The History Behind Game of Thrones by David C. Weinczok

Author:David C. Weinczok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Ancient
ISBN: 9781526749017
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2019-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Banner with the Bloody Heart

Of all the sigils one could carry into battle, a bright red cartoon-style heart does not seem like a choice to instil fear in your foe. The residents of Westeros had certainly never seen anything like the arms of Stannis Baratheon, which placed a crowned Baratheon stag inside the flaming heart of the Lord of Light. To them it was every bit as alien and bewildering as rumours of Dothraki savagery or tales of depraved decadence in Slaver’s Bay. To us in the twenty-first century, the classic heart shape is inseparable from the notion of romantic love and seems farcical as a symbol to march to war under. There is good precedent to fear it, however. To those living in the northern shires of England in the early fourteenth century, few sights were as dreaded as that of the ‘bluidy heart’ of James Douglas.

If Edward I was the Hammer of the Scots, then James Douglas was the unrelenting ‘hammerer of the English’.1 Douglas, Robert the Bruce’s indomitable captain, is overshadowed only by Bruce himself as the most intriguing wartime personality of fourteenth-century Scotland. He is something of a Janus figure. While many Scots came to know him as ‘the Good’ Sir James for his championing of Bruce’s cause, it was his mastery of fear as a tool of war, his personal ferocity in battle and his brutally effective raiding style that caused his victims to bestow on him his most enduring moniker, ‘the blak Dowglas’.2 His bogeyman reputation amongst the English was such that, while he was still very much alive and active, mothers in the north of England sang to their children:

‘Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye,

Hush ye, hush ye, dinnae fret ye

The Black Douglas shall not get ye.’

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