The Forest Laird(176)

“Thereby committing suicide,” Andrew added. “That is obscene, Will. We’ve been over this before. No army that Scotland can field would be equipped to defeat the English host in battle. We might as well lay down our weapons and surrender ourselves to them right now.”

And so the argument began again.

There is no defining military word for what Will was, or for what his methods were. In those days when he and Andrew Murray first took up the sword against the English, there was only one accepted way of waging war, and that was the way of chivalry, the way wars had been fought between Christian armies for hundreds of years. There were conventions to be observed therein and rules to be followed, and a battle—any battle—was as likely to be decided by negotiation and bargaining between leaders as it was by physical combat. All of which appeared highly civilized and carefully structured to avoid unnecessary killing, until the observer took note that the only people who ever benefited from these negotiations were the leaders from each side. The remainder of the people involved, probably ninety-nine out of every hundred people in the field, were unimportant and insignificant. There at the behest of their leaders and under pain of forfeiture and punishment should they refuse, they were expected to die happily should their leaders not be able to arrive at a satisfactory settlement of their troubles.

Will and Andrew changed all that, although the doing of it all was far less simple than that plainly written statement suggests. For the first time, though, between the pair of them they raised an army of the common Scots folk led by men whose sole qualification for leadership was their ability as warriors and leaders. None of these new commanders were high born or titled or otherwise privileged, and none had anything to influence their conduct other than a will to defeat the English invaders. That, in turn, resulted in their having an unprecedented awareness of, and a dedication to, the welfare of the men who followed them and shared their dreams of victory.

I know people today, less than thirty years later, who would dispute that loudly, pointing as evidence to the large number of magnates and high-born lords present at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. But that was later, and their support had materialized with painful slowness during the first long months of the “rebellious” activities of Wallace and Murray. Only when it had become undeniable that the entire populace of Scotland had come out in support of the two rebel leaders, and that no one could hope to stand against them, did the situation change, and then it changed radically, with a sudden and total shift of support among the nobility. In the beginning, though, in the months after I sat there and listened to them talk, there were only Wallace and Murray, two disdained and widely disparaged voices crying, like the Baptist, in the wilderness.

The two men had not yet settled their differences by the time Andrew Murray left to return to the north, but they had arrived at an agreement. Will himself would not appear as a leader in the fighting. His oath to remain with his family precluded that. But otherwise he warranted that he would commit his full support, using his name, his influence, and his outlawed followers to raise the standard of resistance and rebellion in the south, should Andrew Murray ask it of him in the months ahead.

And the months ahead were active months, since John de Warenne, the English Earl of Surrey whom Edward had appointed military governor of Scotland, seemed determined to pacify the whole country within the first few months of his tenure, sending out large bodies of English troops to patrol the entire land and stamp out any signs of rebellion before they could begin to flourish. Towards that goal, he also set out to reinforce and amplify the English garrisons in various strongholds throughout the land, and Lanark, the jurisdiction of the young sheriff I had met in Glasgow, was one such place. Spurred no doubt by his officious superior, William Hazelrig let it be known that he would not tolerate outlawry, in any sense, in his lands.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1

At about the same time that Will and Andrew Murray were debating so earnestly with each other in Selkirk Forest, King Edward’s new treasurer for Scotland, Hugh Cressingham, began to assert his noxious presence more and more visibly. He treated Scotland as a conquered fiefdom, levying taxes here, there, and everywhere in order to pay for England’s foreign wars, and fomenting widespread anger and frustration with his highhanded arrogance. Encouraged perhaps by the overt signs of a widespread English military presence that would back him should the need ever arise, and recognizing that the international trade in wool was the economic engine that had made Scotland prosperous over the past hundred years, he imposed crippling taxes on the gathering, processing, and exporting of wool and thereby came nigh to killing the entire industry within his first year in office. Nurturing Scots trade was of no importance to him, but he smiled with satisfaction as he shipped off enormous sums of Scots money to fill his master’s coffers.