichtondene, November/December, 1337.

4.    Stirling castle fell to Edward I in 1296, to the Scots in 1299, to Edward again in 1304 and to the Scots in 1314.

5.    See Dr Fiona Watson’s essay, ‘The Expression of Power in a Medieval Kingdom; Thirteenth Century Castles.’ S. Foster, A. McInnes, R. McInnes (Eds), Scottish Power Centres (Edinburgh, 1998).

6.    The feature known as the ‘Ripple’ near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania only appears on maps because it was a feature which had some effect on the course of the fighting. It is too low to be recorded on a conventional map.

7.    Two stirrups (not a pair), one bodkin arrowhead and one hammerhead fragment are the sum total of Bannockburn ‘finds’ to date.

1

The Story So Far:

The War of Independence, 1296–1313

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

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

MacKenzie was not the only Scottish historian of his time to examine Bannockburn in some detail. Evan MacLeod Barron’s work, The Scottish War of Independence,⁵ still exerts an influence on Scottish medieval history nearly a century after its first publication. There are numerous weaknesses to Barron’s understanding of Bannockburn that have been explored in detail by Professor Barrow.⁶ Barron’s contribution to the topic largely revolved around his conviction that the contribution of Highland communities to the cause of independence had been obscured by a concentration on Lowland magnate politics, and that the viability of the patriotic cause had been continually undermined by the capacity of lowland nobles and gentry to defect to the English. Barron could certainly provide many examples of serial defections among the Scottish magnates – Robert Bruce, for example, changed sides in 1297, 1301–02 and again in 1306. In the view of Barron, the southern nobility were less committed than their northern counterparts, a reflection of differing values between what he saw as two distinct Scottish cultural, social and political entities, the ‘Teutonic’ (southern/lowland) and the Celtic (Gaelic/northern). This aspect of Barron’s interpretation has been thoroughly discredited by Professor Barrow, but continues to exert a considerable influence on the popular perception of the Battle of Bannockburn and of the war in general. Barron’s intention was to redress what he saw as a tendency on the part of historians to focus on the activities of the southern magnates. His view was not without validity, but he exaggerated some pieces of evidence and marginalised others to make his case. He was not the first writer to draw attention to this perceived north−south imbalance. In 1909, John Shearer, in his Fact and Fiction in the Story of Bannockburn,⁷ wrote:

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

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

Map of the more important castles and strongpoints of medieval Scotland. Most of these lie in the south and east of the country. There were of course a great many castles and fortresses in the far north, west and isles, however medieval conflict in Scotland was dominated by the Wars of Independence. The occupation of governments of Edward I, II and III failed to make much headway in the north and west. Even in the brief period of unchallenged English occupation in 1304–1306, Edward I was largely reliant on the power of indigenous lordship outwith the southern and eastern portions of the country.

Cities and significant towns of Scotland c. 1300. The loss or retention of administrative and economic centres was a crucial indicator of success or failure in war throughout the medieval and early modern periods.

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

Despite assertions such as –

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

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

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

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

This, however, does not mean that either the MacDougals or the Comyns would necessarily have remained in English allegiance regardless of political developments. King Philip of France had been forced to abandon the Scots in the wake of the Battle of Courtrai,¹⁴ but circumstances do change. If Philip had felt that it was in his interests (and within his capabilities) to deploy a significant force to Scotland in an attempt to restore King John after the collapse of the Balliol party in 1304, it is quite possible, even probable, that the Comyns would have reverted to their traditional role of supporters to the Scottish crown, a role from which they – and the crown – had profited greatly over a period of more than 100 years. In practice, of course, this was not an option that the French could pursue; they had problems enough already. Diplomatically it suited Edward I and Edward II to depict their Scottish campaigns as a purely domestic matter; lawful kings exercising their right to discipline recalcitrant subjects in rebellion against their liege-lord. That they enjoyed some success is apparent from the tendency for English – and sometimes Scottish – historians to describe men like Comyn and Bruce as ‘rebels’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has also been something of a tendency for English historians to view any action contrary to English interests as being a threat to good practice and desirable outcomes. May McKisack²¹ saw the development of a strong political alliance between Scotland and France in 1294–97 as being ‘among the most sinister developments of the war of independence’, rather than being the only practical response to the ambitions of an aggressive and predatory neighbour. Few reputable English medievalists of recent times would choose to see Edward’s behaviour in Scotland as the reasonable and lawful actions of a well-intentioned and benign neighbour, however the prevalence of that attitude in the past still exerts an influence on ‘popular’ history. One need look no further than John Harvey’s book The Plantagenets, which clearly makes the Scots the villains of the piece. According to Harvey, the judicial murder of Sir William Wallace was a fate he brought upon himself:

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

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

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

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

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

Traditionally Scottish historians have shied clear of describing Edward’s rule as an ‘occupation’, partly perhaps for fear of giving offence, but chiefly because of the number of Scots who were involved in Edward’s government, particularly in the period after the Strathord armistice of 1304. This is something of an over-simplification. There were certainly a great many Scottish men and women who accepted Edward as their king, some through conviction, some through duress. No doubt there were quite a few who were not really terribly concerned about who was king, so long as they could maintain their own position in society and either felt that Edward was too strong to resist or that he offered the best chance of stability.²⁵ There would probably have been some who felt that the country had been failed by the Bailliol monarchy and