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| Battle of Faughart Battle ofDundalk[1] | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of theBruce campaign in Ireland | |||||||
 Edward Bruce's grave stone | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
| Kingdom of Scotland andGaelic allies | Lordship of Ireland andGaelic allies | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
| Edward Bruce † | John de Bermingham Edmund Butler | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| 2,000 and thousands of dispersed reinforcements | c. 20,000 | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| 30 knights and more than 80 men-at-arms killed[2] | Light | ||||||
TheBattle of Faughart (or Battle of Dundalk[3]) was fought on 14 October 1318 between anAnglo-Irish force led byJohn de Bermingham (later created 1stEarl of Louth) andEdmund Butler,Earl of Carrick, and a Scottish and Irish army commanded byPrince Edward Bruce,Earl of Carrick, brother ofKing Robert I of Scots ('Robert the Bruce'). It was a battle of theFirst War of Scottish Independence and more precisely theIrish Bruce Wars. The defeat and death of Bruce at the battle ended the attempt to revive theHigh Kingship of Ireland. It also ended, for the time being, King Robert's attempt to open up a second front against the English in theWars of Scottish Independence.
Although King Robert's victory over KingEdward II of England at theBattle of Bannockburn in 1314 had effectively secured the independence of theKingdom of Scotland, it did not bring the Scots' war with England any closer to an end. Even repeated Scots raids into the northern counties of England had little effect on an English king seemingly blind to political and military realities. Something more decisive was needed to end the stalemate. It came in 1315 with an invitation fromIreland.
Since the time ofHenry II (r. 1154–1189), the Kings ofEngland had also claimed to be the Lords of Ireland. English settlers had taken root in Ireland, chiefly along the eastern seaboard, north and south ofDublin. But Gaelic-Irish kings and lords still enjoyed a large measure of autonomy, especially in the north and west, and English control was often of a fluctuating nature. In continuing the war with Scotland, Edward II had made heavy demands on theIrish, both for men and materials, pushing the country close to the point of financial ruin.
King Robert, who long maintained political and personal contacts with the aristocrats ofUlster, decided that Irish discontent could be usefully employed against his enemy. He sent envoys to the native Irish kings and clergy with letters invoking the common ancestry of the two nations, and offering to help them recover their liberty. Domnall Ó Neill, king ofTír Eoghain, responded, asking for aid against the English and offering the kingship of Ireland to King Robert's brother,Prince Edward Bruce, who wasEarl of Carrick in thePeerage of Scotland. The Bruce brothers could trace ancestral links to prominent rulers in Ireland[4][5]and connected their line to the Ó Néill clan[citation needed] through their own maternal ancestorAoife MacMurrough (c. 1153 –c. 1188).[6][a]In May 1315 Edward Bruce landed with an expeditionary force atLarne[7]nearCarrickfergus Castle, ready to conjure up the spirit of "Gaelic internationalism".[citation needed]
Bruce was joined by several local chieftains and gained some early successes against the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. He won his first engagement nearJonesborough in the Moyry Pass and sacked nearbyDundalk on 29 June. Bruce was able to exploit disputes between his two leading opponents—Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, andEdmund Butler,Earl of Carrick in thePeerage of Ireland and Justiciar of Ireland, and defeat them piecemeal. De Burgh, King Robert's father-in-law, was routed at theBattle of Connor inCounty Antrim on 10 September, and Butler at the Battle of Skerries inKildare on 1 February 1316. Edward was then secure enough to proceed toDundalk, where he was crownedHigh King on the hill of Maledon on 2 May 1316.
By the spring of 1316, it looked as if the Irish venture was to be a strategic success. It came, however, at the worst possible time. In Ireland, as elsewhere across much of Europe, the weather was so bad that the whole period was later likened to a mini ice-age. Historians refer to the "Great Famine of 1315–1317". Crops failed and people began to starve. Depending on local sources of supply, Bruce's campaigns began to resemble nothing more than large-scaleplundering raids, carried out at the expense of an already desperate peasantry. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the supposed kinship of the Celts failed to materialise, and for most Irish the Scots were little better, if not worse, than the English settlers with whom they were familiar. AConnacht tract of this time refers to "Scottish foreigners less noble than our own foreigners". In the end, rather than acting as a true High King, Bruce could wield power in only parts of the north, and he was held there by problems of provisioning and supply. The opportunity to attempt an extension had to wait until 1318, when the weather, and the harvest, improved.
Unfortunately, the sources provide little in the way of detail and background for the Battle of Faughart. According toJohn Barbour, the Scottish chronicler, Edward Bruce was the architect of his own defeat, deciding to engage a larger enemy force (20,000 strong in his account) without waiting for reinforcements from Scotland, a view which finds some support in theAnnals of Clonmacnoise, where it is recorded that "anxious to obtain the victory for himself, he did not wait for his [Sir John Stewart's] brother." He took up position on the rising ground at Faughart, not far from Dundalk, on 14 October. When his Irish allies objected to facing a stronger enemy force in battle Bruce responded by placing them in the rear, close to the top of the hill, leaving some 2000 Scots troops to face the enemy onslaught.
In contrast to Barbour, theLanercost Chronicle, the chief English source, says that Bruce approached Dundalk "with a great army of Scots which had already arrived in Ireland." It would seem that the three English commanders—John de Bermingham,Edmund, Lord Carrick, andRoland Jorz,Archbishop of Armagh—were themselves attacked, though in a somewhat impetuous and haphazard fashion.Lanercost gives by far the clearest description of the action that followed:
The Scots were in three columns at such a distance from each other that the first was done with before the second came up, and then the second before the third, with which Edward was marching could render any aid. Thus the third column was routed just as the two preceding ones had been. Edward fell at the same time and was beheaded after death; his body being divided into four quarters, which were sent to the four chief quarters of Ireland
We have no precise figures for the number slain, though it is known that thirty Scottish knights and more than eightymen-at-arms died.[2] The dead included a Mac Ruaidhrí ("King of the Hebrides") and a Mac Domhnaill ("King of Argyll").[b] This would suggest that most, if not all, of the Scottish force was drawn from theGaels of theWestern Isles and from Bruce's own earldom ofCarrick inAyrshire.[citation needed] Defeat was followed by the almost complete collapse of the Scottish position in Ulster: Carrickfergus castle was recaptured on 2 December. John de Bermingham received most of the credit for the victory, and was createdEarl of Louth by a gratefulKing of England. It was not to be the end of Scottish involvement in Ireland; but there were to be no more high kings.
While in some ways a failure, the Scottish adventure in Ireland did serve the purpose of Scotland's King Robert the Bruce, as never again were the English able to use a base in Ireland to mount an attack on the western seaboard of Scotland.[8]
The Bruces could assert an illustrious ancestry that included direct links to Brian Boru, Strongbow, Dermot MacMurrough and the Hiberno-Norse king Olaf Cuaran. What is more, they were descended from the Lords of Galloway, a branch of the kings of Man. Their Norman pedigree might have been more prominent than their Gaelic, but in the hurdy-gurdy politics of fourteenth-century Ireland such distinctions would have counted for little. In his remonstrance to the Pope, Domnall O'Neill referred to Edward Bruce as having 'sprung from our noblest ancestors'.
The Bruce descent from the old line of Irish kings through the family of Scottish kings into which their ancestors had married, gave them something of a claim to the Irish throne and this was recognized by the chiefs who called upon [Edward Bruce].
[...] Robert the Bruce, whose ancestor, Aoife MacMurrough, was the daughter of Dermot, King of Leinster.
King Robert (Bruce) had sent insinuating propagandists into [Ulster] even before his brother Edward had landed a Scots army at Larne in May 1315 [...].