To win the dyke

30 March is the anniversary of the sack of Berwick by Edward I in 1296. The popular image is of a frighful massacre, in which most of the citizenry were exterminated by the king’s Irish and Welsh infantry. What really happened is very difficult to know: surviving petitions show that some of the citizens were still alive afterwards, but a town put to the sack in the medieval era would have been handled very roughly indeed. The Scots did similar things at places like Hexham and Corbridge in northern England and Dundalk in Ireland.

One account of the sack, in an addition to the chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, appears to be the earliest mention of Edward’s nickname of Longshanks. When Edward demanded the town’s surrender, the citizens are said to have bared their buttocks at him (shades of Braveheart) and sang the following jingle:

“What wenith King Edward with his lang shanks,
To win Berwick with all our unthanks,
Gaes pike him,
And when he has hit, Gaes dyke him.”

Some of the citizenry then attacked the king’s ships on the Tweed, slaughtering the crews. Incensed, Edward signalled the attack and led his cavalry in person:

“What then did Sir Edward?
Peer he had none like;
Upon his steed Bayard he first won the dyke.”

Berwick-upon-Tweed

What followed was undeniably gruesome, as the ill-defended town was stormed in a couple of hours. By the rules of war, the burgesses of Berwick had sacrificed any right to mercy by refusing to surrender. The actual scale of the slaughter can reasonably be doubted: Earl Warenne, for instance, found time and leisure to go shopping for bread in the town on the same day, which implies that the sack was bloody but brief.