Local Society and the Defence of the English Frontier in Fifteenth-Century Scotland: The War Measures of 1482

Abstract

Despite a growing body of research on political society in late medieval Scotland, and on Anglo-Scottish war, truce, and frontier administration, exactly how local border society responded to the threat of warfare with England is not well understood. Source materials lend themselves to analysis of the military careers of great magnate dynasties, but not to an investigation of the roles performed by the lesser nobility of the borderlands whose fortified residences offered the first line of national defence, and who constituted that social group which conveyed royal and magnate power in the localities. The late medieval Anglo-Scottish frontier is the subject of two outstanding recent monographs. In 1998, Cynthia Neville examined the development of international border or ‘march’ law, illuminating the judicial role of those royal officials known as wardens of the march and truce conservators and the influence on law and on administration of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Whereas Neville expanded on the legal dimensions of the region’s history, especially from an English governmental perspective, in 2000 Alastair J.Macdonald adopted a Scottish governmental perspective to explain Anglo-Scottish warfare in the late fourteenth century. Macdonald shows how Anglo-French conflict allowed the Scottish Crown to pursue a concerted offensive foreign policy towards England, drawing on wide national participation and relying on cooperation between Crown and nobility in military campaigns. These studies are by no means alone in their concern with the late medieval Anglo-Scottish frontier, and other work has tended to focus on warfare, usually from the English viewpoint and mostly concerned with the fourteenth century. This paper offers an examination of the role of the lesser nobility in Scottish defensive arrangements in the later fifteenth century, when Scotland faced an English neighbour which was now mostly shorn of its military preoccupations in France. The Scottish realm was no longer able to sustain the sort of offensive strategy apparent in the period studied by Macdonald; territory formerly lost to English control had now been reconquered, and there was far more security to be had in courting peace. Apart from exploiting English civil strife in the 1460s (thereby regaining Roxburgh and Berwick-upon-Tweed), Scotland reverted to an overall strategy of avoiding major military engagements which in some ways resembled that of the early fourteenth century. Yet open war was to come again, and a new generation of leaders had to face the old problem how the Scottish-controlled border zone, now restored to its pre-1296 dimensions, was to be defended against major invasion. The following study pays close attention to the preparations for hostilities with England in 1482, the conflict which is best known for the arrest of James III at Lauder and for the final loss of Berwick to English control. The relatively detailed evidence brings into clear view the local and regional networks of power by which Scottish marchers governed and defended themselves and by which a ‘periphery’ — albeit not a remote one — was linked directly to the political ‘core’ of the kingdom.