Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
English cavalry and the disciplined men-at-arms. The Scottish cavalry fled the field, and the foot-soldiers were cut down relentlessly as they scattered. English sources claimed that ten thousand Scots were killed, which seems an impossibly exaggerated figure. Nevertheless the casualties among the Scottish foot-soldiery were heavy. The castle promptly surrendered, and many of the leading barons of Scotland – including Atholl, Ross, Menteith and John Comyn the Younger – were taken captive and sent to the Tower of London.
‘Toom Tabard’
Edward defeated the Scottish army in a great battle near Dunbar, and Baliol, who seems to have been a mean-spirited man, gave up the contest.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI
It was the end of the ‘rebellion’. Scottish resistance simply collapsed after Dunbar Castle surrendered. The castles of Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth followed suit. Scotland lay paralysed and helpless. John Balliol sent a letter to Edward in Perth, suing for peace, but Edward would be satisfied with nothing less than unconditional surrender. On 2 July 1296 Balliol met Bishop Bek of Durham at Kincardine Castle, where he issued his document of surrender:
…seeing that we have by evil and false council, and our own folly, grievously offended and angered our lord Edward, by the Grace of God, King of England … Therefore we, acting under no constraint, and of our own free will, have surrendered to him the land of Scotland and all its people …
A week later, on 8 July, at a humiliating ceremony in Montrose, Balliol formally resigned his kingdom to Edward and was subjected to the ultimate ignominy: he was stripped of his crown, sceptre, ring and girdle, and the red and gold royal insignia were ripped from his surcoat, giving rise to that nickname of ‘Toom Tabard’. He and his son were sent into captivity in the Tower of London, along with the last of his supporters still at large, including John Comyn the Elder of Badenoch and the Earl of Buchan. Balliol was soon moved to more comfortable house arrest in Hertford, and after three years he would be released into papal custody and permitted to retire to his family’s estates in Picardy in France, where he died in 1313.
Steve Boardman is more sympathetic to John Balliol than Sir Walter Scott was:
I think of Balliol as one of those unfortunate figures who simply gets run over by history. At one stage he tried to assert his own power as Scottish king and to govern effectively, but he was faced with one of the most powerful kings in Western Europe, a massively prestigious figure. Edward I had destroyed the power of the Welsh princes in the 1280s, and in the 1290s he wanted to make his rights in Scotland stick: he wanted to make something concrete of the vague claim to overlordship which previous English kings had occasionally asserted. Edward was in the position and was of the mind to make these vague claims to overlordship a reality in the years after 1292.
In that sense, Balliol was caught in a unique situation: because of the nature of the competition for the throne, he had already acknowledged Edward specifically as the overlord of Scotland. He was dealing with a very powerful adversary, and his own support within Scotland was limited by the disaffection of the Bruces and their supporters. He was simply unable to cope with that combination of circumstances. But that does not mean that when he came to the throne he intended to be any less of a king than any of his predecessors had been; he was, quite simply, hopelessly outgunned.
From Montrose, Edward I made a triumphal progress north as far as the Moray Firth. Then he ransacked the country, systematically and purposefully. The Great Seal of Scotland was ceremoniously broken in two. The Stone of Scone was removed and sent south to Westminster Abbey, where it was placed in the chapel dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. The state archives were packed into fifty-three containers and shipped out of the country. Edward also ordered the removal of the Scottish regalia (the crown, sceptre, sword, ring and royal robe) and the precious relic of Scotland’s only royal saint, the Black Rood of St Margaret, which had comforted her on her deathbed; it was never seen in Scotland again.1
Dauvit Brown has studied Edward’s motives for the looting of the symbols and the raiding of the government archives:
The English kings and their government had by this stage become one of the most bureaucratic in Europe. The reason why they took all the Scottish government records was not to suggest that Scotland had never existed as a kingdom, but because Edward I, as the sovereign lord, had taken control of it and because, in order to govern Scotland properly, he needed to have on file all the previous records of the kings.
It was typical of their approach to their task that they did not just throw things into sacks and take them south; they compiled an inventory of what they were taking. There is a lengthy and impressive list of the titles, at least, and brief descriptions of what the documents were. Sadly, the documents were lost en route: they sank with their ship on the way south, which was a great loss. If those records still existed we would have a much more complete set of evidence relating to government in Scotland and many more royal charters and official documents of that kind.
It has been claimed that Edward also ransacked the country for any histories and chronicles which existed and took them away, too – which was why chroniclers like John of Fordun had to start writing Scotland’s history from scratch. But, in fact, narrative histories were not listed in the inventory of documents removed; they would not have been part of the government archives.
Edward also clearly believed that taking the Stone of Scone, the inaugural stone of the kings of Scots, was the absolute and final symbol that Scotland had ceased to be a kingdom. But what seems to have happened is that the Stone and its legend became even more famous; references to it as the ‘Stone of Destiny’ start now, along with the story that wherever the Stone is, the Scots will rule. Edward may have thought that it represented a full-stop and a final statement of Scottish existence; but as far as the Scottish people were concerned, it was the beginning of a new chapter.
That new chapter was still a long way off, however. Before Edward left Scotland, a parliament was held in Berwick on 28 August, at which a compilation was made of more than 1,500 earls, lords, bishops and leading burgesses who had sworn fealty to him and formally recorded their homage to him as King of Scotland. This document has come to be known as the ‘Ragman Roll’ from the tangle of ribbons which hung from the seals of the signatories.
John Balliol’s name is there. So is that of Robert Bruce, son of Bruce the Competitor (who had died in 1295), and of his twenty-two-year-old son Robert, Earl of Carrick. Every notable family, every major landowner, every significant member of the gentry – all were required to make legal acknowledgement of Edward’s overlordship. But one name among the lesser gentry is missing: the name of William Wallace.
Only hindsight can claim to know how significant an omission this was. The Comyn-led government of Scotland was discredited, with most of its leaders incarcerated in castles throughout England. Of the aristocratic families of Scotland, only the Bruces were still in favour with the autocratic King of England – but even the Bruces had been contemptuously dismissed. When the older Robert Bruce, father of the future king, importuned Edward about the cherished Bruce claim to the throne, Edward is said (by Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon) to have given the withering reply, ‘Have we nothing else to do but win kingdoms for you?’
What was the driving force behind Edward’s single-minded, ruthless treatment of Scotland? Fiona Watson finds it an enigma:
Edward was already embroiled in a bitter dispute with France over Gascony, of which he was Duke. But that made no difference – he simply ditched Gascony (temporarily, in his mind) to go for Scotland. And that makes no sense: Gascony was one of the richest parts of the English empire, and to lose it for a cold, fairly barren northern kingdom is bizarre. But Edward was the sort of man who never gave up: if he wanted something, he went for it, again and again and again.
Edward was absolutely determined to subdue Scotland,