The Forest Laird(167)

Ten days later, in his own royal castle of Kincardine, John Balliol, the King of Scotland, bent the knee to Edward Plantagenet and begged his English cousin’s royal pardon for rebelling against him. Five days after that, at Stracathro in Angus, where he had been taken as a prisoner under escort, John Balliol, a broken man by then, formally and publicly renounced his alliance with King Philip IV of France. The next day, July 8th, 1296, under the merciless eyes of his royal tormentor, he was formally deposed as King, the royal insignia torn from his gold-encrusted tabard by no less a person than Antony Bek, Prince Bishop of Durham.

Scotland was without a king again; the throne lay vacant and the entire country waited to see who would be first to claim it. In that year of 1296, however, no one did, and the weather grew colder as the months lurched towards winter. To be sure, Edward of England called himself nothing more than the feudal overlord of Scotland, and he made no slightest mention of any claim to the kingship, but in truth he behaved like a despotic monarch, and his behaviour left no one in Scotland in any doubt of how he saw himself. He went to great lengths to subjugate the kingdom and humiliate and stifle its contentious leaders, and in his determination to achieve that he confiscated the Stone of Destiny, upon which every legitimate King of Scots, including King John himself, had been crowned since time immemorial, and shipped it back to England, to his palace in Westminster.

Edward also summoned a parliament at Berwick, where he demanded, and received, a written oath of allegiance from more than two thousand Scots freeholders: knights, lairds, earls, barons, lords, chieftains, and burgesses. The resulting document, in the form of four huge parchment rolls comprising thirty-five pieces, each of those a list signed and sealed under duress, was known as the Ragman’s Roll, meaning, according to whom you ask, the Witnesses’ Roll, or more popularly, the Devil’s Roll. No matter which it meant, though, no one who signed the roll was glad to have done so. More significantly, few who had signed it felt constrained by having done so, and Edward bought himself no loyalty or wellwishers by forcing the Scots freemen to comply with his arbitrary wishes.

Will himself put it best of all, I believe, when he said to me later, mere weeks before he flung down the gauntlet in cold fury and set out to destroy England’s presence in our land, “Edward Plantagenet. Can you believe the folly and the hubris of the man? He surpassed the boast of Julius Caesar, for he came, he saw, he conquered, and then he went home again without making sure he had won. He should have stayed here and ground the spurs on his boot heels into our throats when he had us down. He should have crushed us, killed us all then and there, while he yet could. But he went home instead, and left us to recover, and now he’ll rue it.”





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

Edward Plantagenet carried his war into Scotland from the border town of Berwick, which he had ordained should be rebuilt as the administrative centre for his overlordship of Scotland. He populated the town with English burgesses, having created sufficient room for them through the slaughter of fifteen thousand former residents, and brought in English engineers and architects to redesign its defences as he garrisoned the newly fortified burgh with English troops. He then established a special branch of the royal exchequer in the town and appointed a man called Hugh Cressingham to administer it as treasurer of Scotland. Cressingham, a senior royal clerk who had been, before that, an itinerant justice in the northern counties of England, threw himself into his new post with a voracious eagerness that within two years earned him the reputation of being the most hated man in Scotland.

Edward also used the months following the battle at Dunbar to seed the entire realm of Scotland with his own personnel, placing trusted functionaries of his own to fill positions left vacant by those imprisoned rebels—Edward’s own word—who had dared to oppose his invasion of their land. Then, for the last five months of that year, he and his armies trampled Scotland under their heavily mailed feet. They confiscated the realm’s crown jewels and insignia and they despoiled the countryside and its populace everywhere they went. Few could withstand them. Among those few, however, William Wallace, and the outlaws of Selkirk Forest whom he led, ranked first and foremost.

Every army lives at the mercy of its lines of supply, and Edward, as aware of that as any good general must be, had taken steps to ship supplies into northern Scotland by sea, using the port of Leith on the Firth of Forth. However, most of the supplies that fed and sustained the garrisons of western and central Scotland were channelled directly through the new administrative centre of Berwick on the east coast, because the northern route from there into Scotland was the only viable route for large numbers of personnel and heavy trains of wagons entering from England. The sole western route, north from Carlisle across the sea sands of the Solway Firth into Galloway and Annandale, was little better than a track, ill maintained at the best of times, dependent upon tides and weather, and vulnerable to attack all the way north from Carlisle. For that reason, every supply train, every reinforcing troop body, every important communication that came north from England by way of Berwick passed through Selkirk Forest, either on the high road itself or through the greenwood byways, and for the last half of 1296 and the first half of the year that followed, all of them were at hazard from the threat of attack and plunder by the Selkirk outlaws.