The Battle of the Standard, sometimes called the Battle of Northallerton, took place on 22 August 1138 on Cowton Moor near Northallerton in Yorkshire, England. English forces under William of Aumale repelled a Scottish army led by King David I of Scotland.
King Stephen of England, fighting rebel barons in the south, had sent a small force (largely mercenaries), but the English army was mainly local militia and baronial retinues from Yorkshire and the north Midlands. Archbishop Thurstan of York had exerted himself greatly to raise the army, preaching that to withstand the Scots was to do God's work. The centre of the English position was therefore marked by a mast (mounted upon a cart) bearing a pyx carrying the consecrated host and from which were flown the consecrated banners of the minsters of York, Beverley and Ripon: hence the name of the battle. This cart-mounted standard was a very northerly example of a type of standard common in contemporary Italy, where it was known as a carroccio.Bradbury, p. 238
King David had entered England for two declared reasons:Lynch, Michael, Scotland: A New History, (revised edn: London, 1992 ), p. 83 To support his niece Matilda's claim to the English throne against that of King Stephen (married to another niece)Green, Judith A., "David I and Henry I", in the Scottish Historical Review. vol. 75 (1996) (p. 18) suggests David may have had his own ambitions for the English throne To enlarge his kingdom beyond his previous gains.Strictly speaking he had enlarged his holdings, not his kingdom: England had not ceded territory to Scotland, rather the King of England had granted the King of Scotland various lands within England, some of which abutted Scotland. Everybody knew this to be a polite fiction, though.
David's forces had already taken much of Northumberland apart from castles at WarkOtherwise known as Carham – 'Carrum' in Richard of Hexham's chronicle is a good phonetic transcription. There is also a Wark with a castle in Tynedale, with which it should not be confused; Wark was strategically important because it secured the furthest point upstream at which the Tweed was the border. and Bamburgh.
Advancing beyond the Tees towards York, early on 22 August the Scots found the English army drawn up on open fields north of Northallerton; they formed up in four 'lines' to attack it. The first attack, by unarmoured spearmen against armoured men (including dismounted knights) supported by telling fire from archers, failed. Within three hours, the Scots army disintegrated, apart from small bodies of knights and men-at-arms around David and his son Henry. At this point, Henry led a spirited attack with mounted knights; he and David then withdrew separately with their immediate companions in relatively good order. Heavy Scots losses are claimed, in battle and in flight.
The English did not pursue far; David fell back to Carlisle and reassembled an army. Within a month, a truce was negotiated which left the Scots free to continue the siege of Wark castle, which eventually fell. Despite losing the battle, David was subsequently given most of the territorial concessions he had been seeking (which the chronicles say he had been offered before he crossed the Tees). David held these throughout the Anarchy, but on the death of David, his successor Malcolm IV of Scotland was soon forced to surrender David's gains to Henry II of England.
Some chronicle accounts of the battle include an invented pre-battle speech on the glorious deeds of the Normans, occasionally quoted as good contemporary evidence of the high opinion the Normans held of themselves.
Background
David had gained the Scottish throne largely because of the support of his brother-in-law Henry I of England, and he had attempted to remodel Scotland to be more like Henry's England. He had carried out peaceful changes in the areas of Scotland over which he had effective control and had conducted military campaigns against semi-autonomous regional rulers to reassert his authority; in administration, in warfare, and in the settling of regained territory, he had drawn on the talent and resources of the Anglo-Norman lands. The death of Henry I in 1135, weakening England, made David more reliant on his native subjects, and allowed him to contemplate winning control over substantial areas of northern England.
Henry I had wished his inheritance to pass to his daughter Matilda, and in 1127 made his notables swear an oath to uphold the succession of Matilda (David was the first layman to do so). Many of the English and Norman magnates and barons were against Matilda because she was married to Geoffrey V, count of Anjou. On Henry's death, Stephen, younger brother of Theobald, count of Blois, seized the throne instead.M.T. Clancy, England and its Rulers, (Malden, MA, 1998), pp. 84–85; Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225, (Oxford, 2000), p. 10.
When Stephen was crowned on 22 December, David went to war.Oram, David: The King Who Made Scotland, pp. 121–123. After two months of campaigning in northern England, a peace treaty ceding Cumberlandi.e. Carlisle and the northern half of modern Cumbria; however in David's period the inhabitants of parts of the Scottish lowlands were known as Cumbrians. Similarly, Moravians are men from Moray, not Moravia,'the Scots' are inhabitants of only one area of modern Scotland, 'the English' are people who speak English. and 'the Normans' may never have set foot in Normandy. to David was agreed.Oram, David: The King Who Made Scotland, pp. 122–125. Additionally, David's son Henry was made Earl of Huntingdon. David declined to swear the required oath of loyalty to Stephen, since he had already sworn allegiance to Matilda.
In spring 1137, David again invaded England: a truce was quickly agreed. In November, the truce expired; David demanded to be made earl of the whole of the old earldom of Northumberland. Stephen refused and in January 1138 David invaded for a third time.Oram, David: The King Who Made Scotland, pp. 126–127.
Campaigning in 1138 before the battle
David invades Northumberland David first moved against English castles on the Tweed frontier. Norham Castle belonged to the Bishop of Durham and its garrison was under-strength; it quickly fell. Having failed to rapidly seize the castle at Wark on Tweed, David detached forces to besiege it and moved deeper into Northumberland, demanding contributions from settlements and religious establishments to be spared plunder and burning.
Scots slave-raiding and Anglo-Norman alarm The actions of the army that invaded England in early 1138 shocked the English chroniclers. has 2 pages (180–181) of collated outrage. The two principal sources Richard of Hexham and Ailred of Rievaulx's Relatio de Standardo were well-placed for the events they relate – see "Sources" Richard of Hexham records that:
Monastic chroniclers often deplore depredations made by foreign armies and sometimes even those of their own rulers(two contemporary examples are Orderic Vitalis on the Harrying of the North by William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the Anarchy ) but some Scots forces were going beyond normal Norman 'harrying' by systematically carrying off women and children as slaves.
In contemporary Britain, this was regarded as a useful source of revenue, like (and not significantly more reprehensible than) cattle-raiding.Davies. R. R., The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343, (Oxford, 2000) pp. 122–123. The whole of the chapter/lecture Sweet Civility and Barbarous Rudeness should really be read, to put the remark into wider context. Professor Davies was 'Welsh Welsh' and probably more sympathetic to the Celtic world-view than the Anglo-Norman chroniclers were.
The practicalities of this would support the chroniclers' tales of sexual abuse of the slaves and casual slaughter of unsalable encumbrances:
In February, King Stephen marched north with an army to deal with David. David successfully evaded him,Little of Scotland had been feudalised by David, and consequently he had few knights at his disposal; both in comparison to the King of England and even in comparison to the notables gathered in York. and Stephen returned south.
Scots raid into Craven and the Battle of Clitheroe In the summer, David's nephew William fitz Duncan marched into Yorkshire and harried Craven; on 10 June, he met and defeated an English force of knights and men-at-arms at the battle of Clitheroe.Oram, David: The King Who Made Scotland, pp. 132–133. He also destroyed the recently founded Calder Abbey in Copeland.in modern Cumbria, but in English territory; David's Cumberland went no further down the coast than the Derwent. The surviving monks resettled at Byland Abbey under the patronage of Roger de Mowbray after their parent house Furness Abbey refused to readmit them, Calder had to be refounded in 1142.Victoria County History: 'Houses of Cistercian monks: The abbey of Calder', A History of the County of Cumberland : Volume 2 (1905), pp. 174–178. Date accessed: 17 August 2008Byland flourished; the refounded Calder did not, and a dispute ensued as to whether Byland was a daughter house of either Furness or the refounded Calder; eventually the matter was referred to Ailred for his decision: Ailred was a leading light in his age and his regionBurton, Janet, The Monastic Order in Yorkshire, 1069–1215, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge, 1999) The choice of targets has no obvious strategic logic; it may be pertinent that William eventually inherited both the Honour of Skipton in Craven, and the Lordship of Copeland, previously held by his father-in-law William de Meschines and which should have passed to him on the death of William de Meschines' son Ranulph Meschin, the founder of Calder.(William also inherited the role of lay patron of Calder.)
Peace feelers fail; David enters Yorkshire By late July David had crossed the river Tyne and was in "St Cuthbert's land" (the lands of the Bishop of Durham). With him were contingents from most of the separate regions of his kingdom, amounting to more than 26,000 men (many sources say this is wrong, that it was more like 16,000). Eustace fitz John had declared for David and handed over to him Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. The garrison of Eustace's castle at Malton to the North East of York began to raid surrounding areas in support of David (or Matilda). The magnates of Yorkshirethe value of the major holdings in Yorkshire is given on p298 of Dalton, Paul et al., Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship: Yorkshire, 1066–1154, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2002), gathered in York to discuss the worsening crisis:Archbishop Thurstan of York (who, as will presently appear, greatly exerted himself in this emergency), William of Aumale, Walter de Gant, Robert de Brus, Roger de Mowbray, Walter Espec, Ilbert de Lacy, William de Percy, Richard de Courcy, William Fossard, Robert de Stuteville