The Second Scottish Wars of Indpendence, 1332-1363
Chris Brown wrote this short, heavily illustrated narrative history of the Second Scottish War of Independence while working on his Ph.D. at St. Andrews University. As one would hope from a student at that level, Brown clearly is serious and enthusiastic about his topic. He has enough education in his area to avoid the absurdities one sometimes finds in popular histories on medieval topics, and to do a generally good job setting the military conflict in its Scottish political and social context (though I would say he unduly downplays the civil war aspect of the Balliol-Bruce conflict). He has tramped the battlefields and visited the castles he describes, and includes several valuable photographs of them. The more numerous photos of re-enactors would have been more useful if the author had explained that, for example, the mail armor shown is made of much larger rings than medieval mail, and that none of the pictured men-at-arms have armor that would have been considered really adequate during the period in question.
Given its concision, the narrative of events is reasonably complete and generally accurate, though there are a fair number of errors of moderate significance. The English sources indicate that the Earl of Mar probably had colluded with the Disinherited prior to the invasion of 1332, so Brown is wrong to say "there seems to have been no justification whatsoever" for Sir Robert Bruce’s accusations to that effect. Brown writes that Balliol "for several months after his restoration [in 1333]...seems to have been unable to extend his rule effectively"(52). This is hard to square with the statement of the (Scottish) Book of Pluscarden that "within a few days afterwards Edward Balliol overran the whole kingdom with the forces of the king of England, subduing it and unsettling it and distributing offices and keeping in the hands of the English and of the Scots who embraced his cause all the castles and strongholds but four..."—or with Wyntoun’s observation that no one in the kingdom but children too innocent to understand the consequences dared to profess loyalty to King David. Also, Edward III was no longer having to "foot the bill [for the Scottish war] from his own pocket" (p. 57) after the Parliament of March 1333, and David II was sent to France in 1334, not (p. 59) 1335.
There are, in addition, some omissions so serious as to be downright misleading, as when Brown speaks of the "absence of virtually all" the "magnates and lords" of Scotland at Balliol’s coronation in 1332. It is true that (with the major exception of the Earl of Fife) most of the lay lords of the realm who had survived Dupplin were not present, but the Bishop of Dunkeld and "many prelates" were. Brown’s failure to mention that all but one of the bishops of the realm entered the new king’s peace, as did the abbots of Dunfermline, Coupar, Inchaffray, Arbroath and Scone, prevents the reader from appreciating the powerful impact the battle of Dupplin Moor had, and the real possibility that Balliol could have won over the community of the realm of Scotland, had his initial successes not been derailed by the treacherous attack during truce-time he subsequently suffered at Annan.
The biggest analytical weakness in the book, however, concerns the relationships between its subject and the Hundred Years War. Brown, for example, takes the line that Edward III was aiming to win the war in Scotland in order to clear the way for his ambitions in France. The reality is that until 1336 Edward hoped to avoid a war with France, and was pushed into conflict with Philip VI by the latter’s support for David II against the Plantagenet’s protégé, Edward Balliol. Similarly, in a long discussion of why the Bruce cause was able to survive despite the disasters of Dupplin Moor, Halidon Hill, and the massive invasion of 1335, Brown almost ignores France. Contemporary Scottish opinion, however, was well aware that the two Edwards’ efforts to subdue lowland Scotland would almost certainly have succeeded had the English king not decided to turn his main effort to France.
The book’s weakness in this regard may have to do with the disappointing research base on which it seems (as far as can be judged from the poorly-executed bibliography) to be based. While Brown has wisely made use of recent books by Colin MacNamee and Alexander Grant, and the classic studies of R. A Nicholson, he gives no indication that he used (for example) either my 2000 monograph on Edward III’s wars, or my 1998 article in Northern History on the Neville’s Cross campaign, which was accompanied by transcriptions and translations of unpublished chronicle narratives of the invasion. He could doubtless have benefited from Michael Penman’s 1999 doctoral thesis on David II—completed at Brown’s own St. Andrews--but does not seem to have used it. When it comes to primary sources, it is not clear exactly what texts have been employed. In a book of this nature, it would be nice to see the author making use of the full range of published primary sources, in French, Latin, and Middle English, but it would not be unreasonable for the author to have relied only on works available in translation. I would expect, however, to see at least those sources exploited fairly thoroughly. Brown seems to have used Thomas Grey’s Scalacronicaand Walter Bower’s Scottichronicon, and possibly the chronicles of Lanercost priory, of John of Fordun, and of Andrew of Wyntoun, but he does not seem to have employed the Anonimalle Chronicle, 1307-1334, the Brut, or the Book of Pluscarden, all of which have been published in modern or Middle English.
Tempus, the publisher, badly needs to hire a better copyeditor. The book suffers from a large number of grammatical and typographical errors. Some are merely embarrassing (e.g. the consistent misspelling of "feif" for "fief", and "Crècy" or "Crecy" for "Crécy," or the frequent omission of apostrophes in possessives); others could be confusing to the reader, as when "latter" and "former" are transposed on p. 78, or when "could to afford to" is printed where "could not afford to" is meant on p. 111. Especially since the book is priced at £16.99/$21.99, which is rather steep for a 157-page softcover book, the reader has a right to expect better. The same goes for the quality of many of the illustrations, which are well-chosen but poorly reproduced.
Brown’s book has some valuable passages, such as the discussion of the impact of weather on archery (pp. 80-81), but almost any reader would be better served by Peter Traquair’s Freedom’s Sword, a better-researched and produced popular history which covers the Second War of Independence in similar depth.