Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
of mounting protest at home over the expense of his seemingly endless wars and the ever-increasing burden of taxation. So there are some large unanswered questions about Edward’s character and motives; but ultimately, to my mind, he was simply an obsessive who refused to be balked from his purpose. That made him very dangerous indeed as far as Scotland was concerned.
Edward I left his newly acquired kingdom in the hands of the Earl of Surrey as Governor and Hugh de Cressingham as Treasurer. An exchequer was established at Berwick on the Westminster model. English sheriffs and justiciars were appointed the length and breadth of the country. English soldiers garrisoned the major castles. The subjugation was complete; it had taken Edward I only five months to achieve.
Perhaps Edward thought to himself, that, by uniting the whole island of Britain under one king and one government, he would do so much good by preventing future wars, as might be an excuse for the force and fraud he made use of to bring about his purpose. But … the happy prospect that England and Scotland would be united under one government, was so far from being brought nearer by Edward’s unprincipled usurpation, that the hatred and violence of national antipathy which arose betwixt the sister countries, removed to a distance, almost incalculable, the prospect of their becoming one people, for which nature seemed to design them.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VI
King Edward thought he had settled the ‘Scottish question’ once and for all. There is a story, recorded by Sir Thomas Grey of Heaton (near Newcastle) in his Scalacronica (written while he was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle in 1355–57), that as Edward left Berwick in September 1296 he said to his companions (in French), ‘A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’ (Bon besoigne fait qy du merde se delivrer). But if Edward thought he was rid of the business, he was very wrong.
1 The Great Hall of Berwick Castle, which had fallen into a ruinous state by the seventeenth century, fell victim to the building frenzy of the Railway Age in the nineteenth century. In 1844 an Act of Parliament was passed to permit the linking of the North British Railway line from Edinburgh to Berwick and the Great North British Railway line from London to Berwick. The ruined castle, hard by the north end of Stephenson’s magnificent Royal Border Bridge over the river, was considered the most suitable site for the station, which was formally opened in June 1846.
1 An ‘Eleanor Cross’, erected by Middleton Barry in 1865, stands in the forecourt of Charing Cross Station in London; it is a replica of the original which King Edward put up in the ancient village of Charing.
1 Nothing remains today of Annan Castle. The large oval site of the original wooden motte-and-bailey castle at Lochmaben is now the fourteenth tee of the golf course to the south-west of the modern town; the ruins of the thirteenth-century stone castle which superseded it occupy a promontory at the southern end of Castle Loch.
1 Berwick-upon-Tweed had been given its royal charter by David I in 1120. From then on the town and its castle bore much of the brunt of Anglo – Scottish border conflict. Once Scotland’s richest port, it changed hands between Scotland and England no fewer than thirteen times before it was finally surrendered to England in 1482. It was the scene of umpteen sieges and sackings, and especially of the savage massacre of 1296.
1 It comes as a surprise to discover that the solid, Romanesque St Cuthbert’s Church at Norham today, set in a huge graveyard which testifies to its antiquity, is the very one in whose chancel Balliol paid homage to Edward I all these centuries ago. Its survival through all the alarums and excursions of the Middle Ages is little short of miraculous.
1 Tradition has it that it was returned to Scotland as part of the 1328 Treaty of Edinburgh/Northampton (see here), and recaptured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. A list of relics which arrived at Durham Cathedral after 1346 included ‘a silver gilt cross, with part of the middle of black wood’. It disappeared during the Reformation.
Scotland was, therefore, in great distress, and the inhabitants, exceedingly enraged, only wanted some leader to command them, to rise up in a body against the English or Southern men, as they called them, and recover the liberty and independence of their country, which had been destroyed by Edward the First. Such a leader arose in the person of WILLIAM WALLACE, whose name is still so often mentioned in Scotland.
TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VII
On the first floor (‘Life of Wallace’) of the National Wallace Monument, which rears to a height of sixty-seven metres on the top of the eminence of the Abbey Craig near Stirling, a glass case displays the most treasured icon of this shrine to the memory of William Wallace, National Hero of Scotland – ‘Wallace’s Sword’.
It is a fearsome-looking weapon: a traditional two-handed Scottish broadsword, measuring 1.7 metres from the top of the hilt to the tip of the blade. The information panel proclaims it to be the weapon wielded by Wallace himself, and draws the conclusion that he must have been a giant of a man: ‘It is reasonable to assume that, in order to wield a sword of this size, Wallace would have had to be of considerable stature – at least six foot six inches in height.’
Meanwhile, in the ‘Hall of Heroes’ above, TV broadcaster and weaponry expert Rod McCance from Cambusbarron, near Stirling, gives informal talks on ‘Scottish weaponry used from 1291 to 1745’.
He shows groups of spellbound youngsters and adults how the weapons were made and how they were used in the brutal exchanges of the battlefield. Scottish weapons were of notoriously poor quality compared with Continental arms, and soon broke or buckled (‘We spent most of our time jumping up and down on our sword-blades trying to straighten them!’); their purpose was to bludgeon rather than to slice, to concuss an opponent and render him vulnerable to a stabbing stroke to the throat or temple.
As for the big weapon labelled ‘Wallace’s Sword’ downstairs, however, Rod McCance has grave doubts. The belief that it is the sword owned and wielded by Wallace is based on tradition rather than on documentary proof – and in that respect it mirrors the current debate about the origin, the deeds and the achievements of William Wallace himself.
The blade of the two-handed sword has no maker’s mark, nor any owner’s mark – and this is rather disconcerting for weaponry experts: it is impossible to date the metal of the blade scientifically, and they can only make judgements about the sword based on style. The hilt could, perhaps, be in keeping with a renovation made during a visit to Dumbarton Castle in 1505 by James IV, the ‘New Golden Age’ king who would meet his death at the disaster of Flodden in 1513 (see here). An item occurs in the books of the king’s Lord Treasurer for 8 December 1505, when the king ordered the sword to be re-hilted:
For bynding of ane riding sword and rappyer, and binding of Wallas Sword with cordle of silk, and new hilt and plomet, new skabbard, and new belt to the said sword, xxvjsh [26 shillings].
The presence of a ‘Wallas Sword’ in Dumbarton Castle in 1505, two hundred years after the execution of William Wallace, can be given a plausible explanation: Sir John Menteith, the man who betrayed and captured the outlawed Wallace and sent him in chains to Edward I for trial and summary execution, was the Sheriff of Dumbarton and Constable of Dumbarton Castle. What would be more likely than that he should have kept Wallace’s sword and stored it in the castle as a war trophy? And what more likely than that James