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| ISBN-13: | 9780752496436 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Robert the Bruce's Forgotten Victory
The Battle of Byland 1322
By Graham Bell
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Graham Bell,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9643-6
CHAPTER 1
Scotland: People of Ireland?
The battle of Byland, like all battles, has its antecedents in the history of the armies that fought it. About 500 years after the birth of Christ, Scotland was inhabited by a people described generically as Picts. They left little behind them to tell us of what they were really like, except impressive stone towers and tombs, indecipherable symbols they carved onto stone pillars, and a reputation for savagery and for painting themselves in blue paint.
In about the year AD 560, a group of invaders from Ireland left their home, believed to have been in the county of Armagh, and sailed the short distance east, landing on the west coast of Scotland in modern-day Argyll. Their leader was called Fergus Mac Erc, and they brought with them very little to differentiate them from the Picts (both being Celtic peoples) except for a piece of baggage called the Lia Fiall, or the Stone of Destiny. This was supposed to be the stone on which the ancient prophet Jacob had slept, which had been transported to Scotland in the travels of the Scots via Spain and Ireland.
The Scots and the Picts seem to have lived together in perfect equanimity, an equanimity that was only temporarily interrupted when the Christians made their appearance in Alba (as the ancient kingdom of Scotland was known). The man who converted the Picts and the Scots to Christianity was Columba, an Irish prince who had to make, it appears, a fairly hurried exit from Ireland in about AD 563. By the time of his death in AD 597, the whole of the land had become Christian (according to later historians), and the Isle of Iona on the west coast of Scotland had become the official burial place of the king of the Scots.
We now come to a rather strange occurrence in the history of Scotland. It is known that in AD 843 the king of the Scots, Kenneth Mcalpin, became king of the Picts, most likely through being elected by the Mormaors of Scotland. These men were the great officers of the various areas of the lands of the Picts, who would later be called the Earls of Scotland. They were the Lords of Fife (in later days considered to be the premier area of Scotland), Stratherarn, Angus, Mar, Moray, Ross and Caithness.
Why Kenneth was elected to be the overlord of his Pictish neighbours is something of a mystery. Some have pointed out that at about this time Scotland, like the rest of Christendom, began to be bitterly affected by increasing raids from the Vikings, who were now becoming the terror of the west. Kenneth was a successful warrior, and a good warrior was needed at the helm, especially as the Vikings killed at least two Pictish kings at this time. Suffice to say, Kenneth became king of the Scots and appeared to rule well (which in those days meant being successful in battle), and the line of kings of Scotland would now be called Macalpin for generations.
The next few hundred years followed the pattern of most Christian kingdoms on the continent – in other words, a tale of slaughter and bloodshed as the various kings and Mormaors fought with each other, and sometimes with the Vikings.
It should be pointed out that the orbit of the kingdom was almost entirely to the north of the Firth of Forth, which until well into the thirteenth century was called the Scottish Sea. The land south of the Forth, though originally inhabited by Picts, was now inhabited by a tribe of the Angles who, with their cousins the Jutes and Saxons, had invaded the British mainland in the fifth century. It was these people who would be the most dangerous foes the Scots would ever encounter, and who would to all intents and purposes overwhelm them. As the Picts had rallied under Kenneth Mcalpin, so the peoples of the south rallied under Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex, perhaps the greatest ruler these isles have ever known. By defeating the invading Vikings, and expanding his kingdom to the north, Alfred's line not only became kings of Wessex, but kings of England.
As Alfred had started the West-Saxon kingdom, the most southerly of the British kingdoms, on its march to greatness, his heirs began to absorb the kingdoms to the north, which had ominous implications for the Scots. Alfred's grandson, Athelstan the Magnificent, showed the power of the Saxons by leading a huge raid into the heartland of the Scots in AD 934.
Alarmed at this humiliation, the king of the Scots, Constantine III, raised a huge coalition of Scotsmen, northern Britons and pirates called in for the plunder, and marched down to smash this threat to the independence of the north. At a place called Brunanburgh, most likely near Sheffield, his army was routed by Athelstan in the greatest victory in the history of the old Anglo-Saxons. Constantine wisely rejected any further ideas about attacking his southern neighbours, and for the next few decades relative peace reigned over the border between the Scots and the Anglo-Saxons. It must once again be noted that 'Scotland', in this context, refers to the area above the line of the Forth, the area between the Forth and the Tweed being a sort of no-man's-land ruled by whichever sword-wielding thug happened to be top of the heap at that time. The history of this area, together with the whole of the islands of Britain, would be changed in the year 1066.
The ruler of the kingdom of the Scots at this time was a noticeably vile individual by the name of Malcolm Canmore, famous mostly for being the king in Shakespeare who overthrew the tyrant Macbeth and brought an age of peace and prosperity to the lands of the north. It is now generally recognised that Macbeth was regarded as a humane and intelligent man, under whose reign Scotland reached a peak of prosperity never before seen. It is also recognised that Malcolm was, even by the standards of the time, a vicious and savage boor whose reputation as a noble king was invented almost at the command of James I of England.
Malcolm may have been visited in this year by the former Earl of Northumbria, Tostig, who had been exiled from his lands as a result of his savage quelling of the laws of the Northumbrians. Enraged at this treatment, he sailed to Norway to enlist the help of Harold of Norway, the most famous psychopath of the age, to regain his lands. If he did so, any advice or help he may have received from Malcolm was in vain, since at Stamford Bridge Harold and Tostig were surprised by Tostig's brother, Harold of England, in perhaps the greatest military manoeuvre in the history of the Saxon kingdom, and were slaughtered together with most of their men.
This victory was to prove a bitterly short triumph for the heroic Harold, since almost at the same time as he was fighting his treacherous brother, William, Duke of the Normans (who, with Henry V, was one of the most sadistic and evil men ever to rule England) landed unopposed in the south of England. Harold, over-confident as a result of his earlier victory, hurried south to meet William. At the bloody field at Senlac, Harold of England, facing an enemy which outnumbered him and a man who was a much more subtle general than Hardrada, died, fighting for his kingdom with his housecarles around him. With his death, a new and more ruthless method of administration would enter Britain: the feudal system. It would eventually affect not only England, but also Scotland.
Malcolm's initial response to this change of affairs in the south was to launch a series of vicious invasions of Northumbria, which only ended in 1072 when William, having slaughtered a large part of the Saxon population of England, swept north to invade Scotland by both land and sea. Malcolm, who added realism to his savagery, realised that he was between a rock and a hard place, and placated William at the River Tay by agreeing to become his vassal. William, having more important things to do than slaughter some savages to the north of his kingdom, went home; Malcolm promptly forgot about the oath, and continued raiding Northumbria.
At almost the same time as William marched to Scotland, a ship sailing away from England was washed up on the coast of Northumbria. This ship had a very interesting cargo: the sons and daughters of the old royal house of Wessex, now fleeing, as a large part of the English people were, from the savagery of William of Normandy. One of them, the half-Hungarian Margaret, appears to have overwhelmed Malcolm by her beauty and strength of character. She was sent back to Scotland as a semi-prisoner; Malcolm, after taking the precaution of poisoning his current wife, married Margaret, with dire results for the future of the Scots.
CHAPTER 2The Margaretsons and the Coming of the Saxons
The reign of Malcolm Canmore is so closely linked to his marriage with Margaret, the half-Hungarian Saxon princess he married in such ambiguous circumstances, that their children have been known by historians as the Margaretsons ever since.
This matronymic is a symbol of how Margaret would change the way Scotland was ruled and administered. Shaking off whatever feelings she had about her enforced incarceration, she proceeded to take a hand in the running of the kingdom of the Scots in a way that no other woman had done before. In true medieval fashion, she encouraged trade and manufacture. She was also, it seems, very generous to the poor and tried to improve the conditions of the serfs and peasants. The serf population had increased fairly drastically in the years of Malcolm's reign, since (in complete violation of his oath to William) Malcolm kept raiding Northumbria, with the result that the slaves and refugees unexpectedly brought to the northlands were so numerous that the English language began to dominate the area between the Forth and the Tweed, eventually wiping out the Gaelic tongue in that area.
As well as indulging in these all-too-praiseworthy acts, Margaret, in a movement which may have been more a reaction to her unhappy family life than a true vocation, tried, with a great deal of success, to reform the old Celtic Church. She objected to many of its practices: its habit of holding open-air services; the way the Celtic priests shaved their hair on the forehead and not on the crown; the fact that the Celtic priests wore only homespun habits and not the beautiful vestments favoured by the Catholic clergy. Margaret's sense of order must also have been offended by the fact that there did not seem to be any form of order in the ecclesiastical ranks of the old Church.
Margaret went ahead with her reforms, building stone churches (which of course were then tenanted by Romish priests) and changing the way Easter was celebrated in Scotland. The fact that she succeeded in most of what she set out to do was due in no small part to the fact that, as queen of the Scots, wife of a man who would not hesitate to murder to get his own way, her suggestions had some force behind them. She must have had some emotional hold over her savage husband, as evidenced by the fact that her sons were all given distinctly un-Gaelic names. In chronological order, they were called Edward, Ethelred, Edmund, Edgar, Alexander and David. The three sons of Malcolm's first marriage had been efficiently dealt with: the eldest, Duncan, was held as a hostage at the court of Malcolm's fellow savage, William the Conqueror, and the other two were sent into exile in the highland wastes of the north.
Punishment for the cruelties he had inflicted on the earldom of Northumbria visited Malcolm with a vengeance in 1093. Raiding the March, he was killed in an ambush near Alnmouth. To make things worse for the Scots, and for Margaret personally, her eldest son Edward was also badly wounded in the raid, and died on the way home to Scotland, at Jedburgh.
This double blow of family tragedy shattered Margaret, who, according to some accounts, was suffering a crisis of conscience about her treatment of the old Church of Columba. She had been quietly starving herself for a long time, and going on exhausting penances in order to show her piety. On the news of her husband's and son's deaths, she herself died, a broken woman, in St Margaret's Chapel in Edinburgh.
It was probably a good thing that Margaret died when she did. Donald Ban, the brother of Malcolm, who had spent his life in the northern fastness, came south and, with the agreement of the Mormaors of the realm (for convenience's sake we shall now call them earls), was elected king. The sons and daughters of Margaret (apart from Edmund, now a priest in a Roman Catholic monastery, and Ethelred, who to his mother's consternation had gone native, become a priest of the Celtic Church, and actually changed his name to the rather less euphonious Eth) fled to the court of William I's son, the roistering rogue William Rufus. Rufus, eager to show that he was his father's son, almost immediately placed the halfforgotten Duncan, much-abused son of Malcolm IV's first wife, at the head of an army and sent him to overthrow the Gaelic troublemaker.
Duncan appears to have defeated his uncle with surprising ease. In a gesture of goodwill, which just goes to show that good men do not usually finish first, he sent home his English army (in reality a Norman/Saxon army) to show he could rule without them, trusting in the love of his long-lost Scottish subjects. Donald Ban was soon back on the throne, after Duncan's inevitable murder at Mondynes, in the Mearns.
The reign of this last true Celtic king was a short one: in 1097, Rufus, free from fighting in Normandy, sent another army to Scotland which, under the command of Edgar, the fourth Margaretson, overthrew Donald. Edgar was not going to make the same mistake as his brother. Having captured Donald Ban, he ordered his eyes to be put out. To add insult to injury, he then had his wretched uncle work as a scullion in the royal kitchens.
The first of the Margaretsons to wear a crown, Edgar proved to be a solemn, reclusive character of whom little is known, and none of that particularly interesting. When he died in 1107, there was a general feeling of relief, and his brother Alexander, the second of the Margaretsons, took over. Alexander, unlike his brother, enjoyed wine, women and song; he was hot-tempered and lacked judgement, but really had very little to deal with during his reign. The current Norman king of England, Henry I, proved to be fully occupied with maintaining his position as king of the southern realm, following the probable murder of his brother, William Rufus, in 1100.
There was a notable lack of tension between the kingdoms of Scotland and England at this time. Little occurred in the way of wars and raiding, a fact which caused much distress to bloody-minded scholars of the Victorian period; Alexander married one of Henry I's apparently limitless supply of bastards; and, most importantly, Alexander's brother David, the youngest of the Margaretsons, was appointed governor of Cumbria.
CHAPTER 3David and the Coming of the Normans
The battle of Byland, the Scottish Wars of Independence, and the story of the Wallace, the Bruce and Edward Longshanks, are directly related to the reforms and laws that David brought to the kingdom of the Scots. David had followed his family into exile when the unfortunate Donald Ban was proclaimed king for the first time in 1093. As a royal prince, he would most likely have been treated with some respect and deference. It is quite clear that he spent a lot of time studying and observing the strict Anglo-Saxon and Norman administrations of England while he was there. He was given a good education, something he made full use of when his brother-in-law, Henry of England, in typically shrewd fashion, solved what was seemingly an insoluble problem.
As has been mentioned already, the old kingdom of the Scots was to be found north of the Forth and Clyde; it was only recently that the Scottish kings had started living in Edinburgh, in the Lothian. To the west and south-west of this area were the lands of Galloway and Cumbria. At the time of the Saxon Athelstan, all of this area, from Dumbarton near Loch Lomond down the west of modern Scotland and almost to Lancaster in England, was part of the old Dark Age kingdom of Strathclyde.
By the twelfth century this rather bizarre kingdom had broken up, and Cumbria and Galloway had become completely independent in everything but name. They were known for their ferocity and for their lack of loyalty to anyone who tried to rule them. Henry I, like a true Norman always on the look-out for fresh lands to conquer, saw in Cumbria a fertile field for expansion. But how could he dominate an area so close to the land of Alexander, without the tedium of having to fight a war with his northern neighbour?
With the shrewdness that was to be a hallmark of his reign, Henry came up with a solution which, like all great ideas, was very simple: he would make David, Alexander's brother, governor of Cumbria. Henry considered, quite rightly, that Alexander would not object to his own brother being put in a position of responsibility, if not on his doorstep, at least near his own front gate. Furthermore, as the Cumbrians and the Gallowegians had never shown a desire to be ruled by anybody (and certainly not by their northern neighbours), Alexander could only wish his brother luck in taking over such a troublesome land.
In 1112, therefore, David, the last and ultimately the most able and likeable of the Margaretsons, rode north to take over his inheritance. This date should be marked in Scotland's schoolrooms with as much importance as 1314, when the Bruce emerged victorious at Bannockburn, and 1746, when Bonnie Prince Charlie was defeated by the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Robert the Bruce's Forgotten Victory by Graham Bell. Copyright © 2013 Graham Bell,. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
About the Author,Preface,
Introduction,
1 Scotland: People of Ireland?,
2 The Margaretsons and the Coming of the Saxons,
3 David and the Coming of the Normans,
4 David and the Making of Medieval Scotland,
5 The Rise of the Feudal Knight and the Growth of Fortifications,
6 The Battle of the Standard,
7 The Maiden and the Lyon,
8 The Final Years of Peace: 1275–1289,
9 The Struggle for the Throne: Bruce v. Balliol,
10 The Maid of Norway,
11 King Bruce? King Balliol?,
12 Berwick and Dunbar: An End and a Beginning,
13 The Wallace,
14 Dumfries,
15 The Bruce and the Douglas,
16 Edward II,
17 1307–1314: From Rebellion to Conquest,
18 Myton and Boroughbridge: Fiasco and Triumph,
19 'Slain by the Sword, Slain by the Waters': The Chapter of Myton,
20 Byland: Zenith and Nadir,
Postscript,
Dramatis Personae,
Bibliography,
Maps and Genealogical Table,
List of Illustrations,