HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2024-05-31T15:43:52.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Roger Mortimer: the rebel baron who escaped the Tower to challenge Edward IIhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/roger-mortimer-escape-tower-rebel-baron/2023-07-31T05:28:17.000ZAs the heat of the day sub sided on 1 August 1323, a boozy evening started in the Tower of London. Members of the garrison, including the constable, Sir Stephen de Segrave, settled down to celebrate the feast of St Peter ad Vincula (in Chains), the patron saint of the Tower’s parish church. Unbeknown to them, though, one of their number had slipped something into their drink – a drug so strong that “all of them slept at least two days and two nights”.
How did Roger Mortimer escape the Tower of London?
One of the most daring and ingenious escapes in the long history of the Tower was under way. Alerted to the potion’s success, Roger Mortimer, formerly Lord of Wigmore in Herefordshire, crept out into the darkness through a breach in his cell “in a very high up and confined place… out of sight and hearing of the world” into the kitchen that adjoined the king’s palace. From there, by means of “ropes ingeniously arranged into a ladder” that had been secretly smuggled into his cell, Mortimer scaled the walls of the inner and outer baileys.
In the colourful retelling of the St Albans monk Henry de Blaneforde, “guided by an angel, [Mortimer] passed over both the first and the second walls, and with the greatest difficulty he came at last to the water of the Thames”. Then he dropped into a boat which conveyed him to a group of accomplices holding horses, which bore him to the south coast. From either Portchester or Portsmouth, Mortimer sailed to northern France before King Edward II, the man on whose orders he had been imprisoned in the Tower, had the merest clue what was going on.
Today, 700 years later, Mortimer’s dramatic bid for freedom remains a vivid medieval example of the prison break story so beloved of literature and the screen. More importantly still, the events of 1 August 1323 would represent a catastrophe for Edward II. Mortimer’s escape triggered a chain of events that would lead to a coup, an alliance between Mortimer and Edward’s own wife, Isabella of France, and, it has long been argued, the probable murder of Edward. It would also see Mortimer become the most powerful man in the kingdom.
In short, by ghosting out of the Tower of London, Roger Mortimer changed the course of English history. Yet the verdict of history would not have been Mortimer’s most pressing concern as he tip-toed to freedom past his drugged Tower jailers on that warm August night. Weighing far more heavily on Mortimer’s mind was, more likely, the news that Edward II was intending to have him executed for treason on 11 August. That, at least, is what some contemporary chroniclers claimed – and that claim appears plausible, though there is no definite evidence for it.
What we do know for certain, however, is that Mortimer’s incarceration represented a spectacular turnaround in his relationship with Edward II. Just a few years earlier, the king and the captive had been the staunchest of allies.
Who was Roger Mortimer?
Roger Mortimer was a descendant of Norman knights who had accompanied William the Conqueror across the channel to England in 1066. During the early years of Edward II’s reign, he became one of England’s leading barons, not only Lord of Wigmore but also a Marcher Lord, one of the nobles appointed by the king to guard the restive Anglo-Welsh border. He remained loyal to Edward during the crisis-riven early years of the reign when an alliance of barons challenged Edward’s authority and had his favourite, the reviled Piers Gaveston, murdered in June 1312.
Mortimer’s extensive estates in Ireland made him an ideal choice as Edward’s lieutenant to tackle the invasion of the island by Edward, brother of Robert the Bruce, from 1315–18. Mortimer’s local knowledge and military talents were paramount in halting Bruce’s campaign to be recognised as king of Ireland as part of the Scots’ offensive to achieve recognition of their independence.
Mortimer also attempted to build loyalty for Edward’s lordship among various communities across Ireland. It seems he may have succeeded – for, on leaving in 1320, he was commended by the Dubliners “for having taken great pains to save and keep the peace”. Mortimer never returned to Ireland. Instead, he became embroiled in a civil war that would see him fall out with Edward II in spectacular style.
Dispensing of the Despensers
At the centre of the dispute were two new favourites of the king with the same name: Hugh le Despenser (known as ‘the Elder Despenser’) and his son, ‘the Younger Despenser’. With the king’s tacit support, the two Hughs usurped the precious liberties and legal privileges enjoyed by the Marcher Lords. Unsurprisingly, the Marcher Lords, with Mortimer to the fore, were furious at this undermining of their powers and quickly forced Edward II to exile the Despensers.
However, in a rare show of tactical genius, Edward launched a counterattack in the winter of 1321/22. Assailed on several fronts and abandoned by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the leader of the rebellion, Mortimer surrendered to Edward at Shrewsbury in January 1322, hoping to save his life. Following a military victory at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire on 16 March 1322, Edward had many of the rebels, Lancaster among them, put to death, their corpses left hanging as a reminder to those who challenged the king’s authority.
Mortimer, meanwhile, was incarcerated in the Tower. Edward may now have felt relatively secure, but Mortimer’s dramatic escape in August 1323 changed all that. With one of his greatest enemies at large on the continent, likely plotting revenge, the king uncovered numerous conspiracies, real and imagined. The bishop of Hereford, Adam Orleton, was indicted for having abetted the rebels. Mortimer’s mother, Margaret, was sent into confinement at Elstow Abbey in Bedfordshire, accused of having held secret meetings on the Marches.
Mortimer’s escape also persuaded Edward to act against those with links to the French court – and among those affected was none other than Edward’s own wife, Isabella. As sister of the French king Charles IV, the queen lost her lands, household and damsels in 1324. This was the first real breach in the royal couple’s relationship and, though Isabella at first remained scrupulously loyal to her husband, worse was to follow. Having voyaged to France in 1325 at her husband’s request to negotiate peace with Charles, by Christmas that year she had instead established a political relationship with Mortimer and his fellow exiles.
Edward soon made it known that he believed the couple were in a relationship more intimate than simply political (even though Mortimer himself was also married, to Joan de Geneville). Such was the scandal in France that Mortimer and Isabella were forced to flee to Hainault in modern Belgium.
Roger and Isabella’s scandalous rise to power
Events now took the king by surprise. On 24 September 1326, a fleet carrying around 1,500 men, which had embarked from Dordrecht at some point over the previous two days, landed in the mouth of the river Orwell in Suffolk. A combination of logistical brilliance and the disaffection of large swathes of English society brought Isabella quick success. Soon Edward II was on the run from London, and the king’s son (the future Edward III) was made keeper of the realm with powers to act on royal business in his father’s absence.
It was Isabella and Roger, however, who operated the levers of power. The queen established a satellite government to give legitimacy to her own strongarm tactics. She swiftly hunted down, tried and executed both Despensers. On 16 November the king himself, who had fled London with a small band of loyal men, was captured on a Welsh hillside and thrown in prison.
For many historians, Mortimer and Isabella come as a package. Politically they worked as a well-oiled machine. Their dexterous use of propaganda and management of parliament (the fruits of long and successful military and administrative careers at the very centre of power) convinced the political community to countenance Edward’s unprecedented deposition. Edward II’s reign had lurched from one disaster to the next – losing Scotland, promoting reviled favourites, alienating the church. So when the king was persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son (who was crowned on 1 February 1327), there was little opposition.
Why was Mortimer known as the ‘King of Folly’?
If the country expected Mortimer and Isabella to eschew the favouritism, the arrogance and the profligacy that had dogged Edward’s reign, it was to be disappointed. Over the next three years, Mortimer and Isabella were said to have “usurped royal power and the treasure of the realm and they held the king under their subjection”.
Mortimer would take precedence over the young king in public, rising before him and walking paces ahead of him. In September 1329, Mortimer hosted the court at remote Wigmore, putting on a display of largesse remembered for centuries, hosting a lavish Arthurian tournament and dispensing gifts to the king and queen mother. Even to those closest to him, Mortimer was now displaying foolish arrogance, his son Geoffrey memorably calling him the ‘King of Folly’.
5 good (and bad) escape attempts from the Tower of London
A wife to the rescue
On 22 February 1716, Lady Winifred Herbert walked out of the Tower of London accompanied by her maids. Little did the guards know that one of those maids was her husband. William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, was a leader of the 1715 Jacobite rising in support of the Old Pretender. When the rising failed, he was captured and sentenced to death for treason. And that’s the fate he would have faced if his wife – who visited him regularly in the Tower – hadn’t smuggled him out dressed as a woman. Maxwell escaped to Calais and then to Rome, where he lived out his life in poverty.
A drink for the road
In February 1101, Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham, fled the Tower by a rope ladder smuggled into his cell in a flagon of wine. Flambard had plied his guards with alcohol and scaled the walls while they slept. Flambard had been imprisoned in the Tower by King Henry I on charges of financial extortion. On his escape, he fled to Normandy where he assisted an invasion of England by Henry’s brother Robert Curthose. The invasion failed, but Flambard was pardoned and allowed to return home to concentrate on his bishopric.
The mime (and escape) artist
John Gerard was a prominent Jesuit active during Elizabeth I’s reign, who was captured in April 1594, and eventually moved to the Tower. There, by communicating through mime from his cell window, he befriended another prisoner, John Arden, whose wife smuggled a rope into his cell. Despite badly damaged hands from the torture he had endured, Gerard and Arden escaped on 5 October 1597 by swinging over the Tower ditch into a waiting boat. Gerard, who was suspected of involvement in the gunpowder plot, later fled to the Low Countries and eventually died in Rome.
Swimming, splashing and a final straw
Edmund Neville tried to escape the Tower three times – and failed on every occasion. Imprisoned in 1584, after being implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, Neville first filed the bars of his cell window until he could squeeze out, but was betrayed by his malodorous appearance after swimming in the Tower moat. He retried two years later but was recaptured when his splash-landing alerted the guards. Six years on, Neville crafted a straw mannequin dressed in his clothes to fool his gaolers. It fooled no one. Neville was released in 1598, no longer considered a danger, and died in Brussels decades later.
A pirate’s rise and fall
Like Edmund Neville, the Thames pirate Alice Tankerville also failed in her escape attempt, but her fate was far more grisly. Tankerville had been imprisoned in the Tower for her part in a heist of a royal ship in 1531. Shackled in her cell, she persuaded her gaolers – whom she had befriended while visiting her common-law husband, John Wolfe, in his cell before her own incarceration – to aid her escape. On 23 March 1534, dressed as a man, Tankerville scaled the Tower walls with a rope. But the watchmen spotted her and she was recaptured. Tankerville and Wolfe were hanged in chains and drowned by the rising tide.
And his arrogance grew. Mortimer gained vast new estates across the Marches and in Ireland, and, by his ennoblement in October 1328 as the ‘Earl of March’, implicitly claimed authority over the lordships on the borders of England and Wales. One chronicler suggested Mortimer had “become so proud that he would lose and forsake the name his ancestors had before”. The Oxfordshire chronicler Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook even claimed that “Roger Mortimer, lover of the queen, master of the king, desired to extinguish the royal bloodline and usurp the throne for himself”.
At the heart of such accusations is the fate of Edward II. Whether we believe that Edward was murdered at Berkeley Castle (which was what many of us were taught at school) or escaped to live out his life on the continent (as has also been claimed), the influence of Mortimer is ever present. In the former scenario, he prompted Edward’s ‘killers’ to suffocate their charge on 21 September 1327.
In the latter, Mortimer possibly maintained the captive king alive to entrap his own detractors in treasonous plots, an example being Edmund, Earl of Kent, the late king’s half-brother, who was executed in March 1330 for trying to liberate ‘Edward’ from Corfe Castle in Dorset.
Did Edward III take revenge on Mortimer?
For Edward III, Edmund’s death appears to have been the final straw. That Mortimer could engineer the execution of a member of the royal family with impunity convinced the young king that the Earl of March had to go. And so, three and a half years into his reign – with his 18th birthday fast approaching – Edward struck.
With parliament gathering at Nottingham in October 1330, Edward led a small, secret band through the tunnels under the castle. When they reached Queen Isabella’s bedchamber, they killed two of Mortimer’s henchmen and arrested the Earl of March. A horrified Isabella looked on and supposedly cried out: “Dear son, have pity on gentle Mortimer!”
No such pity was forthcoming. With his own position far from secure, Edward could not risk another escape. And so he had Mortimer transported to the Tower where a special cell was constructed for him, over looked by the king’s own chamber. Condemned in parliament for multiple crimes including usurping royal power, Mortimer was hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330.
His body was cut down and initially sent to the nearby Franciscan friary. Intriguingly, though, petitions from Mortimer’s widow, Joan, in 1332 reveal that the corpse had been spirited away to Coventry, a town in the custody of Isabella, where she might conceivably have been able to pay it private devotion.
So ended one of medieval England’s most remarkable lives. Roger Mortimer, among the most politically skilled men of the early 14th century, was ultimately brought down by his arrogance and towering ambition. The kingdom had once lain at his feet. His great folly was to throw it all away.
Paul Dryburgh is an archivist and historian specialising in Britain in the 13th and 14th centuries
This article was first published in the August 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>The Declaration of Arbroath: your guide to Scotland's historic documenthttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/declaration-of-arbroath-history-facts/2023-04-06T07:05:13.000ZWhat was the Declaration of Arbroath?
The Declaration of Arbroath was a letter written in April 1320 at Arbroath Abbey, on the east coast of Scotland. Around 1,000 words long, and written in Latin on a sheep’s skin, it was addressed to Pope John XXII and outlined particular grievances that the Scots held, including the recent excommunication from the Church of their king Robert I, aka Robert the Bruce.
While not directly asking for the lifting of the excommunication, the letter did request that the pope make an appeal to the English king, Edward II, to cease his invasions of Scotland.
In this, the letter emphasised the proud tradition of Scottish independence – “one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, the line unbroken by a single foreigner”. As such, the document remains one of the most significant artefacts in the country’s long and storied history.
Who signed the Declaration of Arbroath?
No one actually put ink to sheep’s skin, but the names of 39 Scottish nobles – eight earls and 31 barons – are listed at the head of the letter. The seals of many, if not all, were applied to the Declaration ahead of it being delivered to the papal court in Avignon.
Robert’s seal wasn’t affixed to it; it was felt that the letter would have greater impact if the king himself – the injured party, as it were – wasn’t one of the authors. It is strongly suspected, though, that he was at least its co writer, especially as it was penned at Arbroath Abbey residence of Bernard of Kilwinning, who was also the king’s chancellor. Robert did send his own letter to Avignon, too, as did the Bishop of St Andrews, but neither of these survive.
What is the background to the Declaration of Arbroath?
In 1290, the child queen Margaret of Norway died, leaving no obvious successor to the Scottish throne. A two year interregnum followed, after which 13 candidates staked their claim to the throne, the most prominent of whom were John Balliol and Robert the Bruce. Edward I was appointed to oversee the arbitration of the claims and to select the most credible contender, a duty he agreed to as long as the Scots swore allegiance to him as overlord. Unsurprisingly, Balliol, the candidate most sympathetic to England, was selected to be the next king of Scots.
Even as a puppet king, Balliol was a weak monarch and was forced to abdicate in 1296, less than four years into his reign. For the next 10 years, an ever shifting cast of Guardians governed the country, among them Robert the Bruce, the fearsome leader William Wallace and John Comyn III, Balliol’s nephew and the husband of Edward I’s cousin.
During this time, the English king – later known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ – launched a succession of attacks north of the border, seeking to expand his kingdom by annexing Scotland. He forced all Scottish nobles to submit to him, bar Wallace, who was captured and hanged, drawn and quartered in London.
How did Robert the Bruce become king?
Despite being rivals for the throne, Comyn and Robert hatched a secret plan whereby the former would renounce his claim to the throne in return for the latter’s not-inconsiderable land holdings across Scotland. But when Comyn appeared to renege on the deal, Robert summoned him to a clear-the-air meeting at the church of Greyfriars in Dumfries. In the heated exchange that ensued, Comyn was fatally stabbed in front of the altar.
Despite being excommunicated from the Church (for the first time) for the murder, it didn’t stop his passage to the throne, and six weeks later, in March 1306, Robert was crowned king of Scots. In response, Edward once again unleashed the might of his troops in Scotland, forcing Robert to go into hiding and to use guerrilla warfare tactics over the next few years to recapture large swathes of his homeland.
He and his troops laid siege to the English-held Stirling Castle, tempting the English army – by now under the command of Edward II, following his father’s death – northwards and inflicting a severe defeat on them at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
Were there other efforts to broker a truce before the Declaration of Arbroath?
Edward II’s defeat at Bannockburn, where he only just escaped with his life, had neither chastened him nor dented English expansionist ambitions. A papal effort to negotiate a truce between the warring factions failed when, in 1318, Robert recaptured the strategically significant town of Berwick-on-Tweed, located right on the border of the two countries. The following year, the pope issued an edict to the Scots king, instructing him and four of his bishops to visit him in Avignon. When they refused, Pope John XXII excommunicated all five, as well as threatening to do likewise to the entire Scottish population.
What did the Declaration of Arbroath ask of the pope?
While outwardly the language appears reverential towards the pope, its words carried a gentle threat. The Scottish nobles warned Pope John XXII that should he continue to favour the English to the detriment of the Scots, “then the slaughter of bodies, the perdition of souls, and all the other misfortunes that will follow, inflicted by them on us and by us on them, will, we believe, be surely laid by the Most High to your charge”.
It was a confident gambit, the implication that not only would the pope have blood on his hands, but that he would also be subject to divine judgment. The Declaration sets out a history of Scottish subjugation at the hands of the English, particularly their treatment by Edward I, who “came in a guise of a friend and ally to harass them as an enemy”.
The letter’s authors issue a lengthy charge sheet against the late king, making sure to include his crimes against the Church: “imprisoning prelates, burning down monasteries, robbing and killing monks and nuns and yet other outrages without number”.
- On the podcast | Iain MacInnes on the Scottish Wars of Independence
How is Robert the Bruce portrayed in the Declaration of Arbroath?
Alongside Edward I’s character assassination, the Declaration contains a glowing reference for Robert, complete with biblical comparisons: “He, that his people and his heritage might be delivered out of the hands of our enemies, bore cheerfully toil and fatigue, hunger and peril, like another Maccabaeus or Joshua.”
However, rather intriguingly, the authors do stress that their admiration and adoration of the king would be withdrawn if he were “seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the king of England or the English”. They went further: “as long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English”.
The pope will have been in no uncertainty about the ardour of their beliefs. When it came to demands for action, the Declaration was more direct. “With our most earnest prayers and suppliant hearts”, the earls and barons request the pope to warn the English king that he should leave the Scots in peace. “[He] ought to be satisfied with what belongs to him since England used once to be enough for seven kings.”
How successful was the Declaration of Arbroath?
Only partially. The letter did provoke the pope to write to Edward II to request the cessation of hostilities, but he continued to refuse to recognise Robert as the legitimate occupant of the Scottish throne – and the excommunication remained in place.
What the Declaration did do was contribute to the wider campaign for Scottish self-governance. Eight years after the three-man deputation delivered the letter to Avignon, a peace accord was finally signed – the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton of 1328.
Still, the importance of the Declaration wasn’t acknowledged until it was translated from Latin into English at the tail end of the 1680s. Only then was it revealed to be an extraordinarily worded document. As the historian Agnes Mure McKenzie would later observe, “the whole thing is magnificently lucid”, possessing a clarity that “is shot through with quiet implications”.
Is there a link between the Declaration of Arbroath and the Declaration of Independence?
Some believe the translated letter to have been a heavy influence on the American Declaration of Independence, another document calling for freedom from English rule.
Nige Tassell is a journalist specialising in history
This article was first published in the April 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>Medieval(ish) matters #15: What's lurking in the background of medieval maps? And what did medieval people really know about the wider world?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/medieval-maps-what-did-people-know-about-world/2020-07-25T11:00:52.000ZConsider maps, and you likely think of them as tools to get from A to B without the inconvenience of getting lost. You might not dwell on any underlying political context to your cartography. So, let’s talk about medieval maps.
I had a fascinating chat the other day with Dr Catherine Delano-Smith, who is heading up the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Understanding the medieval Gough Map through physics, chemistry and history’. You can follow the project's work through its splendidly droll twitter feed.
The Gough Map (named after the 18th-century antiquarian Richard Gough, who purchased the map and bequeathed it to the Bodleian Library) is one of the most important medieval maps. It shows Britain, with a somewhat different – but recognisable – outline from that on modern maps, and lots of interesting details of towns, rivers and other features. It is large (around 55 by 116 centimetres) and fills two pieces of sheepskin parchment.
Under the sheep skin
Dr Delano-Smith’s collaborative project is an interdisciplinary effort to get under the (sheep) skin of the map. Various scientific tests on the map have been carried out, including an instructive 3D scan, which sheds light on the pin-holes that seem to have been used to prick outlines of prominent places or buildings. These pin-holes were noticed in the 19th century, but the scanning work has enabled a better understanding of what they are about:
“We have come to the conclusion that the pinholes are likely to relate to the first production of the map and that they record a hitherto unknown, arguably unorthodox, form of transferring information onto the map by means of replicating a template, although not every place marked on the map has associated pinholes; many were just inserted into an appropriate space,” noted Dr Delano-Smith in the 2017 article New Light on the Medieval Gough Map of Britain (Imago Mundi 69).
The research team has further established that the map is an amalgamation of three successive layers of work: layer one shows the whole of Britain from Scotland to the English Channel; layer two is a reworking of that map south of Hadrian’s Wall; and layer three is a re-inking of place-names in the south-eastern/central quadrant of England.
That’s the general stratigraphy of the map, and it looks like these reworkings took place over the course of a century or so, but dating is difficult, as Dr Delano-Smith explains: “It is such a hotch-potch that it's very difficult to work out precisely. On the whole, the map seems to come from the decades just before and just after c1400, with some later additions.”
Fossilised features
The pinholes, it’s proposed, reflect the copying of a now lost proto-map from the reign of Edward III – which itself probably incorporated some information dating back to Edward I – onto which new material was added in the second half of the 14th century and later. In this way, it could be said that the map we see today contains a number of fossilised features, making the chronology the map represents all the more tricky to disentangle. Wales, for example, did not attract much interest from the English crown after c1300, while for Edwards I to III, Scotland was arguably the overriding political concern up to 1335 as they tried to make good the English claim, conducting a number of campaigns. All sorts of events and interests, though, might account for a particular place being marked on the map.
So it is the complex political context of that period in British history that’s going to be an area of focus for the Gough Map project team now. Certainly it seems that the map had a long working life, though exactly what it was used for, and by whom, is still very much a matter for research.
Useless for getting from A to B
*“*One thing to squash is the idea that it's a map for travelling or a map with pilgrimage routes. If you've got places on a map, you can always work out the general direction in which your destination lies and create an itinerary -assuming the places are shown in correct spatial order – but until modern times, for finding the way as you rode or walked you relied on local information gained stage by stage. In fact, travellers would have found the Gough Map useless both for way-planning and way-finding. It’s hopelessly inaccurate in that respect," says Dr Delano-Smith.
This leaves the question of what the map was for. If it was used by different people over a long period of time, it could of course have had various purposes to match their particular interests. At present Dr Delano-Smith does wonder if it might have fulfilled the role of an office document of some sort. Something to use and be referred to by the growing body of bureaucrats and administrators working within the apparatus of government in England.
It certainly shows evidence of wear and tear from being rolled and unrolled over the years, and of being pored over: as “Over the years readers and users of the map […] looked at it from the same side," the 2017 article notes, "their garments gradually rubbed out the markings in southwest England and Wales to illegibility and occasionally invisibility.”
One line of thought that Dr Delano-Smith’s team is considering at the moment, as she is going to outline more fully in a forthcoming article, is that it might be more profitable to attempt to assess the map’s usefulness as a strategic document connected to the crown’s need, at a time of heightened military and economic pressure, to move resources about the kingdom on an unprecedented scale.
Wondering about Hadrian's Wall
It’s interesting that the line of Hadrian’s Wall is described on the Gough Map as the Pict’s Wall. As Dr Delano-Smith points out, this name was taken, like the crenellated line itself, from one of Matthew Paris’s maps of Britain (c1250). But as I was looking at that, I was reminded of a conversation I’ve had recently on our podcast with Professor Gordon Noble and Dr Nick Evans about the Picts. In that podcast, we talked about the phasing out of Pictish language and identity in the ninth century AD, so I was curious about why this wording was still in play several hundred years later, and I dropped Dr Evans an email to ask him if this might be some sort of slight from an English scribe.
It appears, though, that the association of the Roman walls in Northumbria with the Pictish inhabitants to the north had a long history. The name could have come, Dr Evans explained, from “late Roman writers and Bede, who attributed the building of the Roman walls to Septimius Severus, although I don't think the Picts were specified as their enemies”, as well as from “Gildas's De Excidio Brittanniae, which had both walls being built against the Picts by the Romans near the end of Roman Britain".
From these texts, Evans adds, "the idea went into ‘Historia Brittonum’, which got a relatively wide circulation in England and the Continent from about 1100 onwards. In addition, in the 12th century, the Gaels of Galloway sometimes were called Picts (for instance in Aelred of Rievaulx's account of the battle of the Standard in 1138), and were regarded as savages.”
The Anglo-Saxon world map
One way or the other, the Gough Map is a map with a possible political context. Another is the Anglo-Saxon world map, otherwise known as the Cotton map from its location in the British Library, where it is preserved in MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. It’s thought to date from 1020–1050, and to have been produced in England (in Canterbury perhaps) in the reign of King Cnut or his successors. As the British Library description notes, this world map “contains the earliest known, relatively realistic depiction of the British Isles, seen in the bottom left hand corner of this map”. At the top of the rectangular, full-page map, we see the east of the inhabited world, and a lion standing over part of Asia. The ocean surrounds the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Incidentally, this rather splendid map has just won the Twitter 'world cup of maps', in a bit of fun orchestrated by the British Library on social media.
View oEmbed on the source website
I noticed that Dr Helen Appleton at Balliol College, Oxford, has written an interesting analysis of this map recently in her article The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi (Anglo-Saxon England, v47), so I dropped her a line to talk about it. She explained to me that it’s an outlier in the tradition of medieval mappae mundi (maps of the world), for the simple fact that it’s earlier than most of the others (the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi is dated to c1300 for instance). Also, however, it differs in content: “In most of the later larger mappae mundi, you will have an episode from the life of Christ somewhere in the map. So you'll get the crucifixion or maybe the nativity shown. And so there's a very obvious Christian overlay on world history that's being presented visually by the map, and this map doesn't do that. So compared to these other maps, it's very unusual. But on the other hand, it's a couple of hundred years earlier than them. So it may be representative of its time.”
What it does do is pay particular attention to the British Isles, as Dr Appleton points out in her article: “The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi is notably rather independent of other cartographic traditions. In particular, it is unusually accurate concerning the shape and inhabitants of Northwestern Europe and offers an exceptionally exact depiction of the British Isles – not until the 13th-century work of Matthew Paris is a better representation made."
Anglo-Saxon interests
So why is that? Dr Appleton has carried out a detailed inspection of what’s in the map and concluded that “the geography represented on the Anglo-Saxon Map can be seen as an expression of later-Anglo-Saxon interests in the arrangement of space and power”. She sees the map as “the product of an island culture keen to emphasize its connections to Rome, its place in the history of empires, and its links to the rest of the world. The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi is a fundamentally outward looking document, albeit one that declares its vantage point to be in the north-west. The place of Britain on the map asserts its prominence; it occupies the north-western corner of the map, surrounded by sea, rather than squashed against the boundary, as it is on later maps such as the Hereford mappa mundi.”
So this is where the political context comes in again, and once more it relates to a fossilisation of political ideas from an earlier proto-map. Dr Appleton continues: “I'm arguing that the map, as we have it, is almost certainly a copy of a larger map. And so I was trying to think about when and where and why the larger map would have been produced. So I looked at the history of cartography and how and why maps were used in Europe in the early medieval period. And they very much associated with political power and ideas of control.
"So it made sense to think about the 10th century in England as a kind of logical place for production, because we know that you've got the kings Edward the Elder and Æthelstan. They were very politically ambitious rulers who were wanting to assert England's place at a moment of decline in power of the Carolingian empire. This creates an opportunity to become more politically influential," continues Dr Appleton.
"We know that Athelstan was acquiring a lot of material associated with Charlemagne and the Carolingians, and imitating that sort of mapping is a kind of statement of imperial power. It's pretty speculative, and unprovable, but it would be a logical point really.”
Two maps, two different expressions – perhaps of English attempts to have more of a standing on the world stage.
Silk Route of the Sea
As an addendum, it just so happens that I’ve been talking to Professor David Abulafia recently for the HistoryExtra podcast about his Wolfson Prize-winning book The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, and particularly the connections engendered by oceanic travel and communication in the earlier medieval period. Looking at a map like the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, produced in England but showing the world, it does make one wonder how far someone living in Europe or the Middle East in the Middle Ages would have known about China and the East, the places that feature on the top of the map. I asked Professor Abulafia precisely that, and you can listen to the podcast to hear his reply to that, and his evocative description of the Silk Route of the Sea.
David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the full medieval matters blog series here
]]>The battle of Bannockburn: Robert Bruce's fight for freedomhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/battle-bannockburn-robert-bruce-civil-war-scottish-history/2020-06-23T09:50:23.000ZThere are only about four hours of proper darkness at midsummer in Scotland. For the English army crossing the boggy ground beneath the town of Stirling, that was just enough time to feed and water horses and men, clean equipment and wonder what lay ahead of them once the sun rose. Morale was low. The foot soldiers were exhausted, having been forced to march as quickly as they could from Edinburgh 30 miles away in order to meet the midsummer deadline agreed for the relief of Stirling Castle. And they had failed to best their Scottish enemies earlier the previous day, 23 June 1314, in a series of encounters including the infamous attempt by Sir Henry de Bohun to kill the Scottish king in single combat, only to be felled by one mighty blow of Robert Bruce’s battle-axe.
Nevertheless, Edward II was prepared. What he did not expect was the Scots to fight, for it was their habit to disappear into the hills when confronted by an English army. But now, as dawn crept into the sky, Edward could see the Scots advancing in three brigades of spearmen before kneeling before him. The English king was exultant, believing that this was a prelude to surrender – until it was pointed out to him that, though the Scots sought mercy, it was from God rather than the English.
If, as appeared to be the case, the Scottish king had decided to fight, it would be the seventh engagement between the two kingdoms in the 18 years since Edward’s father, Edward I, had (temporarily) conquered his northern neighbour in 1296.
The prelude to what was a shockingly dramatic change in the relationship between Scotland and England was the death a decade earlier of the Scottish king, Alexander III, without any surviving male heirs. This had prompted Edward I – Alexander’s former brother-in-law – to begin interfering in the northern kingdom’s affairs.
Edward insisted on presiding over a court looking into the claims of 14 candidates to be king, though the choice was really between John Balliol, Lord of Galloway in Scotland and Barnard Castle (in what is now County Durham), and Robert Bruce of Annandale in Scotland (grandfather of the victor of Bannockburn). Balliol won – a decision that most Scots thought was right – and was crowned King John in 1292. But the Bruces never gave up their royal ambitions.
The verge of war
Edward, meanwhile, was biding his time. Having forced all the candidates for King Alexander’s vacant throne to acknowledge his claims to overlordship over Scotland – claims based on past but equivocal precedent and categorically denied by previous kings of Scots – he made increasing demands on King John. These included an expectation that the latter would send men to fight with Edward against France, with whom England was on the verge of war. The Scots, led by their king’s relatives, the powerful Comyn family, realised that they were losing their independence and negotiated a treaty of mutual defence with France.
Suspecting this, Edward I invaded Scotland in 1296, defeating a Scottish army at Dunbar, deposing and imprisoning Balliol, and setting up his own government. The following year the Scots resumed the war, appointing William Wallace as the first of a series of guardians to rule the kingdom in King John’s absence. Robert Bruce, the future king, spent several years fighting the English, even acting briefly as guardian for Balliol, his family’s rival as monarch, presumably in order to boost his own credentials to lead the Scots.
In 1302, however, Bruce submitted to the English king, having been ousted as guardian by his other great rivals, the Comyns, and having proved to be unable to swallow the prospect of King John’s return with French support after the latter’s release from English prison. However, the French king, Philip IV, soon needed the friendship of Edward I for his own reasons and hopes of King John’s return were extinguished. In 1304, most Scots, led by the current guardian, John Comyn of Badenoch, submitted to Edward I.
The lead characters in the showdown at Bannockburn
King Robert I was born in 1274. He seized the throne of Scotland in 1306 and ruled for 23 years until his death on 7 June 1329. His first marriage was to Isobel, daughter of the Earl of Mar, by whom he had his daughter, Marjorie. Her son, Robert, became the first of the Stewart kings who would rule Scotland, then England, from 1371 until 1714. Edward Bruce, Earl of Carrick, was Bruce’s younger brother. He agreed in May 1314 with Sir Philip Moubray that Stirling Castle would be handed over to the Scots if not relieved by an English army, effectively deciding the site of the battle. He commanded one of Bruce’s divisions on 23/24 June. Sir John Comyn of Badenoch was nephew of the Scottish king, John Balliol, and therefore a contender for the vacant throne. He was murdered by Bruce in 1306, precipitating a bloody civil war, one which Bannockburn largely brought to an end. His son, another John, was killed in the battle. Edward II was the only surviving son of Edward I, succeeding his father in 1307. Inheriting a bankrupt treasury, his tendency to be led by favourites brought England close to civil war on many occasions. Though no coward, at Bannockburn he had no strategy and divided his commanders among themselves. Sir Philip Moubray was a Scot who sided against Bruce because of the murder of John Comyn. After Bannockburn, he closed the gates of Stirling Castle against King Edward and joined Bruce. He went with Edward Bruce on campaign in Ireland in 1315–18 and died with him there. Sir Robert Clifford was a veteran of the wars in Scotland, having fought in most campaigns for nearly 20 years. On 23 June he took a contingent of knights to try to get between the Scots and Stirling Castle but was beaten back by King Robert’s nephew, Sir Thomas Randolph. Clifford was killed along with the Earl of Gloucester in the first wave of fighting on 24 June.
By 1306 Edward I was known to be very ill, so Robert Bruce began canvassing for support to reactivate his grandfather’s claim to the throne. This, however, completely ignored the fact that John Balliol had been king. If John and his son were unable to return to Scotland (Edward Balliol was still in English custody), then the Scottish king’s nephew, John Comyn of Badenoch, was next in line. He was also a tried and tested war leader, a guardian for most of the period between 1298 and 1304 and the head of a great family with lands and followers across the kingdom.
There may have been an innocuous reason – perhaps associated with a land dispute – why Robert Bruce and John Comyn met at Greyfriars Church in the south-western Scottish town of Dumfries on 10 February 1306. But they probably soon moved onto the inflammatory subject of who might take Scotland’s empty throne to rejuvenate the war effort once Edward was dead, for the meeting ended with Bruce murdering Comyn. Six weeks later, Bruce had himself inaugurated as king – an act that effectively split Scotland in two, as well as unleashing the wrath of Edward I.
Profitable raiding
Though Bannockburn has always been portrayed as England versus Scotland, it was the element of civil war that really caused it to be fought. In October 1313, having spent the previous six years conquering his kingdom from his own people as much as the English, King Robert felt confident enough to issue an ultimatum to all those holding land in Scotland that they should swear homage and fealty to him within a year. And even though a line of castles, from Berwick on the eastern border up to Stirling in the middle of the country, was still held against him, Bruce and his men could pass beneath them at will, en route to some extremely profitable and destructive raiding in northern England.
Even the inept Edward II, who inherited his father’s bankrupt throne in 1307, realised that this ultimatum would force many Scots still prepared to fight against Bruce to change sides if he did nothing to help them. In November 1313, therefore, he ordered an army to muster the following June. Then, in May 1314, it was agreed between the Scots and Stirling’s commander, Sir Philip Moubray, that the castle would be handed over to Bruce unless relieved by 24 June. With that agreement, King Robert had effectively decided where Edward II’s army would march and where, therefore, any battle might be fought.
This time Bruce faced the tantalising prospect that, if he fought and won, he might effectively end the war in Scotland. But if he did not, his ultimatum might well be ignored.
The stakes were high. Should Bruce lose, the military reputation that sustained his kingship, given his dubious accession, would crumble. He needed to fight somewhere that cavalry were at a disadvantage. Even Edward II knew that the ground around Stirling was such a place.
And so Bruce worked with his men to transform the Scottish schiltrom – groups of around a thousand men carrying long spears bristling like a hedgehog – from the stationary unit employed previously. Instead of merely repelling Edward’s cavalry, they would move together on the offensive, allowing the Scots to control the design and tempo of the battle.
Edward arrived the day before the deadline with an army of around 7,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. Bruce’s army was probably 5,000–6,000-strong, which meant that the opposing sides at Bannockburn were far more evenly matched than the hyperbole of Scottish chroniclers has since suggested.
The Scots were drawn up in the hunting forest south-east of Stirling, blocking Edward’s route to the castle. When the English failed to make any headway on the first day, they crossed the Bannockburn to the north, seeking the protection of the floodplain of the river Forth before taking the field in the early hours of 24 June. Few got more than a wink of sleep during that brief midsummer night.
Meanwhile, morale was already high among the Scots when Sir Alexander Seton arrived in the Scottish camp and was brought before King Robert. Seton was a Scot, one of many who had found Bruce’s murder of Comyn and seizure of the throne abhorrent. Yet he now considered the squabbling and lack of leadership among the English commanders even more problematic and decided to defect. Bruce asked his nobles if they should fight. The response was unanimous: “As you devise, all shall be done.”
How the battle played out
From opening exchanges to bloody rout, a quick guide to the clash at Bannockburn
Bannockburn was fought to the south-east of Stirling Castle in central Scotland. The English army numbered roughly 2,000 cavalry and 7,000 infantry commanded by King Edward II. The Scottish army comprised around 5,000–6,000 spearmen with a few hundred cavalry led by King Robert I of Scotland. The English arrived on 23 June to find their way to Stirling Castle, which they were intent on relieving, blocked by the Scots. A series of skirmishes won by the Scots left Edward’s men demoralised, and they camped overnight down on the floodplain of the river Forth. Early in the morning of 24 June, fully expecting Bruce to retreat as usual, the English were astonished to see the Scots advancing towards them. The English vanguard charged but were overwhelmed and many knights killed. The ground, near or on the floodplain of the river Forth, was difficult for cavalry to negotiate, but it was King Robert’s decision to train his spearmen to march offensively that won the day, along with the lack of leadership in the English army. Thousands of footsoldiers were killed in the bloody aftermath when the Scots were intent on seizing booty and taking noble prisoners.
The next morning, Bruce addressed his men again in terms that went on to immortalise the ensuing battle. “You could have lived in serfdom, but because you yearned to have freedom, you are gathered here with me.” The Scots then advanced to meet an English charge led by the Earl of Gloucester, who was still reeling from accusations of cowardice that greeted his sensible suggestion that the English should wait for the footsoldiers to recover before engaging. Bruce had ordered his men not to take either prisoners or booty until the battle was won, and so Gloucester and other high-ranking nobles, including the murdered John Comyn’s son and the veteran soldier Sir Robert Clifford, were killed.
As the front line of the English cavalry disintegrated, the English infantry behind began to run away, while the English bowmen were kept at bay by the Scottish cavalry. Then, as more Scots appeared, the English king was forced to flee too, leaving the rest of his army to escape, be captured or killed. Many died in the ‘great ditch’ of the Bannockburn, which stood between them and the road home, those that came behind running ‘dry-shod’ across their compatriots’ bodies.
Edward II had taken the field and God had found him wanting, while King Robert had been granted victory despite having murdered Comyn on the high altar of a church. As a result, the legitimate grievances of those Scots who fought against Bruce have long been consigned to history’s landfill.
Eternally glorified
It is difficult to pinpoint the long-term benefits that Bannockburn brought to Bruce. What’s more, the assumption that there was a direct connection between the battle and a 1328 peace treaty concluded in the aftermath of Edward II’s deposition is misplaced. But, in articulating a rhetoric of freedom, the Scottish king won an even greater battle, one that has eternally glorified the name of Bruce and Bannockburn by transforming what was predominantly a brutal civil war into an epic national struggle.
Most crucial to that image is John Barbour’s highly influential poem, The Bruce, written in the 1370s, where the future of Scotland itself was explicitly deemed to hinge on Bannockburn’s outcome. Barbour portrays the Scottish nobles’ determination to pay the ultimate price, if necessary, to liberate Scotland after their king reminded them of English tyranny and injustice.
Here we supposedly have the crux of the matter, explaining why they resolved to fight and why they won. Many Scots today also know the stirring lines of the Declaration of Arbroath, a letter sent to the pope in 1320, arguing why Scotland should be independent of England and why Bruce should be its king: “It is not for glory, riches or honour that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life.” Stirring words indeed, but ones that would have stuck in the throats of the family of the murdered Comyn.
But facts are facts and Bruce did bring independence to his kingdom against remarkable odds. As late as the 16th century, the Scots exulted in being “18 hundred years unconquered,” which was more than could be said for England. But this was despite the scarcity of victories against the Auld Enemy after Bannockburn. Otterburn in 1388 and Ancrum Moor in 1545 are the exceptions in a catalogue of defeats, some of them catastrophic – Dupplin Moor, Halidon Hill, Neville’s Cross, Homildon Hill, Flodden, Solway Moss and Pinkie.
Bannockburn cast a long shadow over Scottish military strategy, with commanders continuing to rely on spearmen long after weaponry, particularly hand-held firearms, had evolved to render them obsolete.
- 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history
The Scots remember Bannockburn, then, as an exceptional victory. But that is not why it has proved such a powerful force in Scottish identity. It is the rhetoric of freedom that has chimed throughout the centuries, particularly once the parliaments of England and Scotland were dismantled in 1707 and recreated as the United Kingdom. Now a modified version of that was needed, and the view was taken that Wallace and Bruce saved Scotland from Edward I’s clutches so that it could join the union as an equal partner.
But for others, as the benefits of empire receded and Scotland’s great manufacturing base began to suffer in the 20th century, issues of freedom became bound up with questions over the political status quo. Every year a rally takes place to Bannockburn, and while the Scottish National Party no longer officially attends, their song is still Robert Burns’s Scots Wha’ Hae, inspired by Bruce’s “glorious struggle for freedom”.
The Scots are not alone in subverting the realities of the past to create a powerful and enduring myth – every nation has them. But the right of a nation to determine its own destiny is a concept that appeals across time and geography, and Scotland was one of the first to articulate such a right in medieval Europe. Bannockburn is responsible for that.
Dr Fiona Watson is a research fellow at the University of Dundee
This article was first published in the July 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>In profile: King Edward IIhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/kings-and-queens-in-profile-edward-ii/2020-05-27T12:55:07.000ZWho was Edward II?
Born: 25 April 1284, at Caernarfon Castle in north Wales
Died: 21 September 1327, at Berkeley Castle (but some believed that he lived on after this time)
Ruled: July 1307–January 1327
Parents: the youngest child of Edward I (1239–1307) and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile (1241–90)
Married to: Isabella of France
Successor: his 14-year-old son, who became Edward III
Remembered for: his defeat to Robert the Bruce at the battle of Bannockburn on 24 June 1314, and for being overthrown by his wife in favour of his son
Childhood: Edward II was born in Caernarfon Castle, north Wales on 25 April 1284, as at least the 14th (possibly 16th) and youngest child of Edward I and his first wife, Spanish queen Eleanor of Castile.
His three older brothers John, Henry and Alfonso died in childhood, and Edward succeeded his father as king of England in July 1307, when he was 23.
A disastrous reign
Edward's reign was a disaster. He was unsuited to the position into which he was born, and had been left a very difficult legacy by his father – enormous debts, an unwinnable war in Scotland, dissatisfied magnates, and hostile relations with powerful France.
Consequently, Edward’s reign lurched from one crisis to another: endless conflict with his barons, constant threats of civil war, and failed military campaigns in Scotland.
A notable feature of his reign was his reliance on male ‘favourites’, most famously Piers Gaveston, whom Edward made Earl of Cornwall and who was executed in 1312 by a group of English earls.
Edward’s dedication to his last and most powerful favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, brought both of them down in 1326 after they alienated Edward’s queen, Isabella of France. She invaded her husband’s kingdom with the help of her own favourite, the English baron Roger Mortimer.
Edward was forced to abdicate his throne to his 14-year-old son Edward III in January 1327 – it was the first time this had ever happened in England.
Was Edward II really murdered?
Edward II is best known for his humiliating defeat to Robert Bruce at the battle of Bannockburn on 24 June 1314, and for the alleged manner of his murder at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327 – by having a red-hot poker inserted into his anus.
This story is, however, a myth, as is the tale invented in the Hollywood film Braveheart that Edward’s queen, Isabella, had an affair with William Wallace, who was the real father of Edward’s son. Wallace was executed two-and-a-half-years before 12-year-old Isabella even arrived in England, and there is no doubt whatsoever that Edward II was the father of all of Isabella’s four children.
There is evidence to indicate that Edward was not killed at Berkeley Castle in 1327 at all, but survived for years afterwards, perhaps in Italy. Utterly implausible as this sounds, many influential people – including the archbishop of York; the bishop and mayor of London; earls, lords, sheriffs and numerous others, firmly believed that Edward was still alive.
Was he England's worst king?
Edward is often considered to be one of England’s worst kings, and given that he was the first one forced to abdicate, this is not an unfair judgment. He was entirely unconventional by the standards of his time. He is said to have enjoyed the company of his lowborn subjects and their pursuits; dug ditches and thatched roofs; and swum in the company of carpenters, fishermen and ditchers.
Edward’s 19-year reign was inglorious, yet he and his era have their fascinations. He is one of only a handful of people throughout history to found colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, something he should perhaps be better remembered for.
Kathryn Warner is the author of Edward II: The Unconventional King (Amberley Publishing, 2014)
This article was first published by HistoryExtra in May 2014
]]>Scotland's cry for liberty: the Declaration of Arbroathhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/scotland-liberty-declaration-arbroath-what/2020-03-19T16:35:14.000Z**“For so long as 100 of us remain alive, we will never give consent to subject ourselves to the dominion of the English. For it is not glory, it is not riches, neither is it honours that we fight and contend for, but freedom alone, which no honest man will lose except with his life.”**
These words were written 700 years ago in April 1320, but they speak a language of liberty that resonates today. They represent the climax of a letter best-known as the Declaration of Arbroath. It was written on behalf of the barons and community of Scotland to Pope John XXII during the long conflict to secure the sovereignty and rights of their kingdom, known as the Scottish Wars of Independence. Six years after his triumph at Bannockburn, the letter supported the efforts of the Scottish king, Robert Bruce, to secure recognition in his ongoing fight with the English crown, now represented by Edward II.
In just over a thousand words the declaration articulated Scotland’s cause, its ancient pedigree as a European nation and a Christian land, and its endurance through “innumerable oppressions” and “barbarities” inflicted by English king Edward I (father of Edward II). It insisted the Scots were not simply fighting as subjects of a monarch. Although the declaration held up King Robert as the leader who had delivered his people “from the enemy’s hand”, it asserted that, should he “consent that we be subjected to the king or people of England, we will… expel him as our enemy… and make another king who will defend our liberties”. In these terms, Scotland’s struggle was for “freedom alone”, and would be upheld even in the teeth of their own ruler.
The power of these words and the ideas behind them underpin the modern fascination with the Declaration of Arbroath. Comparisons have been made between the declaration and Magna Carta, produced in England a century earlier in the struggle between King John and his English subjects. Both texts were written during conflicts in which the freedoms and status of communities were threatened by tyrannical rulers, internal or external. Both asserted the rights of subjects to resist misrule, and even to restrain or overthrow kings who failed to sustain their liberties. However, the declaration was very different from Magna Carta. It was not a detailed statement of legal rights but a piece of rhetoric. Rather than compelling the king to accept a series of specific limitations on his authority, the declaration was designed to persuade an external figure, the pope, of the justice of the Scottish cause.
Moreover, while Magna Carta, in a curtailed form, rapidly became regarded as a touchstone of good law in English politics, the Declaration of Arbroath had no parallel significance for later generations of Scots. A contemporary copy was preserved but the declaration was primarily known from its inclusion, along with other diplomatic material from the struggle with England, in late medieval Scottish chronicles. It was only in 1680, 360 years after its composition, that the declaration was lifted from these and printed, bringing it to wider notice. Its language and ideas excited theorists and pamphleteers looking for historical evidence for ancient constitutions. The declaration was employed to justify the deposition of James VII of Scotland (II of England) in 1688–89, and during the next century was absorbed into arguments about Britain’s liberties and constitution evolving from a tradition of resistance to tyrannical monarchs.
A symbol of Scottish identity
Yet with its rejection of English rule, the dec laration never sat comfortably within this British framework. As movements to secure home rule or independence for Scotland developed in the 20th century, it became increasingly identified as a text which proclaimed the country’s right to self-determination. The name given to the text reflected this. Often described as a “letter” or “manifesto” before 1900, from the 1920s the titles “Declaration of Arbroath” or even “the Scottish Declaration of Independence” were preferred, reflecting its importance to contemporary politics. By the 1960s, when thoughts were turning to the 650th anniversary, the declaration was seen as a potent and widely recognised symbol of Scotland’s historical independence.
Questions over the commemoration of the anniversary were a political hot potato. Officials advised that “in view of the great effort nationalists will put forth to make the celebrations a rallying point, we should seek perhaps to make our offerings seem adequate, but not excessive”. The issuing of a commemorative stamp, which represented the main official response to the occasion, seems to have avoided accusations of excess.
Even in the 50 years since 1970, the significance of the declaration has shifted. Although Scottish politics has moved onto more contemporary ground, the Declaration of Arbroath has retained its importance in popular consciousness as a symbol of Scottish identity and as a statement of popular rights. The 6th April, the date of the declaration, was adopted as Tartan Day by the US Senate in 1998 as a means of celebrating Scotland’s contribution to North America. Furthermore, in 2016 the Declaration of Arbroath was added to the Unesco Memory of the World register, which cited the “universal value” of the text.
As a medieval document able to inspire modern readers, the Declaration of Arbroath is remarkable. It was not, however, a declaration of independence. It was not a unique, standalone statement of the rights of the Scottish people. What it was was a skilfully composed and targeted diplomatic weapon, created for a specific goal in very specific circumstances. To understand the text is to understand these circumstances.
An embattled king
In the spring of 1320, Robert Bruce had been King of Scots for 14 years. He had spent all of this period fighting to secure his royal title against numerous enemies. These enemies were led by the kings of England, whose efforts to bring Scotland into their realm had AL started the wars 25 years before. However, they also included many Scottish lords who saw Robert as a traitor and criminal (see box, right). In late June 1314, Bruce had won his great victory at Bannockburn. His army had out-thought and out-fought the host of King Edward II of England. The victory won Robert control of Scotland and was taken by many as proof of God’s support for his claim to be king. Bannockburn did not, however, win the war. Edward II would not recognise Robert Bruce as King of Scots. To force his hand, Robert’s armies invaded northern England and Edward’s Irish lordship. Despite successes, Robert was no nearer compelling the English to make peace, and in October 1318 the Scottish army in Ireland was wiped out at Faughart near Dundalk.
In this disaster Robert’s last surviving brother, Edward Bruce, king of Ireland, was killed. Edward was the designated heir to Scotland. His death meant the next in line was Robert’s infant grandson, Robert Stewart. The shakiness of the dynasty and the continuation of the gruelling war left King Robert still insecure and embattled nearly six years after Bannockburn. His vulnerability was heightened by the growing hostility of the papacy. Though Scottish churchmen had been powerful advocates for Scotland’s sovereignty, and previous popes had criticised English actions, Bruce’s relations with the papacy were tense, and from 1317 Robert faced the increasing antagonism of Pope John XXII.
The pope’s goal was to end the wars between Christian rulers and to unite them in a common cause to recover the Holy Land, which had been lost three decades earlier. To achieve this, John sent cardinals to proclaim a truce between England and Scotland. While Edward II accepted it, Robert did not.
As the papal letters did not address him as king, Robert refused to open them. Intent on the capture of Berwick on the English border, he would not let the English off the hook, and on 1 April 1318 his men took the town by stealth. Bruce’s commander, the grimly humorous James Douglas, joked that he entered Berwick as happily as if he had entered paradise. Two months later, his chances of paradise diminished when Douglas and his master were excommunicated by Pope John. John severed the links between the king and other Christians, and also suspended the duties of the clergy in Scotland through an interdict. These moves were a threat to a ruler who, despite his military successes, could not be certain of the loyalty of his subjects.
Small country, big ideas
The need to moderate the pope’s hostility prompted a concerted response. Having finally agreed a truce with England, in spring 1320 Robert dispatched a mission to the papal court. His emissaries carried letters probably from the king and clergy, and one from the barons and community of the realm. This last letter was the Declaration of Arbroath. (Although the letter cited Arbroath as the place from which it was issued, it had probably been crafted elsewhere in the royal chancery.)
It was a text with a very specific purpose. It laid out the justice of the Scottish cause to a hostile audience. It also demonstrated that it was not Robert’s individual ambition that lay behind the struggle but the will of the Scottish people, who would continue to fight for their liberties even if Robert abandoned them. This goal underpinned the passage that captured the attention of modern readers, but it was not the culmination of the letter.
Despite its aims, this was no defensive or apologetic text. Having proclaimed their own cause, the authors proceeded to question the pope’s position. Why did he chastise the Scots for their defence of their liberties rather than “admonish and exhort the king of England who ought to be satisfied with what he has and leave us in peace”? If Pope John’s stubborn attitude to Scotland persisted it would leave Christendom exposed to daily attacks and “tarnish the memory of your holiness”.
Did the declaration achieve its goal? There was no reversal of papal policy, but the sentences on Bruce and his kingdom were suspended and Robert’s royal title was employed in papal correspondence.
As a diplomatic device written by Bernard, abbot of Arbroath, and a group of clerks in the king’s chancery – and drawing on classical texts and historical precedents – the declaration can seem mundane. However, this context should not diminish the letter. Produced at a moment of real crisis, it contains a daring argument being articulated via powerful language.
Both the argument and language speak beyond the events of 1320. Even if it was not meant as a template for popular sovereignty when it was written, it did express the idea that the cause was not simply about the claims and ambitions of rival rulers. The authors saw the struggle as something bigger and more universal. Though they spoke in the declaration of the threat to “poor little Scotland”, they were confident that, from a small country, big ideas could emerge.
Michael Brown is professor of Scottish history at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371 (Edinburgh, 2004)
Listen to the episode of BBC Radio 4’s Making History that covered the Declaration of Arbroath.
This article was first published in the April 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]>The medieval rebel princesseshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/medieval-rebel-princesses-womens-history-royal-family/2019-03-21T07:00:54.000ZEleanor of Woodstock, Edward II's eldest daughter, was 24 years old when she stripped herself nearly naked before the dignitaries gathered at her husband Reginald II's palace. The year was 1342, and the young Duchess of Guelders had been absent from Reginald's court (in Nijmegen, the modern-day Netherlands) for months – banished to a house on the other side of the city on the pretext of suspected leprosy. Eventually, rumours spread to the English princess that Reginald was planning to divorce her on the grounds of her supposed illness. A divorce would ruin Eleanor financially, threaten her two sons' inheritance, and rupture one of England's most critical military partnerships in its war with France. But Eleanor knew she had the power to stop it.
Reasoning that the swiftest way to silence her accusers would be an unequivocal demonstration of her health, Eleanor gathered her young sons and travelled unannounced to the ducal palace, the Valkhof, on a day she knew Reginald’s court would be filled with witnesses. Ushering her children before their father, she dramatically cast off her mantle to reveal a tunic of the flimsiest silk – through which her unblemished skin was apparent to all.
The chronicler William of Berchen reported that the duchess challenged anyone present to examine her for “the bodily affliction of which I am thoughtlessly accused”. She also declared: “I know that this threat to our marriage has stemmed from malicious slander.”
The young princess evidently made quite an impression: the scene Berchen described was popular in Dutch engravings as late as the 19th century, often depicting the semi-nude princess throwing her head back with wild abandon.
But behind the theatre and the titillation of Eleanor’s gesture lies a question: why was Reginald so determined to cast off his wife?
Read more:
From a distance of 700 years, it doesn’t appear that Reginald genuinely believed his wife had leprosy – if that had been the case, he surely would have blocked any contact between his sons and their afflicted mother. And this was a marriage that, in its early years, had appeared a great blessing to Reginald: Eleanor’s vast dowry of 10,000 pounds greatly enriched his coffers; the English princess provided her older husband with two healthy sons; and when, in 1339, Reginald was made a duke, he largely had his union with Eleanor to thank for his elevation. In short, the Duke of Guelders’ motivation for ostracising his royal wife appears scant.
But motivation there was, and it may have been the product of a widely ignored phenomenon – one that contemporary histories barely acknowledged but that had a transformational impact on court politics and international diplomacy. That phenomenon was the power of royal women.
The power of princesses to shape the world around them has largely been forgotten. One of the reasons for this is that women are almost invisible in the major national chronicles that have for centuries provided the foundation on which histories have been written. When their names do appear, it is most often only to record which leading nobleman or foreign potentate had been linked to the king through their marriage. More detailed or personal accounts of women’s exploits were even more rare – only written down in instances deemed particularly memorable or dramatic, as Eleanor’s act of defi-ance at the Valkhof palace undoubtedly was.
Read more:
But women’s absence from the written record shouldn’t be mistaken for an absence of power. I have been researching the princesses of medieval England for a biography of Edward I’s five daughters (Eleanor’s aunts, although she could only have known two of them), and what became clear early in my research was that Eleanor and her peers were required to be so much more than the submissive stereotype popularised by fairy-tales. Not for them was the passive acquiescence of Rapunzel in her tower or the serenity of Sleeping Beauty as she awaited rescue by Prince Charming. Instead, the roles they played within political and social structures were dynamic, active and empowered.
This is not to deny the deep misogyny at the heart of medieval culture, which saw most women deprived of legal autonomy, and widespread suspicion of the female sex as weak, lustful and changeable. But feudalism, with its emphasis on social status, offered elite women an opportunity to wield influence – economic, political and cultural – that far exceeded most of their contemporaries, even aristocratic men.
Far from being meek pawns to be traded in marriage by their fathers without consultation, many English royal women in the medieval period participated in their own marriage negotiations. There were adolescents like 12-year-old Eleanor, eldest daughter of Edward I, who in 1282 dictated a letter in her own name affirming her desire to marry. Calling herself “the eldest child of the illustrious King of England”, Eleanor dispatched an official embassy to Aragon to contract a marriage “between us and a man of glory, Prince Alfonso, eldest child and heir of the illustrious King of Aragon”, confirming both her own consent to the match and that of her parents.
Whereas the norm among the famous princesses of fiction – like good Victorian children – was to be seen but not heard, their historic counterparts knew their proximity to the king gave them a voice. At the royal court, these women advocated forcefully (and with considerable success) on behalf of favourite causes and to secure promotions for friends and loyal servants. Meanwhile, those who married abroad used the considerable power of the English king to advance the interests of their new home. Their letters back to England were full of familial warmth, turning the knife of emotion – even when they were writing on matters of business, securing more favourable trading partnerships or requesting that English privateers be held accountable for unlicensed raids against merchants.
Eleanor’s aunts, Margaret, Duchess of Brabant, and Elizabeth, Countess of Holland, both wrote regularly to their father, Edward I, on behalf of the business interests that fuelled their mercantile countries, often with favourable results. And many, like Eleanor in the early years of her marriage to Reginald in Guelders, promoted military collaborations that supported English aims to expand an empire across Britain and into France.
For women to play these roles was neither unexpected nor discouraged. Contemporary treatises, such as Christine de Pisan's Treasure of the City of Ladies and Geoffrey de la Tour Landry's Book of the Knight of the Tower, make clear that 14th-century aristocratic women were expected to be effective in managing complex estates, deploying patronage to increase their influence, and even commanding a castle garrison. In the event her husband was captured or died, a royal woman might be required to govern, acting as regent to safeguard her own interests and the inheritance of her children. Princesses knew they could not afford to shy away from such responsibilities; in Christine de Pisan's words, a princess "should conduct herself with such skill that she may be feared as well as loved".
The significant demands on royal women required more than a knowledge of embroidery, hunting and romance. To succeed as a regent, princesses had to be literate: they predominately read in the Anglo-Norman French that was the mother tongue of English royals until the late medieval period, although they also learned some Latin gleaned from recitation of devotional texts like the psalms. They studied basic arithmetic from a young age, while absorbing much about the management of courtiers and administrators from watching their mothers and grandmothers in action.
Young women needed to master the social conventions by which they might wield authority in heavily patriarchal medieval society. Most often, this education was passed down from mother to daughter, and supplemented by tuition from aristocratic governesses and other ladies charged with attending the princess.
But perhaps the most important factor determining a medieval princess’s success was her ability to perfect the art of intercession – that is, using privileged access to husbands and fathers to win favours. This skill was passed on largely by example. It was also learned from religious models such as the Virgin Mary – the ultimate intercessor, whose position seated at the right hand of Christ on the day of judgment afforded unique opportunities to plead with her son on behalf of worthy souls.
By the early 14th century, intercession was accepted as the most effective tool in the princess’s armoury. It was soft power, but it was very real. Surviving chancery rolls (in which were recorded the bestowing of royal offices and lands, licences conferred, fines levied and pardons granted) abound with references to actions executed at the request of royal women. As a result of such entreaties, courtiers were rewarded, incomes were enhanced, and murderers were pardoned.
In a well-known example of royal female intercession, Philippa of Hainaut, lauded by the English people for her kindness, persuaded her husband, Edward III, to spare the lives of the Burghers of Calais after the English had seized the city at the height of the Hundred Years’ War. In using her emotional link to the king as a powerful bargaining tool, Philippa was far from alone.
Surviving patent rolls detail that, while travelling with her father, Edward I’s, army in Scotland in 1304, Joan of Acre convinced the king to pardon Walter Page of Framlington for killing Roger Founyng of Newcastle-on-Tyne. No other records tie Joan to Walter Page; most likely, Page’s supporters sought out Joan as a senior royal woman at court and, in recognition of her accepted role as an intercessor, begged her support.
Successful intercession might also bring official recognition: Joan’s sister Mary of Woodstock, a nun of Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, was as a teenager named as a legal representative of the chief abbess of her order in recognition of her ability to argue the abbess’s interests directly to her father, the king. Mary was attached to her title; in a request to her father that he help restore lands seized from the priory estate, she concluded: “Do as much, sweet father, for the love of me, that my lady the abbess of Fontevrault may perceive in all things that I am a good attorney for her in this country.”
And princesses were just as skilled at influencing their husbands as they were their fathers. Theirs was a mission in stealth diplomacy, in which emotional ties were expected to serve international political aims. The early years of Eleanor’s marriage offer an excellent example of success: in providing her husband with heirs, her position was strengthened. The duchess’s increased influence in turn bolstered her advocacy for English wool and Plantagenet empire-building at the court in Nijmegen. Eleanor helped win military support for England’s wars, and reinforced essential economic ties for its exports.
But while a princess’s distinctive position – her full membership of two ruling families – gave her power, it could also make her a target. As Edward III flexed his muscles on the continent, Reginald’s advisors became increasingly wary of their duchess’s brother, and – by extension – of Eleanor’s influence on their ruler. Rather than a genuine fear that she was infected with leprosy, therefore, the threat to Eleanor’s marriage seems likely to have stemmed from anxiety among the duke’s inner circle that, through Eleanor’s advocacy for the English cause, the small duchy of Guelders might become collateral damage in what would become known as the Hundred Years’ War. By 1340, their concern was not unreasonable: Edward III’s claim to the French throne might easily have threatened an ally so close to the border with France.
Happily for Eleanor, her decision to take off her clothes in full view of her husband’s court paid dividends. The duchess could no longer be sidelined on the pretext of a disease from which she was unmistakably free, and Reginald ceased seeking a divorce. Through her bold and unexpected action, Eleanor was restored to her position at court. Over the following months, she demonstrated her renewed influence by offering patronage to the Franciscan convent in Harderwijk and endowing a new house for that order – a favourite of English royal women since her great-grandmother Eleanor of Provence – at the trading city of Deventer.
Eleanor’s brush with nudity in Nijmegen may have inspired generations of artists but it was far from the only episode of high drama involving royal women in the Middle Ages. Medieval princesses got married in secret, engaged in high-stakes power plays, and fell prey to gambling addictions. Though chronicles remain mostly silent on these women, by paying close attention to less well-known sources, they can be uncovered in their vibrancy. What emerges is a new vision of a medieval princess: a woman trained from childhood to excel in cultural, economic and military diplomacy on an international stage. She is not the powerless girl the fairytales would have us believe. She never really was.
Kelcey Wilson-Lee is a historian and author. Her book Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Children of Edward I was published by Picador in March.
This article was first published in the April 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]>The big debate: was Edward II really murdered?https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/the-big-debate-was-edward-ii-really-murdered/2019-02-25T12:15:37.000ZIf there’s one thing most historians agree on, it’s that Edward II was one of medieval England’s least capable rulers. He is chiefly remembered for squandering his father, Edward I’s, military gains in Scotland (notably by losing the battle of Bannockburn), and alienating his wife and barons by promoting personal favourites such as Hugh Despenser the Younger.
But how did Edward die? We know that Queen Isabella’s patience with her husband snapped in 1326, and that she invaded England with her lover, Roger Mortimer, who was living in exile in France. Edward was forced to abdicate and was then imprisoned at Berkeley Castle, where he was murdered on 21 September 1327 (with, as legend would have it, the assistance of a red-hot poker).
That, at least, has been the accepted view of events for centuries. Yet, in 2005, Ian Mortimer challenged the consensus by arguing – in the journal The English Historical Review – that Edward had cheated death and was still alive in 1330. Mortimer’s theory has sparked a lively debate in the historical community, as the following exchange proves…
Ian Mortimer:
How can we be sure whether Edward II did or did not die in Berkeley Castle? The answer is not a straightforward: ‘because this document says so’ – after all, any single piece of evidence could be wrong. It is, rather, a matter of showing first that the evidence for the death, which we have hitherto accepted, is fundamentally flawed; and second that there are multiple independent accounts from people who knew him, stating that Edward was alive at a later date.
According to the royal accounts, Edward II died in Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327. Lord Berkeley’s accounts show that the news was taken in his own letters to the royal household, which was then at Lincoln. An extant letter written at Lincoln by Edward III on 24 September states that news of his father’s death had been received during the previous night. It was therefore accepted in the royal household and circulated from 24 September.
Additionally, one chronicle specifies that members attending the parliament at Lincoln (which finished on 23 September) were told the news as they dispersed. As Lincoln is over 150 miles (240km) from Berkeley, no check on the veracity of the news of the death was possible before it was circulated and preparations for a royal funeral began. The body itself was embalmed and completely covered in cerecloth (waxed fabric used for wrapping corpses) before it was shown publicly, and exhibited only superficially.
So the evidence that led everyone to believe Edward II was dead at that time – and which was widely held as fact until 2005 – depends entirely on that initial message from Lord Berkeley. However, Lord Berkeley admitted in parliament three years later (in November 1330) that he had not previously heard about Edward’s death. We can therefore have no confidence in the reliability of his original message. If he did not know about the death of the ex-king in his custody, how could he have faithfully reported it?
Given that the hundreds of documents attesting to the death are based on this one unreliable message, it behoves us to consider the evidence for possible alternative events, including testimonies of his survival. There are multiple items to consider.
First, there is Lord Berkeley’s own testimony, which implies that the king could still have been alive in 1330. Second, an original letter from the highly regarded archbishop of York states that the latter had received “certain news” that Edward was still alive in January 1330, and the archbishop consequently made efforts to rescue him.
Third, Lord Pecche took part in a plot to free Edward from Corfe Castle in Dorset in 1330. This is significant because Lord Pecche had been in charge of that castle from 1325 to 1329, so had the means to ascertain whether or not Edward II was being held there. Fourth, the Earl of Kent, Edward II’s respected half-brother, was sentenced to death in parliament for trying to rescue Edward from Corfe Castle and make him king again in March 1330.
Fifth, there is an extant copy of a letter written by the secretary of Luca Fieschi, a friend of Edward II, who claimed to have met him in the disguise of a pilgrim at the papal court in 1331. This letter gave a detailed version of Edward’s account, telling how he had been taken by his gaoler from Berkeley to Corfe Castle, then sent to Ireland and only released after the fall of Roger Mortimer, the man who dethroned him. There are at least three other information streams that attest to Edward’s survival after 1330.
These points should be seen in the context of a huge number of otherwise inexplicable circumstantial details that historians have traditionally ignored, such as Edward III’s failure to prosecute Sir John Maltravers for failing in his duty to keep Edward II safely when he was in his care. Taken together, they strongly suggest that Edward III’s maintenance of the lie that his father was dead was a political convenience – one welcomed by everyone who trusted the young king and feared the renewal of the unrest brought about by Edward II during his disastrous reign.
Nicholas Vincent:
Ian Mortimer makes the case that we should suspend disbelief and allow that evidence points to the survival of Edward II beyond the supposed date of his death, in September 1327. I agree that the evidence here requires careful consideration. I disagree that it is “fundamentally flawed” or that it points inexorably towards the king’s survival.
To disprove a negation is never an easy task. Nonetheless, consider the following. All of the main political actors at the time behaved, after September 1327, as if the king were dead. There was a public funeral at Gloucester. When in 1330 Lord Berkeley denied any knowledge of Edward II’s death, he was on trial for his life, desperate to prove that he had been absent from Berkeley. He did not deny that others had carried out the deed.
As late as 1330, the archbishop of York, Sir John Pecche and Edward II’s half-brother, Edmund of Woodstock, may all have hoped (or feared) that Edward might still be alive. Edmund was executed for a deluded attempt to free the late king from captivity at Corfe – but Edmund had many enemies.
In 1322 Edmund had played a leading role in the execution of his cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, and in the following year had seized back Berkeley Castle for the king. After 1326 his alliance with the new regime was never secure, and his trial and execution were very much acts of political vengeance. It is surely significant that even the public executioner, believing that Edmund was too naive to merit death, refused to behead him – he was kept waiting for a whole day until at last a common criminal was found who was prepared to wield the axe. Indeed, Roger Mortimer, when tried later that year on the charge of assuming royal power, was accused of deliberately duping Edmund into the belief that the late king still lived.
As for the Fieschi letter, or Edward III’s later meetings with a ‘hermit’ who claimed to be his father, these fit all too neatly into a wider pattern. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the legend of the hidden or undying king remained a powerful one – in political reality, not just in the legends of Arthur, Charlemagne or Frederick Barbarossa. King Harold, it was rumoured, had not been killed at Hastings but lived on as a hermit outside Chester into the 1180s (by which time he would have been more than 160 years old). The German emperor Henry V, far from dying in 1125, was likewise rumoured to have lived on as a hermit.
As with Edward II after 1327, there were sound political reasons to encourage such rumours, not least to discredit the dynasties that had thereafter ‘usurped’ the succession. Count Baldwin of Flanders, Latin emperor of Constantinople, disappeared into Greek captivity in 1205, assumed dead. The regency government that he left behind had little incentive to confirm his demise; hence, as late as 1225, when a man appeared in Flanders claiming to be the real Baldwin, many were prepared to believe him. He led a revolt against the real Baldwin’s daughter, until the following year when he was unmasked as a Burgundian pretender and executed.
In the Middle Ages, rumour was a powerful weapon. In 1263, Edward II’s grandfather, King Henry III of England, was rumoured to have died. So keen were various people to credit this that the annalist of Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire inserted it as a certain fact in his chronicle, penning a rhyming obituary notice. In fact, Henry did not die until 1272.
As for the ‘hermit’ claiming to be Edward II, whom Edward III is said to have met many years later in Flanders, consider this: I live for much of the year in Paris, where one of our neighbourhood beggars regularly declares himself king of Poland. Rather than denounce him as a pretender, or insist that he share the fate of Lambert Simnel or Perkin Warbeck (both imposters who challenged Henry VII in his claim to the throne), I greet him with a friendly wave and a murmured “Your Majesty”. Perkin Warbeck, it may be remembered, was executed in 1499 only after strenuous attempts to tolerate his mythomania. Lambert Simnel, having dropped all pretence, was allowed to live out his life as a minor court servant. He died in c1530, four decades after his coronation in 1487 in Dublin (the only English coronation ever held there) as ‘King Edward VI’.
Ian Mortimer:
This argument is not about ‘suspending disbelief’ – it is about hard information. It is not about what happened to Baldwin of Flanders or Perkin Warbeck – or any other postmortem royal claimant.
It is about what happened to Edward II in 1327. One cannot use the cases of 13th and 15th-century pretenders as evidence for the events of 1327 – that is reductionism. It is like saying: “These cats look grey, therefore all cats are grey.” Nor should we rely on circumstantial evidence when we have direct evidence for how the story of the death came to be circulated.
The key thing that Professor Vincent should appreciate is why he thinks Edward II died in 1327. He relies on the fact that “all the main political actors in 1327 behaved… as if the king were dead”. But why did those political actors behave in that way? Because they had been told Edward was dead by the royal household at Lincoln on 24 September. Their behaviour is therefore merely circumstantial evidence: they weren’t at Berkeley themselves.
Why did the royal household believe Edward was dead? Because Lord Berkeley had sent them news to that effect. As I have explained, the dates of sending and receipt of information prove that there was no check on this news – and, three years later, the sender himself stated he had not heard about the death. The entire edifice of evidence that Professor Vincent trusts was thus founded on a self-confessed lie.
The important aspect here is the methodology. The traditional methodology is basically the same as that employed by those who maintain that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Proponents select the circumstantial evidence that best tallies with their preferred belief, and they ignore the testimonies of those contemporaries whose information was obtained at first hand. Every historian should resist such methods, even if the results challenge a long-accepted orthodoxy.
It’s a great shame that here we have a senior academic dismissing a scholarly reappraisal of the inconsistent contemporary evidence. He does this even though the said reappraisal has gone through a peer-review process and been published by The English Historical Review.
Nicholas Vincent:
Ian Mortimer demands that I ask myself why I think that Edward II died in 1327. I think that Edward died because people at the time declared this to be so. They also behaved as if it were so. For much the same reasons, I believe that Barack Obama is president of the US and that water flows downhill. I regard the evidence of Edward’s survival to be unreliable, and I believe (foolishly, according to Mortimer; prudently in my reckoning) that this survival story fits in to a wider pattern of such stories that extends across the Middle Ages and into more recent times.
In my opinion, it has not been proved that Edward II cheated death in 1327 any more than Elvis Presley can be proved to be alive and well and living in Hemel Hempstead. Many people believe that Elvis still lives.
Ian Mortimer believes that Edward II did not die at Berkeley Castle. In both cases, a passionate belief is founded upon evidence that unbelievers consider implausible. I remain an unbeliever.
Dr Ian Mortimer is the author of numerous history books and a fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia.
Further reading: Medieval Intrigue by Ian Mortimer (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2010) includes the peer-reviewed paper on Edward II mentioned in this article. A Brief History of Britain 1066–1485 by Nicholas Vincent (Robinson, 2011) covers the reign and ousting of Edward II**
This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Books interview: Edward III and the triumph of Englandhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/books-interview-edward-iii-and-the-triumph-of-england/2013-09-08T11:42:51.000ZDo we get a sense of Edward’s personality early in his reign?
You begin to, yes, but really what’s more interesting was the group of people around him and the way in which he interacted with them. What emerges fairly rapidly – and this is a theme throughout the book – is that Edward’s great strength was that he didn’t interact with people in the way that
Edward II and Richard II did, which was to say “I am the king”. Edward was very much one of a group. He was first among equals, certainly at this stage in his reign.
Would you say that, in battle, he was stronger as a fighter or a strategist?
He is actually quite an all-rounder, and he’s clearly a thinker who is well advised and takes advice. I think that’s possibly one of the key things about Edward. Whether it’s about the reform of the law or what to do next in the middle of the battle, he doesn’t say “I know what do”: he sets the agenda but then lets other people work on it too and takes advice. It’s only in relation to parliament that he sometimes refuses to take advice, because it’s not an organised body and is quite difficult to deal with. But his great strength really is this business of acting together with people rather than going off on his own trail.
Moving ahead to the battle of Crécy, what kinds of tactics were used?
The important thing about Crécy is that Edward was clearly, in my view, using tactics and weapons that had never been seen on a battlefield before. And new evidence has come to light that indicates that Edward was actually fighting from inside a ring of carts. He was using archers, which in terms of continental warfare was completely new, and he was using guns, which were also completely new. He constructed this ring of carts in open country because there was nowhere that was suitable on the battlefield for the English technique of getting a defensive position with a narrow approach that archers could cover, so he created it. This is doubtless going to be argued about, but at least I’ve put it on the table for other people to knock it down!
What allowed him to be able to use all of these innovations at the same time?
Edward was interested in new technology: he had one of the first public clocks in England at Windsor and he liked new technology and new things. The archers, meanwhile, were an innovation in terms of continental warfare but were something that the English had particularly developed.
The other thing is that Edward was very good at improvising. The ring of carts was an improvisation in response to a situation using something that was known about – you can trace this ring of carts idea back into barbarian attacks on the Romans in the eighth century – but ringing them together so that you couldn’t break in, and the way that he used them to place the archers, that shows that he’s someone who can think and improvise. It may have been one of his knights who suggested it, of course, but he was open to this kind of suggestion.
What do we know about the Company of the Garter, which Edward founded?
This is rather sweeping, but nobody ever seems to have actually read the statutes before writing about the subject! There’s one military clause, which says you’ve got to be
a respectable knight, but it’s very vaguely phrased and is rather like saying that you’ve got to be a gentleman before you can be admitted to a club. There’s nothing that says they will hold a tournament every year on Saint George’s Day; they didn’t. There was one at the very beginning, and one that happens to coincide with Saint George’s
Day, but that’s all the evidence for regular tournaments, so it’s not a chivalric order of knighthood. What the statutes are is a great table of how many masses an earl or a knight has to pay for a deceased companion. So it’s an absolutely straight religious fraternity, like a guild of knights.
How important were tournaments as a social and political tool?
I think because of Edward’s own interests, they were extremely important. At one level, they were a bit like playing golf today: it was where you met and talked to people socially. But they had other real advantages, because they taught people how to work and fight together as a team.
What caused the downturn in his fortunes later in his reign?
I think Edward’s political strategy was quite limited. He didn’t understand how to bring the natives over, so to speak. He never managed to hold the people that came over to the English side, or he got the ones who were pretty devious anyway, such as Robert of Artois, who were more of a nuisance than they were worth. So he ended up with a successful English invasion of France but no French base and no French clientele, and he never managed to build it up.
So Edward’s political strategy was flawed only in that he hadn’t been able to solve something that very few people had, which was how to conquer a country which was basically, root and branch, hostile, and was also hostile because they don’t particularly like the idea, irrespective of nationality, of someone ruling them when they were used to being ruled with a pretty light rein.
You write a lot about sources. How difficult is it researching this period?
This is what I tried to show by starting the book by asking how we know what we know. I don’t think anyone’s quite set it out in this way before, but it is absolutely basic to our understanding of medieval history.
You get some very intelligent chroniclers who are really thinking about what they’re doing, not just putting down what they hear. There’s an author called Gilles Li Muisis who writes a wonderful passage about how, when you’re in the middle of battle, you really don’t have a clue what’s going on. It’s hugely useful to have somebody who is trying, within 10 years of events, to assess what happened.
Do you hope this book will change our understanding of Edward?
I wouldn’t claim to make anybody change their understanding, but what I hope they would do is go away and look at it all again and show me where I’m wrong!
Richard Barber has written widely on medieval history. He is the author of Edward III and the Triumph of England (Allen Lane)
This article was first published in the September 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>A fresh look at Edward IIIhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-fresh-look-at-edward-iii/2013-08-19T15:54:14.000ZAuthor and publisher Richard Barber describes the life and career of one of England's most successful medieval kings, Edward III, based on research for his book, Edward III and the Triumph of England: The Battle of Crécy and the Company of the Garter.
]]>