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10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history
Who was the first king of Scotland? What language did people in Ancient Scotland speak? And has Scotland really never been conquered? Dr William Knox from the University of St Andrews investigates...
In his book, Scottish History For Dummies, Knox explores the story of Scotland and its place within the historical narratives of Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. Here, writing for HistoryExtra, he reveals 10 surprising facts about Scottish history... There is no genetically pure or original Scot There is no common ancestral or genetic heritage that links the peoples of Scotland. The country was a patchwork quilt of various peoples grouped together in tribes who certainly never thought of themselves as Scottish. They owed allegiance only to their kith and kin, but in the campaigns against Roman imperialism they built federations that laid the basis of kingdoms. Ancient Scotland was made up of four separate groups: Angles, Britons, Picts and Gaels (or Scoti), who each spoke a different language. Latin became the common language of the whole country only after the Christianisation of Scotland in the 6th century AD. No, the Celts weren't primitive hooligans with terrible table manners... Kenneth McAlpin (810–858) was not, as is popularly claimed, the first king of Scotland What McAlpin did was in 842 take advantage of the Picts who had been severely weakened militarily by punitive Viking raids, and unite the kingdom of the Gaels with that of Pictavia. But while he ruled over the whole of Scotland north of the river Forth, large parts of the country were still in the hands of the Vikings in the north and Islands, and in the south the Anglo-Saxons ruled. But McAlpin was referred to as king of the Picts – a title conferred on him at his coronation on Moot Hill at Scone, Perthshire, in 843 AD. It was not until the reign of Donald II (889–900) that the monarch became known as the ri Alban (king of Alba). McAlpin’s achievement was to create a long-lasting dynasty that gradually extended the territorial borders of Scotland both north and south, but it was not until 1469 that what we know as Scotland today was established. Listen | Professor Tom Devine explores one of the most traumatic moments in Scottish history and explain how a number of misconceptions still exist around the Highland Clearances William the Lion (1165–1214) was not, as his name suggests, a strong and fearless king Although he was on the throne longer than any other Scottish monarch, with the exception of James VI and I, never was a king so humiliated as William. Captured by the English, he gained his release only by signing the treaty of Falaise in December 1174. By the terms of the treaty he only ruled Scotland with the permission of the English crown. The treaty lasted 15 years and was repealed when the Scots agreed to pay a hefty sum of money. But the humiliation didn’t end there, as in 1209 he was again forced to pay homage to John I. Therefore, his contribution was to heraldry rather than statecraft; he put the lion rampant on the Scottish flag. Scottish history: 9 steps from Union to Referendum View oEmbed on the source website William Wallace was not the only patriotic leader of the resistance to the English occupation of Scotland Equally important was Andrew de Moray. In the winter of 1297 he escaped from an English prison and immediately began to organise the resistance in the north of Scotland against English rule. By the end of the year his forces were in control of Morayshire and had taken possession of the principal castles of the region, including Elgin and Inverness. De Moray’s success in the north was matched by Wallace’s in the south. After the defeat of the English at Stirling Bridge in September 1297 de Moray was mentioned along with Wallace in letters as ‘the leaders of the army and of the realm of Scotland’. However, victory came at a price: de Moray was wounded at Stirling and died two months later. Some historians have argued that too much of the credit for this has gone to Wallace, and that the successful campaign of 1297 owed more to de Moray than it did to his more celebrated contemporary. 7 myths about the battle of Culloden busted 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites The Scots never won a battle when they were favourites At Flodden Field in 1513 the largest Scottish army ever assembled to invade England was annihilated by a much smaller English army that inflicted 10,000 causalities on the Scots in just two hours. Again at Solway Moss in 1542 a Scottish force of 15,000 men was defeated by 3,000 English soldiers – and 1,200 Scots were taken prisoner. The defeat was so demoralising that James V took to his bed and died of shame. When the Scots were the underdogs they did best. At the battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297 a vastly outnumbered Scottish army inflicted a devastating defeat on the English. Just 17 years later at Bannockburn an English army three times that of the Scots was decimated by the forces of Robert the Bruce. In 1745 the rag tag army of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, walked through Scotland and in to England as far as Derby where it inexplicably turned face and marched home with London within its grasp. When was the last battle between England and Scotland? The proud boast that Scotland has never been conquered is nonsense This view is part of the folklore of the Scottish people handed down from one generation to the next. There are of course a few grains of truth contained in the assertion: the Romans were frustrated in their attempts to conquer Caledonia and so resorted to building walls to keep the warring tribes from attacking them. Likewise Edward I, the hammer of the Scots, occupied large swathes of Scottish territory, but that only sparked a resistance that ended with the defeat of Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314. The patriotic Scottish boast regarding national prowess begins to look more than a little threadbare when we take account of the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland in the 1650s: Cromwell’s New Model Army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scots at Dunbar in 1650, and followed it up with another at Worcester a year later – 2,000 Scots were killed and more than 10,000 were taken prisoner, including almost all the Scottish leaders. Scotland was incorporated into 'the free state and Commonwealth of England', with 29 out of 31 shires and 44 of the 58 royal burghs assenting to what was known as the ‘Tender of Union’. Under the terms of the Cromwellian union, the Scots were given 30 seats (half of them held by English officers) in the Westminster parliament. With General George Monck in charge, the conquest of Scotland was complete, and it was only Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the political chaos that followed it that allowed Scotland to regain its sovereignty. Scotland on the brink: the nation's final years of independence Why did Scotland join the 1707 Union with England? Flora MacDonald (who became famous for helping Bonnie Prince Charlie escape to France after he was beaten at the battle of Culloden, the final confrontation of the 1745 Jacobite Rising) died a Unionist and Hanoverian Flora MacDonald was and is a Scottish icon ever associated with the romantic but essentially doomed attempt by the Stuart dynasty to reclaim the throne of Great Britain in 1745. After the adventure collapsed following defeat at Culloden in 1746, Charles Stuart took refuge on the island of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. Dressed as Flora’s Irish maid, Betty Burke, Charles made his escape. MacDonald was arrested for her part in the escape and spent some time in the Tower of London, but it was only temporary. Under the amnesty of 1747 she was released from captivity as a prisoner on parole, and lived with Lady Primrose in London. She became a celebrity, and among the many fashionable people who visited her was Frederick Prince of Wales, eldest son of George II. At the age of 28 Flora married Allan MacDonald of Kingsburgh and moved to the Isle of Skye. Difficult economic times saw the couple emigrate to North Carolina in 1774. When the American Wars of Independence broke out in 1776, her husband and five sons fought not on the side of the rebels but for George III’s royal British army! This gives some credence to MacDonald’s claim that she had helped Charles Stuart out of compassion rather than politics. Her husband was taken prisoner and she left for Scotland. He joined her two years later, and the family took up residence on Skye once more where she died in 1790 a British patriot. Listen | Historian Sir John Elliott explore the long histories of Scottish and Catalan nationalism. He considers some of the key similarities and differences between the two The Labour Party was not a wholly working-class party in Scotland Although working people constitute the largest section of society north of the border, they were not always supporters of Labour. Most workers in Scotland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries voted Liberal and it was only after the First World War that the vote went to Labour. However, it was never hegemonic, as the religious divisions in Scotland ensured there was always a sizeable Protestant working-class Unionist (a party that merged with the Conservatives in 1965) vote. The party itself in Scotland was an alliance of skilled male workers and the middle classes –as such it preached against class-based politics, such as those advocated by the far left. A study of the social backgrounds of inter-war Labour MPs found that around 45 per cent of them were from non-manual backgrounds; a social trend that was to intensify after 1945. 7 facts about Robert Burns, Scotland's national bard Sectarianism was not just a west coast phenomenon Most people would identify Catholic and Protestant rivalry with Glasgow and its satellite towns. But the bitterest conflicts in the 20th century took place not in Glasgow, but in middle-class Edinburgh in the 1930s. Led by rabble-rouser John Cormack, leader of the Protestant Action Society, Catholics faced harassment and violence. Employers were pressurised into sacking Catholic employees, priests were spat on in the streets, and Sunday congregations were subject to verbal and physical assault. On top of this, huge demonstrations were held to disrupt important events in the Catholic Church’s calendar. The high water mark was the riot of 1935, when Cormack led a mob of 20,000 Protestants baying for blood against the Eucharist Congress that was taking place at the Catholic priory in Morningside. The activism was rewarded with seats on the Edinburgh Town Council; indeed, Protestant Action in the municipal elections of 1936 won 31.97 per cent of the Edinburgh vote, pushed Labour into third place and returned nine councillors. But the popularity of Cormack and Protestant Action was short-lived, as the outbreak of war in 1939 pushed sectarianism on to the sidelines of politics in Edinburgh. In spite of this, Cormack held his seat on the Town Council until his death in the 1960s. Did the Scottish mass-murdering cannibal Sawney Bean actually exist? Hell at Glencoe: what led to the massacre in the Scottish Highlands? Outside of Canada, the central belt of Scotland was the highest recipient of American inward investment anywhere in the world between 1945 and 1970 This little strip of land in the middle of Scotland saw the influx of giant American corporations such as IBM, Timex, National Cash Registers, Caterpillar and many more besides. Why did they come? For three good reasons: firstly, it opened up British and European markets; secondly, there existed a highly skilled and educated pool of workers earning historically relatively low wages; and, thirdly, there were no linguistic barriers, as English was the common tongue. William Knox is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Scottish Historical Research, University of St Andrews. He is the author of seven books and more than 30 articles covering the past 300 years of Scottish history, including Scottish History For Dummies (published by Wiley, July 2014) To read more about Scottish history, click here. This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2014
The battle of Bannockburn: Robert Bruce's fight for freedom
The battle of Bannockburn (23–24 June 1314) was fought to the south-east of Stirling Castle in central Scotland. It was the climax of a brutal civil war, pitting the Scots under Robert the Bruce against the English under Edward II. Here, Fiona Watson explains the circumstances surrounding the battle and reveals how the conflict was later recast as an epic struggle for liberation...
There 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
9 of the most overrated battles in history (and one underrated one)
From Bosworth and Bannockburn to the Battle of Britain, historian Sean Lang examines nine British battles accorded a decisive importance that, he argues, does not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny…
To be overrated, a battle must be famous and have been generally regarded as decisive or of great historical significance. Of course, some battles, like those of the Crimean War, never had much reputation to start with; others, such as El Alamein, are genuinely debatable: a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, it helped turn the tide in the Second World War’s north African campaign and was of genuine value in stiffening British morale. Judging a battle to be overrated does not mean it was insignificant; still less does it deny the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought in it. It simply means that it has been accorded a decisive importance that does not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny. For reasons of space, I have restricted this exploration to battles from British history; other peoples can doubtless compile similar lists of their own. Julius Caesar’s invasions of Britain, 55 and 54 BC The cheeky satirical volume 1066 and All That gave 55 BC as one of the two memorable dates in English history (the other, of course, being 1066), but a memorable date does not prove a battle’s significance. What was Julius Caesar actually doing in Britain? What was his landing supposed to achieve? Caesar himself says it was to punish the Britons for the aid they sent the Gallic tribes during his conquest of Gaul in 58–50 BC, which would make it a sort of punitive expedition, like the ones the British would later launch in their own empire. Either way, it cannot be called a conquest, or even, properly speaking, an invasion. One of the problems with Caesar’s raid, as with so much ancient history, is that we are so heavily dependent on tainted written sources – in this case Caesar’s own written account. Corroborative archaeological evidence for the scale of Caesar’s expedition is relatively sparse. We do know that Caesar’s account was a propaganda exercise to promote his own bid for power, and that it would have suited his purposes to ‘big up’ what was either a large raid or an embarrassingly aborted invasion. Either way, its significance seems to have been overblown. Read more about Caesar's British gamble Bannockburn, 1314 Robert the Bruce’s victory over King Edward II at the battle of Bannockburn was unquestionably important, but it wasn’t as decisive as many like to claim. For one thing, Edward II was one of the most incompetent men ever to occupy the English throne; it is hard to imagine his father, Edward I, the fearsome ‘Hammer of the Scots’, walking so blithely into Robert the Bruce’s trap. In the short term, the English were so completely defeated that Bannockburn really did seem to have established Scottish independence. But not for long. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history The English kings’ claim to overlordship of Scotland remained in force, so in 1320 Bruce had the Declaration of Arbroath drawn up, addressed to the Pope and asserting Scotland’s right to be a free kingdom. It was needed, because although Bruce got the English to accept Scottish independence in 1328, just over a year later he was dead, leaving his five-year-old son, David II, on the throne. The English promptly invaded, forced the king into exile, put Edward Balliol on the throne and annexed the southern part of the kingdom. It was the end of the reign of the House of Bruce. Later Scottish nationalism was to accord Bannockburn a decisive significance that would not have been so obvious to people in Scotland at the time. Bosworth, 1485 It is still popularly believed that the battle of Bosworth, the battle in which Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took the throne from the Yorkist King Richard III, marked the end of the Wars of the Roses and therefore of the English Middle Ages. It did nothing of the sort. Militarily, the battle hung on the decision of Lord Stanley as to which side to support; he chose Henry Tudor, which sealed the contest, though the real significance of the day lay in the fact that Richard III himself was killed. It gave Henry just enough of an opening to try to make his rule permanent, but by no means did it indicate that his position was secure. Treachery at Bosworth: what really brought down Richard III There were plenty of people with a stronger claim to the throne than Henry Tudor, and he knew it. The Yorkists were a genuine threat, especially as they had good contacts abroad, in France, Burgundy, Ireland and Scotland. It’s too easy for us nowadays to underestimate the importance of the Yorkist pretenders to Henry’s throne: the battle of Stoke Field in 1487, in which Henry VII faced the Irish-backed Yorkists under the pretender Lambert Simnel, required him to mount a robust defence and has a better claim to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Even after Henry’s victory, the Yorkists were able to maintain their military and diplomatic pressure through a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck. Bosworth’s importance in the popular imagination comes from the significance given to it by Henry’s skilful use of propaganda, rather than from events on the battlefield. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-638913846-1-153b046.jpg" width="6557" height="6717" alt="An illustration of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, a clash which historian Sean Lang argues is overrated. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An illustration of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, a clash which historian Sean Lang argues is overrated. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The Armada, 1588 The defeat of the Spanish Armada was for so long such an iconic moment in English history that it might seem perverse to include it here. Certainly, English naval gunnery was superior, both in technology and in its execution, and as an English propaganda coup, the Armada campaign was a masterpiece: the narrative of the little English ships nipping in and out between the ungainly Spanish galleons, of Drake’s fireship attack at Calais, and above all of Queen Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury, has stirred patriotic hearts for centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-463909425-0345deb.jpg" width="3699" height="2827" alt="A portrait of the Spanish Armada. "The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation," says Sean Lang. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="A portrait of the Spanish Armada. "The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation," says Sean Lang. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The reality was very different. The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation, and it was acknowledged even at the time that what really destroyed the Armada was the stormy weather that drove it northwards to be wrecked on the rocky Scottish and Irish coasts. More importantly, the battle did not establish immediate English naval supremacy, as so many have assumed: the English fleet dispersed shortly afterwards and many of the sailors were soon destitute. In 1596–97 the Spanish sent two further invasion armadas, which were again defeated more by the storms in the Channel than by the English fleet. The defeat of the Armada was a major blow to Spanish prestige, but the English had no call to be complacent. Was the Spanish campaign doomed to fail from the start? Plassey, 1757 For many years, Plassey was up there with Blenheim and Waterloo as a triumph of British arms – a “miracle”, as one historian once called it. This was the battle at which Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’) defeated the treacherous nawab (ruler) of Bengal, avenged the atrocity of the Black Hole of Calcutta and established British rule over India. The trouble is, almost none of that version of events is accurate. The nawab had driven the British from Calcutta and, in an event still hotly disputed, some of the prisoners he took died in the airless room in which they were confined – the famous ‘Black Hole’. He also flirted with the idea of a French alliance, so Clive was sent to retake Calcutta and deal with the French. He did both of these, and that should have been the end of the campaign – only Clive sensed an opportunity to stage a palace coup and replace the nawab with one of his subordinates, Mir Jafar. The result was a strange non-battle: although his forces heavily outnumbered Clive’s, the nawab didn’t know which of his own men he could trust, while Clive, for the same reason, didn’t want to press home an attack in case he was killing the wrong men. What fighting there was began on the initiative of a British officer who disobeyed Clive’s orders and launched an attack. Politically, Plassey was of the first importance, but as a military exercise it has been heavily overrated. The chaotic conquest of India New Orleans, 1815 New Orleans is a battle more overrated in the United States than in Britain, where few people have ever heard of it. It was the climax of the curious Anglo-American War of 1812–14, a sideshow to the main military event of the time, the war against Napoleon. It must rank as one of the most needless conflicts in history: American merchants were caught between the wartime blockades that Britain and France imposed on each other, and opinion was divided in the United States over whether to fight France or Britain. In the end, British impressment of US sailors tipped the balance in favour of war with Britain, but the war began badly for the Americans: their invasion of Canada was defeated and the British were able to outmanoeuvre them and take Washington DC itself, burning the presidential mansion down as they did so. Trafalgar, a futile victory? Why Nelson's triumph didn't turn the tide on Napoleon American history myths: 7 things people get wrong A war over wartime trade restrictions becomes pointless when that war ends, so when the European war ended in 1814, there was nothing left for Britain and the US to fight about. A number of Wellington’s Peninsular War veterans were shipped over to the States, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, a competent rather than a gifted commander. The British attack on New Orleans, where the American commander was Andrew Jackson, was not well planned, and Pakenham was himself killed in the fighting. It was certainly an American victory; however, since peace between the two countries had already been signed (the news had not yet crossed the Atlantic), the battle cannot be said to have decided the war one way or the other. It was undoubtedly a source of patriotic pride to the Americans, but of much less significance to the British. Rorke’s Drift, 1879 The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was as blatant an example of aggressive war as one can find: Britain had no particular quarrel with the Zulu people before invading their land. Moreover, the British commander, Lord Chelmsford, was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Zulus and committed the elementary blunder of dividing his force when he could not be certain where his enemy was. That enemy turned out to be attacking Chelmsford’s base camp at Isandlwana, where the British force holding it was wiped out. To the Victorian public, Isandlwana was a defeat of unimaginable proportions. All the more reason, therefore, to make the most of the more successful engagement that followed, at Rorke’s Drift. The attack on the tiny mission station at Rorke’s drift was led by Zulu commander Prince Dabulamanzi, in defiance of strict orders not to attack fortified positions, especially along the frontier with British territory, as Rorke’s Drift was. He and his men had played no part at Isandlwana and they were keen to ‘wash their spears’ in British blood. The defence was led by two junior officers, Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, who displayed an almost impressive lack of military imagination, missed the chance to evacuate and just sat there, waiting for the Zulus to attack. In the event, even rudimentary fortifications of mealie bags and biscuit boxes proved enough protection to break the Zulu attack, which was called off before British reinforcements could arrive. No fewer than 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift, and the 1964 film Zulu helped to embed the battle in national consciousness; in reality it was an unnecessary battle, badly planned on both sides, and given a huge importance it never really deserved. 9 medieval battles more significant than Agincourt The Siege of Mafeking, 1899–1900 When the Boer republics launched pre-emptive strikes into British territory at the start of the Anglo-Boer War towards the end of 1899, they managed to catch the British on the hop and besiege them in a series of townships, including Kimberley, Ladysmith and the railway junction at Mafeking. The British commander at Mafeking, Robert Baden-Powell, having got himself unnecessarily trapped there, went on to make the most of it by a brilliant news management campaign, presenting himself as the plucky lad at the wicket, gallantly blocking some fiendish Boer bowling. When Mafeking was finally relieved by troops under Field Marshal Roberts in May 1900, the British public went wild with joy and relief. The importance of the siege of Mafeking was always heavily overstated: it gave the Boers some initial propaganda leverage, but in military terms it tied too many troops down and left them unprepared to face the main British attack when it came. The British presented the siege as a sort of test of manly character, though it was of limited importance to the outcome of the war. It also gave them a sense of moral superiority, which was soon undermined by the revelations about the appalling conditions in the concentration camps in which the British held the local Boer population. The Battle of Britain, 1940 You might think you need your eyes tested, or me my brain examined, to see the Battle of Britain in this list. The crucial role of the RAF in denying the Germans control of the air in 1940 and therefore persuading Adolf Hitler to abandon his invasion plans is so well known that it might seem almost sacrilegious to question it. There is, indeed, no cause to question the importance of the battle, but was it solely responsible for saving Britain from invasion? Not quite. For a ruthless dictator, Hitler was surprisingly sensitive about heavy losses in battle and his navy had taken a pounding in 1940 during the invasion of Norway. The difficulties of launching an amphibious invasion across the Channel were hardly a secret, and he knew the appalling damage that even a relatively small squadron of British ships could inflict on an exposed German fleet of invasion barges if it caught them mid-Channel. The loss of life would be devastating, and so would the blow to German prestige. Had the Germans been able to get hold of the French fleet the odds might have been evened, but Churchill’s ruthless decision to sink it at Mers-el-Kébir denied Hitler that possibility. German control of the air would certainly take a heavy toll on the Royal Navy, but it only needed a few British planes disputing the skies with the Luftwaffe to allow the Navy to destroy the German army in the West. It was probably never worth the risk and Hitler almost certainly knew it. The Battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few And one underrated battle: Jutland, 1916 The battle of Jutland was probably the single most important British victory of the First World War, yet not only is it often underrated, some books even suggest it was a British defeat. It was nothing of the sort. When Winston Churchill called Admiral Jellicoe, in charge of the British Grand Fleet, the one man who could lose the war in an afternoon, he was speaking the truth. If Britain lost control of the sea, the Allies would lose the war. If the Germans controlled the Channel, they could cut British military aid to France, land troops on the undefended French coast and launch a devastating attack in the Allied rear. Submarines could certainly take their toll on Allied shipping, but the Germans’ key to landing a decisive blow lay with the battleships of their High Seas Fleet. All they had to do was command the sea. And that is why Jutland was so important. Jutland was certainly not decisive in the way Nelson’s battles were: the British actually lost more ships than the Germans, in many cases through poor ship design, and the Germans escaped to fight another day. Except, they didn’t fight another day. As an American journalist put it, the German fleet had assaulted its jailer and was back in jail. Where it stayed until the end of the war – thanks to Jutland. Sean Lang is a senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising in the history of the British empire. He is also a professional playwright and a regular broadcaster on radio and television. You can follow him on Twitter @sf_lang
Robert the Bruce (1274–1329) proclaimed his right to the Scottish throne in 1306 and is remembered as a hero of Scotland who waged a highly successful guerrilla war against occupying English forces. He has been portrayed numerous times in film and television, most recently by Chris Pine in Netflix's original film, Outlaw King. But how much do you know about the Scottish king? Here, medieval expert Chris Brown explores the true facts of Robert the Bruce's life, from his supposed birth in England to his landmark victory over the English forces of Edward II at the battle of Bannockburn…
What most people think they know about Robert the Bruce can be compressed into a single paragraph: He was born in Writtle, Essex (his family were great landowners in England as well as Scotland) and he was a French-speaking Anglo-Norman. He was perfectly willing to serve Edward I (the ‘Hammer of the Scots’) as a client king, if Edward would put him on the throne. He murdered John Comyn, a major rival for the Scottish crown, at Greyfriars church in Dumfries and later embarked on a lengthy guerrilla war, ostensibly because Scottish troops did not have such good horses or armour as their English counterparts. In June 1314, at the battle of Bannockburn, he managed to score his one great victory against the English – with the help of Knights Templar. During the battle, the English attacked Robert the Bruce’s fortified position up a hill and through a bog and, despite being mounted on a mere pony, he dispatched an English knight in single combat. With his war concluded, he promptly died of leprosy. Read more: Robert the Bruce: champion of Scotland or murderous usurper? Bannockburn: Robert Bruce's fight for freedom That’s pretty much it, isn’t it? Yet, with the exception of the murder of John Comyn, the entire paragraph is what historians might call ‘rubbish’; there is not a word of truth in it. Here’s a closer look at some ‘facts’ about the Scottish king… Edward I and the ‘Great Cause’ The Bruce family first came to prominence in 1291–2, after Robert Bruce of Annandale (grandfather of the man who would become king of Scotland in 1306) was rejected as the next king of Scotland, in favour of John Balliol. After King Alexander III died and left no heir, Edward I of England was invited to decide who would be the next king of Scotland, given that there was some doubt over who – out of 13 contenders – had the best claim. The process is often described as the ‘Great Cause’, and it is widely believed that Edward deliberately chose John Balliol because the king was confident that Balliol would be more amenable to Edward’s desires than Bruce. Although many English historians (and a few Scottish antiquarians) have repeated the claim that Edward I was invited to arbitrate between the claimants, this is simply not true. Edward I was invited to conduct a court of enquiry, not to make a decision. The court, not including the king, consisted of 104 auditors (jurors), of whom 40 were chosen by the Balliol party, 40 by the Bruces and the remaining 24 were chosen by Edward himself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-51241995-9971cb4.jpg" width="2171" height="2865" alt="An engraving of 13th-century king of England Edward I, who was known as the 'Hammer of the Scots'. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="An engraving of 13th-century king of England Edward I, who was known as the 'Hammer of the Scots'. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Inviting Edward to oversee the process made perfectly good sense at the time. Edward was a noted jurist who took an interest in legal topics and he had had a good relationship with the late king of Scotland, Alexander III. In practice Edward manipulated the situation shamelessly. He was the root cause of a conflict that would run long after he died and that would poison Anglo-Scottish relations for centuries. But Edward did not choose John Balliol; the auditors quite correctly decided that John Balliol had the better dynastic claim and appointed him accordingly. Had they chosen Robert Bruce, Edward would have behaved just as badly and there is no reason to assume that the eventual general outcome would have been markedly different. An English-born, French-speaking Scots hero? If the popular perception of the ‘Great Cause’ is abject nonsense, what can we say about the younger Robert, born in 1274? We can comfortably reject the claim that he was born in Essex as a simplistic piece of English nationalism. Robert’s father – also Robert – spent a good deal of time in England, mostly at Carlisle, where he served as constable for Edward I. This sort of arrangement had been common enough in the 13th century when England and Scotland were – by medieval standards at least – pretty good neighbours. They did not really have very much to do with one another; they were not much inclined to interfere in one another’s internal affairs; and the border was peaceable, settled and long-recognised. Read more: 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history Flodden 1513: the biggest ever Anglo-Scottish battle There was a modest amount of social intercourse (John de Balliol and Devorguilla de Galloway founded Balliol College in Oxford in the 1260s) but other than the small number of Scots with considerable landholdings in England, and English people with similar properties in Scotland, there was very little political interaction of any significance and very little trade. The most significant export for both countries was wool. England produced about 80% of the trade-quality wool of later medieval Europe and Scotland produced virtually all the rest. It is hardly surprising that they did not trade much with each other, given that the chief imports were items like wine, oil and spices that neither could produce domestically. If the ‘middle’ Robert spent a good deal of time in England, why can we doubt that Robert the youngest was born in Writtle? For one thing, Carlisle is a very long way from Essex, and relatively close to the Bruce family seats at Maybole and Turnberry. More to the point, though Robert’s father spent time at Carlisle we have no evidence to suggest that his mother Marjory ever left Scotland at all. As Countess of Carrick in her own right, she was a more important figure than her husband, who was a mere baron – and was hardly likely to leave the comfort and security of her own castle with a view to having her child elsewhere. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-463997591-7b2767a.jpg" width="3694" height="4725" alt="An 18th-century depiction of Robert the Bruce, Scottish king from 1306–1329. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An 18th-century depiction of Robert the Bruce, Scottish king from 1306–1329. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> As to the charge that Robert the Bruce was a French-speaking Anglo-Norman, his great-great-great-great-great grandfather did live in Normandy, but that is pretty meaningless. If we applied those values to our own society, the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would be German Greeks. Though there’s a belief that all the nobles spoke Norman French, if that were the case we would have to wonder how on earth they communicated with their tenants, baillies, servants, merchants and tradesmen. We can be pretty confident that those people did not speak French and also that Robert’s childhood was spent in Scots-speaking Annandale and Gaelic-speaking Carrick. It would be a most unusual child that did not grow up speaking his mother’s language. In any case, French was never a language of governance in Scotland. Charters, laws, warrants and legal and business proceedings of all kinds were conducted in Latin or Scots. Read more: From Stirling Castle to the Ness of Brodgar: Neil Oliver chooses 5 fascinating places to visit in Britain Peter Williamson: The diehard Scot It is a different matter as to whether Robert the Bruce could speak French. He spent some time at Edward I’s court, where French was the preferred language, and biographer John Barbour tells us that when Robert was reduced to hiding in the hills he entertained his comrades by reading and translating French romances. Since French was the language of literature, it would be odd if an educated man did not have some grasp of it. The Bruce family certainly did have landholdings in England, but not on anything like the scale required to make them significant figures in the English political community. They may have held a barony in Essex, but so did a score or more of other families. The Percy family had landholdings in Scotland, but that did not make them Scottish, any more than having a holiday apartment in Barcelona would make one Spanish today. Did Robert the Bruce murder John Comyn? So, did Robert the Bruce murder John Comyn, a major rival for the Scottish crown? He certainly did – or at least he was involved in an affray that left Comyn dead. The details of the event are less than clear and very much in the eye of the beholder. Accounts vary from a simple, pre-meditated cold killing by Robert to a clash involving self-defence. The other part of the tale, that Comyn was a rival for the crown, is more suspect. It has been suggested, claimed or just plain stated that Bruce offered either to step aside and support Comyn as king or that he offered give all his lands to Comyn in exchange for unequivocal support for his own bid for the crown. The weakness of the tale is that Bruce’s own claim to the throne was hardly rock-solid; John Balliol was still alive and had an heir, Edward. It is true that John Balliol had abdicated, but he had done so at the point of Edward’s sword and medieval jurisprudence recognised the concept of duress. Even if John’s abdication had been valid (and he had rejected the possibility of being restored some years earlier) he had no right to give away his son’s claim to the throne. This was a crucial matter for the rather conservative political community of Scotland; the legitimate heir must have the right to succeed. If Robert’s claim was, at best, legally shaky, any claim by John Comyn would have been much more so, and therefore most unlikely to be acceptable to Scottish society. In many versions, Bruce kills Comyn, then declares himself king and starts his guerrilla war, which is near to the truth. In the first few weeks of his reign, Bruce was soundly defeated by English forces in two battles, Methven and Dalry, and his forces, such as they were, scattered. He went into hiding over the winter of 1306–7 and then mounted a series of new campaigns against the English occupation forces and his domestic opposition. It is all too easy to conflate these two groups. Some Scots were content to support the occupation for the sake of peace or advancement, some because they simply could not abide the Bruces. Some fought against Robert Bruce because there was still considerable support for the Balliols and of course some fought against him because there was an English garrison on their doorstep or even resident in their castle. It’s not easy to make a principled decision if there is a dagger at your throat. Read more: 7 myths about the battle of Culloden busted 8 of Britain’s best battlefields But was it a guerrilla war fought by Robert the Bruce? Actually, Robert fought a very conventional sort of conflict. He seized towns and castles and set up his own administration – all very much in the typical pattern of medieval war. He also avoided major battles against larger armies, but that is generally termed ‘prudent’ rather than ‘guerrilla’. There is a persistent belief that during these conflicts, the Scots did not have the kind of armour or warhorses or longbows that the English fought with. If that were the case we could be confident that chroniclers would tell us so. But they do not. English and Scottish soldiers – spearmen, archers and cavalry – were identical. Scottish romanticists do not like to hear that; they want the medieval Scots to be simple ploughmen armed with a stick with a nail through it, but the evidence is quite unequivocal. The truth about the battle of Bannockburn There are also a number of myths that surround Bruce’s famed victory at Bannockburn – which he fought against Edward II, in a swamp near Stirling, and was saved at the last minute by a force of Templar knights. The great battle was fought near Stirling, but that’s about it. One chronicler mentions a “great stinking ditch” in which many English soldiers drowned while trying to escape, but by that point the battle was already over. Far from being marshland, all the contemporary accounts are at pains to point out that the fighting took place on ‘good ground’, or ‘dry ground’ or ‘firm ground’. Moreover, the English did not charge recklessly up a hillside to come to grief on great round hedgehogs of Scottish spearmen. In fact, Robert marched his army down from the higher ground of the hunting park (roughly where Bannockburn High School stands today) then deployed across the neck of land between two sizeable streams; the Pelstream and the Bannock burn and advanced on the English, throwing them into confusion. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-463962379-e57f7d7.jpg" width="4736" height="3504" alt="A 19th-century illustration of the battle of Bannockburn, June 1314. From Cassell's Illustrated History of England. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century illustration of the battle of Bannockburn, June 1314. From Cassell's Illustrated History of England. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The notion that the Templars turned up to save the day is a total invention, less than 200 years old, with no evidence whatsoever to support it – and plenty of evidence to the contrary. But did Robert the Bruce kill an English knight, though he was only riding a pony himself? In fact, we know that the ‘pony’ was a palfrey – a horse for transport rather than combat. The term ‘palfrey’ encompasses quite a range of mounts in much the same way as we might use the term ‘car’: it covers everything from a 1971 Fiat 500 to the latest model of Ferrari. Robert was the king, so something more akin to a Ferrari seems more probable. He did, however, kill a man in single combat before the first engagement of the battle and did so with an axe against a lance – which was still quite a feat of arms. Read more: Bannockburn: Robert Bruce's fight for freedom 7 medieval kings of England you should know about Death after victory? So the common misconception goes that Robert the Bruce won his war at Bannockburn and then died of leprosy. There’s little doubt that Bruce’s victory was massive, but the war did not come to an end for another 13 years. Edward II was simply not prepared to give up on the unwinnable war he had inherited from his father, who had been known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-1043786772-b9ddcd8.jpg" width="4288" height="2848" alt="Statues of Robert the Bruce together with the Wallace monument seen from Stirling castle, Scotland, UK. (Photo by: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)" title="Statues of Robert the Bruce together with the Wallace monument seen from Stirling castle, Scotland, UK" /> Incidentally, Edward I didn’t acquire this nickname until he had been dead for the better part of two centuries, and someone was commissioned to add the inscription to his tomb. Edward I conducted several campaigns in Scotland with varying degrees of rather temporary success, but he only fought one battle, Falkirk, in 1298. It was a major victory, but hardly really changed the course of the war even in the short term. As for Robert the Bruce’s death, it’s false that he died from leprosy. At the time of his death in 1329, he had been gravely ill intermittently for many years. The nature of his ailment is not certain – possibilities include motor neuron disease, syphilis and muscular sclerosis. It is perfectly possible that he suffered from different conditions at different times, but we can rule out leprosy. However much of a hero he might have been, as a leper he would have been quarantined just as strictly as anyone else. It was a disease that was all-too-familiar to medieval society and quite impossible to disguise. Beyond the paragraph at the start of this article, there’s much more to be known about Robert the Bruce. Like any other king Bruce generated a huge raft of documentary material and unlike other medieval kings he was a the subject of a major near-contemporary biography; in fact we know more about King Robert than virtually any other major figure of his time. Medieval expert Dr Chris Brown is the author of King and Outlaw: The Real Robert the Bruce (The History Press, 2018) out now. To read more Scottish history, click here. This article was first published on History Extra in November 2018
The big debate: was Edward II really murdered?
In 2005, the bestselling historian Ian Mortimer caused a storm when he argued that Edward II had not been assassinated at Berkeley Castle in 1327 – received opinion for almost 700 years – and was still alive in 1330. His theory has attracted numerous critics, among them the medieval academic Nicholas Vincent. In a debate from 2016, the two put forward their conflicting views on the fate of an English king...
If 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
Robert the Bruce: champion of Scotland or murderous usurper?
On 23 and 24 June 1314, Robert Bruce, king of Scotland, faced King Edward II at Bannockburn in the decisive battle of the Wars of Scottish Independence. Dr Michael Brown takes a closer look at the Scottish king and his often bloody path to the throne
On 10 February 1306, the most important political murder in Scottish history took place. John Comyn, “the Red”, was slaughtered by Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick, and his followers in an outburst of violence in the church of the Franciscans, the Greyfriars, at Dumfries. Comyn and Bruce were leading members of the Scottish nobility. They had been rivals and had recently fought on opposing sides in the wars between Edward I of England and the Scots. In early 1306 with Edward finally recognised as ruler of Scotland, the two lords met together in the Greyfriars church. At first the men seemed friendly and Bruce talked alone with Comyn before the high altar. Read more: Bannockburn: Robert Bruce’s fight for freedom (subscription) The Black Prince: hero or villain? Kings and Queens in profile: Edward II Suddenly the mood changed. Bruce accused his rival of treachery. Making to walk away, Robert Bruce then turned back with sword drawn and struck Comyn. Bruce’s followers then rushed in, raining blows on John Comyn who fell to the floor. Comyn’s uncle, who joined the melee, was cut down. Bruce left the church. Mounted on Comyn’s horse he led his followers the short distance to Dumfries Castle where King Edward’s justices were holding court. Breaking in, Bruce arrested the king’s men but then he heard news that Comyn was still alive. He dispatched two of his men to the friary. They found John Comyn tended by the friars in the vestry, wounded but not dying. Michael Penman will be speaking on 'Robert Bruce of Scotland (1306-29): Myth and Aftermyth' at our Kings and Queens Weekend in March 2019. Find out more here After allowing him to hear confession, Bruce’s men dragged Comyn back into the church and killed him on the altar steps, spattering the altar itself with blood. While Comyn’s corpse was abandoned to the friars, Bruce rode from Dumfries to begin the uprising against Edward I which would climax with his crowning as king of Scots six weeks later. Those seeking to understand these events saw Comyn’s death as a deliberate step on Bruce’s path to the throne. The English investigation of the murder in 1306 concluded that Comyn was killed because “he would not assent to the treason that Bruce planned against the king of England, it is believed”. In English chronicles of the period, Bruce lured Comyn to Dumfries to kill him. In Scottish accounts, by contrast, Bruce and Comyn agreed to work together for Scotland’s freedom. Comyn, however, betrayed Bruce’s plans to Edward I and was killed in revenge for his treachery. All these versions agree in identifying Bruce in February 1306 as a man preparing to launch a bid for the kingship and killing Comyn to clear the way. The portrayal of Bruce as either cold-blooded killer or clear-sighted champion of his people suited the conflicting perceptions of later years. It placed the murder at the heart of a planned coup which would also involve Bruce’s seizure of the throne and his war against the English king, a war which ultimately secured recognition of Scotland’s independence. However, these interpretations also relied on a heavy dose of hindsight. If viewed from the perspective of February 1306 do the conclusions of these accounts seem quite so clear? Was Bruce at that time focused on the seizure of the throne? Was the killing of Comyn on holy ground, an act bound to appal and alienate many Scots, a deed of calculated revolution? Did the immediate aftermath of Comyn’s death, the six weeks before Bruce was crowned king, witness the unfolding of a planned coup? The answers lie in the evidence which emerged before Bruce assumed the reputation and role of hero king or bloody usurper. The difficult years In early 1306 Robert Bruce was not an obvious champion of Scottish liberties. He was in his early 30s and his career had been shaped by the decade-long wars between Edward I (ruled England 1272–1307) and the Scots. The king of England had taken advantage of a succession crisis in Scotland after the death of Alexander III (who ruled Scotland 1249–86). Bruce’s position in this conflict was defined by family interests. Part of this was the Bruce claim to the Scottish throne. This had been rejected in favour of the rival rights of John Balliol in 1292 but with Balliol in exile from 1296 the Bruces did not abandon hope of a crown. While Bruce was conscious of his family’s royal aspirations, it was his responsibilities as a nobleman which exerted most influence on his activities. As earls of Carrick and lords of Annandale in south-west Scotland and a number of English estates, the Bruces had to preserve lands in two warring kingdoms and protect their friends and tenants in the difficult years since 1296. In these years Bruce had played a shifting role. He had briefly led resistance to Edward I in 1297 and had been a guardian of Scotland between 1298 and 1300 but after both episodes had submitted to the English king. From 1302 to 1304 he had been active in Edward’s government of Scotland. Bruce’s shifts of side were motivated less by a machiavellian hopes of winning the throne than by the duty to preserve his family’s lands and tenants from the worst effects of war. His actions were normal amongst the Scottish nobility and were entirely understandable to contemporaries. They do not, though, reveal Bruce as a man committed to the abstract defence of Scotland. Instead they suggest a young lord whose concerns were with more limited and pragmatic issues of lordship and loyalty. In the months before February 1306 Robert Bruce continued to face these concerns in new circumstances. In 1304 Edward I finally compelled his leading Scottish enemies to submit to his rule. He was now the master of Scotland and during the next year Scotland’s nobles sought his favour and petitioned him for lands and offices. Bruce was one of this group. In April 1304 his father had died and Bruce approached the king to receive his family’s lordship of Annandale. The succession of enquiries into the Bruces’ ancient rights in their estates probably encouraged Bruce to find allies. To this end, in June 1304 he entered a bond or private alliance with William Lamberton, the bishop of St Andrews. Deep political rivals While this was later used by the English to suggest a conspiracy between Bruce and one of the leaders of the Scottish church, its terms do not support this. Instead it was a formal statement of friendship between lords who had recently been on opposite sides in the war but now saw the need to co-operate. Needing to secure his inheritance and under government scrutiny, Bruce would have found such an alliance valuable, especially as Lamberton became head of Edward’s Scottish council. Issues of land, lordship and influence within this Edwardian Scotland seem to have preoccupied Robert Bruce in 1304–5. The same issues explain Bruce’s presence in Dumfries on 10 February and his meeting with John Comyn. The king’s justices were holding court in Dumfries and as local landowners it would be natural for Bruce and Comyn to be present. For them to meet in private to discuss the court’s business would also be normal. However any meeting between these two men came with considerable baggage. There is a garbled tale in several accounts of an indenture between Bruce and Comyn which may indicate a promise of mutual support like that between Bruce and Bishop Lamberton. In the case of Bruce and John however, any written expressions of friendship overlay deep animosity. The two men were open political rivals. Comyn’s family were long-standing opponents of the Bruces and between 1302 and 1304, while Bruce served King Edward, Comyn had led the king’s enemies. They were also personal enemies. In 1299 Bruce and Comyn were the guardians of Scotland, leading the war against the English. When a dispute broke out between followers of the two men, Comyn turned on Bruce and seized him by the throat. Accusations of treason were flung at Bruce before the two men were separated. The mistrust and violence between Bruce and Comyn in 1299 may have flared again in February 1306, perhaps sparked by a similarly minor disagreement. Seeking a deal The closely contemporary account of Walter of Guisborough hints at this scenario. Bruce and Comyn met to discuss “certain matters touching both of them”. During the conversation Bruce charged Comyn with influencing King Edward against him. This suggests less the betrayal of a conspiracy than competition for royal favour between rivals which had cost Bruce lands and offices and may have broken a written promise of friendship. Old antagonisms spurred Bruce into an attack on Comyn and others present joined in the fight. The result was not assassination but a bloody scuffle. The aftermath of the killing suggests that even then Bruce only slowly developed the intention of seizing the throne. It would be six weeks before he was crowned and in this period the consequences of Comyn’s death and the nature of Bruce’s intentions only gradually unfolded. Vital evidence of this comes from an English report, crucially written in early March before Bruce took the throne. It shows Bruce remaining in the south-west, taking castles and trying to recruit followers in the manner of previous aristocratic rebellions. The report also reveals that Bruce was negotiating with Edward I and his officials and in these talks indicated that he had taken castles “to defend himself with the longest stick that he had”. This was not the unequivocal defiance of a king in waiting but suggests a man trying to safeguard his position but still seeking a deal, perhaps a pardon for Comyn’s death. However the report shows that such aims were changing. The writer identifies the key figure in this as Wishart, the bishop of Glasgow. Robert Wishart was a veteran defender of Scottish liberties and in early March, as Bruce’s “chief adviser”, he absolved Bruce from his sins and “freed him to secure his heritage”. This could only mean that Bruce was now determined to bid for the throne. Wishart provided the spiritual support. By releasing Bruce from his oath to Edward and from the sacrilege of slaying Comyn on holy ground the bishop made Bruce a credible leader of the Scots. It had taken weeks for this move and it was only in March that Bruce started to widen his appeal and win support. On 25 March Bruce was crowned King of Scots at Scone. The ceremony was makeshift and, if it demonstrated that the new king had gathered support from clergy, nobles and people, a majority stayed away, refusing to recognise the usurper or unwilling to risk sharing in his likely defeat. Edward I’s terrible retribution Bruce had taken a huge gamble. He was on a path of no return and by October he and his friends had paid a heavy price. Defeated three times in battle by English and Scottish enemies, Bruce fled the Scottish mainland. Many of his supporters and family suffered worse fates as Edward I wreaked a terrible punishment on those he regarded as perjured rebels. With stakes so high it would always have been a huge risk to plan a rebellion against Edward. It would not be surprising if Bruce, a wealthy and influential noble with a career of cautious self-interest to his name, baulked at such a gamble. Instead, through lingering personal antagonism which sparked an act of unpremeditated violence, Bruce put his future in jeopardy. By killing Comyn, Bruce had made enemies of John’s family and following. As well as this blood feud Bruce now faced the judgement of Edward I, not a lenient or forgiving ruler. In these unpromising circumstances and influenced by Bishop Wishart, Bruce took the decision which changed his life and Scotland’s future. He laid claim to the title and authority of king, appealing to his family’s allies and to those Scots who wished to renew the war against the English king. Despite the defeats of 1306 it would be in this role that Bruce would return to Scotland the following year. From 1307 as King of Scots Robert Bruce would begin to win his realm. Michael Brown is reader in medieval Scottish history at the University of St Andrews. His books include The Wars of Scotland 1214-1371, (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and Bannockburn: The Scottish War and the British Isles, 1307-1323 (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). This article was first published in the March 2006 issue of BBC History Magazine
Don't know the battle of Bosworth from the battle of Bannockburn? Confused between Magna Carta and Domesday Book? We've got you covered. Here we bring you 10 key medieval dates you need to know
1066: The battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest The Norman conquest of 1066 marked a dramatic and irreversible turning point in English history. Events began with the battle of Hastings, in which the Anglo-Saxon king Harold II attempted to defend his realm from the Norman invasion forces of William, Duke of Normandy (later known as William the Conqueror). Harold’s English troops numbered around 5,000, compared to a well-equipped Norman force of 15,000 infantry, archers and cavalry. Although the English had some initial success using shield-wall tactics, they proved no match for William, who was a formidable warlord. English defences were eventually broken down and King Harold was killed. His crushing defeat and gory death on the battlefield is famously recorded in the Bayeux tapestry, which was completed in the 1070s. Following William’s success at the battle of Hastings – dubbed by Andrew Gimson the “most durable victory of any monarch in English history”– William the Conqueror set about transforming the face of Anglo-Saxon England. He skillfully secured his hold on the lands he had invaded, replacing the English ruling class with Norman counterparts and building defensive fortresses at strategic points throughout the kingdom. Under William the feudal system [a hierarchical system in which people held lands in return for providing loyalty or services to a lord] was introduced, the church reorganised and England’s links to Europe strengthened. The legacy of 1066’s Norman conquest can still be seen today in Britain’s language, culture and social structure. 1085: The Domesday Book is completed The Domesday Book is England’s earliest surviving public record, unsurpassed in depth and detail until the introduction of censuses in the 19th century. Towards the end of the 11th century England came under threat from Danish invaders. William the Conqueror (who had himself been an invader two decades earlier) realised the need to catalogue the country’s financial resources in order to assess how much taxation he could reap from the land to fund a potential war. He therefore commissioned a massive survey of England’s landholdings and financial assets. The monumental resulting document, the Domesday Book, extensively catalogues the kingdom’s taxable goods and records the identities of England’s landholders at the time. The Domesday Book is significant because it provides a unique and remarkably rich historical source for medievalists. Its vast amount of information offers historians, geographers, linguists and even lawyers invaluable insights into the nature of England’s government, landscape and social structure at the time. The book now survives in two volumes: Great Domesday and Little Domesday. 1095: The First Crusade is decreed Pope Urban II’s official call for “holy war” in 1095 heralded the beginning of centuries of religious conflict. The crusades were a significant and long-lasting movement that saw European Christian knights mount successive military campaigns in attempts to conquer the Holy Land. Religious conflict peaked during the 12th and 13th centuries and its impact can be traced throughout the Middle Ages. Muslims in the Holy Land were not the only target of the crusades. Crusade campaigns were directed against a variety of people viewed as enemies of Christendom. Military campaigns against the Moors in Spain and Mongols and pagan Slavs in Eastern Europe have now also been recognised by historians as part of the crusade movement. The crusades had a huge impact on medieval life in Britain. People from all walks of life were involved – everyone from peasant labourers to lords and kings took up the fight for Christendom. Richard the Lionheart (r1189–99) considered the quest to conquer the Holy Land to be so important that he was absent from England for many years of his reign, waging war in the Middle East. These intercontinental military expeditions also had a much wider impact on global relations. They led to an unprecedented interaction between east and west, which had an enduring influence on art, science, culture and trade. Meanwhile the shared fight for Christendom arguably also helped to foster ideological unity within Europe. In the words of historian Linda Paterson, the crusades “transformed the western world and left a profound legacy in inter-cultural and inter-faith relations nationally and worldwide”. 1170: Thomas Becket is murdered Bloody proof of overflowing tensions in the ongoing power struggle between the medieval church and crown, the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 has gone down in history for its shocking brutality. In 1155, after enjoying a successful career in the clergy, Becket (1120–70) became chancellor to King Henry II. Friendship and rapport developed between the two men and in 1161 Henry appointed Becket as archbishop of Canterbury. Read more | What happened to the assassins who killed Thomas Becket? However, following Becket’s appointment as archbishop, his harmonious relationship with the king was short-lived. Trouble began to emerge as it became clear that Becket would now fight for the interests of the church, often in opposition to the wishes of the crown. Becket began to challenge the king over a wide range of issues and their turbulent disagreements lasted several years. Their relationship disintegrated to such an extent that between 1164 and 1170 Becket lived in France to avoid Henry’s wrath. He returned to Canterbury in 1170 but was soon in conflict with the king again, this time over the excommunication of high-ranking clerics. This dispute was the final straw for Henry. According to popular legend he lost his temper with the archbishop, asking “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Believing this to mean that the king wished Becket dead, four knights travelled to Canterbury to seek out the archbishop. On 29 December 1170 they brutally murdered Becket in his own cathedral. In 1173, three years after his death, Becket was canonised. His murder transformed him into a martyr figure and his shrine at Canterbury Cathedral became a major European pilgrimage site. The priest’s murder was extremely damaging to Henry’s reputation and in 1174 Henry visited Becket’s tomb to pay penance for his actions. 1215: Magna Carta is signed Sealed by King John at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, Magna Carta (meaning ‘great charter’) has become one of the founding documents of the English legal system. At the time of its creation, however, the document’s long-lasting significance was not immediately recognised. Following a period of political and military upheaval in England, John was reluctantly forced to sign Magna Carta as part of peace negotiations with rebel barons. Drafted as part of a peace treaty, the initial document contained specific grievances dealing expressly with King John’s rule. At the time the agreement had little impact, as King John swiftly backtracked on its promises, prompting civil war. Magna Carta’s real significance lay elsewhere. Buried within its many clauses were certain adaptable core values that ensured its influential legacy in English history. As the first document to establish that everyone, including monarchs, was subject to the law, Magna Carta laid the foundation for legally limiting the power of the sovereignty. Its 39th clause, meanwhile, ensured the right of all ‘free men’ to a fair trial. The fundamental principles laid down in these clauses proved central to the establishment of the English legal system. The original document was adapted several times in subsequent years and three of the clauses from the original Magna Carta still remain on the statute books today. These establish the liberties of the English Church (Clause 1), the privileges of the City of London (Clause 13) and the right to trial by jury (Clauses 39 & 40). 1314: The battle of Bannockburn The battle of Bannockburn saw Scottish leader Robert the Bruce take on the English king Edward II in a pivotal conflict in Scotland’s fight for independence. In 1296 Anglo-Scottish tensions spilled over into open warfare when English forces under Edward I invaded Scotland. By 1314 the Scottish Wars of Independence had been raging for many years and Edward II’s hold over Scotland had begun to crumble. In an attempt to restore his grasp on the kingdom Edward II amassed a large body of troops to relieve Stirling Castle, which had been besieged by the forces of Robert the Bruce. However, Edward’s attempt to regain control backfired, as the Scots prepared to face the English forces head-on in what became the battle of Bannockburn. The battle took place on 23 and 24 June 1314. Although the English force boasted greater numbers, the Scottish were well trained and well led, fighting on land they were motivated to defend. Their knowledge of the local land also worked in their favour, as they tactically targeted terrain that would be difficult for Edward’s heavy cavalry to operate on. English casualties were heavy and Edward was forced to retreat. Bannockburn dealt a significant blow to English control over Scotland and Edward’s withdrawal left swathes of northern England vulnerable to Scottish raids and attacks. Robert the Bruce’s victory proved decisive for Scotland, solidifying the country’s independence and strengthening his grip over his kingdom. In 1324 Robert finally gained papal recognition as king of Scotland. 1348: The Black Death comes to Britain The summer of 1348 saw the first outbreak of the bubonic plague in England, leading to an epidemic of huge proportions. The disease is estimated to have killed between a third and a half of the population – a devastating and unprecedented death rate. Read more | Plague, famine and sudden death: 10 dangers of the medieval period Known as the Black Death, the bubonic plague was caused by a bacterium now know as yersinia pestis. Without any knowledge of how it was transmitted the disease spread like wildfire, particularly in urban areas. The writer Boccaccio saw the plague ravage Florence in 1348 and described the symptoms in his book The Decameron: “The first signs of the plague were lumps in the groin or armpits. After this, livid black spots appeared on the arms and thighs and other parts of the body. Few recovered. Almost all died within three days, usually without any fever”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/03/Death20strangles20plague20victim-54ae732-39bcffa.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Death strangling a victim of the plague. From the 14th-century Stiny Codex.(Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="Death strangling a victim of the plague. From the 14th-century Stiny Codex.(Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> The dramatic death toll had a significant impact on the social and economic landscape of Britain in the following decades. Writing for HistoryExtra, Mark Ormrod has argued that in the long-run the epidemic led to a “real improvement in the quality of life” for medieval people. He suggests that “the drop in the population resulted in a redistribution of wealth – workers could demand higher wages, and tenant farmers could demand lower rents, giving the poor more expendable income”. 1381: The Peasants’ Revolt The first large-scale uprising in English history, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 threatened to overturn the existing social structure and undermine the country’s ruling elite. The revolt was prompted by the introduction of a third poll tax (raised to fund the war against France), which had a particularly damaging effect on the poor. Unrest began in Essex, spreading rapidly to East Anglia, St Albans, Bury St Edmunds and London. As events escalated, government ministers were attacked and their homes destroyed. The chaos reached a peak as rioters captured and executed the king’s treasurer and the archbishop of Canterbury. Soon, the rioters’ demands extended far beyond abolishing the third poll tax. They called for the abolition of serfdom and outlawry, and the division of lordship among all men. They also railed against the corruption of the church, demanding that its wealth be distributed among the people. Faced with the threat of escalating violence in his capital city, the 14-year-old King Richard II met with one of the central figures of the revolt, Wat Tyler, to discuss the rioters’ grievances. However, violence broke out at the meeting and Tyler was murdered by William Walworth (Lord Mayor of London). Following Tyler’s death, government troops sought out and executed those who had rebelled, and resistance soon died out. 1415: Henry V defeats the French at Agincourt Soon after becoming king of England in 1413, the ambitious young Henry V turned his attention to expanding his realm. During his father’s reign he had pushed for an invasion of France, and as the country was undergoing a period of political turmoil under its elderly monarch, Charles VI, it was the perfect time to launch an assault on the vulnerable kingdom. After landing in France on 13 August 1415 and besieging the town of Harfleur, Henry’s troops marched on Calais. The French army met them at Agincourt and Henry’s men found themselves outnumbered as a bloody battle ensued. Despite this the French death toll was significant and Henry claimed victory. Agincourt has gone down in history as a legendary victory for England and for Henry. However, historian Ralph Griffiths suggests that it was in fact a close-run and far from decisive battle. He argues that contemporaries exaggerated Henry’s achievements in France. However, patriotic Agincourt propaganda undoubtedly had sticking power in the Middle Ages. The defeat proved devastating to French morale, while Henry’s reputation on the continent was enhanced dramatically. Henry was welcomed back to Dover with triumph and the story of his illustrious victory at Agincourt was celebrated for centuries to come. 1485: Richard III is defeated at the battle of Bosworth The last significant clash of the Wars of the Roses, the battle of Bosworth saw the Lancastrian Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII) defeat Richard III in a bloody fight for the English throne. Following Richard’s deposition of Edward V in 1483, Henry challenged the Yorkist king as a usurper. In August 1485 Henry launched an attack on Richard in an attempt to seize control of England. Richard’s army of 15,000 vastly outnumbered that of Henry, who had only 5,000 men. Confident of defeating his challenger, Richard was reportedly overjoyed at Henry’s arrival in England and even delayed facing his troops in order to celebrate with a feast day. However, once the battle began, Richard’s strong initial position was undermined by the desertion of his troops and the defection of Lord Stanley (who had previously fought on the Yorkist side and commanded significant troops). The Yorkist forces were defeated and Richard was killed on the battlefield. Read more | Alternate history: what if Richard III had won at Bosworth? The discovery of Richard’s skeleton in Leicester in 2012 has told us much about how the defeated king met his death. Writing for History Extra, Chris Skidmore states that “several gouge marks in the front of the skull seem to have been caused by a dagger, perhaps in a struggle. The two wounds that would have killed Richard include the back part of his skull being sheathed off; if this did not kill him, a sword blade thrust from the base of the skull straight through the brain certainly would have done the job”. As the last major conflict of the Wars of the Roses and one that heralded the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, the battle of Bosworth marked a significant turning point in British history. It signalled the end of the medieval era and beginning of the Tudor period.