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Documentary, After Braveheart episode 2
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00:00In 1315, an army from Britain invaded Ireland, numbering 6,000 battle-hardened veterans.
00:20It was one of the most powerful foreign forces ever to set foot in the country.
00:24But this was no English army.
00:29Its tough, male-clad soldiers were Scotsmen, gallo-glasses and fighting men from the Highlands and Western Isles.
00:40Their commander was Edward Bruce, brother of Robert Bruce, the King of the Scots.
00:45Shelton, arms!
00:47They had a simple objective, to drive out the English and make Edward Bruce King of Ireland.
01:01It was an ambitious plan.
01:03In over 100 years, no one had succeeded in breaking the English stranglehold on Ireland.
01:09This is a story of two Celtic nations, a shared heritage and a forgotten war that could have changed the course of history.
01:31Soon after he arrived, Edward Bruce had himself proclaimed High King of Ireland.
01:39In a bid to forge an Irish-Scottish alliance, support for Edward's claim came from Donal O'Neill, the powerful King of Tyrone.
01:51The English and Ireland, known as the Anglo-Irish, were in disarray.
01:56One of their greatest lords, Richard de Bourgh, had been crushed in battle.
02:00Edward Bruce now had control of most of Ulster.
02:03He brought his army southwards, into Leinster, hitting at the heart of Anglo-Irish power.
02:10Winter 1315-1316, the Scots are in a position where they're actually on the threshold of sweeping everything away in front of them.
02:32You can't stop the Scots, they've had no serious reverse.
02:35When the Bruces invaded Ireland, the only people, almost without exception, who supported them were the native Irish.
02:50The reason being that if you were a member of the English colony in Ireland and you joined the Bruces, that made you a traitor.
02:55So there was very little support for them in Anglo-Ireland.
02:58Overwhelmingly, it became a war between the English in Ireland and the native Irish.
03:06And they only had the backing of the native Irish.
03:08The Scots knew that overall victory in Ireland was far from certain.
03:23Before long, they were faced with a devastating enemy that couldn't be defeated in battle.
03:28The heavens showed anger, as if the spirits of our fallen foe were imploring the unearthly powers to pour their gathered stores on our unsheltered heads, threatening us with ruin.
03:44Heavy rain had been falling in May 1315, the month in which the Scots arrived in Ireland.
03:55All summer long, the country was plagued by the worst weather seen across Europe in generations.
04:01When the time came to gather what was left of the harvest, the reality was bleak.
04:06There would not be enough food to last the winter.
04:09This was the beginning of the Great European Famine, one of the worst natural disasters in the continent's history.
04:20For the early years of the 14th century, Europe is subject to a series of crop failures.
04:26And that culminates in the Great Famine of 1315-17.
04:30Life was pretty difficult in general in Ireland.
04:33By the time Edward Bruce arrives in 1315, the population would probably have been substantially weakened.
04:42It's a poor country.
04:44People are subject to, I suppose, the iniquities of war all the time, whether you're in a Gaelic or an Anglo-Irish area.
04:52Edward Bruce comes in here to a country where it's not exactly optimum conditions for the population at that time.
04:59In fact, it's going to become very difficult very quickly from 1315-17.
05:08Many afflictions in all parts of Ireland.
05:12Very many deaths, famine and many strange diseases.
05:17Murders and intolerable storms as well.
05:21And I think it's very telling that a number of the Irish annual sources for the period and later actually blame the famine itself on the presence of the Bruce army.
05:33That somehow they've caused it or worsened it.
05:36Although they also criticise the English forces for adding to it too.
05:40So there's certainly a sense in which for the ordinary populace, the two are run together.
05:46If you think of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, war and famine, here's two of them being visited on us at the same time.
05:52In his first few months of being in Ireland, Edward Bruce clearly rounds up large bodies of supply, spoil, booty and ships it back to Scotland.
06:12And it may be that supply was a central motive to going there in the first place.
06:19But by the time you get to 1316, 1317, after two failed harvests into your third bad winter, livestock would be dwindling, population would be moving about in search of food.
06:34It's really a large part of the war itself.
06:36We left nothing but the harvest of a charred desert that was now the bitterness of dust and ashes.
06:54And in their affliction we began to see the hand of God outstretched to punish sin.
07:00Famine and sickness waited not to be invited, as the oppressed looked around for a protector and finds he has none.
07:16People in the Middle Ages understood their place in a way.
07:20That's the way the system worked.
07:22So, if you were born into poverty, you could look forward to an afterlife of heaven.
07:30I mean, that's what was sold to them.
07:32That keeps you in your place.
07:34The world is run on these lines.
07:36There are those who work, those who pray and those who fight.
07:39And depending on which one you're born into, that's where you stay.
07:43So there is an acceptance of that.
07:45There's a kind of a fatalism about what you're born into.
07:48There would be an idea that, well, this is my lot and this is what I have to put up with.
07:55You are being punished, in a way, by suffering now for some unidentified sins that you or somebody else did a while ago.
08:04So that is the world view.
08:07That is how calamitous events are understood.
08:10Like the Bruce invasion, like the famine, like the Black Death that follows not that long afterwards.
08:18As the year 1315 drew to a close, Edward Bruce was campaigning in the Irish Midlands.
08:26He was many miles from his base in Ulster.
08:29And his main priority was to find food and shelter for his army.
08:34But in a scenario that was becoming more and more common, the local population suffered the burden of war.
08:40And the idea is not to engage so much in actual battles as to take a phalanx, a huge number of men, through a territory and devastate it.
08:54Destroy anything in it that could help the residents once you've passed through.
09:00So you can starve them out.
09:01The chevauché has been described as an early example of total warfare, because it attacks women and children as well as men.
09:09And I suspect that something like this might have been in Edward's head in Ireland.
09:13I have looked at an example of an attack on a settlement outside Slahane in County Mead.
09:20There is an entry saying that 80 men, women and children were killed by an attack of the Bruce.
09:26So even from that, you can just tell that it must have been tremendously savage.
09:31No quarter seems to have been given.
09:34This was a village in an English-held area.
09:36So what you do have, even in a country which was used to quite savage warfare,
09:42what was happening with Edward Bruce seems to have taken people even then by surprise,
09:49in the ferocity of what was happening.
09:50It's probably the worst time to be alive in the Middle Ages is the first half of the 14th century.
10:09It's pretty much hell.
10:20Ravaged by famine, many areas were deserted.
10:25Entire towns vanished at this time, like Ardry, near Athai.
10:30This place was once a thriving settlement, but was abandoned in the 14th century.
10:36When a cemetery was excavated there, over a thousand skeletons were recovered.
10:42Some of them date from the time of the Bruce invasion.
10:50During the course of excavation works here, over 1,200 people were found, so a full medieval population.
11:14And we know this is actually an area that the Bruce army passes through because they go through Athai and the surrounding area.
11:19So it was an area that would have been affected, without a shadow of a doubt, by the wars.
11:28When you come to looking at how things really were for people hundreds of years in the past,
11:33if you're looking at human remains, you're looking directly into the face of somebody who was alive at the time that the Bruce invasion was taking place.
11:40The types of injuries that they sustain are practically unimaginable to us now.
11:44The tough aspect of their lives is just quite incredible.
11:52The human remains like this, they're like a storybook of people's lives at the time.
11:55Here we have an individual that is male and aged between 35 and 45 years of age at death.
12:06Evidence of interpersonal violence would be evident by the presence of sharp force trauma to the skull, which we have here in the frontal bone.
12:14It comes in at a point which has sharp edges on each side, which indicates that it may have been a sword.
12:22And it comes to a point just above the eye, which narrowly misses the eye.
12:26So here we have the frontal bone, which has the orbits of the eyes here and here.
12:31And this is the ear.
12:33This male was probably facing his assailant and a right-handed attack has come in, probably from a sword, and it's swept in like this.
12:44This sharp force trauma, it probably exposed the skull.
12:47This individual is incredibly lucky because he survived this blow.
12:51And as well as this blade cut coming through here, there is the blunt force trauma on the top of the head.
12:56So either at the same time or at two separate occasions, this man was hit by two different weapon types, a sharp force trauma, probably a sword, and then a blunt force trauma, which could be a variety of different weapons.
13:09But the type of things in the medieval period that can inflict this type of force are things like hammers, that type of weaponry.
13:16We have some from the same cemetery where people, we can tell that they've raised their arms above their faces in an attempt to ward off blows.
13:24So really, the human remains are the human story of what's going on at this time.
13:31And this man is one of the people who lived through it.
13:33Just a few miles northeast of the now-vanished town of Ardree is a huge artificial mound, the Mott of Ardskal.
13:56Today, the Mott is covered with trees, but in the 14th century, it had a very different appearance.
14:02In January 1316, the Anglo-Irish lords gathered a great army here, commanded by Edmund Butler, the English king's representative in Ireland.
14:13They knew the Scottish army was nearby, and were determined to destroy them once and for all.
14:22Battlefield archaeologist Tony Pollard is following the trail of Edward Bruce and the Scottish army as they advance through Ireland.
14:31There can be no denying that this is pretty impressive.
14:37Absolutely, yeah.
14:38We've been looking for battlefields all the way down to get to here, and everywhere we've been, we've seen Mott's.
14:44Yeah.
14:44But they've all been much smaller than this.
14:46Well, what we have here, Tony, is a very important settlement site.
14:49So, what we're looking at is this huge mound that originally would have had a wooden palisade on the top.
14:55It would have had a small garrison inside.
14:57But what we see today is only a small fraction, really, of what used to be here.
15:01There would have been a major settlement that accompanied this Mott.
15:04And when the Anglo-Normans came to Ireland, they constructed these Mott's to try and control the landscape.
15:09So, you'll consistently find them beside routeways, whether they're roads or rivers, or beside a road here, a road that undoubtedly the Bruce army would have marched down originally.
15:21The Bruce army is the largest army that's really ever come to the country.
15:25And it's the largest army that will be seen for a number of hundred years in Ireland.
15:28And an army that size has to operate along the major routeways.
15:32It has to move close to these centres of power consistently.
15:35And that's exactly what we have at Ardskull.
15:37So, these are like castles, really, but built on the cheap.
15:40That's exactly it. A quick fix to try and control territory as quickly as they can.
15:49The Anglo-Irish, they seem to have a fairly big army here.
15:53They surely had an opportunity here to smash the Scots, who by this time must have been in a fairly dilapidated state.
16:01But they kind of let it go, don't they?
16:03Oh, absolutely. There's no doubt that they significantly outnumbered the Scots.
16:07And should have won.
16:10The Scots say that there were about 50,000 English descended on them.
16:13They had about 10,000 men.
16:15And they defeat, using the tactics that you would be familiar with at Bannockburn, defeat the English.
16:21If you then look at the other side of the accounts, the Anglo-Irish accounts, what they're saying is that, in fact, really, the Scots didn't have much to do with this battle at all.
16:27That they had a bit of a disagreement among themselves.
16:29And after killing about 70-odd Scots, they lost five men.
16:33And then they had this argument and leave the field.
16:35So it was really unfortunate what occurred to them here.
16:38Whichever way you cut it, it doesn't really bode well for the Anglo-Irish, does it?
16:42Either they're defeated by the Scots through sheer force of arms, or they can't agree among themselves what to do and have a barney and then clear off.
16:51And I think the balance of evidence, you have to consider that the Scots more than likely defeated them militarily on the battlefield.
16:57The Scots are allowed to fight another day.
16:59Yeah, allowed to fight on their terms and allowed to fight another day.
17:02And the war continues.
17:03And the misery continues for everybody, really.
17:09Ard Scull was a missed opportunity for the Anglo-Irish.
17:13Edmund Butler had failed to take his best chance yet to annihilate Edward Bruce.
17:18And now Dublin lay open to assault by the victorious Scots.
17:22However, in the days that followed the battle, they found themselves caught in the fog of war, that cloud of uncertainty when an army is unsure of its own capability and its enemies' intentions.
17:39The Scots were hungry and exhausted.
17:42Edward Bruce knew they were in no condition to attack the most important city in Ireland.
17:52At the end of the first campaigning season, if you like, contemporary opinion was that Bruce was winning, he had the advantage, and, you know, he had an opportunity then to consolidate his position and work ahead.
18:12The problem for him, I suppose, was that that first season in Ireland was also the first of these famine years.
18:21The conditions weren't ripe for him to do something very elaborate to begin with.
18:28I think even Edward Bruce was, you know, even after his first matter of months in Ireland, he might have begun to think that maybe it wasn't going to go as easily as he had thought initially.
18:40The Scots had no option but to begin the slow and painful march north to their base in Ulster.
18:58Their supplies were now almost gone, and the men began to die of starvation.
19:02What was happening during the course of the Bruce invasion was very extreme.
19:15Contemporary accounts say that people were struggling so much they were resorting to cannibalism in parts of Ireland.
19:21It was said truly that some evil men were so distraught by famine that they dragged out of the cemeteries the corpses of the buried and roasted the bodies on spits and ate every single one of them.
19:40And women ate their sons for hunger.
19:44It was a very bleak time, and I think it was, you know, the timing was devastating from the Scots' point of view.
19:56The weakened Scottish army limped back to Ulster.
20:05Even there, the Scots were not secure.
20:09As Carrickfergus Castle, the most important stronghold in the north, still held out against them.
20:17Edward Bruce relied on the tried and trusted weapon of siege warfare, starvation.
20:26The Scots don't really need big siege engines.
20:30They don't need to be actively attacking this all the time.
20:33They just sit outside in their siege camp and let nature take its course.
20:37So it's an incredibly brutal conflict, but it's not one that involves lobbing huge missiles inside.
20:44It's just keeping them bottled up.
20:46And at one point, the Scots send emissaries into the castle to negotiate, and they're taken prisoner by the garrison.
20:53And rumours start to leak out that these guys have actually been eaten by the garrison.
20:59So hungry are they?
21:00And eventually, nature does take its course.
21:04And around about late July, August 1316, just over a year after the siege begins,
21:11the castle opens its gates and Edward Bruce takes control.
21:14This victory could not hide the fact that Edward Bruce was still a long way from being recognised across the island as the High King.
21:32Phelan Macconor, the King of Connacht, now threw his lot in with Bruce and attacked English settlements throughout the western province.
21:40But he was defeated and killed in the Battle of Athen Rye.
21:46Other Gaelic chiefs showed little or no interest in joining the Scots.
21:51The thing about Ireland in the Middle Ages, which is not true of Scotland, is that Ireland was a very polar society.
22:02You had the native Irish and you had the English of Ireland.
22:06So, of course, it probably was a bit naive to think that they could put aside these internal divisions
22:12and rise above it for some kind of, in inverted commas, national cause.
22:18Bruce still had the backing of a formidable Gaelic leader, Donal O'Neill of Tyrone.
22:25O'Neill's army represented the main Irish support for the Scottish campaign.
22:29Instead of fighting the English, we'll fight ourselves.
22:36And so we owe to ourselves the miseries with which we are afflicted.
22:45Degenerate, manifestly unworthy of our ancestors.
22:50It was by their valour and splendid deeds that the Irish race in all the ages past retained her liberty.
23:03We must be at harmony at home.
23:07We must prosecute this war with our united forces if we are to regain our liberty.
23:13The idea that they thought of themselves as distinctively Irish does emerge.
23:22But Ireland is still a very divided country for most of the Middle Ages.
23:27That's the tragedy, is that they didn't band together and work together.
23:31That just never happened.
23:33You can argue that these Irish leaders should have put the differences aside in this national cause.
23:49You're asking a person to take a gamble on losing everything that he has in the world for some greater cause.
23:56And it was too much to ask.
23:57Each of these Irish leaders was the head of a, you know, a branch of the family.
24:05He was somebody who was trying to hold on to his land.
24:09And ultimately, it's all about land.
24:18Edward Bruce's campaign was losing momentum.
24:22He desperately needed reinforcements and supplies for his depleted and weakened army.
24:27And only one man could provide such assistance.
24:31In September 1316, Edward travelled to Fife to see his brother, the King of Scotland himself, Robert Bruce.
24:40The Irish are impressed.
24:50The government is frightened of the wedge that has been thrust so quickly into the heart of English influence.
24:57And yet, you did not march on to the walls of Dublin.
25:02My hand was forced.
25:04Famine and fatigue wore away from a few remaining men, while Carrick Fergus still lay under siege.
25:09I could not afford a battle on two fronts.
25:13I heeded your advice, brother.
25:16Demand nothing until you have the force to enhance your claim.
25:22I fear they must face the wrath of two kings to convince them of their loyalty.
25:27It was always Edward Bruce that we see to the fore in this invasion of Ireland.
25:41And indeed, Robert's contemporary biographer, this man, John Barber, who wrote a very long poem about Robert later on in the 14th century, he paints Edward as a bit of a troublemaker and that Robert wanted rid of him.
25:55But I think there are other reasons for that.
25:58I mean, all the contemporary evidence suggests that Robert and Edward were very close.
26:03Edward was Robert's right-hand man.
26:06It could be that Edward was desirous of proving himself as the worthy successor, worthy potential successor to Robert Bruce.
26:18Edward might have thought, well, if I'm going to be the next king of Scots, maybe I should show that I've got the metal for it.
26:25Because he must have felt somewhat overshadowed, I think, by his brother, Robert.
26:32The whole thread running through this story, I think, is the relationship between the two brothers, Robert and Edward.
26:38And it's a relationship that I don't think has been given enough attention.
26:42I think there are assumptions made about it.
26:44And I think some of them are very wrong.
26:46One of which is that Robert wanted to get his brother out of the way because he was a possible threat.
26:52I think that's absolute nonsense.
26:56Robert sent his brother to Ireland because he fully trusted him.
27:01And I don't think it smacks at all of a suspicious or difficult relationship between Edward and Robert.
27:07And let's face it, the entire Bruce family has almost been wiped out.
27:11All of the other brothers are dead.
27:13It's only that pair.
27:14And I think they've got a fairly close bond.
27:22It is, to me, very interesting that one-fifth of John Barber's poem is devoted to the Irish expedition.
27:50And that suggests that to contemporaries, this was a really important thing.
27:55It was a big deal.
27:57Much bigger deal than most Scottish historians have made of it ever since.
28:03When Robert Bruce came into Ireland, the army marched down.
28:06And they were clearly marching on Dublin.
28:13Dublin was at the centre of everything in Ireland.
28:16It was the headquarters of the English government.
28:18And if you were going to topple English government in Ireland, you had to get control of Dublin.
28:24They came as far as Castle Knock and they were looking at the city.
28:27And they were, you know, contemplating an assault on it maybe the next morning.
28:33But the citizens of Dublin, they went inside the walls and burned the suburbs after them
28:39to deny the Scots cover as they tried to get to the town.
28:43The citizens of Dublin pull down their own walls.
28:46They retreat within the very bastions of the core of the city.
28:50The governor flees Dublin for Cork.
28:53It's effectively wide open.
28:55It's hard to see, other than the capture of Dublin, what would have tipped the balance in Ireland.
29:03I mean, it takes them over a year to take Carrickfergus and it falls and it doesn't really make much difference.
29:08What are they actually trying to achieve?
29:11But the problem for Robert Bruce when he was in Ireland was that he was committed to a short, sharp shock here in Ireland.
29:18He couldn't spend a year hanging around outside Dublin for them to surrender.
29:23So I think they took a look at the situation and they realised it was either a lengthy siege
29:28or we just abandoned Dublin for the time being and march on.
29:36Leaving Dublin behind, the Scots march west to Leakslip, where they spent four days burning and plundering.
29:44Further south, the Franciscan monks at Castle Dermott had no reason to welcome the approach of Robert Bruce.
29:51Two years before, his brother had destroyed their friary in Dundalk.
30:04Throughout the campaign, the Scots had seen religious orders as legitimate targets.
30:10Because these same religious orders stood accused of committing atrocities of their own against the native Irish.
30:17So these places are certainly not set aside, they're not left alone, they are embroiled within this conflict.
30:32They are.
30:32Neither side is offering any sanctuary to these locations at all.
30:37Yeah.
30:37These are fair game.
30:38There's no rhyme nor reason why they necessarily single out a particular monastery, friary or abbey.
30:45But when they do, they visit the wrath of the Bruce's upon the place.
30:50It just demonstrates how serious the Scots were about this place and this operation.
30:56They left no stone unturned, really, did they?
30:58No, they didn't.
31:02In the Remonstrance in 1317 by Donald O'Neill, for example, there's a direct allegation at Abbey Lara that monks are going round hunting Irishmen.
31:14The monks?
31:15The monks going out hunting Irishmen because he wants to say, this is the chaos that Edward II has wrecked upon Ireland.
31:25This is why we want Edward Bruce to come over and save us.
31:35One side is accusing the other side of the absolute terrible crimes imaginable.
31:41It is horrific, really.
31:42What we're looking at is total war, I guess.
31:44Absolutely nothing is sacred.
31:47There's all that Braveheart nonsense about the Scots always being the underdog and the English aggressor.
31:53But when you step back and look with an objective eye, the Scots are capable of mixing it up in a bad way with the best of them.
32:00Or should I say the worst of them?
32:02The Bruce army was slicing its way through the heart of Ireland, leaving a trail of smoldering ash and a land stripped bare in its wake.
32:19It's a Scots military practice to actually deny your enemy food supplies, resources.
32:49The only thing is, of course, is that it actually robs your own army of the ability to have provisions as well.
32:58If you can talk about public opinion in the early 14th century, it might have begun to swing opinion slightly against the Scots.
33:06Some people were saying, what was so wrong with the English?
33:09There is one source that says this exact thing.
33:12Our old foreigners are much better than these new foreigners who've come in and doing all this damage.
33:18You only have to look at the campaign, how aimless it almost seems, weaving round and about, first past Dublin, down into the south, across to Limerick, back across, back up.
33:34Are they actually desperately in search of food?
33:36The joke that they almost starve to death, they're eating their own horses.
33:44How do you explain it?
33:46They're marching to places to try to rouse the Irish population to join their side.
33:50So, I mean, the furthest south they get to is within sight of Limerick, literally, and they're trying to get the O'Briens to join them.
33:59The problem with the O'Briens, as with the O'Connors and many of the other dynasties, is that there are two rival branches.
34:07And once one side says that he's going to join with the Scots, the other fellow stays with the English government.
34:13And the kind of unity that they were expecting, it was alien to Ireland in the early 14th century.
34:29Treachery! Stalk's unashamed in Ireland among the nobility as well, I see.
34:37What now, Robert?
34:38Demand nothing until you have the strength to enforce the claim.
34:45We'll retreat to Carrickfergus.
34:47Hup! Hup!
34:53There was more bad news for the Scots.
34:56An army of English reinforcements had landed at Yawl and was on its way north.
35:08That campaign, in particular, is the one to really question, at one point, King of Scots, his brother, the High King of Ireland,
35:17the man who would have been guardian of the Scottish realm in the event of the death of both of these men, Thomas Randolph.
35:22So the three leading men of Scotland are pretty close to being starved, killed, hunted down, wiped out,
35:30at a time when Robert Bruce only has a grandson to follow him.
35:37What's going on? Why do they think it's worth it?
35:41The Scots' latest retreat had an air of finality to it.
35:46Robert was needed back in Scotland, which the English were threatening to invade again.
35:51In May, he boarded a ship for his homeland.
35:57There's a sense in which Ireland stretches them too far.
36:00And as much as it's a sort of two-front policy, they can only really run one at a time, effectively.
36:07I suspect the English, after a while, know that.
36:10And they know that unless Edward Bruce commits to really taking somewhere like Dublin,
36:15it's not going to tip the balance.
36:21There is virtually no information on how the war went for over a year after Robert's departure.
36:32It seems that for many months, the Scots, the Irish, and the Anglo-Irish abstained from further fighting.
36:39The most likely explanation is that each side needed to recover after almost three years of war and famine.
36:51Excommunication is to be pronounced against all invading England and disturbing its peace.
37:08Zoro.
37:08Your brother may be able to afford to defy the Pope.
37:21But if the judgment of heaven is called down on me and my people, what is to become of us?
37:28We shall address the Pope ourselves.
37:32Through the Cardinals, we shall persuade them that Ireland's cause is a just one.
37:36In 1317, O'Neill and other Gaelic leaders sent a letter known as the Remonstrance of the Irish Princes to Pope John the 22nd.
37:56It explained why they had supported Edward Bruce against the English.
38:00From that time, the English crossed the borders of our kingdom with evil intent.
38:07With all their strength and using all the skills and their power, they have tried to destroy our people utterly and eradicate them completely.
38:19On account of the aforesaid injuries, then, and innumerable others which cannot easily be grasped by the human understanding, we are compelled to enter into a deadly war with the aforementioned.
38:34The Remonstrance claims that Donal O'Neill had the support of a large number of Irish bishops.
38:44And I think that may well be the case.
38:46Because if you read the text of the Remonstrance, the importance of it is that it was sent to the Pope, who was then in Avignon.
38:53And so it has to make an appeal to something that might win the Pope over.
38:57So it reminds him that actually the English came to Ireland because they had a license from the then Pope to do it, Pope Adrian IV.
39:06And that part of their mission in Ireland was meant to be to reform the Irish church.
39:11But in fact, the Remonstrance says, the opposite happened.
39:14They didn't reform the Irish church.
39:16They damaged the Irish church.
39:17So it's trying to make an ecclesiastical appeal to get the Pope to take the Irish side against the English, just as at the same time Bruce in Scotland was trying to get the Pope to take the Scots side against the English.
39:29In its wording, the Remonstrance is unkind.
39:59A number of Irish historians, as well as Scottish historians, detect the hand that was behind the Declaration of Arbroath in the Remonstrance.
40:19That this was a product of Bruce's chancery, if you like.
40:22A propaganda document, no question.
40:25But it's making many similar points.
40:27The Irish had ruled for centuries unconquered by a foreigner, exactly as the Scots did in the Declaration.
40:36The English king came to the Irish as a friend but betrayed them as an enemy.
40:41The same thing in Scotland.
40:43The English ever since have reigned as tyrants in Ireland.
40:46The same as Edward I and Edward II tried to rule in Scotland.
40:50So there is a direct relationship between these two documents.
40:55I'm pretty sure of it.
40:57It's controversial.
40:58If things are not controversial in history, they're not worth talking about.
41:01It is in truth not for glory, or riches, or honour that we're fighting,
41:14but for freedom alone, which no honest man will give up, but with life itself.
41:24I think this is really where Bruce invents something called Scottish independence.
41:31Bruce must have realised somewhere along the line that as long as people had this loyalty to their clan and their family,
41:39we could never build a state or a nation.
41:41And I think that's when he said, we've got to give these guys something greater than themselves to which they can aspire.
41:48Bruce's supporters send a letter to the Pope begging him to bring pressure to bear upon Edward II
41:55to recognise Bruce as legitimate King of Scots.
41:57To end these terrible wars, they tell the Pope that if you don't do this,
42:01you will be responsible for the bloodshed that follows.
42:04And in the course of this letter, they make two great pronouncements.
42:07Bruce, if Bruce should ever submit us or our kingdom to the King of England or the English,
42:15we will remove him and set up another better able to govern us as our king.
42:21And this, I have argued, is the first articulation, really, of the contractual theory of monarchy in Europe.
42:30And then they go on to make the statement, which many people still like to quote,
42:35For so long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never surrender.
42:40It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we're fighting,
42:43but for freedom alone, which no honest person will lose but with life itself.
42:47Who could argue with that?
42:48Some 450 years later, the Declaration of Arbroath would inspire one of the most famous assertions
43:03of freedom, human rights, and self-determination ever written,
43:08the American Declaration of Independence.
43:10This document could have had its roots in a forgotten war fought in Ireland and Scotland centuries earlier.
43:22And in 1317, that war had still to reach its conclusion.
43:30Time was running out for Edward Bruce.
43:33Twice he and his army had a chance to capture Dublin, and twice they had failed.
43:39The Irish kings who supported him outside of Ulster had been defeated in battle.
43:45But even in the face of these setbacks, Edward had reason to believe that things might improve.
43:52In 1318, for the first time in years, there was a good harvest.
43:58Finally, he was able to supply his men properly,
44:02and news came from Scotland that further reinforcements were on the way.
44:05And so, in the autumn of 1318, Edward made the decision to bring his army south and out of Ulster.
44:14We know that Robert is sending reinforcements to Carrickfergus.
44:25And it's just a question of why Edward suddenly decides to leave Carrickfergus before King Robert comes over again.
44:33It could be something to do with a repeat of the events of 1317,
44:39when, effectively, Edward leads the vanguard down south, and Robert's main army follows him.
44:46And it could have been some kind of attempt to take Dublin.
44:49I suspect they only headed south in October, 1318, because they had a new idea.
44:56There was one final effort that they thought might do the trick.
45:01So the Scots still had hopes for Ireland.
45:04It's just possible that they might have been able to pull some kind of a rabbit out of the hat at that stage.
45:09We're just south of the Moray Pass,
45:29which is one of the most important ways to get from the north into the south.
45:33And we're on the hill at Fockert, which is just at the mouth of the pass,
45:39so a very important strategic location.
45:42It's still a very important place.
45:43Indeed, during the Troubles, this was a hot spot.
45:46So for Edward to be up here makes total sense.
45:50But whatever the reason, the Anglo-Irish have got their act together
45:54and have a big army waiting for him.
45:56And Edward Bruce has to decide what to do.
45:59And Barber talks about him having a council of war with his Irish allies.
46:03And everybody's basically saying, don't be so foolish.
46:06We're massively outnumbered. We've only got 2,000 men.
46:09What are we going to do against that massive force?
46:15There could be, in Edward's mind, that he wanted to finish this off.
46:23Maybe there is some kind of thing going on in Edward's head
46:27where he needs to have the same kind of victory as Robert had at Bannockburn.
46:31It might be the case that Edward Bruce, likewise, was a bit of a hothead
46:37and that he rushed into this battle, even though there were further,
46:41apparently, the contemporary sources say, there were further troops on their way
46:45by way of reinforcement to him.
46:47But he decided to take the gamble on the battle.
46:50Historians have settled on this spot, this slope facing down towards the mouth of the pass
46:59as the battlefield.
47:01To me, it doesn't really make sense.
47:04It's far too steep for cavalry to be positioned on it if the Anglo-Irish are up here.
47:09If Edward Bruce is up here, he's surely going to be facing towards the town.
47:14That seems to be where the enemy are coming from.
47:17I am not convinced that this is the battlefield.
47:20To me, having seen a lot of battlefields in my time,
47:23this really doesn't make too much sense.
47:25Every time I've been in a place of historical importance on this trip,
47:46there's been one of these things,
47:47almost like a signpost saying, here is a battle.
47:50And it's a mot, it's a type of Anglo-Irish fortification.
47:55The Normans were very good at them.
47:57And it's basically just a mound of earth that gives you a strong point.
48:02And this being on the top of the hill at Fockert
48:04makes it an ideal location for Edward Bruce
48:08to be able to see whatever's happening around.
48:11So I think this location is probably a pretty good marker
48:15from where to start to think about where this battle was fought.
48:20On top of the mot, on top of the hill at Fockert,
48:25I've got a very clear view down into the town.
48:30But importantly, it's not just the visibility.
48:34This is a much gentler slope.
48:36So if Edward Bruce and his Scottish army and his Irish allies
48:40are on this hill, it offers a much better advantage going into a fight
48:47because these men can move down it.
48:48They've got the advantage of height, but they can move down it in a controlled fashion,
48:52unlike the other side, which is just far too steep.
48:56But he seems to fancy his chances.
48:59So there are scores to be settled, and indeed on that day they are.
49:02Then with great anger, Edward said, let whoever wants to help.
49:10But rest assured that I will fight today without more delay.
49:16Let no man say that while I am alive, that superior numbers would make me free.
49:22God forbid that anyone should blame us for defending our noble name.
49:26God forbid that you are.
49:43God forbid that there are no really slow.
49:48God forbid.
49:48God forbid that you are alive.
49:50God forbid that you are alive.
49:51As it turns out, it really actually ends up being an Anglo-Norman bannockburn,
50:01because they completely rout the Scots,
50:04and that's the end of the dream on that Dundalk hillside.
50:12He should have won that battle.
50:15The leader of the Anglo-Irish forces unit was not a particularly elevated individual.
50:20He was a man called John de Birmingham.
50:22He led what, by all accounts, is a relatively local force of people,
50:28primarily from County Laud itself, some of them from County Mead.
50:32It wasn't some vast government army,
50:35and they were trying to forestall the Bruce's, presumably,
50:38before they got to Dundalk and could do a lot of damage there.
50:43If they had beaten Birmingham's army at Falkert,
50:47the chances of the Scots establishing their foothold here permanently
50:52would probably be a safe bet.
50:55Ah!
51:17Ah!
51:17It goes very badly wrong for them.
51:32Indeed, so badly wrong that Edward Bruce is killed in the battle.
51:39Edward's head is removed.
51:41It's packed in a box of salt and sent to Edward II
51:44to prove that he's actually dead.
51:47His limbs are hacked off and displayed in various parts of the kingdom,
51:51again, to demonstrate that the dreaded Edward Bruce has been vanquished.
51:56If that's the case, this can't be the grave of Edward Bruce.
52:02But it is a fitting memorial.
52:04It marks the end of Edward Bruce's story.
52:07It marks the end of the Scottish invasion of Ireland.
52:12And three and a half years of warfare and grief and fear
52:17come to an end somewhere near this hilltop.
52:21One, one, two.
52:23One, one, two, three.
52:23Two, one, two.
52:24Two, one, three.
52:25One, two, one, two.
52:35One, two, three.
52:35Oh!
52:36We are set here in jeopardy, to win honor or for to die.
52:53We are too far for him to flee.
52:56Therefore, let ilk man worthy be.
53:06For Bruce's Irish supporters, things took a turn for the worse.
53:23Donal and Neil's rivals, the O'Donnells, attacked him and killed his son, Shohan.
53:28Donal himself survived, but his hopes of driving the English from Ireland were in tatters.
53:37The war was over.
53:38I think there is a sense in which King Robert is taken out of the account of the campaign
53:50which came to grief at Foccher.
53:52I think that, in a way, this was down to his brother.
53:57This was Edward.
53:58He was carrying the can for what happened here.
54:02Maybe there's even a notion that Bruce, given these few hints we have in his correspondence,
54:10that Bruce somehow understood the Irish sympathetically in a way that Edward didn't.
54:16Edward didn't know really how to treat them.
54:19When you think about it, it's a pretty odd thing for a guy to show up on the Irish shore
54:27and say, I'm here to be High King.
54:31And they say, well, who are you?
54:35So, I suspect Robert Bruce, the king, felt that if he had led the expedition,
54:41there might have been a different outcome.
54:44Barber is probably just as accurate as any medieval source would be.
54:48But you have to bear in mind the various kind of agendas he has.
54:53And his agenda mainly is to glorify Robert, not Edward.
54:57And so he will give Edward due regarding courage and bravery,
55:02but not necessarily a lot of common sense.
55:06And it's always Robert is perceived as being the one who's the wiser head,
55:10which I think is unfair on Edward, but that's John Barber for you.
55:15There are later charges against Edward Bruce that he's headstrong,
55:18that he's overambitious, that he's short-tempered.
55:22And some of that probably has to be later distancing by the Scots, probably,
55:29of Robert I from his brother's failings.
55:34For Robert, I think it probably only confirmed the difficulties of Ireland,
55:41probably the insurmountable difficulties.
55:43I think he's more worried about what it means for Scotland,
55:46because with his brother's death,
55:48it's fairly clear from the evidence that this provokes a major crisis in Scotland.
55:54Bruce's enemies see that now he only has his grandson, an infant, as his heir presumptive.
56:00He hasn't yet had sons by his queen, Elizabeth de Bourgh.
56:03And there's a real danger for the Bruce dynasty.
56:08But the shadow of misfortune did seem to fade.
56:16In 1324, Robert's wife gave birth to a son and heir, David.
56:22And in 1328, the English finally recognize Robert's right to rule Scotland.
56:28To this day, he is remembered as the greatest monarch ever to sit on the Scottish throne.
56:40Robert Bruce, all through his life, you find him back and forth in Ireland.
56:45Even when he was on his deathbed, one contemporary source says,
56:50he was so ill that he could barely move his tongue.
56:53He had himself brought to Ireland on a couple of occasions.
56:57In the latter years of his life.
57:00But I think it does show that this Bruce connection with Ulster in particular is an ongoing thing.
57:06It's part of their background. It's part of their family life.
57:09And if you want to understand the Bruce invasion,
57:12it's not just in terms of the long-running relationship between Ireland and Scotland in the Middle Ages,
57:17but it's the family ties between the Bruces and some people in the northeast corner of Ireland.
57:23This period, except in some very unique quarters and specialised quarters, has been effectively dismissed.
57:32And that is interesting in itself, because the potential that it might have had is staggering.
57:41The idea of having an Irish kingdom, albeit one which had a Scots ancestry,
57:49well, we don't know how on earth that could have played out in, you know, sort of centuries to come.
57:56But for a small, brief period, the Scots did have a kingdom in Ireland.
58:00For over three years, Edward Bruce was the self-styled ruler of that kingdom.
58:12But he never managed to inspire and lead the Irish in the way that Robert did the Scots.
58:19Ireland remained, and would remain, a divided country.
58:23Ireland remained, and would remain, a divided country.
58:53Ireland remained, and would remain, a divided country.
58:58Ireland remained, and would remain, a divided country.
59:00Ireland remained, and would remain, a divided country.
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