Nations A History of Britain by Simon Schama

In the last decades of the 13th century, the nations of Britain found their voices -

loud confident and defiant - and they were raised against England.

"The people of Snowdon assert that even if their Prince gave over lordshipment to the English King,

"they would refuse to do homage to any foreigner of whose language, customs and law they were ignorant."

"On account of the endless perfidy of the English and to recover our native freedom,

"the Irish are compelled to enter a deadly war."

"For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, we will yield in no least way to English dominion.

"We fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honour, but for freedom."

We know these voices. They have been with us a long time now.

All the same, it is a shock to hear them this early,

to discover the politics of birthplace uttered with such passion and such pain.

Once said, they could not be unsaid.

When the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish acted on their words,

the bloody wars of the British nations became inevitable.

And these would not just be battles about territories,

they were battles for ideas.

Ideas of what a sovereign nation should be -

an extension of the rule as will or something wider,

something involving the people as well as the Prince, something called "the community of the realm".

Those battles would be fought between the peoples of Britain - Welshmen would die in Scotland,

Scotsmen would perish in Ireland, the English would kill and be killed everywhere.

For the fight to the death between princes and principles,

the battle for the making of a nation would begin in the very heart of England.

One man was responsible for provoking the peoples of Britain into an awareness of their nationhood

and he was England's own, home-grown Caesar, Edward I.

In 1774, those made curious by his fearsome reputation opened his tomb.

The man they found inside was every bit as awesome as contemporaries had recorded -

dressed in the purple robe of a Roman emperor, an impressive six foot two tall,

fully justifying his nickname, Long Shanks.

Upon that stark marble tomb, the only ornamentation reads,

"Edwardus Primus, Scottorum Malleus Hic Est.

"Hammer of the Scots."

After a century of rule by kings who were essentially Frenchmen,

Edward can be called the first truly English King, given an old Anglo-Saxon name

and imbued with a certainty that it was England's imperial mission

to take its rule to the four corners of the British Islands.

His many enemies compared him to one of the big-cat predators.

"Perhaps he will rightly be called a Leopard.

"Leo - brave, proud and fierce. The pard - wily, devious and treacherous."

The Leopard Prince was born to splendid, impossible expectations.

His father Henry III had named his son for England's royal saint, Edward the Confessor,

the paragon, so it was then thought, of kingly perfection.

Though the Confessor had been dead for almost 200 years, Henry ate, drank and worshipped him

and finally created for the long-dead King a shrine of unparalleled magnificence.

Of course, such a shrine would need a home that equalled its splendour -

the new Westminster Abbey.

Henry demolished the old basilica at Westminster and replaced it with an immense Gothic abbey,

a building that now fitted his vision of an awe-inspiring English monarch.

From now on, Westminster would be the symbolic heart of the kingdom,

the place where all English monarchs would be crowned and buried.

His father, King Henry III, reigned for 56 years.

He is not remembered for any stirring achievement or blood-soaked conquest,

but Henry's time on the throne was driven by a magnificent obsession -

he wanted to turn the monarchy into England's dominant power.

Henry's great gift to the nation was more than just a fine new church.

Across the way, its secular counterpart

was the great hall of the Palace of Westminster.

The palace was seat of government AND a residence for King Henry

one like his Angevin ancestors didn't much like being in the saddle.

And the hall was a court in both the senses the word suggests -

a place of judgement and a theatre of ceremony.

At Westminster, the King had to be seen to be magnificent.

But the King had also to be seen to be just.

Westminster may have been the creation of the monarchy,

but it also belonged to England, a nation of laws,

the nation of Magna Carta.

Henry had grown up with the charter, signed by his father King John in 1215,

which put real limits on the power of the King - a bit of a blow for a king who wanted absolute authority.

Kings could no longer ignore the complaints of their subjects

that they could be forced to submit to a council of the barons.

That council thought of itself as the voice of the community of the realm

and even now began to be called Parliament.

Its role would be to hold the King to his contract.

Since Henry had become King as a boy of nine, he had no choice but to swallow this bitter pill.

However, as he grew older, Henry burned with frustration, becoming determined to escape its shackles,

to restore the unchallenged authority of the Crown.

Knowing that this couldn't happen without a fight, Henry accepted a compromise position for many years

that the King was not free to govern through pure royal will.

But Henry III was also a Plantagenet and Plantagenets dreamed dangerous dreams,

expensive dreams of campaigns far abroad, which no-one in York or Canterbury could see the point of.

And when Plantagenets thought they might get unwelcome advice, they stopped listening...

until, that is, they were made to.

In 1258, in the very hall that defined his majesty, Westminster,

seven of the most powerful barons confronted the King.

Fully armed, they paused only to leave their swords outside.

They demanded that Henry meet them at a parliament in Oxford

and stop trying to turn his European dreams into reality.

The barons were led in all but name by the most improbable revolutionary in all of British history -

Simon de Montfort. Here at Kenilworth,

he presided over a little empire of culture.

A French aristocrat who inherited the Earldom of Leicester,

Simon became convinced that he was more English than the English.

What was good for de Montfort was good for the nation. Love him or hate him, everyone knew

that Simon de Montfort was a man with a mission.

That mission, embarked on with his fellow barons,

was to bring the wayward, self-glorifying monarchy to book,

to make it the servant, not the master, of the realm.

At Oxford, amidst wildfire rumours, a camp of soldiers and the growling hunger of a famine,

Henry III was treated to the emasculation of his sovereignty.

A document was drawn up for the King to sign - not discuss, just accept.

And what it said was so startling, so genuinely revolutionary,

that 1258 ought to be one of those dates engraved on the national memory.

The Provisions of Oxford were at least as important as Magna Carta.

In effect, the Crown had been replaced by a new council of nobles and clergy.

That council now virtually ruled England - foreign courtiers were made to disappear.

"It has been ordained that there are to be three parliaments a year to view the state of the kingdom.

"It is provided that, from each county, there are chosen four loyal, worthy knights

"to hear all complaints for the common benefit of the whole kingdom."

When the community of the realm, including the King and Prince Edward, swore to uphold the Provisions,

they could have been in no doubt about the significance of the moment for the fate of the nation.

And so Henry III's facade of omnipotent rule had come crashing down around his ears.

But he was not the only royal with a stake in events.

How did the 19-year-old Edward feel about the drastic shrinkage in the power of the Crown, his crown?

There is no doubt that, for some time, even the Prince was dazzled

by the intense magnetism of Simon de Montfort's personality.

And for a while, Edward went along with it.

But, inevitably, divisions opened up between the reformers.

It was all very well to make the King and his officers answerable to the barons,

but ought the barons to be answerable to THEIR inferiors?

De Montfort thought yes, the earls thought no.

And as those divisions opened wider,

the Leopard Prince began to change his spots and sharpen his claws.

Now it became increasingly clear that the struggle over who was to rule England and how they would do it

centred on two men - Simon and Edward.

Neither could prevail without the other's total defeat.

Over five years, Henry and Edward manoeuvred against de Montfort for power until finally words ran out.

For this was no three-month paper revolution, like the original signing of the Magna Carta.

The issue could now only be settled on the field of battle. For the first time since the Norman conquest,

the political fate of England was completely fluid, its eventual outcome uncertain.

In 1264, de Montfort won the first round at the Battle of Lewes on the Sussex Downs.

King Henry and Edward were both taken prisoner.

The year which followed, with de Montfort in charge,

was the closest England came to a republic until the days of Oliver Cromwell.

And in Parliament, not just aristocrats and bishops, but ordinary knights of the shire

and even burgesses from the towns presumed to discuss the fate of their superiors, a prince and a king.

But like the later republic, this one quickly gained the attributes of a dictatorship.

With power going to his head, Simon seemed more vainglorious adventurer than messianic reformer.

In the end, he simply repelled more people than he attracted.

With the impotent Henry III firmly under lock and key,

the Crown's future lay with Edward, who outwitted his captors

and made a dashing horseback getaway.

Even at this stage, it was obvious that there was something extraordinary about Edward.

He radiated the kind of charisma that drew confused responses of both fear and adoration.

He purposely kept his signals mixed, the better to convert them into loyalty.

Edward led his following to Evesham in Worcestershire

where de Montfort's now outnumbered army camped near the abbey.

Under stormy skies, the battle was a slaughter.

Told his son had been killed, Simon replied, "Then it is time to die."

He charged into the fray and was slain on foot, his devoted knights falling with him.

Edward ignored the rules of war.

The wounded were stabbed where they lay.

Simon's head, hands, feet and testicles were cut off...

..the genitals hung around his nose.

The Crown had won, but only after overcoming Kenilworth's mighty defences

in a siege that lasted nine months.

But Edward had been given a serious early lesson in the political realities of England.

He wouldn't cringe before the barons, but he had to make them his allies.

As partners, they'd go on to create an English empire of their own -

the reincarnation of Roman Britannia.

In 1274, Edward I's coronation finally took place

in a magnificent sanctuary created by his father.

The Westminster in which he was crowned would,

if Edward had anything to do with it, be the capital not just of England but of Britain.

It was in Wales that Edward first made the seriousness of his ambitions crystal clear.

Here, the dominant Prince was Llewelyn ap Gruffydd,

ruler of the mountainous kingdom of Gwynedd, Greater Snowdonia.

Knowing that the almost impossible terrain of his country had been the graveyard of English armies,

Llewelyn was determined to resist their attempts to subdue central Wales.

Here, the native Welsh clung on to their language, customs and laws,

lords in their own lands, but still subjects of the English King.

By the 13th century, Wales was divided into the principality of Gwynedd,

the disputed centre and the encroaching English baronial and Crown lands.

Encroaching, that is, until 1258, when Llewelyn was strong enough to have himself declared

"princeps wallie", Prince of Wales.

Exploiting the Civil War in England, and making an alliance with de Montfort,

Llewelyn's armies overran the now undefended centre,

but he then overreached himself, marrying de Montfort's daughter,

an offence Edward was unlikely to forgive or to forget.

Years later, Llewelyn handed Edward the perfect pretext for retribution -

he failed to show up at Edward's coronation

and ignored a total of five summonses to pay homage to his new king.

Edward, who needed no tutorials on the connections between ceremonies and power, immediately took this

as a slap in the face, an act of virtual rebellion.

In 1276, a huge army - the biggest in Britain since the Norman conquest -

invaded Gwynedd, penetrating right to its furthest corners, to Snowdonia and to Anglesey.

Faced with this invasion, Llewelyn was forced to surrender.

But, as so often in these years, humiliation bred defiance.

In 1282, the Welsh launched a surprise attack on an English garrison.

Edward now bore down again with an even bigger army,

but this campaign was far from being a walkover.

Realising this, the Archbishop of Canterbury attempted to conciliate between the warring factions,

offering Llewelyn land and title in England if he would renounce his rights in Wales.

And the answer to this offer was blunt.

"That they must stand by their laws and rights in defence of all Wales.

"The people preferred to die rather than to live under English rule.

"They would not do homage to any stranger of whose language, manners and laws they were ignorant.

"They would fight in defence of 'nostra natio' - our nation against the English.

When the war was renewed,

it was with fresh and unsparing savagery.

No quarter was given by either side.

The Welsh exploited their land, ambushed the slow-moving companies of knights

and then disappeared off again into the hills and forests.

FEROCIOUS SHRIEKS

Then, in a minor skirmish in central Wales, Llewelyn was killed by an anonymous English spearman.

The final annihilation of resistance took another six months

before the King could claim Wales to be pacified.

However, the subjugation of Wales was far more subtle than the surgical application of brute force.

Edward had the chilling, uncannily modern knowledge

that to break your enemy you must first strip him of his cultural identity.

Before this place was called Conway by the English, it was Aberconwy.

It was a monastery housing the tomb of the most powerful of all Welsh princes and home to a sacred relic

that the Welsh believed to be a piece of the true cross.

Naturally, then, the monastery became a fortress

and the cross was taken to London along with Llewelyn's crown.

The lords called themselves Princes of Wales - fine.

From 1301, THEY will be the most English of the English,

the first son of the King, the heir to the throne, the emperor in waiting.

But the most titanic of all the visible signs of the English empire were its castles,

a granite ring of fortresses stretching from Builth to Hope,

most supplied from the sea, depriving the Welsh of any hope of liberation.

For the Welsh of Snowdonia, the great stone fortresses in their midst were what one of them called

the magnificent badges of our subjection.

The symbol not of imperial grandeur, but of crushing national annihilation,

a permanent, daily, wounding reminder of conquest and humiliation.

The most colossal exercise, in fact, in colonial domination anywhere in medieval Europe.

Beneath the lion standard of Edward Plantagenet, the Welsh inhabitants

had now become second-class citizens in their own country.

Those natives were treated for the most part like naughty children,

not allowed to bear arms, of course, but even forced to ask permission

if they wanted strangers to stay at their house overnight.

Worst of all, I think, the Welsh were doomed by English superiority

to become objects of terminal quaintness -

the quaint language, quaint songs, those amusing choirs and chants.

It could have been worse, and for the Jews of England, it was.

The Welsh wars cost ten times the King's annual revenue

and the price of victory and castle building had so bled the Jews, the usual source of loans and taxation,

that they had nothing left to yield and so could be dispensed with altogether.

Early in his reign, Edward, perhaps acting from religious conviction, outlawed moneylending

and so put most of England's Jews out of business.

He then forced them to wear yellow felt badges of identification

and so be recognised as the subspecies of humanity he undoubtedly believed they were.

A year after his first Welsh invasion,

Edward arrested all the heads of the Jewish households

and hanged nearly 300 in the tower.

Not satisfied with this, he expelled the entire community,

perhaps 3,000 people, in 1290 -

an act so overwhelmingly popular, especially with the church,

that it awarded him a huge tax grant.

So it's Edward's England

which became the first country to perform a little act of ethnic cleansing on its Jews -

the violent uprooting of entire communities in York, Lincoln and London.

It was not plain sailing for the Jews aboard one deportation boat in the Thames.

At Queenborough, the captain encouraged his Jewish passengers to stretch their legs

as the ship beached on the receding tide. As it returned, he barred them from getting back aboard,

challenging them to call on their God to part the waves as He had with the Red Sea.

But there was no miracle this time - they all drowned.

In Lincoln Cathedral lie the entrails of Eleanor of Castile, Queen to Edward I.

She died within months of the expulsions, leaving her husband,

normally so thick-skinned and emotionally coarse, distraught, plunged into grief.

Edward's devotion is best reflected in the monument unique in medieval kingship -

twelve crosses he built to mark the points where Eleanor's body lay en route to Westminster Abbey,

the most famous being Charing Cross in London.

Eleanor's death seemed to transfer Edward's reserve of passion to what now became the real love of his life,

the single-minded pursuit of imperial power.

It was Scotland that was destined to be on the receiving end of Edward's deadly power games,

which began, as always, by converting accidents into opportunities.

The accident was the death in 1290 of the last surviving direct heir to Alexander III,

King of Scotland.

With her gone, the Scottish nobles were lining up for the throne.

Someone was needed to judge the contestants. Well, guess who?

The strongest claimants led the two most powerful family factions in Scotland -

the Bruces and the Comyn-Balliol Alliance. They hated each other.

Both were determined to have their man made King, and as they pushed their rival claims fully,

their conflict would cause civil war across all of Scotland.

Edward came north to decide which of the two rivals would be King.

The competitors met him on either side of the River Tweed near a place called Norham.

Of course, Edward being Edward, he had a price on his mind

in return for being adjudicator/godfather to the Scots.

And that price, needless to say, was homage, the bent knee, the kiss on the ring of the devoted sword,

the acceptance by whoever got the job that henceforth he would be Edward's man,

deeply in his debt, his soldiers at the King's command.

To prove his point, he gathered an army at Norham - an army of monks, scholars and antiquarians.

Their heavy artillery were ancient charters and chronicles,

their job to find the historical proof of English overlordship.

But they failed, so the King threw the problem right back to the Scots.

Edward asked the guardians of the realm to find documentary evidence why he was NOT their feudal overlord.

To which he got a wonderfully canny contradiction - not at all what he wanted to hear.

"Sire," they said, "the bona gentes, the responsible men who have sent us here, know full well

"you couldn't possibly make so great a claim unless you actually believed you had a right to it.

"But of this right we know nothing."

Which is like saying, "You can't be completely off your head to come up with this sovereignty stuff,

"but actually it is all news to us, chum, since the Scottish realm on this side of the river

"is held tribute to no-one but God. We don't have to prove a thing.

"It's for you to come up with the super-monk with the perfect charter. Let us know when you have it."

In the end, all those who thought they were still in with a chance of winning the Scots throne

paid homage to Edward, but the rest of the Scots community of the realm held their noses and stood aloof.

Was this, as some Scottish historians have always insisted, an Edwardian trap?

Was he already thinking of turning Scotland into Wales north,

the next territory to be gobbled up by his imperial appetite?

Well, I think the appetite grew with the eating.

A year later, when the final verdict came through,

Balliol did prove to have the better claim and was the clear choice of Scotland.

Edward did not force him on anybody.

For his part, once Balliol had acknowledged Edward's overlordship,

the English King agreed to keep the separate identity of Scottish institutions.

Only if their interest crossed would there be trouble.

Alas, they did and trouble there certainly was.

Edward wasted no time in humiliating Balliol on every occasion over the next five years,

driving the Scots community of the realm - the nobles, clergy, gentry and burgesses

to stand against their own King.

When war with France coincided with another Welsh rebellion,

Edward exercised his overlordship of Scotland and summoned their nobility to fight for him.

They refused and then went one stage further.

They signed a formal treaty with France against England.

To Edward, it was self-evidently a declaration of war.

The army he raised in 1296 put even the Welsh campaign in the shade.

First to fall was Scotland's wealthiest city port - Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The siege lasted only hours... the massacre that followed, days.

"The King of England spared no-one...

"..whatever the age or sex.

"And for two days, streams of blood flowed from the bodies of the slain.

"So that mills could be turned round by its flow."

At Dunbar, the Scots Royal Army were swept aside.

Now Edward turned imperial conqueror in deadly earnest.

King John Balliol's arms were torn from his coat like a court-martialled subaltern.

English officials took over Scottish government.

And just as he'd ripped the heart from the Welsh sense of independence by carrying off their sacred relics,

Edward now took the Stone of Scone, symbol of the independent Scottish crown, to Westminster,

where a magnificent coronation chair was custom-designed to hold it.

And when Edward was given the broken Scottish royal seal, he set it aside, commenting...

"A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd."

One by one, a host of Scots came to do homage to Edward,

including the Bruces, but there was one who did not -

Malcolm Wallace... and this Malcolm had a brother.

Here he is - the standard-issue freedom fighter of the imagination,

the give-'em-hell whiskers, the save-me-Jesus eyes,

the hamstrings from hell.

We haven't a clue, of course, whether William Wallace looked like this,

any more than we know if he could have been a stuntman for Mel Gibson who immortalised him in Braveheart.

But Wallace IS one of those larger-than-life figures whose epic romance refuses to go away.

It just grows to match this extraordinary monument to him dominating the Stirling skyline.

There is no doubt, of course, that Wallace DID count.

His brief, dramatic intervention in the wars between England and Scotland did change British history -

if only to show that the armies of Edward I were not invincible

at all times and in all places.

Beyond that, Wallace was one of the few Scots who never at any stage

paid homage to Edward, remaining loyal to King John Balliol.

More gentleman-turned-outlaw than peasant man of the glens,

Wallace wasn't a one-man war either.

By mid 1297, all Scotland was on the boil.

North of the Forth, Andrew Murray matched or surpassed him by leading a wild and brilliant guerrilla war.

When Murray marched south and Wallace moved north

to meet here on the Forth at Stirling, the key to Scotland,

the chaotic, wildfire uprising turned into a major military campaign.

On the eve of the Battle of Stirling Bridge, Wallace told the English, "We are not here to make peace,

"but to do battle and to liberate our kingdom."

The Scots gathered on the Abbey Craig ridge.

Below, a narrow wooden bridge led to the castle and to the English.

Wallace allowed half of them to cross the fragile structure, enough for his forces to deal with.

And so they did, rushing down from their perch, through the woods and into the English ranks.

"Wallace on foot, with a great sharp sword, goes amongst the very thickest of his foes.

"The Scots vanquished the savage English, whom they put into mourning for death.

"Some had their throats cut by swords, others were taken prisoners, others drowned."

One, the hated English taxman Cressingham, was skinned,

his fat body made into a belt for Wallace's victorious sword.

And yet, as so often in Scottish history, defeat quickly followed victory down the Forth at Falkirk.

Wallace's warriors died by the thousand.

"They fell like blossoms in an orchard when the fruit has ripened.

"Bodies covered the ground as thickly as snow in winter."

Wallace himself managed to escape the slaughter,

only to be captured years later...

..betrayed by a Scotsman, possibly even the Bruce himself.

After a mock trial, Wallace endured the most appalling death that the King's rage could devise -

a live disembowelment.

In the intervening six years, Scotland suffered almost as badly by Edward's hand,

as the Scots drew inspiration from Wallace and fought on.

Edward came back from 1297 to 1304.

The war became a murderous academy of siege warfare.

Edward came from the south west to Caerlaverock Castle,

took it and left, with its defenders hanged from the walls.

North to Bothwell, where a huge siege tower overcame its mighty battlements, and on and on...

Not even Scotland's Westminster was saved from his fury.

Dunfermline Abbey is one of those places where you can almost smell tragedy in the stonework.

Pretty much everything you see here was built, or rather rebuilt, after 1303.

In that year, Edward I, in one of his murderously vindictive tantrums,

torched the place, burnt it to the ground.

He was, as usual, making a point.

To smash up a royal mausoleum was to strike directly at Scotland's sense of independent history.

The greatest symbol of that independence, as always, was Stirling.

Its surrender took the fight out of the Scots.

In 1304, they submitted to Edward.

"Well," he must have thought, "that was that. Done with, peace."

A mistake.

For what Edward couldn't possibly have predicted was the emergence of a Scottish lion

even more ruthless than the Leopard himself.

And he was, of course, the Bruce.

Strangely, when you catalogue the strengths of Robert the Bruce -

his political cunning, his military ingenuity, his steely resolution, even his intermittent fits of rage -

they all begin to sound rather like the attributes of the man whose work he had sworn to undo - Edward I.

If he had read the book of Edward's life, he would have known that lesson one was not "beat the foreigner",

it was "first, win your battles at home."

And so, in 1306,

Bruce, the most politically intelligent and militarily successful figure in medieval Scottish history,

did just that.

He met with John Comyn, his main rival, and ended up

stabbing him before the alter of Greyfriars Church in Dumfries.

The murder is neither explained nor justified by it being the case of a patriot knocking off a quisling,

for Comyn had been a lot more consistent in his opposition to the English than Bruce.

He remained loyal to King Balliol, who still lived and so had to be removed.

Barely six weeks after he had murdered Comyn, Bruce had himself inaugurated King at Scone.

Instead of unifying the Scots behind a single leader,

Bruce's actions only intensified what was already a Scottish civil war,

one that he initially lost.

He fled Scotland and so created a vacuum of knowledge filled by heroic mythology -

the fable of the cave and the spider, whose patience gave Robert the resolution to persevere.

There was no cave, no spider, but there was something much more extraordinary,

the polished noble turning himself into a guerrilla captain.

For Robert the Bruce, not Wallace, wrote the book on partisan warfare.

On his return, four months later, adversity now made him a great general,

attacking his Scots and English foes alike.

In the end, Robert the Bruce simply outlived the old King, who breathed his last fearing the worst,

should ever his son Edward of Caernarvon have to meet Robert the Bruce on the field of battle.

Eventually, Edward died,

here, near Carlisle, in 1307,

en route to deal with Bruce himself.

Ironically, at the end of his life,

Edward turned thoughtful, even writing that he wanted to promote

"pleasantness, ease and quiet for our subjects."

Well, if he really believed this, he must have died a truly disappointed man.

A story says the King ordered his bones to be boiled from his flesh and carried before his son's army,

believing that as long as his bones marched north, the Scots would never be victorious.

But Edward junior was going to need more than his father's shinbone if he was to have any chance of success.

He was certainly not the incarnation of the community of the realm.

Neither was he the true heir of the Caesar of Britain, the monarch of all he surveyed.

He was just a loser.

Bruce, on the other hand, was still a winner. Over seven years, he regained his kingdom.

So, by 1314, the English only controlled Bothwell, Berwick, Jedburgh

and the key, Stirling Castle, now besieged by the Scots.

Faced with complete humiliation in Scotland, Edward II finally acted and marched north.

He met his nemesis in a muddy field along the banks of the Bannock Burn.

It was not to be the usual story of charge, arrows away, slash, victory,

but a relentless, two-day affair.

Outnumbered three to one, Bruce did get to choose the boggy battlefield,

knowing that even Plantagenet war machines don't work well on wet ground.

However, it was almost all over before it had begun.

Young English knight Henry de Bohun caught Bruce unawares and unarmoured

on his little mount, some way off from his soldiers.

"So Henry missed the noble King and he, standing in his stirrups with an axe that was both hard and good,

"struck him a blow with such great force that it cleaved the head to his brains."

The shaft of the axe left broken in Robert's fist.

Skirmishing followed as the short June night fell, Bruce reminding the Scots,

"The English are bent on obliterating my kingdom, nay, our whole nation."

The English knights charge.

The sodden ground and schiltrom -

hedgehogs of 1,500 men, each holding a 12-foot spear - defeat them.

Ranks of infantry meet head on.

"Such a smashing of spears that men could hear it far away."

English archers are now swept away by Scots cavalry

or blocked by the four schiltroms, which unite and push forward.

"Many a splendid, mighty blow dealt there on both sides

"until blood burst through the mail coats and went streaming down to the earth."

Edward II fled the field with 500 knights.

The English force broke behind him and was slaughtered. The burn becomes so choked...

"Men could pass dry foot over it on drowned horses and men."

Edward II left his shield, his seal, his honour

and perhaps 4,000 English and Welsh dead.

Having won the victory on the battlefield, if not the war itself,

the Scots now sought international recognition of their newly-won liberty.

The occasion was a letter sent to the Pope

giving reasons why Scotland's independence ought to be recognised by the Church as itself sacred.

The letter was written here in Arbroath Abbey

and more than anything ever produced south of the border

represented a perfect fusion between the two ideas of sovereignty we have seen in action -

the Nation and the Prince.

At the heart of what we call the Declaration of Arbroath is something much more powerful and deeply moving.

It is the insistence that the nation lived on beyond and outside the person of the Prince,

who for a time happened to claim its government.

We heard something like this earlier, at the very beginning of our story - in Oxford, in 1258.

But here in Scotland, it is much more eloquent -

the image of the free patriot, drawn not as a desperado like Wallace or a mighty Prince like Bruce,

but as one of a band of brother survivors...

"For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, we will yield in no least way to English dominion.

"We fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honour, but for freedom,

"which no good man gives up except with his life."

The real lesson of the Battle of Bannockburn was that the Scottish King commanded loyalty

in ways that just never occurred to Edward II.

Robert the Bruce knew that he could only be successful if he could be the personification of Scotland,

the incarnation of the community of the realm.

That's why he was not Scotland's Edward I, he was Scotland's Simon de Montfort.

Like de Montfort, Bruce had pinned his personal cause to the flag and to the passions of his country.

Unlike Edward I, Robert was not just a warlord who hammered the country to his will,

he had managed to forge a true alliance with the people -

a community of the realm that, when united and led by King Robert I, could win its freedom.

And so the emboldened Scots take the war to the English.

For 22 years, the Scots raided huge areas of northern England,

reaching as far south as Yorkshire.

Abbeys and castles fell, cities paid the Scots off to avoid destruction.

Villages were trashed.

Border raids on a weakened enemy were what you would expect,

but what Robert the Bruce did next was utterly unexpected.

In May 1315, Robert Bruce's brother Edward landed here in north-east Ireland near Carrickfergus Castle

with a formidable Scots army of many thousands of men.

What the Bruces were doing, in effect, was opening a second front against the English empire.

Robert had written a remarkable letter. "The Scots would come," he said,

"not as an invader, but as liberators." For...

"Our people and your people, free in times past,

"share the same national ancestry and common custom."

The rhetoric was stirring and in part it found resonance with the native Irish.

For nearly a century and a half, there had been an entrenched English colony in north and eastern Ireland,

often safe only in castles like Carrickfergus,

which Edward Bruce now besieged for a year.

But the timing was unfortunate,

for 1315 also saw the worst famine in living memory.

Very soon, Edward Bruce's army became indistinguishable from any other disorderly gang of knights

using force to extract the provisions they desperately needed for their men and animals

and not choosing to distinguish with any care between Gaelic friends and English foes.

Famished and desperate, the Scots soldiers took what they needed from Irish villages, finally resorting,

so it was said, to digging up fresh graves and eating the decayed bodies.

Month by month, the Bruces' war of liberation turned into something remarkably like an occupation.

Ambitious Edward Bruce also wanted to be a king - a king in Dublin -

and he didn't much care what taking the throne would cost the Irish.

It was the usual story - a victory over the Ulster English, then a march south towards Dublin.

There, many of the population tore down their own houses to use as walls against the Scots

rather than surrender the city.

Not all the Irish nobility and kings opened their arms to embrace their Scots liberators.

A bitter civil war broke out between Irish supporters of both sides.

A climactic battle in the west took, according to contemporaries, no fewer than 10,000 lives.

In 1318, Edward Bruce was himself killed. Before the end of the year, the Scots had left.

Perhaps the experiment of collaboration across the North Channel deserved to fail

because, from the beginning, Robert the Bruce had his own rather than his Irish brothers' interests at heart,

needing a second front to divert critical English military resources from Scotland to Ireland.

Not for the last time, the Irish were being used in someone else's quarrel.

As grim as the story of the Scots in Ireland was,

they did leave behind something other than widows and tragic ballads.

The Anglo-Norman colony stopped expanding from its base in Ulster and Leinster.

The idea of the unstoppable English empire of the Plantagenets

had the shine knocked right off its myth of invincibility.

And, not least, the Bruces gave Irish leaders their voice of resistance -

an expression of national identity.

"To recover our native freedom, the Irish..."

"For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, we will yield in no least way to English dominion..."

"The people preferred to die rather than live under English rule.

All these startlingly modern-sounding declarations of national community come together

as the epitaph of the idea of the Plantagenet empire of Britain.

You hear this language - eloquent, fierce, righteously belligerent -

and you hear a voice which, for better or worse, would shout, roar and lament down through the ages.

Robert the Bruce outlived both Edwards, and while war would continue with England for generations,

the Scots HAD won English recognition of their truly independent kingdom.

This is not what Long Shanks imagined when he had been crowned before his namesake the Confessor's tomb

or when he had seated himself upon the Stone of Scone.

Edward's attempt to pound the nations of Britain into a united superstate

ended up just reinforcing their acute sense of difference.

The hammer that Edward had taken to the Scots

had rebounded fatally against his dream of a reborn Britannia.

For the cost of all those endless marches and mile upon mile of castle walls

was political as well as financial.

It meant that Parliament was more, not less, necessary to the government of England.

It was Parliament which had to agree on how to foot the bills and how big those bills ought to be.

Edward II, of course, completely failed to bring any attention to this new reality.

Falling back on rule by favourites,

Edward made himself an alien in his own land.

The nobility failed to remove him, but his wife succeeded.

Legend has it that he was killed in Berkeley Castle from a hot iron thrust up his rectum.

Edward's murder was proof that the King could be removed, even physically disposed of,

if he betrayed the community.

But England would get a new King, more the heir to Edward I than Edward II.

But Edward III knew he couldn't achieve anything simply by acts of brutal, imperial will.

He'd learned something from the long wars of Plantagenet Britain.

He'd learned that his power depended not just on force, but on consent -

on the consent of his barons and his churchmen,

on the consent of Parliament, on the consent of the English community of the realm.

Not for the first or the last time,

it would take the rest of Britain to teach England just how to be a nation.

There is much more to discover and debate about the history of Britain on the BBC history website.

Subtitles by Roger Young BBC - 2000