Bannockburn itself, on the day, is also best guess, though the idea has perpetuated that the boggy ground hampered the English heavy horse, an idea no doubt culled from all the later historians who bothered even to walk that ground in a typical wet summer.
But the summer of 1314 was not typical, just as the battle was not typical. There are hints, in other extant accounts, that May and June of 1314 had been rainlessly hot – and Bannockburn’s carse, given weeks of beating sunshine, is firm and perfect for cavalry, even if the steep-sided streams, tidal washed twice a day at one end, retain a measure of damp.
That year, 1314, marked the start of a climate change which saw long, harsh winters, arid summers and wet autumns, all of which conspired, for the next few years, to ruin harvests. The year after Bannockburn saw famine in Britain, worst of all for the people of northern England, whose wheat crops were ruined by weather and the ravages of victorious, raiding Scots. Scotland also suffered, though the despised oat, staple of the Scots diet, was a hardier plant for wet weather and the Scots were not being burned out of what little they had.
Another persistent idea concerns the Templars and the debate about their presence continues to rage on. Did Bruce give them shelter? Did he, as is claimed, become head of the Order, or form a new Order out of their ruins? Are the Masons of today the direct inheritors? Is the Scottish Rite handed down from the Templars? Did they lead an army of ‘sma’ folk’ down Coxet Hill at the crucial turning point of the battle and so bring Bruce victory?
If you want proof that a writer has gone mad, see if he has become involved with the history of Templars in Scotland. For my own part, I dismiss all of it. Bruce was not foolish enough to shackle himself to a discredited, disbanded Order simply because he had been excommunicated. The whole thrust of his life in the aftermath of Bannockburn was to undo that and gain papal approval of his kingship, so he was hardly likely to be flaunting heretic Templars in the Vatican’s face.
The Templars ended in Scotland, just as they did everywhere else, but there is no doubt that disinherited Templars were treated with more leniency in Scotland, as they were in Ireland. There is some evidence that both those countries were backwaters for Templar commanderies, a sort of retirement home for aged servitors of the Order. No one was too concerned to punish old men in a care home.
Was there a Templar treasure, taken from France to the north of Scotland? Possibly – define treasure. If the Templars thought they possessed the Grail, the Shroud of Christ and other such holy artefacts, which was their speciality after all, it may be that kings and popes spent a long time looking for the wrong fortune.
There may not, however, have been a fabled Treasury at all; most accounts of commanderies taken over reveal very little in the way of loot. If there was a Templar treasure for Bruce it would be in the weapons and harness he needed – constant war, raids and English domination is not conducive to garnering the money needed to trade or create the amount of weapons and armour, simple though it was, with which the Scots army was equipped.
So where did he get them? Probably not as I have stated, using Templar money to buy Templar weapons from the beneficiaries of the fallen Order in northern Spain, the new Order of Alcántara. But it gave an adventure for Hal and Kirkpatrick while the events leading up to Bannockburn warped and wove themselves into a bloody tapestry of Midsummer’s Day, 1314.
Incidentally, the Glaissery Castle I have Bruce handing to the ‘simple Benedictine monks’ in exchange for their help is now known as Fincharn Castle, a former MacDougall stronghold on Loch Awe and not more than a prayer away from Kilneuair Church, a sadly neglected ruin with Templar symbols on gravestones. Loch Awe is the place where the Templars from France brought their fabled treasure, if you believe the many theories.
All of it is too good for a novelist to pass up. Historians would be wiser to treat tales of the secret continuation of the Templars in Scotland with a huge saline pinch.
The salient points of the battle at Bannockburn are fairly well confirmed, source to source: the arrival of the English, weary and exhausted; their hasty and ill-conceived assault; the death of Sir Henry de Bohun at the hands of Bruce personally; the belief that the Scots would not stand for a second day and the shock of them not only still being in situ but actually attacking.
The victory was the culmination of Bruce’s struggle to ensure that Scotland recognized him as king. It would take fifteen more years before the rest of the world recognized it as well.
The start of this book is purportedly written by an unknown monk in February of 1329, three months before Robert the Bruce is finally acknowledged as King of Scots by the Pope – and four months before his death, ravaged and ruined by ‘an unspecified illness’.
Think of this as stumbling across a cache of hidden monkish scribblings which, when read by a flickering tallow candle, reveal fragments of lives lost both in time and legend.
If any interpretations or omissions jar, blow out the light and accept my apologies.