Why did medieval England and Scotland hate each other so much?

As the 13th century drew to a close, tensions along the English-Scottish frontier erupted into conflict when Edward I’s invasion sparked a cycle of brutal raids. Helen Carr explores attacks that “surpassed in cruelty all the fury of the heathen” AsEdward Iarrayed his English army around Berwick on Friday 30 March 1296, its residents must have grown very fearful, very quickly. Some 30,000 enemy soldiers mustered outside, with around 5,000 horses – an intimidating force indeed. And they clearly hadn’t come in peace. Berwick was among the most important and prosperous towns in Scotland, a royal burgh with a mint and wealthy religious houses. Its location on the river Tweed not only provided access to sea traffic, it also made the town a strategically vital location on the slightly nebulous border separating England from Scotland. But though it was the country’s main trading port, and perhaps Britain’s second-largest economic centre, it was vulnerable to Edward’s mighty army. When English trumpets sounded the advance, theScotstook one look at the horde amassed outside their town, outnumbering their own troops perhaps three to one – and surrendered almost immediately. What followed was nothing short of a bloodbath. The commander of Berwick’s garrison was spared, on condition that he would agree to fight for Edward. It was the townsfolk who bore the brunt of the English king’s ire: according to some accounts, women and children were spared (though others report that women, too, were targeted), but every man in the town was slaughtered, their bodies falling “like autumn leaves”. One chronicler described the assault as being like “that of a wild boar pursued by dogs”. Thousands of corpses – some say up to 17,000 – were thrown down wells or cast into the sea. Edward’s brutal invasion of Scotland had begun. The capture of Berwick and its subsequent refashioning as an English garrison did not go unavenged by the Scots. They swiftly retaliated by raiding Northumberland, where they allegedly rounded up 200 schoolboys and burned them to death inside a church in Corbridge. Such incidents were certainly exaggerated by chroniclers but, following a number of aggressive sorties across the border, Scots became known to the English as ‘baby killers’. In turn, the Scots called the English ‘tailed dogs’, reflecting a contemporary myth about the men south of the border. Scots troops reportedly shouted that, as well as killing English soldiers, they would amputate their enemies’ tails. The region stretching across Britain where England met Scotland had always been a contentious space marked by confusion and conflict – but it was also one that belonged to both countries. Shaped by shared local culture and aristocracy who held land on either side, the border had been porous, and relations across it generally amicable, unfettered by nationhood. Indeed, one report of an early episode from the conflict tells how Scottish soldiers agreed a secret password to enable them to distinguish compatriot from enemy, so similar were the dialects across the region. So what changed to create the tensions that sparked Edward’s invasion of 1296, and the descent into chaos and violence that followed? The border was a creation of theMiddle Ages, forged from a process of conquest and diplomacy. On 25 September 1237,King Henry IIIof England and Alexander II of Scotland, then at peace, met to ratify the Treaty of York. This established sovereignty over the counties in the frontier region, and determined the border more or less as we know it today, with Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland (those last two combined in the 20th century to form Cumbria) confirmed as English. The border now, as then, is largely defined by rivers. From its western terminus on the Solway Firth, it follows the river Sark, cuts across to the river Esk and its tributary Liddel Water, following the even smaller Kershope Burn up to the watershed on the Northumberland border. It finds its way via more meandering burns and ridges to the Tweed between Kelso and Coldstream, tracing it past Norham Castle to Berwick-upon-Tweed at that river’s mouth. The agreement between Henry and Alexander, signed “apud Eboracum” (at York), served as a binding legal document with which the Scottish monarch relinquished all claim to the border counties in exchange for land in Northumberland and Cumberland to the value of £200 annually. The peace that largely endured for much of the 13th century was shattered near its end. Following the untimely death of Alexander III (son of Alexander II) in 1286, Henry’s son Edward I was later invited to Norham Castle to help decide who should take the Scottish crown. He backed John Balliol, in the belief that he would be the candidate most loyal to the English crown. Edward was initially content with being considered an overlord of Scotland but, in 1295, Balliol agreed a treaty with Philip IV of France, forging what became known as the ‘Auld Alliance’ – and enraging the English king, who was at war with France. On 26 March 1296, Scots warriors raided England and attempted to take Carlisle. Edward responded by launching the most aggressive attack on Scotland in many years, including his assault on Berwick-upon-Tweed. That invasion was, for the English king, a demonstration of power and personal rage. In a letter to Pope Boniface VIII in 1301, Edward asserted a claim to be sovereign of Scotland by invoking a mythical narrative, likely derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136. In this version, after founding the kingdom of Britain, Brutus – great-grandson of the Trojan hero Aeneas – divided it among his three sons. Edward declared that he was descended from Brutus’s eldest son, Locrinus, and therefore overlord of the kingdoms of Locrinus’s brothers’ successors. He also cited past precedent. After the accession of Henry II of England in 1154, Malcolm IV of Scotland had sworn an oath that he would become the liegeman of the English king; that Scots king’s successor, William, had also been forced to swear fealty to Henry. Whether or not Edward truly believed that the fanciful legend and that earlier oath legitimised his claim to overlordship of Scotland, the outcome was the same: war. With the outbreak of conflict, the porous border became a violent space where loyalties were divided and people lived in permanent fear of attack – even more so after the rebellion spearheaded by Scottish leader William Wallace began in 1297. The Scots launched punitive raids across Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland, through Durham and Lancashire, and as far south as North Yorkshire and Ripon. A chronicler at Lanercost Priory, north-east of Carlisle, wrote a vivid first-hand account of a Scottish attack that “surpassed in cruelty all the fury of the heathen”. He also described an assault on Hexham by Scottish soldiers who “committed the consecrated buildings to the flames, plundering the church property stored therein, even violating the women in that very place and afterwards butchering them, sparing neither age, rank nor sex”. Homes were torched, crops trampled or burned, possessions stolen and people abducted. The borders of the Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated manuscript produced in the first half of the 14th century for Lincolnshire knight Geoffrey Luttrell, depict atrocities allegedly committed by Scottish raiding parties across Northumberland and Cumberland (shown on pages 28–29). An unarmed man is attacked from behind; an old woman is beaten, her breasts exposed; babies are massacred. Luttrell fought for Edward I after the invasion, and the psalter reflects his hatred for Scottish soldiers. These images and stories of butchery were meant to strike fear into the hearts of English people, to whom William Wallace was portrayed as a monster sent from hell to murder children. An early 14th-century song about the Scottish wars describes the tunicatus populus (tunic-wearing p