King Edward Hammer of the Scots

Paul Bennett details an historical character

Introduction by Alan
 

Many members of our society will by now have seen the movie ‘Braveheart’, particularly since it features Patrick McGoohan as Edward the First, commonly known as Longshanks. It was with this in mind, that Liverpool Group member Paul Bennett kindly offered to write a piece on Longshanks’. Knowing Paul to have been a member of the Birkenhead Historical Society, I happily asked him to go ahead with his project and it is with great pleasure that tpf can now present in its entirety, Paul’s carefully researched article...

A case can be made that Edward I Long Shanks’, was the greatest English king of the Middle Ages. A strong ruler, he was a man blessed with a strong sense of duty. Although, he was no democrat, he believed the king should promote the general welfare and place himself above class or faction - a revolutionary concept in the 13th century.

Although he had been called ‘The English Justinian’ because of his legal codes, Edward was first and foremost a military man, one of the great generals of the mediaeval world.

Edward was born in June 1239, the son of Henry III. Weak and indecisive, Henry was not a bad man, just a bad king. He was devoted to his family and took great pleasure in art and architecture. One of his pet projects was the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey in the gothic style that was just coming into fashion.

Unfortunately, Henry’s private virtues became public vices. Due to his devotion to his wife, he gave the Queen’s undeserving foreign relatives places at court. Worse still, Henry’s building projects were a drain on the exchequer, and his excessive piety made him a dupe of the papacy.

That mix of piety, politics and penury - he was always short of funds - bore bitter fruit. Simone de Montfort, leader of the baronial opposition, led an open revolt that defeated the king at the battle of Lewes in 1264.

Lewes gave Prince Edward his first real taste of combat. As a headstrong young blade at 25, he took exception to London troops of Montfort’s army, sincerely believing they had insulted his mother.

When the battle opened on May 14th, Edward led a cavalry charge that scattered the London burghers like dead leaves - only to find that Montfort had defeated his father’s main army. Assailed from both flanks by Montfort’s knights, the dumbfounded prince was forced to surrender.

A great lesson had been learned though - from then on, with few exceptions, his intellect would govern his passions.

Eventually Edward escaped, he joined forces with Roger Mortimer, Earl of Gloucester, and together they defeated Simon de Montfort at Evesham on August 4th, 1265. By then, Edward was king in all but name, since his father was growing old and was as self-absorbed as ever.

Fired with chivalric zeal and a subject of youthful energy, Prince Edward “took the cross”. That is, declared himself a crusader pledged to free the holy land from the grip of the ‘infidels’. In 1271, Edward reached the Middle East with a small army of 1,000 men and amazed everyone by chalking up a series of victories over the Muslim forces of the Mamluk Sultan Bundukari Baybars of Egypt. The Prince captured Nazareth, scoring a moral victory by liberating the hometown of Jesus Christ, but his forces were too small to consolidate his gains.

Once, when Edward was resting in his tent, a Muslim assassin broke in and attacked him with a poisonous knife. The Prince quickly killed his assailant but was wounded in the arm. Soon the limb swelled and the gout smelling flesh grew black - gangrene had set in. Handicapped by the lack of medical knowledge at the time, the doctors were baffled and lost hope. One brave physician cut away the blackened tissue and hoped for the best. By some miracle Edward survived. The next year, 1272, a truce was arranged between Baybars and the Crusaders, enabling Edward to go home at last.

Whilst en-route to England, he received word that his father was dead, and he was now king in his own right. On August 2nd, 1274, he landed at Dover, after an absence of four years. Crowds gave a tremendous welcome to their new monarch, who at 6 foot 2 inches, towered over contemporaries.

He was handsome, but his piercing blue eyes were slightly offset by a drooping left eyelid. Like most of his Plantagenet dynasty, Edward had a volcanic temper that sometimes erupted into murderous rages. Generally, though, he was too intelligent to let his anger get the better of him. A few years after his ascension to the throne, Edward was forced to deal with Wales, the mountainous land to the west of England.

Politically, Wales was a confusing mosaic of divided loyalties in the south and central portions of the country. Anglo-Norman Barons, called The Marcher Lords, managed to subdue and pacify the Welsh tribesmen, but in the north the situation was different.

A line of Gwynedd Princes high in the mountains of Snowdonia refused to submit to the English yoke. One Welsh ruler, Llewelyn-ap-Gruffydd, declared himself Prince of Wales, and set about expanding his domain at the expense of the Marcher Lords. Initially, Edward had little interest in Wales, and he might have accepted Llewelyn’s independence if the latter had rendered lip service to his feudal obligations to the English crown. However, Llewelyn’s arrogance seemed to grow with his power, and he refused to render homage to England. Aroused, the King was determined to bring his rebellious vassal to heel. In July 1277, in the town of Worcester, Edward gathered one of the biggest armies ever seen in Britain. The feudal levy summoned 1,000 armoured knights, while a number of English shires - Cheshire, Derbyshire, Shropshire and others - supplied about 15,000 foot soldiers, including many Welshmen and Gascon crossbow men. The Northern Welsh under Llewelyn were not prepared to meet Edward on his own terms, so they melted back into the misty valleys and snow capped peaks of their mountainous homeland. Natural guerrillas, they lived off the land when fighting and generally preferred ambushes to pitched battles. The men of Southern Wales generally had spears, but the Northern tribes possessed a formidable new weapon, the Longbow. One chronicler described it as “made of wild elm, unpolished, rough and uncouth.” However, in the hands of a trained archer it was a formidable weapon, hitting targets with such force that a longbow shaft could pierce chain mail and pin a man to his horse. Edward, advanced along the North Wales coast, marching slowly up the valleys of the Severn and Dee.

Leaving a chain of rising fortresses in his wake, Edward continued on until he reached the mouth of the Conway river. There, the King unveiled his trump card: sea power. Just off the coast, on the island of Anglesey, was some of the most fertile soil in Wales, the bread-basket of Llewelyn’s tribes. Thanks to ships provided by Edward’s cinque ports, Anglesey was quickly taken. Ringed in by hostile troops and threatened by starvation, Llewelyn sued for peace. After a few years’ respite, however, Llewelyn’s brother David raised the standard of revolt. The 1282 rebellion was a replay of the 1277 campaign, but this time Llewelyn was killed in a chance encounter, and his head was captured and executed, and the rebellion he had hatched collapsed. Edward decided that only more castles could help sink English roots and stabilise the shifting political soil of Wales. Luckily for the King, his reign coincided with the great age of mediaeval military architecture, and he found a builder of genius in Master James of St George. Master James’ fertile imagination produced a series of elaborate designs, each adapted to the particular needs of an individual site. Even today Conway, Harlech, Rhuddlan, Beaumaris and Caernarvon castles give an over-whelming impression of strength and majesty.

Wales was pacified, at least for the moment, so Edward turned his attention to Scotland. The Scottish throne was empty, and there were no less than 13 claimants for it.

To solve the impasse, the claimants asked Edward to be arbiter and choose a candidate among their number. The English King should have known better, the Scottish succession was a morass of claim and counter-claims. After fevered consultations with Barons, lawyers and churchmen, Edward chose John Bailol as King of the Scots.

Bailol was a weakling, but the fractious Scottish nobles stiffened his backbone enough to defy Edward. Once again, Edward could brook no disobedience from a man he considered his feudal underling. The English monarch invaded Scotland with a large army, and in March 1296 he proceeded to besiege the important Scottish town of Berwick. Feeling overconfident, the citizens of Berwick shouted insults at Edward, in particular making fun of his “Long Shanks”.

Mounted on his great warhorse, Bayard, Edward personally led the assault on Berwick. Hooves flailing, Bayard leapt across a ditch, bounded over a low palisade and brought his royal master into the very heart of the city. Soon English troops poured into the narrow streets and fighting gave way to a general massacre of the inhabitants. In short order Bailol was deposed, and Edward ruled the northern kingdom through a series of military garrisons. Edward’s brutal conquest had unleashed a sort of early nationalistic spirit among the Scots.

A Scottish knight, William Wallace, gathered an army and managed to defeat an English force at Stirling Bridge on September 11th, 1297. With his prestige on the line, Edward, though he was now growing old, took to the field once again and invaded Scotland.

On July 22nd, 1298 the English and Scottish armies met at Falkirk. The backbone of Wallace’s forces was his infantry, drawn up in four phalanx-style formations called schiltrons. Bristling with spears, the schiltrons seemed invulnerable to the kind of cavalry charge favoured by mediaeval knights. Sure enough, before Edward could fully deploy his unwieldy army, his knights rushed forward in a headlong charge. Try as they might, the English knights could make no impression on the prickly Scottish formations, and round one went to the stubborn Cults.

Edward had a surprise waiting in the wings - swarms of Welsh archers, who came forward in large numbers to discharge their deadly shafts. The schiltrons were quickly reduced to heaps of dead and wounded men, and the remaining Scottish infantry became easy prey for Edward’s cavalry. Only Wallace and a handful of fugitives escaped the terrible slaughter, and the back of Scottish resistance seemed broken forever.

At Falkirk, Edward Long Shanks acquired a new nickname: Scotto-Rum-Malleus (Hammer of the Scots). The battle validated his reputation as a General and showcased his tactical skills. His adoption of the Welsh longbow foreshadowed the English triumphs at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt.

Eventually, Wallace was captured and hung, drawn and quartered, but his grisly fate left the Scots uncowed. Time and again, Edward had to return to Scotland in an attempt to crush the embers of revolt. Yet, every time he returned home, the flame of Scottish nationalism would blaze anew. A new Scottish champion, Robert the Bruce, declared himself King of Scotland and girded himself for another English invasion. It was not long in coming. Edward, white-haired and ailing, must have felt he was an English Sisyphus, condemned to roll the rock of conquest forward again and again. At 69 – something akin to 90 by the standards of the Middle Ages – the King had little reason to find happiness in his waning years. His son and heir, Prince Edward Of Caenarvon, was a homosexual and a worthless spendthrift, more interested in fine clothes than the art of war. King Edward moved forwards toward Scotland, but his battle-scarred and aging body could not obey the commands of his iron will.

He died on July 6th, 1307, a short distance from the Scottish border at Burgh-on-Sands.

Later, Edward II would return to Scotland in force – only to suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, on June 23rd, 1314, by which Scotland won its independence from England. Although he was not the equal of a Caesar or Napoleon, Edward I was still a great commander who grasped the essentials of war. Even his enemies recognized his military greatness. Comparing Edward I to his son Edward II, Robert the Bruce once declared: “I am more afraid of the bones of the father dead, than of the living son; and by all the saints, it was more difficult to get a half a foot of land from the old King than a whole kingdom from the son.”