English invasion of Scotland (1385)

rdf:langString English invasion of Scotland (1385)

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rdf:langString In this type of warfare there was little room for French knights. The growing antagonism between them and their allies is vividly portrayed by Froissart, whose admiration for the bravery of the Scots mingled with contempt for their poverty-stricken uncouthness.

rdf:langString The campaign as a whole also reveals a grasp of strategy and the will—perhaps even the courage to carry it out...The King, however, had achieved and carefully defended his military objective.

rdf:langString The English...had no enemy to fight and no food to eat. Increasingly hungry and frustrated, they took what revenge they could.

rdf:langString There has been considerable debate as to why [the feudal levy] should have been needed, given the Crown's power for decades past to raise military forces without such an expedient being necessary. Broadly, the debate hinges on whether a feudal summons was needed to ensure an impressive turn-out for Richard's first campaign, or whether the government hoped to ease its fiscal problems by placing financial burdens on those who did not respond to the feudal call to arms.

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rdf:langString James Gillespie, Richard II: The King of Battles?

rdf:langString Nigel Saul, Richard II

rdf:langString Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages

rdf:langString Maurice Keen, Richard II's Ordinances of War of 1385

rdf:langString Alastair J Macdonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War, 1369-1403

rdf:langString The French wanted a sustained campaign which would tie down significant English forces. They wanted to attack the major walled towns and castles of the English borderlands. They believed in careful advanced planning and disciplined movement. The Scots wanted to fight the kind of campaign which they had always fought, involving fast movement by formless hordes of men, maximum physical destruction and the capture of valuable cattle.

rdf:langString They were amazed to find that Edinburgh, which had been described to them as the Paris of the north, had only 400 houses. They were unimpressed by the 'red-faced and bleary-eyed' King Robert. they found his subjects a 'savage race' without courtesy or chivalry and his country bare of everything that made life sweet.

rdf:langString The component companies of a contract army could be very heterogeneous in their makeup, which was another reason why common rules, binding all, needed to be made explicit. Individual companies varied enormously in size and the status and background of their leaders; in their ranks, near-professionals with long campaigning records mingled with young men who were "armed for the first time".

rdf:langString In July 1385 Richard II, king of England, led an English army into Scotland. The invasion was, in part, retaliation for Scottish border raids, but was most provoked by the arrival of a French army into Scotland the previous summer. England and France were engaged in the Hundred Years' War, and France and Scotland had a treaty to support each other. The English King had only recently come of age, and it was expected that he would play a martial role just as his father, Edward the Black Prince, and grandfather Edward III had done. There was some disagreement amongst the English leadership whether to invade France or Scotland; the King's uncle, John of Gaunt, favoured invading France, to gain him a tactical advantage in Castile, where he himself was technically king through his wife but had trouble asserting his claim. The King's friends among the nobility – who were also Gaunt's enemies – preferred an invasion of Scotland. A parliament the year before had granted funds for a continental campaign and it was deemed unwise to flout the House of Commons. The Crown could barely afford a big campaign. Richard summoned the feudal levy, which had not been called for many years; this was the last occasion on which it was to be summoned. Richard promulgated ordinances to maintain discipline in his invasion force, but the campaign was beset by problems from the start. One of Richard's knights was killed by the king's half-brother before the army even reached Newcastle; once there, the leadership was divided and often indulged more in internecine fighting than in fighting against the Scots, who, with their French allies, had retired in the face of the English and refused battle. The Scots scorched the earth as they retired. The invaders swiftly exhausted their food and other supplies; by the time the English reached Edinburgh, they had achieved little of military value, mostly the burning of churches. Gaunt may have proposed chasing the Scots into the mountains to force them to battle, but the King refused to countenance such a tactic and the army soon withdrew to England. As Richard's force left Scotland, the Franco-Scottish army counter-invaded England from the West March getting almost as far as Carlisle and ravaged Cumbria and Durham on its return. Richard was to propose another invasion of Scotland a few years later, but this came to nothing; and on his next invasion, of Ireland in 1399, he was deposed by Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke.