David II of Scotland invaded England for his French allies after Crécy, was beaten outside Durham on 17 October 1346, and was captured with two arrow wounds in his face — the beginning of eleven years in English custody.
The Battle of Neville’s Cross was fought on 17 October 1346 on rough ground half a mile west of Durham, and it is the clearest single demonstration of what the Auld Alliance cost Scotland. David II of Scotland had invaded England because Philip VI of France asked him to, six weeks after the French army was destroyed at the Battle of Crécy and while Edward III was sitting down in front of Calais. The English north was supposed to be empty. It was not: the Archbishop of York and the border wardens had an army in the field within days.
The battle destroyed the Scottish leadership in an afternoon. The Earl of Moray and the Earl of Strathearn were killed, the Constable and the Marischal and the Chancellor of Scotland with them; four earls were taken prisoner, and so was the king, fighting on with an arrowhead in his face that his surgeons never managed to remove. David spent eleven years in English custody and came home in 1357 owing a ransom of 100,000 marks. The Second War of Scottish Independence effectively ended on that ground.
The alliance between Scotland and France, first sworn in 1295 and renewed in 1326, was a mutual obligation to make war on England whenever the other party was attacked, and it worked in both directions: it was why Scotland was rarely left alone, and why France could reliably open a second front. In July 1346 Edward III landed in Normandy; on 26 August he destroyed Philip VI’s army at Crécy; on 4 September he began the siege of Calais. Philip’s appeals to David grew urgent, and they came with a piece of intelligence that turned out to be wrong — that northern England had been stripped of fighting men and lay open.
The Anglo-Scottish truce expired on 29 September 1346 and David crossed the border on 7 October with the strongest army Scotland had put in the field in years, carrying French-supplied weapons and accompanied by a few French knights. He had his own reasons beyond the alliance. Crowned at five, driven into French exile at ten after the Battle of Halidon Hill, and restored only in 1341, he had spent his adult life in the shadow of his father’s reputation and of Edward Balliol’s claim. A profitable invasion of England was the obvious way to make a reign of his own.
The Scots took Liddell Strength, sacked the Augustinian priory at Hexham, and moved down through Northumberland toward Durham, burning and lifting what they could as they went; the Lanercost chronicler, whose own house had been plundered in earlier raids, records the damage with feeling. At Durham the Scots settled at Bearpark and negotiated with the city for a payment of £1,000 to leave it alone, with the money due on 18 October. It was never paid, because the English army arrived first.
What David did not know was that William Zouche, Archbishop of York and Lord Warden of the Marches, had been raising troops from the moment the truce expired and had joined with the border commanders Ralph Neville and Henry Percy at Bishop Auckland — around 6,000 to 7,000 men, a mixture of northern levies, hobelars and about 1,200 archers from Lancashire. On the morning of 17 October the two armies found each other by accident: a Scottish raiding party of some 500 men under William Douglas of Liddesdale rode into the English in the mist near Merrington, lost about 300, and ran back to camp with the news.
David formed three divisions on ground he had not chosen, a slope west of the city broken up by stone walls, ditches and enclosures that made it almost impossible to keep a formation together while moving. The English, all dismounted, formed three divisions of their own with men-at-arms in the centre and archers on the wings, and then did the sensible thing, which was nothing at all. For much of the day the two armies stood and looked at each other; the Scots would not attack into the obstacles, and the English had no reason to leave good ground.
The deadlock was broken by the archers, sent forward to shoot into the Scottish ranks until someone lost patience. Someone did. John Graham, Earl of Menteith, asked for horse to ride the bowmen down, got almost none, charged anyway and was unhorsed and captured. Moray’s division then went forward and came apart on the walls and ditches exactly as the ground promised; the archers fell back behind their own men-at-arms and the two lines met. Moray was killed, and with him the Earl of Strathearn, the Constable David de la Hay, the Marischal Robert Keith and the Chancellor Thomas Charteris. On the Scottish left the third division under Robert Stewart, the king’s nephew and heir, and Patrick, Earl of March, broke off and left the field largely intact. That withdrawal has been argued about in Scotland ever since, exactly as the flight of the horse from the Battle of Falkirk has: what can be said is that Stewart got most of his men home and became king twenty-five years later.
David’s own division was left alone against the whole English army and fought until it disintegrated. The king was hit twice in the face by arrows. Surgeons got one out; the head of the second stayed in the bone and gave him headaches for the rest of his life, which is the sort of detail that survives because it was still visible to everyone who met him afterwards. He got clear of the rout wounded and hid under a bridge over the River Browney, where — by the chronicle story — an English party spotted his reflection in the water.
The man who took him was John de Coupland, a Northumbrian squire, and David knocked out two of his teeth before he was secured. Edward III knighted Coupland for it and settled £500 a year on him for life. Durham tradition adds that the monks of the cathedral climbed the tower to sing and pray while the battle was fought, and that the Corpus Christi procession which followed for centuries commemorated the victory; it is a tradition of long standing rather than a contemporary record, and it is how the city has remembered the day.
David was held first at Wark and Bamburgh, then moved to the Tower of London in January 1347, and afterwards to Windsor and to Odiham Castle in Hampshire. Captivity for a king of his rank was comfortable and political rather than punitive: he hunted, he was visited, and he negotiated. Three times Edward III offered release on the condition that one of his own sons be accepted as heir to the Scottish throne, and three times the offer was refused — by David or by a Scottish parliament that could be relied on to refuse, which may have been the point.
The Treaty of Berwick of 3 October 1357 finally ransomed him for 100,000 marks, payable at 10,000 a year, with a truce attached. The instalments dominated Scottish public finance for the rest of his reign and were never fully paid. He returned an experienced and unsentimental politician, faced down the Steward in 1363, taxed and administered the kingdom with a competence his contemporaries did not expect, and died childless in 1371, leaving the crown to the nephew who had walked off the field at Neville’s Cross.