All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.04of15.Nations.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

(MOURNFUL PIPES)

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.

(WELSHMAN) The people of Snowdon
assert

that even if their prince should give
overlordship of them to the English king,

they would refuse to do homage
to any foreigner

of whose language, customs and law
they were ignorant.

(IRISHMAN) On account
of the perfidy of the English

and to recover our native freedom,

the Irish are compelled
to enter a deadly war.

(SCOTSMAN) 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've been with us a long time now.

All the same, it's 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 about what a sovereign nation
should be.

An extension of the ruler's 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 inside was 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,
Longshanks.

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 the frightening 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 powered,

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,
it was thought, of kingly perfection.

(MONKS CHANT)

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's 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.

Its secular counterpart was the great
hall of the Palace of Westminster.

The palace was both the seat of
government and a residence for Henry

who, unlike 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.

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'd had no choice
but to swallow this bitter pill.

However, as he grew older,
Henry burned with frustration

and became determined to get free
of 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 quite see the point of.

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 to accept.

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 worthy knights

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

When the assembled
community of the realm,

including the king and Prince Edward,

swore an oath
to uphold the provisions,

they could have been in no doubt
about its significance

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?

Well, 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
answerable to the barons,

but ought the barons 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.

It became increasingly clear that the
struggle over who was to rule England

and how they were going to 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 the vainglorious
adventurer than a 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, 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.

(BATTLE CRIES)

Told that 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 would have
to make them his allies.

As partners, they would 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 clear.

Here, the dominant prince
was Llewellyn ap Gruffydd,

ruler of the mountainous kingdom
of Gwynedd, Greater Snowdonia.

Knowing that the difficult, not to say
impossible terrain of his country

had been the graveyard
of English armies,

Llewellyn was determined to resist
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 had become divided

into the Principality of Gwynedd,
the disputed centre,

and the encroaching
English baronial and crown lands.

Encroaching, that is, until 1258,
when Llewellyn was strong enough

to have himself declared
"princeps Wallie" - Prince of Wales.

Exploiting the civil war in England
and allying with de Montfort,

Llewellyn'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, Llewellyn 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
connection 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 seen
in Britain since the Norman Conquest,

invaded Gwynedd, penetrating
right to its furthest corners,

to Snowdonia and to Anglesey.

Faced with this invasion,
Llewellyn 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 Llewellyn 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 natsu" -

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 the land, ambushed
slow-moving companies of knights,

and then disappeared off again
into the hills and forests.

(BATTLE CRIES)

Then, in a minor skirmish
in central Wales,

Llewellyn 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
strip him of his cultural identity.

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

It was a monastery that housed the
tomb of the most powerful Welsh prince

and was home to a sacred relic

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

Naturally, the monastery
became a fortress

and the Cross was taken to London
along with Llewellyn's crown.

The lords call 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.

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

a granite ring of fortresses
stretching from Builth to Hope,

most of them 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.

Well, 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, the 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 exhaustively 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 money lending, putting 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 sub-species 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 communities
in York, Lincoln and London.

(MOURNFUL SINGING)

It was not plain sailing for the Jews
on 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 reflected in a
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 factions in Scotland -

the Bruces
and the Comyn-Balliol alliance.

They hated each other.

Both were determined
to have their man made king,

and if 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,
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

as to why he was not,
in fact, 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,

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 as much to say, look, you
can't be completely off your head

to come up with this sovereignty stuff,
but it's 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
a supermonk with the perfect charter.

Why don't you let us know
when you have it?

In the end, all those who thought
they had a chance at the Scots throne

did pay 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 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.

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 port, Berwick Upon Tweed.

The siege lasted only hours...

the massacre that followed, days.

(SCOTSMAN) The king of England
spared no one...

whatever their 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
was 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,

and English officials
took over Scottish government.

Just as he had ripped the heart
out of Welsh 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...

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

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've not a clue, of course, whether
William Wallace looked remotely like this

any more than we know whether
he could have stood in 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's no doubt, of course,
that Wallace did count,

that his brief
but incredibly dramatic intervention

in the English-Scottish wars
did change the course of 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.

My mid-1297,
all Scotland was on the boil.

North of the Forth, Andrew Murray
matched or even surpassed him

by leading a wild and brilliant
guerrilla war.

It was when Murray marched south
and Wallace moved north to meet here,

on the Forth at Stirling -
the key to Scotland -

that a 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 Bridge.

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

Wallace allowed about 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, 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 thousands.

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.

It was in that year
that 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.

The strange thing, though, is that the
formidable strengths of Robert the Bruce -

his political cunning,
his military ingenuity,

his steely resolution,
even his intermittent fits of rage -

are rather like the attributes of
a man whose work he'd sworn to undo.

Edward I.

If he'd read the book
of Edward's life,

he would have known that lesson
number 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 altar of Greyfriars Church
in Dumfries.

The murder is neither explained
nor justified

by it being the case of a patriot
knocking off a quisling -

Comyn had been 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
more extraordinary -

the polished noble turning himself
into a guerrilla captain.

It was Robert the Bruce,
not William Wallace,

who 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 Caernarfon,

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."

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

One story says the king left orders

for his bones to be boiled away
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,

Jedborough 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 battlefield,

knowing that even Plantagenet
war machines

don't work well on wet ground.

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

The young Henry de Bohun,
English knight,

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 "schiltron" -

hedgehogs of 1,500 men, each holding
a twelve-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 schiltrons,
which unite and push forward.

And 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 a 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,

setting out the 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've seen in action -

the nation and the prince.

At the heart of what we call
the Declaration of Arbroath

is something much more powerful,
much more 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've heard something like this before

at the very beginning of our story
in Oxford in 1258.

But here in Scotland,
it's 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.

And 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 Robert I,

could win its freedom.

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

For 22 years,

the Scots raided and terrorised
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.

The border raids on a weakened enemy
were what you'd expect.

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 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 not choosing to distinguish
with any care

between Gaelic friends
and English foes.

Famished and desperate,

the Scots took what they needed
from the Irish villagers

and finally resorted, so it was said,
to digging up fresh graves

and eating the decayed bodies.

Month by month,
the Bruce's 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
native Irish supporters of both sides.

A climactic battle in the west took,
according to contemporaries,

no fewer than ten thousands lives.

In 1318, Edward Bruce
was himself killed.

Before the end of the year,
the Scots had left.

Perhaps the experiment of Scots-Irish
collaboration 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.

And the idea of the unstoppable
English empire of the Plantagenets

had the shine knocked right off
its myth of invincibility.

And the Bruces had given Irish leaders
their voice of resistance

...an expression of national identity.

(IRISHMAN) To recover our native
freedom, the Irish...

(SCOTSMAN) For as long as
but a hundred of us remain alive,

we will yield in no least way
to English dominion.

(WELSHMAN)
The people preferred to die

rather than to 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 certainly not
what Longshanks had imagined

when he had been crowned before
his namesake the Confessor's tomb,

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

For Edward's attempt
to pound the nations of Britain

into a united super-state

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 parliament was more, not less,
necessary to England's government.

It was parliament which had to agree
on how to foot the bills

and how big those bills ought to be.

Edward II 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 the First
than the Second.

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,

and what he'd learned was 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
and not for the last time,

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