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the great irritation of a feudal estate was that it could cross national boundaries. As the modern state evolved, this created difficulties not only in terms of military obligations, but also in such issues as taxation and local government. As Princeton’s Joseph Strayer wrote in his classic text
Western Europe in the Middle Ages
, “Overlapping political authority was just as natural under feudal conditions as it is unnatural in the modern state; the transition from the first to the second was bound to cause conflict. The concept of distinct boundaries, within which one ruler has supreme authority, was new at the end of the thirteenth century. In attempting to draw such boundaries, overlapping rights had to be ignored and tenuous claims of suzerainty exaggerated.” 29
    King Edward I was a master of this process of exaggerating claims to contested land areas, using it to good effect in the “final conquest” of North Wales, and then setting his sights, or rather his obsessions, on Scotland. Noting the fragility of the Scottish throne, Edward seized the moment, gaining agreement among Scotland’s and Norway’s high royalty that the infant girl should marry Edward II, his eldest son, who would one day succeed him. The arrangement was formally agreed to among Margaret’s four guardians and the king in the Treaty of Birgham-on-Tweed. Ominously, the treaty also guaranteed that young Edward would gain an irrevocable personal right to “the Scottish inheritance” if he produced an heir, with Margaret or any other wife, so long as he and the infant queen had once been married. 30 Thus, Edward I had arranged to deliver to England by royal fiat that which it had been unable to accomplish through a thousand years of military effort—a Scotland that would be firmly ruled by English royalty.
    The Scottish people and their tribal leaders watched and listened, having already rejected the entire basis of this odd Norman concept whereby the ownership of land somehow equated to the subjugation of peoples. And they were not convinced.
    The child-queen mooted the point in 1290 when she died in a stormy sea as she was being rushed from Norway to the royal court. But after her death, civil war threatened Scotland as the Scottish kingdom had no clear line of succession to its throne. Thirteen people stepped forward and claimed the right to rule, and the Scots had no legal apparatus that would resolve their claims. Instead, Scotland’s high families invited the notorious Edward I to reconcile the question, and predictably he acted not as a mediator but as a firm-handed regent. His appetite having been whetted by his earlier attempt to wed his son to little dead Margaret, Edward chose John Balliol, the weakest among the possible successors. At the same time, Edward made clear that he considered himself to be the true overlord of Scotland.
    John Balliol might be king, but Edward was going to rule.
    Balliol was crowned at historic Scone on St. Andrew’s Day, 1292. He was now king of Scotland, but many of the castles and their soldiers were already in Norman-English hands. Edward I himself lost no effort in humiliating Balliol, and within a year he had claimed the three largest towns in Scotland as his own due to Balliol’s alleged contempt of the throne. Two years later Balliol appealed to the French for help, and in October 1295 he signed a weakly worded treaty with the French. Edward seized upon this desperation as a breach of fealty and decided to march on Scotland.
    March Proud King Edward did. Burn he did. Kill he did, earning along the way the nickname “the Hammer of Scotland.” In a campaign more vicious than anything Scotland had seen since the pillage by Roman emperor Severus a thousand years before, Edward set upon the flourishing port of Berwick, then the richest city in Scotland, and literally destroyed everything in it, including its people. On March 30, 1296, Edward entered Berwick with some 5,000 cavalry and 30,000