The invasion of William the Lion, in 1174, was made ostensibly to aid the rebellious sons of Henry II. against their father. William’s true object was, no doubt, to recover the border counties. Perhaps no invasion of England has ever appeared so threatening, and proved so completely ‘the fleeting shadow of a dream.’ William’s army was large—perhaps the largest that a Scots king had hitherto gathered—but he could not control his wild followers. His advance was marked by ravage and destruction—peculiarly stupid in view of the fact that he hoped to annex the country which he was ruining. Several fortresses were captured, and in July he besieged Alnwick. He kept only a very small force about him, and allowed the main portion of his probably unruly host to spread over the country for purpose of pillage. The consequences of the dispersion were disastrous. The troops of the North had already assembled under Robert d’Estuteville, Sheriff of Yorkshire, and were marching against the invaders. A body of some four hundred horsemen was scouting ahead of the main body, and so hopelessly were the Scots scattered that they passed, apparently unchallenged, through the enemy’s line into his rear. Before the walls of Alnwick they saw a small body of about a hundred horsemen engaged in exercising and tilting. They can hardly have expected that they would be so rash as to charge their own superior numbers. Yet so it was. Practically the whole of the tilting band were taken, and the astonishment of the victors may be imagined when they found that they had captured the King of Scots. The Scottish army melted away across the Border. The King paid dearly for his recklessness. He was forced to become Henry’s vassal, and so remained until the death of the Angevin king. Richard I. very wisely freed him from this humiliation in return for a money payment, but there were no more Scottish invasions of England for many years. The Scottish kings never gave up their hopes of gaining Northumberland, and more than once hostilities appeared to threaten; but on the whole the relations between the two countries were peaceful, and when Alexander III. died in 1286 there had been no real outbreak of war for a century.
This peaceful period came to an end when Edward I. made his attempt to unite the two countries. That his aim was wise and statesmanlike is not to be doubted. There was no strong dividing line between the great mass of the English nation and the Scots Lowlanders, who, for all practical purposes, formed one race. The two countries had been in close and generally peaceful connection for over a century; the estates of many of the magnates lay on both sides of the Border. On the subject of the repeated ‘commendations’ of the Scottish kings to those of England, opinion will always be divided; but to Edward’s legal mind they must have appeared to constitute a strong body of precedents. Nor does it, on the whole, appear that there was at first any great disinclination to the union among the Scots. It was Edward’s highhandedness, and the blundering violence of his officials, who were foolish enough to treat the country like a conquered land, that slowly roused the pride and courage of the Scots.
In 1297 Scotland was in full revolt under William Wallace, and after his famous victory at Cambuskenneth he invaded northern England while Edward was absent in France. For some three months the Scots ranged over the English Border counties. Newcastle and Carlisle successfully held out, but the open country was swept bare. The chronicler Hemingburgh accuses the Scots of committing unmentionable atrocities, but practically admits that Wallace was not to blame for them, being unable to control his followers. There exists a letter of protection granted by him and his colleagues to Hexham Abbey, and doubtless there were others. Still, great barbarities appear to have been perpetrated, and it was largely owing to them that Edward conceived his furious animosity against the Scottish patriot.
In the stress of their struggle for independence with Edward I. the Scots contrived to make a raid on Cumberland in 1299, but by 1305 the country was at the feet of the English king. Not until Robert Bruce had taken the lead in Scotland, and the worthless Edward II. had succeeded his great father, were the northern borders again troubled. In 1310, and again in 1311, Robert raided Northumberland, and in 1313 he swept through Cumberland, joined a fleet which he had sent from the Isles and the Clyde, and annexed the Norse principality of Man. In 1314 he gained the supreme victory of Bannockburn. The independence of Scotland appeared assured and the way open for invasions of England.
Between 1314 to 1323 the Scots invaded England repeatedly. All their operations were of a guerrilla type, and rarely appear to have aimed at more than the devastation of the country-side. Robert, himself one of the ablest generals of mediæval days, had no illusions as to the ability of Scotland to cope single-handed with her strong antagonist, and his famous testamentary counsel to always avoid action and to endeavour to starve invaders out of the country is well known.
The armies which carried out the invasions of England during this heyday of Scotland’s renown were well adapted for their purpose. They included a force of mail-clad men-at-arms strong enough to overcome any local resistance which might be offered, and a much larger contingent of light-armed men mounted on rough, hardy, country ponies. Each man carried a bag of oatmeal on his horse, and an iron plate whereon to bake it. Otherwise men and beasts lived on the country through which they passed. The hardy, frugal Scots were quite at home in this rough-and-ready campaigning, and for several years they rode at will over northern England.
There is generally a lack of interest about the invasions themselves, which all bore almost the same image and superscription. Once the Border was crossed, the Scots rode far and wide over the northern counties, ravaging, plundering, or ransoming villages, towns, and castles, much as the Vikings had done four centuries before. There was little fighting as a rule. England was at war with herself. And when once or twice English armies did assemble, the Scots simply avoided an action until they were starved into dispersion.
In 1314 Edward Bruce and the ‘Good Lord’ James Douglas wasted the English Border. In 1315 Bruce himself attacked Carlisle, but it repulsed him. For the next two years the main energy of Scotland was devoted to Edward Bruce’s attempted conquest of Ireland, but Douglas was busy on the Border; and such was the dread of him in the North that his name was used to frighten disobedient children, and the humiliation of the times is depicted in the lullaby:
‘Hush thee, baby, do not fret thee;
The Black Douglas shall not get thee!’