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infantry, and in one day killed an estimated 17,000 people. As Churchill rather dryly put it, “Berwick sank in a few hours from one of the active centres [
sic
] of European commerce to the minor seaport which exists today.” 31
    Why did Edward do this, and indeed, how could a supposedly Christian monarch have lived with such blood on his hands? Centuries later, in 1937, the Japanese would coin a phrase for such ruthless conduct as they took similar (though not so completely brutal) measures in Nanking, China. In Asia the concept was called “killing the chicken to scare the monkeys.” Laying waste to Berwick was a deliberate act of state terrorism, the medieval equivalent of a strategically placed atomic bomb. It was meant to create such fear in the rest of Scotland that the people would hurry to show their deference to the powerful English king.
    Wrong country. Wrong people.
    Edward should have read his history more carefully, for he then would have understood that Roman emperor Severus also had underestimated the intransigence of the people of the North in the face of foreign brutality. The English king did predict accurately the actions of many of the high Scottish nobles, but he vastly underestimated the people themselves. The high royalty ran from Edward, but the people did not. In fact, the rape of Berwick had inflamed them.
    Edward discounted the people, content with the notion that his intimidation of the Anglo-Norman high nobility had been successful. After Berwick, the hapless Balliol was trapped into a fight, having no choice but to renounce his homage to England, which he did a month later. The trap thereby sprung, a month after that the English routed the Scottish at Dunbar, where ten thousand Scots died and their high nobility literally fled the battlefield. Soon after that, all the great castles belonged to the English. In July, Balliol surrendered himself and his “kingdom” to Edward, and he was taken to England, where he lived a comfortable life for a few years and then retired, equally comfortably, to France. Just after Balliol’s surrender, Edward himself rampaged through Scotland, marching freely throughout the kingdom to demonstrate his invincibility. On his way back to England the avaricious king looted jewelry, relics, and the famed Stone of Scone from Scone, symbolically “uniting” the two countries with the capture of Scotland’s most important ceremonial accoutrements.
    Scotland had been subdued, or so it might have seemed. But Proud Edward’s fatal mistake was thinking that Scotland was merely ruled from above rather than driven from below. Instead of frightening the Scots, Edward’s promiscuous violence had roused in them an uncompromising nationalism. The English king had set into motion a spirit of vengeance and independence among the “monkeys.” Indeed, he had awakened, in Churchill’s words, “a race as stern and resolute as any bred among men.” 32
    Even as the high nobles were crumbling before Edward’s advance, the Scottish people were coming together, and soon they were actively resisting. They had built their nation from below, family by family, glen by glen, oath by oath, not through some impersonal, didactic Norman pyramid based on obligations tied to real estate but instead through the Celtic way of blood loyalty, locked elbows, and the honor of raising swords in unison. They would march and they would fight and many of them would die, all for a new and rare concept that even then they dared to label freedom.
    When the moment for fighting and dying came, it fell on two very different leaders to deliver the Scottish people to their future. One leader was a commoner whose fighting spirit, moral courage, and charisma were so unusual that the world has seen his sort only rarely in the entire annals of history. William Wallace gave the individual Scot his patriotic “brave heart” as well as the certainty of this new national identity, and even today his legacy has