James Douglas rode into the sleeping camp of the fifteen-year-old Edward III in Weardale on the night of 3-4 August 1327, cut down the tent ropes of the king's own pavilion, and rode out again.
In the small hours of 4 August 1327 James Douglas took a few hundred Scottish men-at-arms across the River Wear into the camp of the English army in Weardale, killed the sentries, rode through the lines shouting his own name, and cut the ropes of the pavilion of Edward III, a king of fourteen who had been crowned six months earlier. He was driven out when the camp rallied, and he had not destroyed the army. He had done something more useful to Scotland: he had shown that England could put a large and expensive host into the field for a month and be unable to protect its king in his own bed.
Stanhope Park was the last significant action of the First War of Scottish Independence. No pitched battle was fought in Weardale - that was the whole Scottish point - but the campaign cost the English crown roughly 70,000 pounds at a time when its ordinary revenue was near 30,000, achieved nothing, and ended with the Scots walking home unmolested. Eight months later the regency government of Isabella and Roger Mortimer signed the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton, renouncing every English claim over Scotland.
Edward II had been deposed in January 1327 and his son crowned in his place, with real power held by the queen, Isabella of France, and her ally Roger Mortimer. The new regime was vulnerable in exactly the place the old one had been beaten: the north. Robert the Bruce, unrecognised by England since the Battle of Bannockburn thirteen years earlier and now ill, had no intention of letting a minority government settle in peace, and in the summer of 1327 sent an army into England under his best commanders.
It was not an army of conquest but a raiding force, mounted on the small hardy horses the border called hobbins, carrying oatmeal and a griddle plate instead of a baggage train, burning its way across a seventy-mile front in County Durham and Northumberland. The English response was conventional and expensive: a great feudal host mustered at York, stiffened by 780 men-at-arms hired from Hainault under John of Hainault, and marched out on 1 July to catch and destroy the raiders. Among the Hainaulters was Jean le Bel, a canon of Liege who wrote down what he saw and thereby gave this campaign an eyewitness.
The chase was a catastrophe of logistics. The English marched north-west into the Pennines guided by burning villages, forded rivers in flood, lost their supply train, went hungry, and at one point spent a night in arms in the rain on a moor having convinced themselves the Scots were upon them. When they finally located the raiders in Weardale in late July the Scots were drawn up on the north bank of the Wear on a steep slope with the river in front of them, and there they stayed.
Edward's commanders sent heralds across to propose that the Scots withdraw to level ground and fight a proper battle, since the honour of chivalry required it. The reply, as le Bel records it, was that the king of England knew they were in his kingdom and had burned it, and that if this displeased him he was welcome to come across and do something about it. The English, having tried the crossing once and found it murderous, sat down opposite instead, and the two armies watched each other for days. On the night of 31 July the Scots quietly shifted upstream to a stronger position inside Stanhope Park, the bishop of Durham's enclosed hunting ground, and the English followed and camped facing them again.
At about midnight on 3 August, in bright moonlight, Douglas took his men-at-arms - somewhere between two and five hundred, by accounts that do not agree - across a ford downstream and rode straight into the English camp. The sentries were cut down before they could give a proper alarm. He went through the lines shouting "Douglas! Douglas! Die, my English masters", which in a camp already sleeping in its armour after a fortnight of false alarms produced exactly the confusion he wanted, and made directly for the largest tent.
The pavilion was the king's. Three of its ropes were cut and it came down, with the boy inside it by every account; his chaplain and several of his household were killed defending the entrance. The English recovered faster than Douglas can have hoped - the camp was awake, armed and far larger than his party - and he pulled out and rode back across the river with the whole business over in about an hour. The English never recorded their dead; the French account of the raid puts them at about three hundred, while the Battlefields Trust notes only that they were heavier than the Scottish losses, which were probably few.
The English drew the obvious lesson and tightened their watch, which is to say they settled down to starve out an enemy they could not attack. It did not work either. On the night of 6 August the Scots lit their fires as usual, left them burning, and moved out northwards through a stretch of bog the English scouts had written off as impassable, having laid brushwood hurdles over the worst of it. By the time the trick was discovered on the morning of the 7th they were hours away and moving fast; nobody followed.
The English army disbanded and went home. Its bills came in over the following months: something like 70,000 pounds for a campaign in which a shot was barely fired, with 41,000 of it owed to the Hainault contingent alone, and the devastated northern counties in no condition to be taxed - several were given relief instead. For a regency whose legitimacy rested on having replaced an incompetent king, the political damage of Weardale was worse than the money.
Negotiations opened in the autumn and moved fast because both sides wanted them to: Bruce was a dying man who needed his son's inheritance secured, and Mortimer needed the northern war closed before it closed his government. The terms agreed at Edinburgh on 17 March 1328 and ratified by the English parliament at Northampton on 1 May gave Scotland everything the war had been about - recognition of Robert the Bruce as king of an independent kingdom, renunciation of the English overlordship claimed since 1296, and the marriage of Bruce's son David to Edward III's sister Joan - in exchange for 20,000 pounds.
In England it was called the shameful peace, and Edward III repudiated it as soon as he had overthrown Mortimer and taken the government into his own hands in 1330. The war resumed within five years by proxy, when Edward Balliol and the disinherited English claimants invaded and destroyed a much larger Scottish army at the Battle of Dupplin Moor in 1332, opening the Second War of Scottish Independence; Edward himself took the field at the Battle of Halidon Hill the following year. The generation of Scottish commanders who had won the first war did not see it. Douglas died in Spain in 1330 carrying Bruce's heart on crusade, and Randolph in 1332.