Horse boys

As well as raising large numbers of Welsh infantry for the 1301 campaign, Edward I also exploited the resources of Ireland. The Plantagenets treated the lordship of Ireland as a combination of food factory and recruitment ground; they seldom bothered to visit, and no English king set foot in the country between the reigns of King John and Richard II.

The purveyance in Ireland was to consist of:

3200 quarters of wheat 300 quarters of oats
2000 quarters of malt 500 quarters of beans and peas
200 casks of new wine
10,000 hard fish and 5 lasts of herring

Half of the above was to be sent to Skinburness, the port near Carlisle, and half to a port on the isle of Arran. Since 1298 the isle had been held for Edward I by Sir Hugh Bisset of Antrim, an Irish pirate who earned his knighthood by keeping the Irish Sea clear of Scottish ships. The stores were distributed to the garrisons of Lochmaben, Dumfries and Ayre, as well as the army of the Prince of Wales at Carlisle.

The king also wanted Irish soldiers, and lots of them. He was especially fond of hobelars or ‘horse boys’, light horse ideally suited to the difficult terrain of Ireland and Scotland. Edward’s justiciar of Ireland, John Wogan, haggled over terms of service with the Irish nobility. They drove a hard bargain, and the eventual arrangement was complicated. In return for pardon of two-thirds of their debts at the Exchequer, the Irish nobles agreed to serve in Scotland for 100 days. The remaining one-third would be allowed as wages or as compensation for loss of horses in the campaign. If this did not suffice, Edward guaranteed to pay extra cash to make up the deficit.

The Earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, refused to come to terms. Edward had practically begged for his support, informing Burgh that he relied on him “more than any other man in the land for many reasons”. Burgh was fully aware of the king’s desperate need for Irish troops, and wanted to extract the best possible terms for himself.

Even without Burgh’s support, an Irish army of 120 men-at-arms, 178 hobelars and 1200 infantry sailed for Scotland on 9 July in a fleet of 74 ships. They landed at Arran, and went on to join Prince Edward and his Welsh army at Carlisle. All of the Irish served in exchange for remission of debt, and the surviving wage-roll shows how highly the king valued their services: the infantry were paid 6d (pence) a day, three times the normal wage of English or Welsh footsoldiers. One of their troop-leaders, Donald Ruath Macarthi, was also granted an extra pardon of £100 of his debts.

Meanwhile the Earl of Ulster tired of playing politics, and sent a smaller Irish force to Scotland to join the king. This consisted of 4 knights, 42 men-at-arms, 39 squires, 86 hobelars and 128 infantry. These men, led by Eustace de Poer and Thomas de Mandeville, were in pay from 1 July.

[Second pic above is a modern sculpture of an Irish galloglass at Roscommon]

Diplomatic bunfights

The truce with the Scots, which began on 31 October 1300, was set to expire on 21 May 1301. On 1 March 1301 Earl Warenne and other English envoys were appointed to meet with envoys of the King of France, to discuss “the rectification of the disobediences, rebellions, contempts, trespasses, injuries, excesses and losses inflicted by the Scots”.

On 26 March the Scottish envoys, led by Master Nicholas Balmyle, were granted safe-conducts to travel south and discuss terms with the English and French representatives at Canterbury. Balmyle and his comrades may well have been outraged at the charges levied against the Scots by King Edward - given what the English got up to in Scotland - but they had to tread carefully. They were a long way from home, entirely under the power of a king who regarded them as traitors.

Why did Edward invite his enemies to talk turkey at Canterbury, in the heart of his realm? It was one way to keep them busy while he prepared for another campaign in Scotland. As early as 3 February, weeks before the talks at Canterbury, he ordered Earl Warenne to muster an army at Berwick, ready to set out “with horses and arms” against the Scots when the truce ended. He always knew what the outcome of the talks would be, though pretended not to. On 8 April his officers in Northumberland were warned to prepare for Scottish attacks, since the king “knew not what may result” from the conference between Scots and French ambassadors at Canterbury.

Edward did know what the result would be. He offered a further truce to the French on condition the Scots were excluded. Philip le Bel was fully engaged with trouble in Flanders, where the Flemish communes were on the point of driving out the French occupiers; just as Wallace and Moray drove the English from Scotland in 1297. The English king was fully aware of the situation, and that the French wanted no distractions in Scotland. Thus, when he offered the truce, Philip’s envoys bit his hand off. Balmyle and his fellow negotiators rejected the treaty, so the war was back on.

Inheriting the purple

At the Lincoln parliament of 1301, on 7 February, Edward I granted the royal lands in Wales, along with the earldom of Chester, to his son Edward of Caernarfon. This was reminiscent of the grant made to Edward senior by his father, Henry III, forty-seven years earlier, and did not give the heir to the throne any specific title; Edward junior only began to be termed Prince of Wales from May onwards.

The grant may have been related to the forthcoming Scottish campaign. Edward had not raised any Welsh troops for the Galloway campaign in 1300, which proved a mistake as the English raised from the northern counties deserted in large numbers. In 1301 the king planned a two-pronged attack on the Scots; he would lead one army from Berwick, while Prince Edward led another from Carlisle. The idea was to catch the Guardians in a pincer movement and force them to battle.

In what looks like an act of political symbolism, the newly-minted Prince of Wales was given an army of Welshmen. William de Caumvill, Warin Martyn and Morgan ap Maredudd were empowered to raise the men of South and West Wales and ‘bring them to Carlisle by Friday before Midsummer’. The two sons of Hywel ap Meurig, Philip and Rhys, were appointed to pay the infantry conducted to Carlisle. Meanwhile Gruffudd Llwyd, Iwan ap Hywel and several others were appointed to raise the men of North Wales, specifically those of the Four Cantreds and Hopedale.

Carlisle Castle

Among the prince’s army were the sons of loyalist or defeated Welsh princes. Gwilym de la Pole and his brother Gruffudd, two of the sons of Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, served in the retinue of John de Havering, Justiciar of North Wales. The four sons of Madog ap Llywelyn, self-proclaimed Prince of Wales, were transferred from prison to Prince Edward’s bodyguard. As symbolism went, this was fairly blunt: the Plantagenet was master of Wales now, and his son had ‘inherited the purple’, as it were.

Getting the men up to Carlisle wasn’t an easy process. Warin Martyn, leader of the men of West Wales, later sought and received a pardon for the robberies and murders his men committed while they marched through England. The Welsh weren’t always perpetrators: on 26 July 1302 a commission was set up to investigate the killing of Welsh soldiers, attacked at Wigan in Lancashire on their way back from the Scottish war.

Ferrets and sparrows

The truce between the English and Scots in August 1300 gave both sides a chance to rest and recover. We don’t really know what the Guardians did, but the English took the opportunity to stuff their existing garrisons in Scotland with munitions. The logic was to secure the gains made in 1300 and then use them as a springboard for the next campaign after the truce expired in May 1301.

The details of victualling give an exact picture of the English position in Scotland at the turn of the century. They had royal garrisons at Berwick, Jedburgh, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Dumfries, Lochmaben and Caerlaverock. In addition there were three castles - Hermitage, Dirleton and Dunbar - held by Scottish landholders loyal to King Edward. This meant the king held most of the strongpoints below the Forth, with the exception of Stirling and the castles in the barony of Renfrew; specifically Bothwell and Inverkip. North of the Forth was ‘Free Scotland’, the heartlands held by the Guardians.

To take a random example, Dumfries was supplied with the following:

9 bulls and cows, 14 sheep, 73 quarters and 4 bushels of oats, 70 gallons of wine, unidentified quantities of bread, ale, fish, chickens, almonds and various spices.

Etc. However, Edward wanted to rule Scotland, not just maintain garrisons. For that he needed to set up a working administration that was seen to enforce the law and raise taxes. In 1300, for the first time since he got involved in Scotland, there is an account of revenues raised on behalf of the king. From 30 September Sir John Kingston, sheriff of Edinbugh, collected revenue from the following:

Farms: North Berwick, Tyninghame, Haddington, the town of Edinburgh, Lasswade, Aberlady, Easter Pencaitland, East Niddry and Lowood.

Tolls: Town of Edinburgh.

Tenth (a tax on movables): Inveresk, Lasswade, Roslyn, Aberlady, Ballencrieff and Carrington.

All told, Kingston collected the fair-sized sum of £66 8 shillings and three pence, and a further sum of £25 15s 5d from the farms of Tranent and Seton, the sale of hides and sale of goods belonging to felons in Carrington. Among Kingston’s purchases were ‘sparrows’ and ‘ferrets of Dirleton’. At this point the mind starts to boggle a little bit.

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1277 AD. England prepares for war. Prince Llywelyn of Wales refuses to swear loyalty to the king, Edward I, and dreams of independence for his country. To defy the might of the English crown, Llywelyn will need allies. He looks to the west, to Ireland, where the rebellious Clan MacMurrough plan to set up their chieftain as High King. Together, the Welsh and Irish leaders plan to drive Edward’s forces from their land. 

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Peace talks

On 30 October 1300 Edward I concluded a truce with the Scots, through the mediation of Philip le Bel of France, to last until 21 May 1301. This was the first time Edward had agreed to a truce in Scotland, and shows the effectiveness of Scottish resistance after 1296.

According to Rishanger, during the peace talks Edward had threatened to “set light to Scotland from sea to sea” and force the people into submission. This was hardly the language of diplomacy, and most unlikely since the talks ended in a temporary peace. The quote makes for good copy, but is yet another example of monkish chroniclers adding the spicy sauce of invention to the dull pottage of humdrum politics. Or something like that: feel free to invent your own metaphor, because mine is awful.

Edward was certainly in a vile mood, but his rage wasn’t directed at the Scots. He had made some tactical gains on his summer campaign in 1300, but was forced to make peace after his army fell apart. This was due to the mass desertion of the English infantry, which did more to scupper the campaign than the ineffectual efforts of the Guardians under the Earl of Buchan. By early September Edward had just 500 infantry left from the 9000 that had mustered at Carlisle a few weeks earlier.

Why did the infantry desert? There were the usual supply problems, which meant their wages were often overdue. Many were drawn from the northern counties, and preferred to stay at home to protect their families than march about Galloway with the king. While the gentry class in England were still keen on the Scottish war, enthusiasm among the commons had drained away since the first heady rush of war in 1296.

A revealing order went out in July 1300, when the campaign was still in progress. Edward sent a furious letter to the sheriffs in England, ordering them to imprison those bailiffs and ministers responsible for raising infantry: they had, the king claimed, caused a great part of his infantry to desert ‘by malice among themselves’, which suggests some kind of conspiracy. Possibly Edward was just being paranoid, though it is known that local officials were frequently bribed to excuse men from military service.

Lord Hunsdon

The king particularly blamed the men of the county of York, and this wasn’t the last time Yorkshiremen were suspected of a lack of enthusiasm. A later Warden of the East March, Lord Hunsdon, once caustically remarked that the army of York would not have ‘put their noses over Doncaster bridge’ if others hadn’t ‘beaten the bush for them’.

Team Guardian

On 8 August 1300 the main body of the English army reached the estuary of the Cree in southwest Scotland. The previous day this had been the scene of a skirmish between the Scots and an English foraging party, which ended with the capture of several Scottish knights. Piers Gaveston, Edward II’s future best friend, had sampled the waters of the Cree when his horse was killed under him.

Facing the English, on the western bank of the Cree, was a Scottish army. They were led by the brand-new team of Guardians; the Earl of Buchan, Ingram de Umfraville and John ‘the Red Comyn’ of Badenoch. This was an interesting phase in Scottish leadership: Sir William Wallace was relegated to the sidelines after his defeat at Falkirk, and Robert de Bruce had recently been sacked as Guardian in favour of Umfraville. The defence of Scotland was now in the hands of the Comyn faction.

After the disaster at Falkirk, the general policy of the Scots between 1298-1314 was to avoid open battle. In August 1300 Buchan and his lieutenants decided to risk a confrontation with Edward I, possibly in the hope that a victory would not only end the war, but shove Bruce into his box forever. The omens were not especially good: Buchan’s men had come off worst in skirmishes over the past couple of days, and the high desertion rate of Edward’s infantry still left the small matter of 2000 English knights and men-at-arms to deal with.

Edward also wanted a battle, but wasn’t about to rush into anything. At low tide some of his infantry crossed the ford and exchanged missiles with the Scots. The Prince of Wales rode up and down the bank, watching the skirmish with interest. The king ordered his vanguard to cross the ford. Then he was informed the Scots meant to lure him into an ambush, so he stopped and told the Earl of Hereford to recall the infantry. The footsoldiers mistook Hereford’s approach for the signal to attack, and charged the Scots. Their comrades on the other side rushed over to help, led by Prince Edward at the head of his Castilian lancers.

Edward senior had gone back to his pavilion. A galloper came tearing up to inform him that his only adult male heir had just triggered a general engagement. Cursing, Edward scrambled onto his destrier and roared at Earl Warenne to get on parade. The rickety old Warenne, for whom Scotland was his own private hell, puffed and clambered aboard his horse and followed the king into battle; as he had done for much of the past forty years. Trumpets screamed, and together they led two divisions of cavalry down to the ford. At this point Scottish morale disintegrated.

When the king’s banner was seen advancing into the field - the “three leopards courant gold” - Buchan’s division collapsed and his men fled in all directions. Panic spread through the ranks, as it always did in medieval armies, and the other two divisions were “scattered in a moment like hares in front of greyhounds”. Struck by “excessive fear”, the Scots were driven as far ten leagues into the mountains and groves. Over four hundred were killed in the rout, and all their baggage and equipment fell into English hands. The only recorded casualty on the English side was the loss of a single horse, belonging to one Thomas de Kingsemuthe.

Though a humiliation for Team Guardian, the Cree was not a disaster. Edward had raised no Welsh infantry or light horse for this campaign, so was unable to pursue the Guardians further and wipe them out. Thus, the chronicler concluded, “victory was suspended on both sides”.