Andy King

‘According to the custom used in French and Scottish wars’: Prisoners and casualties on the Scottish Marches in the fourteenth century

John Balliol’s defiance of Edward I in 1296 saw the beginning of a century of intermittent warfare and raiding on the Anglo-Scottish borders. It might be expected that this would have led to a heavy casualty rate amongst the border gentry, but, in fact, the conventions of fourteenth-century chivalry and the nature of the war worked to keep fatalities to a surprisingly low level. The chivalric ethos and the customs of war ensured that prisoners were well treated, and that ransoms were not too exorbitant, while the practice of allowing prisoners to substitute hostages ensured that their captivity was frequently only of short duration; furthermore, English prisoners were often able to solicit aid from the king in paying their ransoms. As a result, the risks inherent in a military career in the Scottish marches were not actually all that great, and very few of the marcher gentry were either killed or ruined by ransom demands. This, along with the benefits of royal wages for military service, goes a long way towards explaining why the marchers remained committed to the Scottish wars, despite the devastation that was wrought within the border counties. ☆ This is a comparatively well-travelled paper: various versions of it have been inflicted on the St Martin’s Postgraduate Conference, Nottingham; the Medieval Postgraduate Discussion Group, Durham; the Medieval Society, Hull; and the Workshop on Medieval Warfare, King’s College London. I would like to thank these audiences for their perceptive comments and criticisms; and in particular, Michael Prestwich, Chris Given-Wilson and Len Scales for their comments on various drafts of this piece.

Englishmen, Scots and Marchers: National and Local Identities in Thomas Gray's Scalacronica

IN 1295 A CERTAIN THOMAS HUGTOUN had a vision. In this vision, his long-dead father appeared to him in the habit of a Franciscan friar, to warn his son that his neighbours at Berwick had been neglecting the charitable donations which he had begun in honour of St Francis; if they did not amend their ways, they would swiftly experience the loss of their worldly goods and the dishonour of their bodies. Needless to say, this timely warning went unheeded, and the revelationem was proved true when the town was sacked with the utmost ferocity by Edward 1.2 However, whilst the onset of war may have been the ruin of the good citizens of Berwick, some of the apparitions worldly descendants made their fortune out of it, for Hugtoun was a younger son of Sir John Gray, probably the great-grandfather of Sir Thomas de Gray, the author of the Scalacronica. Like his father, Thomas had an active military career, serving as constable of Norham Castle on the Scottish Borders. He was in Flanders in 1339 with Edward III; he fought at Nevilles Cross in 1346; and he fought in France in 1359, with the Black Prince and this record of good service to the Crown brought the family considerable advancement. 3 In 1355 Thomas was captured by the Scots, and was held in Edinburgh Castle while he scraped together the money for his ransom. As he tells us in the introduction to his work, this period of enforced leisure gave him time to read up on the history of Britain; as a result, he was inspired to write a history of his own; and the Scalacronica was the result of these endeavours.4 Gray was nothing if not ambitious, and his chronicle starts at the Creation. Until it reaches the fourteenth century, his narrative was, of course, derived entirely from existing chronicles (though he was evidently a highly competent historian, making

THE ANGLO-SCOTTISH MARCHES AND THE PERCEPTION OF ‘THE NORTH’ IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

The author of a continuation of the Brut chronicle reported how ‘they of the north’ plundered the town of Dunstable, ‘robbyng alle the contre and peple as they came’, and plundering abbeys and churches ‘as they had be paynemes or Sarracenes and no Crysten men’.3 John Whethamstede, Abbot of St Albans, related that in the aftermath of the second battle of St Albans, fought on 17 February (three weeks after Clement Paston wrote his letter), the victorious Lancastrians asserted that they had been given licence by the Queen and northern magnates (proceres Boreales) to ravage anywhere south of the Trent, ‘by way of remuneration and recompense for their labours’. And

Fortresses and fashion statements: gentry castles in fourteenth-century Northumberland

The fourteenth century saw a dramatic upsurge of new castle building in northern England. Not unreasonably, historians have associated this with the Scottish wars, seeing this proliferation as a direct response to Scottish raiding, and assuming that these castles were designed and built solely to perform a defensive military function. However, recent work on castles has questioned such purely functionalist interpretations. This article examines the castles built in the fourteenth century by the ‘gentry’ of Northumberland, the most exposed of all the border counties to Scottish attack, and sets them in their local and national contexts. Were these castles just built as defensive fortresses, or did they also serve a more symbolic role, in a society which had rapidly become militarised with the onset of war in 1296? Were they in fact intended as much to keep up with the neighbours as to keep out the Scots?

‘Then a great misfortune befell them’: the laws of war on surrender and the killing of prisoners on the battlefield in the Hundred Years War

ABSTRACT The Battle of Agincourt has been seen as glorious feat of arms for the English, and for Henry V in particular. However, for many historians, Henry’s conduct was marred by his order for the killing of French prisoners, which has been characterised by some as a war crime. This paper examines how common were such massacres of prisoners, and whether such attitudes were shared by contemporaries. It has usually been considered that the ethics of chivalry and the laws of war forbade the deliberate killing of prisoners; how then could such conduct be justified?

False traitors or worthy knights? Treason and rebellion against Edward II in the Scalacronica and the Anglo‐Norman prose Brut chronicles

This article examines three vernacular chronicles written from contrasting view-points: the Scalacronica of Sir Thomas Gray, whose father was linked with Edward IIs court, and the ‘Long’ and ‘Short’ continuations of the prose Brut, both markedly sympathetic towards Thomas of Lancaster, leader of the opposition to the king. This is a period which saw a sea change in the crowns attitude towards rebellion, but the accounts of these chronicles suggest that a significant part of the political community did not accept the crowns new definition of treason.