To Rule the Earth (We Already Rule the Waves): An SS6.4 British Snippet collection
As my previous campaign crashed, I've started a new one, from the English. Difficulty is H/H, SS6.4 with the latest version of RBAI.
Let's start it off with a tale undoubtedly familiar to the English players...that of William Wallace...
Of the Scottish Rebellions and William Wallace
From ‘Bloody Highlands: a History of Scottish Rebellions and Uprisings’
The Scots had provoked English wrath during the reigns of both Henry and Oliver. Their raids and attempts to take York gained them Papal ire, leading to their King, Etgar, being excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1141 in an attempt to curb their wanton destruction and cruelty. The English acted as the Papal instrument of chastisement at that point, with Duke Oliver leading the assaults that broke the Scottish armies with minimal losses on his part. Oliver’s heir, Andrew, was blooded at the siege of Edinburgh when Etgar made his last, desperate sally, as is emboldened and embroidered in folklore. By 1151, the English ruled as far north as Aberdeen, which was made Andrew’s fief in an effort to teach the young administrator some fighting skills (though Andrew, in his position as heir to the throne, saw little of it). The Scots had been bloodied twice over, with the vast majority of their armies destroyed and their rulers killed, but they coalesced at Inverness behind a new King, Ided. Ided was a patient man, and signed a ceasefire with the English in 1154, to the displeasure of his remaining nobles. The new Scottish King recognized that with Oliver in the field with the Royal Army, the Scots stood no chance, and with his realm bankrupt he could not raise but a few companies of soldiers from the hardscrabble highlands. The vast majority of Scottish citizens, in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, accepted their new masters easily enough. The English ruled with a light hand, interfering little with local customs and imposing peace as necessary.
Other troubles were of importance to England. Duke Oliver, on a Crusade to reclaim Constantinople from the Fatimid Jihad that had taken it in 1152, found himself King when Henry breathed his last in 1159. The French had been forced into vassalage after their disastrous wars with the English, Aragonese, Geonese, and Holy Roman Empire had reduced them to a pair of fiefs centered on Pairs and Clermont, a reversal of the relationship between Norman and Frank present at the turn of the millennium. In 1161, the Brothers Royal, though Andrew and David were young yet, were gathering the Royal Army for a campaign against the Aragonese, and had only recently departed.
In 1162, a young noble of middling standing, Uilliam Uallace (Anglicized to William Wallace in most literature) had had enough. He saw the English occupation, light and relatively fair-handed though it was, as an affront to Scotland, and discontented nobles and contentious Scottish Highlanders flocked to his banners as he called for war. Ided was able to restrain the young firebrand for a time, calling his own banners to prepare, but in 1164 William’s armies began advancing against the cities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. In 1165, sieges of both had begun…
Recovered letter from Arstan mac Fillis, wool merchant, Edinburgh, dated June of 1167
I write this expecting to be found out and killed by the wild Highlanders shortly after I send it. I have been a leal subject of Henry, and of Oliver, and, if the news from the south be true, now of King Andrew, may the Lord preserve him. Thus I send this news by fast messenger to York, and I shall pray for it’s safe delivery. It contains what I know of the battle.
Waleran de la Warr was the noble in charge of the city garrison, recently expanded to a thousand good men, a mix of archers, spearmen, and some merchants in heavy armor and atop good horses. Against the Scottish army, which outnumbered them badly and had far more and better men, Waleran chose to make his stand in the central square of the city. Men manned catapults behind clusters of schiltromed spearmen- I watched from a nearby window, and paid other men to do the same.
The Scots, under a foul man named Cennedigmac Garthait, stormed the walls with siege engines, their bloodlust unsated for the moments. Wasting not a moment, they opened the gates for the rest of their madmen and hooligans to pour through, and marched up the streets. Waleran and the merchants attempted to meet some of the Scots in the streets, but as others have reported, the tight confines and the claymores of the nobles turned this attempt to turn back the enemy infantry into a slaughter, and Waleran fell. The Scottish rabble, emboldened, advanced quickly, hurling themselves against the militiamen, who stood their ground. Our archers sent fire arrows into the sky, and the catapults added flaming boulders, but the Scots were simply too numerous and too fired by zealotry. Inch by inch, over bloodied ground, the militia were pushed back. However, they made the Scots pay dearly for each foot, and I saw Cennedigmac fall to our boys and their spears late in the battle. May the Devil have a thousand torments for him in Hell! By then, though, the battle was decided- the Scots had learned to use pikes, long, deadly spears, and they cut our exhausted men apart. Our boys fought to the last, even the archers drawing daggers and knives to hurl themselves at the Scots, even when all was lost. A third of the Scottish force, including their damned commander, lay dead in the streets, many burnt, but the remainder have now turned to looting and wanton cruelty. I have seen men hanged for being ‘traitors to the land’. I will, like as not, be among them soon, for my custom has been enjoyed by English merchants looking for good fabric. But this message matters far more.
Send word to the Royal Brothers, I beg of you. Send word for Andrew and David, the King and the Duke. We have need of them.
Royal Letter and Proclamation, November 1167:
We are coming.
We come to take back what is ours. My brother leads the Royal Army, and the men of Normandy and Flanders have answered our call to arms.
We call upon William Wallace, traitor, oathbreaker, slaughterer of women and children, to meet us in the field. We shall destroy him, and reclaim what was ours.
Ided made peace with us, but it is clear he thinks that peace is unimportant when stolen riches can be hoisted high in the halls of the Highland Clans. Ided. Cower in Inverness as we destroy all your newfound armies. Learn a thousand times over the fear you inflicted on our people by not restraining the mad dog Wallace when you had the chance.
The people of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, people you called kin a few years before and have now butchered like cattle for not falling in with your mad cause, shall be avenged.
England comes, and we shall bring fire and sword to the Highlands.
-His Royal Majesty, King Andrew I, King of England and Wales and Scotland by the Grace of Our Lord God.
From ‘The Brothers Royal: a Combined Biography of the Normandy Brothers’:
Gathering an army was no small task, especially an army sizable enough to lay siege to Scotland, empowered as it was by Wallace’s Highlanders. It took years, and in the time spent Wallace and his raiders caused untold misery to the regions they had ‘reclaimed for the Scottish people’. However, by 1171, the main Royal army, and a second battalion of Dutch and Norman volunteers, had landed in England. Battered from fierce fighting along the Spanish border, they regrouped at Nottingham to plan their campaign and find the best course of action. By 1174, all was in readiness, with the vast majority of the English professional forces either in England or en route. Duke David, leading the main army, appointed Richard of Pembroke, the Duke of York, as head of the Dutch/Norman force, and attacked the first Scottish army on the border. Judging from recovered accounts, this was the same army that had attacked and sacked Edinburgh in 1167.
The battle itself could only be described as a slaughter. Without a noteworthy commander, the Scottish army, despite having an advantageous hilltop position, was quickly surrounded by the Miles heavy cavalry and taken apart a piece at a time. The infantry of the Royal army, and Pembroke’s forces, never even reached the battle, as the cavalry killed the captain in charge of the twelve-hundred-strong force, and carved apart the Highlanders and Scottish noble infantry easily. The pikes were dealt with by archers and crossbow fire.
David marched north losing fewer than a hundred men, and annihilating the Scots utterly. He then laid siege to Edinburgh. What happened next, is enshrined in history…
###
Many called King Andrew lazy, or inept, or absent-minded. These people had little to no idea who they were dealing with. The King was a man who knew his limitations. His brother, David, the warmaster, the commander of armies, was utterly loyal to him, and did a far better job at warfare than Andrew ever could, hence his being dispatched to put down the Scottish insurgents. Andrew administrated the realm, ruled it, while David conquered. The two were inseparable, halves of the same coin, and while some lords would have preferred David be King, the last man to insinuate such to the younger Normandy brother had had his head returned to his master in a vat of brine, with a jointly penned letter detailing all of the lord’s misdeeds and little dark secrets. For behind Andrew’s harmless façade lurked a man who understood the workings of minds and men without peer, a man who was comfortable ruling the shadows and dark places of Europe. England’s networks of spies and assassins had no peer. But the harmless façade of the genteel, slightly buffoonish ruler rarely slipped.
Thus, anything that could turn that façade to a mask of apoplectic rage was a rare event indeed.
However, a Papal letter could certainly achieve it.
“King Ided is a man of God,” Andrew mockingly recited to the court of Bordeaux, eliciting a volley of hisses and boos. These men, at least, were loyal, men who had fought and bled in France. “And to tamper with his realm with fire and sword is a mockery of the order our Lord God has given to us. As the Christ on Earth, I charge you to summon your brother and hold him accountable for his crimes against the people of Scotland, and to cease your depredations of their land and people. William Wallace, too, is a man of God, and his destruction of the regimes you imposed…” He cut off, and spat on the floor, before eyeing the court.
“I have read my brother’s dispatches, my lords,” he said, voice quiet and deadly. “Wallace and his scum march with women and children impaled on their pikes, and this flaccid Hungarian bastard dares call him a man of God? They sack cities, burn buildings, kill good honest men, and he calls them holy?! And when my brother tries to reclaim what is ours, fighting the good fight on the cold frontiers, this cretin dares pass judgement from a gilded seat in Rome, as if any mortal man should look upon the butchery of proper, good Englishmen as a just deed? I turned David aside from Toulouse once, for fear of Papal censure and for need of his men against Wallace, and now this fool of a false Christ says we must allow Wallace to slaughter as he pleases? I. Say. Nay! He threatens us with excommunication for doing what is right? He threatens our German allies with the same for curbing the Geonese ambitions? The Hungarian can rot! David will take back what is rightfully ours!” Andrew’s voice dropped back, cold as a Highland winter. “And if the Pope bars us both from the Church, so be it. England will prevail.”
From ‘The Doomed Rebellion: History of William Wallace’:
Edinburgh fell quickly, and David moved on. His next battle, against another Scottish army, this one the one Wallace himself had led, was bloodier than the one against the force at the border, but David recouped his losses from Pembroke’s Normans and moved on to Aberdeen, wondering where Wallace had gone to ground.
As it so happened, it was in Aberdeen where Wallace, and a small band of Highland nobles, the last remnants of the Scottish rebels, had regrouped. David stormed the city in 1177, and Wallace, a general and inspirational speaker, was cut down by a cavalry charge, his men slaughtered in the streets.
Inverness, last bastion of the Scottish nation, fell in 1178, King Ided the Indifferent cut down in the streets by Norman serjeants. Weary, bloodied, and victorious, David and the battalions of the Royal Army returned to Nottingham.
There was a new war brewing, a conflict with Genoa.
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Originally Posted by mad orc
