The Marches by Rory Stewart

Author:Rory Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

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I was now standing up to my waist in the water that marked the line of the final break between the kingdoms of England and Scotland. In 1286, racing to visit his mistress, the Scottish king had fallen from a cliff, leaving as his heir first a Norwegian princess, and then, when she died, a throne which was disputed between the two great border dynasties, the Balliols and the Bruces, with their loyalties to both English and Scottish kings, and their land stretching both sides of the Solway border. They were eventually challenged in turn by the English king Edward I. Robert the Bruce had led his cavalry, cantering through the Solway perhaps not far from the point at which I was standing, and to display his newly found Scottish chauvinism sacked Holme Cultram abbey in which his father was buried, bringing the roof down on his father’s grave. And in 1300, the cavalry of Edward I had cantered along the Solway shoreline directly ahead of me, trailing silk and satins.

These men were killers. Bruce and Edward were both remembered as standing well over six feet tall – perhaps ten inches taller than the average man of the day. My father’s favourite moment in the Battle of Bannockburn came when Bruce took on the English champion in front of the battle-line, crushing his skull with a single hammer blow. We had often enacted the moment with plastic soldiers. Edward’s greatest moment had come on crusade. When an assassin had charged into Edward’s tent in Damascus and stabbed him with a poisoned knife, Edward had killed him with his bare hands.

The contemporary description of Edward’s ride along the Solway in 1300 was in yet another language of the medieval Middleland – not Cumbric, Norse or Northumbrian but the mother-tongue of the kings of England and of Bruce and Balliol, that is to say, French:

Meint beau penon en lance mis

Meint banier deploie

Se eftoit la noife loign oie

De heniffemens de chevaus.

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