The Siege of Berwick 1296

On this day in 1296 Edward I captured and sacked the town of Berwick on Tweed. It was the first major military action of the long-drawn-out wars of Scottish Independence. (The Scots had attacked Carlisle a few days earlier, but without success).

Edward's action at Berwick became notorious because, once his army had entered the town they put many of its citizens to the sword. Contemporary English chroniclers maintain that only the men were killed; later Scottish writers wrote of the indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children. There is no doubt that a lot of people died, though probably not quite as many as suggested by the chroniclers, whose estimates varied wildly between 7,500 and 15,000. Generally when medieval chroniclers reach for figures like this, they simply mean 'a large number'. For comparative purposes, London at this time had a population of about 80,000 people.

The accounts get more lurid as time wears on. One story that gets repeated all the time is how the slaughter went on for two days, and Edward was only moved to call a halt when he witnessed a pregnant woman being killed. But this story was not written down until the early fifteenth century, by which time the English and Scots had been fighting for well over a hundred years. It's exactly the kind of horror story you'd expect to find after such a long and bitter conflict.

What gets left unsaid in much of the commentary about the attack on Berwick in 1296 is that Edward's decision to sack the town - while it seems abhorrent to us (note italics) - was entirely conventional behaviour for a military commander at the time. In the Middle Ages, cities and castles that offered to surrender expected terms, including life and limb, and in almost every instance received them. Cities and castles that chose to hold out, and offer only defiance, left themselves open to exactly the kind of brutal treatment that Edward visited on the Scots at Berwick. It was appalling, but wholly unexceptional. One of the best people to read on the ethics of medieval warfare is Matthew Strickland, a professor at the University of Glasgow, who wrote a very good article on Edward's conduct during his war with Scotland. (You can read a bit of it here.)

Anyway, based on what contemporaries wrote, and the comments of Strickland, here's how I wrote up the siege of Berwick in A Great and Terrible King (pp. 287-8):

Edward arrived in Newcastle on 1 March 1296 to meet the giant English army he had summoned. The Scots, who had been ordered to present themselves on the same date, unsurprisingly failed to appear. The king therefore marched his host along the Northumbrian coast and drew it up at Wark, a castle on the River Tweed, where the English lord had decided to join the Scots on account of his love for a Scottish lady – a nice reminder, at this critical moment, that the Tweed was a political boundary between the two countries, not a cultural one. Edward’s arrival at the border coincided with the start of Holy Week, and so, with proper respect for Christian piety, the English army sat and waited. During this time, the Scots made an attack on nearby Carham, and on Easter Monday they tried, unsuccessfully, to take Carlisle. When the festivities at Wark were over, therefore, the English king had all the justification he needed for his invasion. As the end of March approached, he crossed the Tweed and led his army in the direction of Berwick.

Berwick was one of the three towns whose surrender Edward had demanded by proxy the previous year, and that demand was now repeated in person. The citizens again rejected it, throwing back insults, taunts and gibes at the king, and even – according to one English chronicler – baring their buttocks at him. Such bravado was quite surprising, given the size of the English army, and the fact that Berwick’s defences at this time amounted to no more than an insubstantial wooden palisade. The assault that followed, however, seems to have caught both sides unprepared. The king had drawn his forces up in front of the town, and was engaged in the pre-battle ritual of creating new knights – a display perhaps intended to persuade the Scots to reconsider their position. But to the English navy lurking offshore, this military activity looked like a cry to arms, and they duly began their attack. When the sailors in turn got into difficulty and several ships were set on fire, Edward was obliged to sound a general advance. His troops rapidly breached Berwick’s flimsy defences and poured into the town, putting many of its stupefied citizens to the sword.

The king has often been criticized for his behaviour at Berwick, and stands accused of having ordered the indiscriminate massacre of the townspeople. In fact, Edward’s tactics and the killing that took place – however reprehensible they may seem to modern sensibilities – were entirely in keeping with the conventions of medieval warfare. A town or city that refused to surrender left itself liable to be sacked in just this way. That Edward was operating squarely within the usual chivalric norms at Berwick is emphasized by his treatment of the two-hundred-strong garrison who holed themselves up in the town’s castle. To these men, the king offered generous terms of surrender: safety of life and limb, the right to retain their lands and possessions, and even the right to go free, provided they swore never again to bear arms against him. It was a most magnanimous package, which the garrison wisely chose to accept.