Worse Than the Red Wedding: 12 Real British Massacres that Make Game of Thrones Look Like Child’s Play

2 – The Sack of Berwick, 1296

For our next stop, we move over a thousand years forwards and far to the north, to the border of Scotland and England. The town of Berwick has historically been the dividing line between the two countries and, indeed, has changed hands on several occasions between the two, one such example of which took place in 1296 and resulted in the deaths of thousands upon thousands of non-participants.

The Sack of Berwick was a turning point in British history and a defining moment in the progress of English forces towards the colonisation of Scotland. The conflict that was sparked at Berwick would later become known as the First Scottish War of Independence, although at the time, the concept of independence was a lot murkier. Scotland and England were separate kingdoms with separate royal families: Edward the First – known as Edward Longshanks – being the King of England and Scotland in the midst of a succession crisis that had occurred after the death of Margaret of Norway, Queen of Scots, just over a year previously. Margaret, the granddaughter of Alexander III, was born in Norway and never took her crown nor set foot on the Scotland mainland – in fact, she was just 7 years old at the time. She succeeded her grandfather, whose own children were already dead, but herself died of sea-sickness in the Orkney Islands, leaving no clear succession.

A group known as the Guardians of Scotland had been arranged to govern as regents while the Queen was a girl and had organised an arranged marriage between Margaret and Edward I of England’s son, which might well have lead to the unity of the English and Scottish crowns. With her death, however, there was a political feud between Robert the Bruce and John Balliol, both of whom saw themselves as potential monarchs. The Guardians decided to invited Edward I in to ensure that war did not break out. Quite the opposite occurred.

Edward decided that John Balliol should be king and he was duly made King, but in practice, Edward had made a vassal state of Scotland. After several years of this, the Scottish nobility revolted, signed a treaty of mutual defence with France – known as the Auld Alliance – and attacked Carlisle, the northernmost city in England. Edward retaliated spectacularly. He set his troops on Berwick, not only the first city over the border but also the major sea port of Scotland and the second most economically powerful city in mediaeval Britain, after London. Edward Longshanks’ men entered the town on March 28, 1296 and massacre the inhabitants, thought to be a number well into the thousands. Writing in the Scotichronicon, a history of the Scottish people, 15th century historian Walter Bower wrote:

“When the town had been taken in this way and its citizens had submitted, Edward spared no one, whatever the age or sex, and for two days streams of blood flowed from the bodies of the slain, for in his tyrannous rage he ordered 7,500 souls of both sexes to be massacred…So that mills could be turned round by the flow of their blood.”

The Sack of Berwick would be a devastating blow for the Scots, but the brutality was such that resistance was vital. Public opinion was strongly against the English and, in 1297, there were risings all over the country lead by Andrew Moray and William Wallace. The Scots, helped by France and Ireland, managed to fight the English back into Northumberland, as anyone who has seen Braveheart will well know. In 1298, however, the French signed a deal with the English and removed their backing from the Scots, while Wallace was defeated at the Battle of Falkirk and in 1305, Wallace was executed in London. Robert the Bruce would eventually defeat the English again at Bannockburn in 1314 and return Berwick to Scotland in 1318.