Battle of Bannockburn

In the immediate aftermath of Gaveston’s execution, the infighting at court was obscured by events in Scotland. Ever since the coronation of Robert Bruce in 1306, English armies had struggled to impose terms on the Scots. Early in 1314, news arrived at the English court of the fall of both Roxburgh and Edinburgh castles. Unless relieved by midsummer, the English constable of Stirling was also pledged to surrender to the Scots. To forestall this, Edward advanced into Scotland with the greatest English army mustered since his accession, albeit an army from which the earls of Lancaster and Warwick were signally absent. At Bannockburn, near Stirling, on 24 June, in an even more catastrophic rerun of the Battle of Stirling Bridge fought twenty years before, Edward’s cavalry was cut to pieces by the Scots spearmen. The Earl of Gloucester, accused by the King of cowardice on the day before the battle, was killed leading a courageous but entirely futile charge. The Earl of Hereford was taken prisoner. Edward himself had a horse killed beneath him before being led to safety.

Bannockburn was one of the most crushing defeats in English history. It secured Robert Bruce his throne in Scotland and ushered in a period during which the Scots overran or taxed large parts of northern England, perhaps as much as one-fifth of the English realm. Amidst the recriminations that followed, Edward was forced to reissue the Ordinances and to allow Thomas of Lancaster a new supervisory role at the centre of English government. More catastrophically still, Bannockburn was followed by pillage, poor harvests and extended periods of famine in the English countryside, a great famine from 1315 to 1317 (with rumours of cannibalism), exceptionally poor harvests in 1320 and 1321, and outbreaks of cattle and sheep murrain in 1319 and 1321: perhaps the worst agrarian crisis in English history since the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. Teeth recovered from plague pits or other burial sites of the 1340s often reveal patterns of decay and deformity (in technical terms ‘hypoplasia’, tell-tale ridges in the enamel of developing teeth) which suggest severe malnutrition for at least a generation before the arrival of plague in 1348. Scurvy and rickets, caused by deficiency in vitamins C and D, and iron-based anaemia, revealed through a characteristic honeycomb pattern in the bone of the eye-socket, occur in a remarkable proportion of such medieval skeletal remains. In other words, it was the children of the famines of Edward II’s reign who grew up, already malnourished and lacking resistance, to become the adult victims of the great pestilence, twenty years later.