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14. 1290: The
Watershed in Anglo-Scottish Relations

 

At the start of the year 1290, Edward
I was fifty years old and at the height of his power. King of England for over
seventeen years, he had been a legend for even longer. Half a lifetime earlier
he had defeated and killed his notorious uncle, Simon de Montfort, at the
Battle of Evesham; a little later, in his early thirties, he had travelled to
the Holy Land on crusade – an adventure in which he had miraculously dodged
death by surviving an attack from a knife-wielding Assassin. Above all there
had been his conquest of Wales.
During the first decade of his rule, Edward had decisively terminated Welsh
independence with an awesome display of military power, still manifest today at
Conwy,
Harlech
and Caernarfon, to name just the three
most celebrated of his many Welsh castles.

Now, at the start of 1290, Edward was
close to realizing an even greater goal. Since the conquest of Wales, his overriding ambition had been to lead
a new crusade and recover Jerusalem.
It was a project that had kept him busy for years, partly because of protracted
negotiation with the papacy on the question of funding, but mainly because the
other kings of Europe had been engaged in a
fratricidal war. From 1286, Edward had spent over three years outside of England, trekking back and forth across the
Pyrenees, trying to broker peace between France and Aragon, and to
effect
the liberation of his cousin, the captive king of Sicily. By the time he
returned home in the summer of 1289, his plan was approaching fruition. The
Sicilian king was free, peace seemed to be in prospect, and, at the end of the
year, the pope proposed a financial package for the crusade that would require
only minuscule fine-tuning. When, in January 1290, a parliament assembled in Westminster – the first in almost four years – Edward was
pleased to receive an embassy from the Mongol
il
-khan
of Persia, who professed to
be ready to ally with the English king, and who promised to meet him outside
the walls of Damascus
in one year’s time.

The year 1290, moreover, looked set to
be an
annus
mirabilis in more ways than one. Another
subject for discussion in that parliament would have been the situation in Scotland.
Almost four years earlier, on the eve of Edward’s departure for the Continent,
the northern kingdom had suffered a terrible tragedy. King Alexander III,
forty-five years old, vigorous and successful, had set out riding in a storm
and tumbled over a cliff. The scale of the disaster was magnified by the fact
that all three of his children by his first marriage had predeceased him, and
the pregnancy of his second queen had ended after his death with the delivery
of a stillborn child.

Yet out of this tragedy a golden opportunity had arisen, for
Alexander had not died entirely without heirs. Five years earlier, his late
daughter had been married to the king of Norway, and in their brief time
together the young couple had produced a daughter of their own. This girl, only
three years old at the time of her grandfather’s untimely end, was named
Margaret, like her mother. But to posterity she is better known as ‘the Maid of
Norway’. She was the last chance of survival for Scotland’s established line of
kings, but also the hope of something far greater still.

What if this young girl, heiress to the throne of Scotland, were to marry a son of the king of England? Edward
I had been hardly
more lucky
than Alexander III in his
family: he and his wife Eleanor of Castile had produced at least fifteen,
possibly sixteen children, but only six of them were still living in 1290, and
only one of the survivors was a boy. Nevertheless, one boy was all that was
required. If the six-year-old Edward of Caernarfon were married to the Maid, he
would become king of Scotland
in right of his wife. Any children they went on to have would one day stand to
inherit two kingdoms. Perhaps, in time, they would seek to rule them as a united kingdom.
What was on the cards in 1290, in short, was nothing less than a union of the
crowns, over three centuries in advance of the eventual union of 1603.

To many modern ears, this may sound like a ridiculous
suggestion. The textbooks tell us that England
and Scotland
were enemies for much of their history, and we are inclined to believe that it
was ever thus. ‘March straight back to England,’ says Mel Gibson’s William
Wallace to his English opponents in
Braveheart
,
‘stopping at every home you pass by to beg forgiveness for a hundred years of
theft, rape and murder’. But this is the biggest of the film’s many
nonsenses
. Not only had there been no armed conflict
between the two kingdoms for eighty years before 1296; during those eighty
years, and for many decades beforehand, the English and Scots had been getting
on like a house on fire.

This was largely because, since the twelfth century, Scotland been busy approximating itself to England. The
Scots, led by the example of their kings, had embraced social, economic and
moral standards that were normal south of the Border. At the same time,
Englishmen – merchants, labourers and monks – began
emigrating
to Scotland in their
thousands, helping to found new towns, or to establish new religious
communities which retained their links with England. Meanwhile Scottish
aristocrats built castles (such as
Caerlaverock
, near
Dumfries) after the English example, and
intermarried with their English counterparts. And this was also true of their
respective royal families. Edward
I’s
aunt, Joanna
(d. 1238) had been married to Alexander II (d. 1249), and his sister, Margaret
(d. 1275) had been the first wife of Alexander III. Nothing could have been
more natural, therefore, than another Anglo-Scottish royal wedding in 1290. In
March that year, the magnates of Scotland assembled on the Border at
Birgham
, and unanimously agreed that the match should
go ahead.

The only difficulty lay in deciding how the new relationship
would work in practice. The Scots wanted a powerful protector for their infant
queen, and Edward I was certainly that. But they were concerned that he might
prove too powerful, and might make demands that would compromise Scotland’s
independence. Thus, during the spring of 1290, there was much discussion
between the representatives of the two nations. On many points they were able
to reach agreement, but when it came to control of Scotland’s royal castles, there was
deadlock. Edward was determined that the right to appoint their keepers should
belong to him alone, and the Scots were equally adamant in their refusal to
accept his demand.

For a while, therefore, the projected marriage hung fire, and
Edward proceeded with other momentous business. In April he took the remarkable
step of safeguarding England’s
future stability by fixing the English succession on his daughters, should he
and his namesake son die without other heirs. At the end of the month, one of
these daughters – Joan – became the first of the king’s children to marry,
taking as her husband the earl of Gloucester.
A few weeks later Edward caused the body of his father, Henry III, to be moved
to a new tomb in Westminster Abbey, subsequently decorated with the magnificent
gilded-bronze effigy that can still be seen today. Later, on 9 July, there was
more ceremony in the abbey when another of the king’s daughters, Margaret, was
married with great pomp to the duke of Brabant.
Lastly, on 18 July, Edward committed one of the most notorious acts of his
entire career when, in return for a generous grant of taxation, and to the
universal delight of his other subjects, he ordered the expulsion of all the
Jews from England. It would be more than three centuries before they were
allowed to return.

At length, as the summer drew to a close, there was a
breakthrough in negotiations with the Scots, though not because either side had
abandoned their earlier contrary positions. What seems to have happened is
that, around the end of August, Edward learned that the Maid had set sail from Norway and was en route to Scotland, and
that this intelligence obliged him to settle. The crucial question of castles
was fudged; the Scottish envoys contented themselves with the statement that
their keepers would be appointed ‘on the common advice of the Scots and the
English king’. In return they received a clear statement safeguarding their
country’s independence. In the most resonant phrase of the agreement, Edward
promised that Scotland would
remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’.

With the third royal wedding that year seemingly just weeks
away, Edward sent his own envoys into Scotland, bearing jewels with which
to welcome the Maid on her arrival. At the same time, he prepared to finalize
his crusading plans. By this stage he had received a final offer from the pope
to which he was ready to commit, and a small parliament of magnates was
summoned to meet in Sherwood Forest in October
in order to witness its approval. In the meantime, Edward took himself into
Derbyshire and the Peak District for a spot of hunting.

Then the wheel of fortune turned and the king’s plans
collapsed. When he arrived in Sherwood in mid-October, it was to the news that
the Maid of Norway was dead. Probably she had been inadvertently poisoned by
eating decayed food during her voyage. A fortnight later and the next blow
fell. Eleanor of Castile, who had contracted a lingering malarial fever on the
Continent the previous year, suddenly became seriously ill. Despite desperate
efforts to save her, the queen died at the end of November. Edward had her body
carried from Lincoln to London in a slow, mournful procession – every
stop would later be marked with an ornate monumental cross – and buried in
Westminster Abbey on 17 December. The king then retreated into a religious
house at
Ashridge
in Hertfordshire, to spend
Christmas and New Year in the deepest sorrow.

Eleanor’s death was more devastating in personal terms, but
it was the death of the Maid that altered the course of history. Had the girl
lived, the union of the crowns would have taken place in the autumn of 1290,
and England and Scotland could
have been peaceably united for generations to come. Edward might well have gone
on crusade for a second time (in spite of the bad news from the north, he did
ratify the pope’s offer), with Scotsmen fighting by his side, as had been the
case during his first expedition. Closer to home, too, there would have been
ample scope for Anglo-Scottish co-operation. Together, the English and the
Scots, led by a single monarchy and their intermarried aristocracies, might
have directed their energies into subjugating the peoples who dwelt in the
northern and western extremities of the British Isles – the ‘wild Scots’ of the
Highlands and Islands, and the ‘wild Irish’ – resulting in a single kingdom
that was precociously united.

But none of this was to be. The Maid’s death left the Scots
unable to agree on who should wear their country’s crown, and the king of England was
invited to come and arbitrate between the two most obvious candidates. But when
Edward emerged from his mourning at
Ashridge
, it was
to announce a disastrous Plan B, ‘to reduce the king and kingdom of Scots
to his rule’. To the Scots’ dismay, he came north insisting that he was Scotland’s
rightful overlord. By coercion and intimidation he persuaded the two principal
claimants, plus a host of other less credible contenders, to admit his
superiority. At length he found in favour of John Balliol, who was forced to
perform an unambiguous act of homage, to annul the guarantees of independence
that had been given in 1290, and to travel to Westminster
whenever the king of England
demanded.

In this way, Edward I turned the Scots, who had long been
friends and allies of the English, into their most embittered enemies. When, in
1294, war unexpectedly broke out between England
and France, Scotland for
the first time allied itself to the latter. The trend towards convergence in
the British Isles was thereby arrested and
thrown into reverse. Edward spent the last ten years of his life hammering away
at the Scots, devastating their country with fire and sword in an effort to
persuade them to accept his authority. In so doing, he established the hostile
relationship between the two countries that persisted for the rest of the
Middle Ages and beyond, and which in some respects persists even in our own
day. Scotsmen had once striven to make themselves more like their cousins south
of the Border; in the years before 1290, many of them had been pleased to
christen their sons ‘Edward’. They would not do so in the future. ‘As long as a
hundred of us remain alive’, they famously wrote to the pope in 1320, ‘we will
never on any conditions submit to the dominion of the English’. It was a change
of heart that had been caused by the death of a seven-year-old girl from Norway, and the
terrible miscalculation of Edward I.

 

15.
Lanercost
Priory and
Edward I

 

By the start of 1306, Edward I had lived longer, travelled
further, and achieved more than any previous king of England. At sixty-six years old, he
had visited not only every corner of Britain but also France, Belgium, Italy,
Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Cyprus, North Africa and the Holy Land. And, in the
eyes of his contemporaries, he had performed the most praiseworthy deeds. He
had fought against the infidels on crusade; he had, as one chronicler put it,
‘expelled the faithless multitude of Jews from England’,
and he had – also to the great rejoicing of his English subjects – conquered Wales.

The great chain of castles that the king constructed to
cement his victory over the Welsh are his most enduring architectural legacy.
Caernarfon, Conwy,
Harlech
and
Beaumaris
,
to name just the four most famous, are collectively recognized today as a World
Heritage Site, and are a must-see for anyone even marginally interested in the
medieval past. They are not, however, the focus of this present story, which is
devoted to the last few months of Edward’s life, and a ruined monastic church
in Cumbria,
now in the care of English Heritage.

Lanercost
Priory lies on the
Anglo-Scottish Border, close to Hadrian’s Wall,
which might seem a foolhardy place for anyone to have planted a religious
community. Most people assume that during the Middle Ages England and Scotland
existed in a state of perpetual hostility. But, in fact, for a century and more
after
Lanercost
was founded in 1169, the two kingdoms
had been getting on famously. English merchants and monks had emigrated to
Scotland, helping to found new towns and monasteries; the aristocracies of the
two realms had intermarried, and so too had their royal families: Edward
I’s
aunt, Joan, and his sister, Margaret, were both married
to consecutive kings of Scots. The line of the Border on which
Lanercost
lies was fixed by treaty in 1237. Far from being
a hostile frontier, this was a place where two cultures met and merged on
peaceful terms and for mutual profit.

But all this changed in the 1280s, when a series of tragic
deaths wiped out the Scottish royal family, leaving the Scottish throne with no
obvious heir. Edward I was invited to help decide between the various
claimants, but used the opportunity to browbeat the Scots into accepting him as
their superior lord. Having found in favour of one candidate (John Balliol), he
forced him to perform a humiliating act of homage, and repeatedly required him
to appear in Westminster.
Eventually the new Scottish king and his subjects decided that they would stand
for no more, and sought to reclaim their lost independence. For the first time
in over eighty years, the two countries went to war.

Naturally, this was bad news for those living at
Lanercost
. Within days of the war’s outbreak in 1296, the
priory had been raided by the Scots – ‘dastardly thieves’, as the local
chronicler described them – and the following year it was attacked again, this
time by none other than William Wallace (‘that bloody man’, said the same
chronicler). In general, however, this was a war in which the English had the
best of the fighting. In 1304, after eight years of devastating English
invasions, the Scots surrendered. The following year Wallace was captured and
sent to London
to be executed. Edward erected a new government in Scotland, to be overseen by an
English governor. Scotland
was declared to be a kingdom no longer, and was to have no new king.

Which brings us back to the start of 1306.
Just when Edward
thought his life’s work was complete, news came out of the north of a new
Scottish rebellion, led by Robert Bruce, who resurrected his country’s claim to
independence by having himself crowned king. Inevitably this meant the
resumption of war, and within weeks a new English army was advancing into Scotland. But
Edward I was not there to lead it. News of Bruce’s revolt coincided with (and
thus possibly triggered) a sharp decline in his health. When the English king
eventually set out northwards that summer, he had to be carried on a litter.
His intended destination was Carlisle, but
after three agonizing months he was forced to stop just twelve miles short of
the city – at
Lanercost
Priory.

Religious houses were accustomed to receiving the kings of England from
time to time as they toured their domains. Such stays, however, were always
kept short, for the royal household was a monstrous and all-devouring beast.
Edward arrived at
Lanercost
on 29 September 1306 with
almost 200 people in tow – mostly grooms, cooks, carters, clerks and huntsmen –
and that was just the core of his entourage. He would have been attended in
addition by military men coming and going from the field, and also by the
merchants, beggars and prostitutes that his household invariably drew in its
wake.
Lanercost
had been once again been invaded by
an army, albeit a friendly one.

But it was quite clear that, on this occasion, the army was
going nowhere. Edward’s condition meant that he could not be moved, so his
household proceeded to ensconce itself in the priory for the long haul. Soon
teams of carpenters, plumbers and glaziers were arriving to build new chambers
for the king, the queen and their manifold servants. Surviving household rolls
reveal the considerable extent of the work. The priory precinct may appear
peaceful and empty today; but in the winter of 1306 it must have resembled
nothing less than a small town, crammed with new timber buildings and
innumerable tents.

Edward’s household rolls also reveal something of his existence
that winter. He travelled with vast quantities of gold and silver plate,
including a pair of table knives with crystal handles. Food was obtained in
huge quantities: scores of oxen and pigs, and cartloads of almonds, rice, sugar
and bread. The other great expense was medicine: the king’s doctors ordered a
cornucopia of spices, herbs and oils in their effort to prolong his life.
Edward also had the benefit of the chests of holy relics with which he
habitually travelled – a hoard that included a fragment of Christ’s cross
appropriated from Wales, a piece of St Andrew’s cross taken from the Scots, as
well as a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder’.

In the spring of 1307, Edward finally left
Lanercost
, but he never recovered his health. Soon after
reaching Carlisle he fell sick again, and the
rumour arose that he was already dead. In a grand gesture of defiance, the king
gave up his litter, mounted his war-horse and led his army out of the city
towards Scotland.
Ten days later he died at Burgh by Sands on the Cumbrian coast, having advanced
barely six miles.

Lanercost
never recovered either. In
1292 its estates had been valued at a healthy £200 a year, but at the time of
the Dissolution in 1536 that figure had shrunk to just £85. This decline in
prosperity was due in part to the long centuries of hatred that Edward I had
engendered by his attempt to conquer Scotland. But the decisive turning
point in the priory’s fortunes had come in the winter of 1306–7, when for five
months its resources had been decimated by the magnificent court of a dying
English king.

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