Читать книгу Robert The Bruce: King Of Scots - Ronald McNair Scott - Страница 13

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In the autumn of 1296 Edward returned to England to deal with the problems of the French war, disdainfully remarking as he crossed the border that it was ‘a good job to be shot of shit’ (bon besoigne fait qy de merde se deliver).1

His satisfaction was premature. The fall of Berwick, the collapse at Dunbar, the abject figure of John Balliol, the unopposed progress through the burghs of his new conquest had given him and his lieutenants a false impression of the people they now proposed to govern. The Earl of Surrey was so unconcerned about his duties as Viceroy of Scotland that he retired to his Yorkshire estates leaving the direction of affairs to Hugh de Cressingham. This portly ecclesiastic, sensual and money-loving, concentrated his energies on extracting from the subject Scots, by taxes and sequestration, funds which his master so urgently required for the war against France. He was ably abetted by William Ormesby, the Chief Justice, who with a dog-like fidelity hunted out all who had not signed instruments of fealty, proclaimed them outlaws and seized their properties and goods.2

But Scotland had been stunned and not subdued. A growing band of outraged and dispossessed men took refuge in the forests and mountains of their native land. The pent-up resentment of a proud and spirited race, smouldering like a peat fire below the surface, burst into flame and by May 1297 the whole of Scotland, outside Lothian, was in revolt led by two outstanding men: Andrew Moray and William Wallace.

Andrew Moray had been captured at Dunbar together with his father, Sir Andrew Moray, and his uncle. Escaping from his prison in Chester,3 he made his way to the hereditary lands of his family in the Mounth, the great mountainous mass which divides the Spey river from the Tay. There he raised the standard of rebellion at his father’s castle at Avoch and to him rallied not only the warlike men of Moray, but also the burghers of Inverness under Alexander Pilche. Together they so harried and ambuscaded the English that anguished cries for help were sent to King Edward.4

Down in the Selkirk forest William Wallace, son of a knightly family from the parish of Paisley, was living an outlaw life since neither he nor his eldest brother, Sir Malcolm, had bowed their heads at Berwick. A giant of a man with a mane of brown hair and piercing eyes, Wallace had become a magnet for the discontented. He had recently married a young woman who lived in Lanark. Visiting her by stealth, as a marked man, he clashed with an English patrol. Fighting his way clear, he retreated to her house and as his pursuers hammered on the front door he escaped by the back to the rocky Cartland Crags. Enraged by the failure to capture him, Sir William Heselrig, Sheriff of Lanark, ordered the house to be burned and all within it, wife and servants, to be put to the sword. From that day Wallace vowed an undying vengeance against the English.

Gathering together a band of desperate men, he fell by night on the sheriff and his armed guard, hewed the sheriff into small pieces with his own sword and burned the buildings and those within them.5

For the first time one of the high officials of the hated conquerors had been slain and a ripple of jubilation spread through the oppressed.

Men flocked to Wallace’s banner and with a growing force he turned eastward to where the chief justice was holdings his courts at Scone. On the way there he was joined by that stormy petrel, Sir William Douglas, late commander of the castle at Berwick, with a body of mounted men. Leaving the foot soldiers to follow, Wallace and Sir William, with all the horsemen of the party, galloped ahead in the hope of surprising the chief justice at his sessions. But in the nick of time he was warned of their approach and fled in the clothes he stood up in, relinquishing to his attackers a rich haul of booty.6

The gesture of Sir William was typical of the man. Cruasader, warrior, egoist, he had gone his own way throughout his life with very little regard for anyone else. He had flouted the guardians of the interregnum and insulted the authority of King Edward by abducting and forcibly marrying Eleanor de Ferrers, an English widow, while she was staying with relatives in Scotland.7

Nevertheless, in that heraldic age, the adherence of this great nobleman immediately conferred on Wallace’s band of outlaws the cachet of respectability. Sir William Douglas’s kinship to the family of Moray and the fact that his first wife was the sister of James Stewart, Wallace’s feudal lord, linked the two areas of insurrection. Behind his move it is reasonable to discern the fine hand of Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow.

Nobody was more opposed to the domination of England than the Scottish Church, and this opposition had been intensified since the parliament of Berwick by King Edward’s repeated presentations of English priests to Scottish benefices. Nobody had a better network of communication to direct and coordinate subversive activities.

Both these aspects were personified in the frail body of the bishop. He had pledged his fealty to King Edward at Berwick, but for him the Church came first and he regarded his recurrent pledges as no more than pawns in the struggle, given under duress, discarded without compunction whenever the defence of his country required it. For he remembered only too well the blatant manner in which the English King had repudiated his most solemn promises. As news of the spreading revolt reached him on the ecclesiastical grapevine, he turned his attention to his fellow guardian in the days of the interregnum, James Stewart.

This cautious man with his vast possessions in Bute, Kyle Stewart and Renfrew, Teviotdale, Lauderdale and Lothian, his hereditary position as royal steward, his freedom from any distracting landhold-ings in England, his overlordship of William Wallace, had for weeks been hovering on the edge of a decision. The example of his neighbour and relative, Sir William Douglas, the return of Wallace to the west where he chased the cocksure Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, from the episcopal palace in Glasgow and trapped and burned an English garrison in Ayr, together with the urgings of Bishop Wishart, proved decisive. Early in June 1297, at the same time as Macduff of Fife, a son of an Earl of Fife, and his two sons raised their standard of revolt in the east, he summoned his knights to take the field against the English and join him at the town of Irvine in the west.8

When news of Sir William Douglas’s defection reached King Edward, he was deeply involved in English problems. Knowing of old the contrariness of this opinionated knight, he did not take the matter seriously enough to alert the English forces but sent orders to the Governor of Carlisle, the elder Bruce, to instruct his son to muster the men of Annandale and with them proceed to the Douglas lands and seize the Douglas castle.

So Robert Bruce, the young Earl of Carrick, rode from Carlisle to Annan and Lochmaben to summon his father’s vassals, and when he had gathered a sufficient force together drew up to the Douglas stronghold. During his journey there he had much on which to ponder. His father had always been a follower of King Edward, more at home with the civilities of the English court and the blander climate of his English estates than with the roughter life of the north. But Robert Bruce was Scottish born and Scottish bred. With his brothers and sisters he had roamed the Carrick lands of his Celtic mother or ridden beside his tough old grandfather through the hills and valleys of Annandale. He had played his part indeed on the English side and in return had been granted a postponement of his debt repayments to the English exchequer:9 but that was when he was ranged against the Comyns for whom John Balliol had confiscated the Bruce estates in Scotland. Now the Comyns and John Balliol were captives and the leaders who had taken the field against the English in Ayrshire were the very men who had supported his grandfather’s claim to the Scottish throne.

That claim Bruce had never forgotten. Brought up in the knowledge that in his veins ran the royal blood of the House of Canmore, convinced of the injustice of the court decision which had denied his family their regal inheritance, his abiding ambition was to retrieve the crown his grandfather had struggled for and lost. That purpose dominated his actions. Hitherto it had been served by Edward I’s promise to Bruce’s father that the Scottish throne would be his when Balliol was deposed. But Edward had reneged. The Scottish throne had been incorporated in that of England. The single devil of Balliol had been swept away only to be replaced by the sevenfold devil of the Plan-taganet king. By assuming the sovereignty of Scotland, Edward I had become the chief obstacle to Bruce’s objective and the catalyst to fuse the two elements in Bruce’s nature, his love of his native land and his determination to rule it.

So, as he rode up the long valley of Annandale, this young man of twenty-two, already admired by men for his skill at arms and by women for his courtesy, took the crucial decision of his life.

When he reached the castle, which was held by Sir William’s wife, he called his followers around him. ‘No man,’ he said, ‘holds his flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception. I must join my own people and the nation in which I was born. Choose then whether you go with me or return to your homes.’10

Many of the knights who accompanied him were vassals of his father, who was still pledged to King Edward, and decided that they must abide by their overlord’s allegiance and so departed. But with those who were left and with the men of Douglas and Lady Douglas, who had been advised of his decision, he moved northeastward through his domain of Carrick, gathering recruits as he went, and joined the steward and the bishop at Irvine.

Meanwhile the humiliated Antony Bek had alerted King Edward to the strength of the insurrection. On 4 June the King empowered Henry Percy and Robert Clifford, the two foremost barons in the border shires, to raise levies from Lancaster, Westmorland and Cumberland ‘to arrest, imprison and try all disturbers of the peace in Scotland’, and instructed all sheriffs and castle governors to give them every aid.11

With commendable speed the two commanders collected a powerful body of armed knights and, moving fast along the Annandale and Nithsdale route, reached towards the end of June the English-held castle of Ayr, a few miles south of Irvine where the Scottish forces were encamped.

No battle ensued. Almost as soon as Percy and Clifford had dismounted, envoys arrived under a flag of truce to ask if they had authority to treat with the Scottish leaders.

Dissension had broken out in the Irvine camp between those who supported Balliol and those who supported Bruce. Andrew Moray and William Wallace were fighting in the name of John Balliol whom they still regarded as king, and may well have been sceptical of young Bruce’s sudden conversion to the Scottish cause. Bishop Wishart, James Stewart, his brother John and Alexander Lindsay considered that, by his abdication, John Balliol had renounced his rights and that Robert Bruce’s father was the natural successor to the Scottish Crown and the true focus for the upsurge for independence. Sir William Douglas agreed with nobody.

Moray and Wallace preferred to fight on their own terms and in their own centres of resistance and departed forthwith. Without their support the forces of Stewart and Bruce were in no position to make headway against the English invasion. Their men were mainly foot soldiers: those of the English were armed knights. The contest would be glaringly unequal and a defeat damaging to the growing confidence of the Scottish people.

News had reached Scotland of a clash between King Edward, his Church and his barons. The Archbishop of Canterbury had instructed his clergy to pay no taxes on pain of excommunication, and the two great magnates in England, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the Earl Marshall, and Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, the Constable, had refused to serve overseas, retiring to their fiefs and calling up their vassals. Many other of the barons had followed their example. There was the possibility of civil war in England. The forces of Percy and Clifford were the only English armed troops in the field. It was a time to keep them engaged in negotiations so that Moray and Wallace could pursue their activities undisturbed by attack. Such must have been the reasoning which led the subtle bishop and canny steward to ask for parley.

Percy and Clifford, in their turn, were aware of the uncertain situation in England and had no desire unnecessarily to hazard forces, reluctantly conscripted, which they might desire at home. So talks began.

After days of discussion the English made certain promises, and on 9 July 1297 the Scottish leaders agreed to surrender to King Edward’s pleasure and produce hostages as pledges of good faith.12 Bruce, in particular, was required to hand over his infant daughter, Marjorie, but it is clear that he was unwilling to do this; the bishop, the steward and Sir Alexander Lindsay took it upon themselves to act as sureties on his behalf.13

In the upshot, Sir William Douglas failed to produce his hostages on the appointed day and was imprisoned in Berwick castle, where, wrote Henry Percy, he was Very savage and very abusive‘.14 A year later he died, leaving behind a son of three years, James Douglas, who was to become the most famous and devoted of all the followers of Robert Bruce, the future king.

Sir Alexander Lindsay made his own peace. The bishop was held prisoner. Robert Bruce and James Stewart neither surrendered nor produced hostages, and remained at large deprived of their lands. Bruce’s father was relieved of his post as Governor of Carlisle and retired to his English estates, where he remained until his death in 1304.

* * *

After the capitulation of the nobles at Irvine, the leadership of resistance remained entirely in the hands of Moray and Wallace and their efforts were attended with such success that on 10 July Hugh de Cressingham wrote to the deputy treasurer in London that ‘not one of the Sheriffs, bailiffs or the officials of the Lord King … can at this time raise a penny of the revenues of their bailiwicks on account of the multitude of different perils which daily and continually threaten them’,15 and a fortnight later, in still more urgent tones, to the King:

By far the greater part of your counties in the Scottish Kingdom are still not provided with keepers because they have been killed, besieged or imprisoned or have abandoned their bailiwicks and dare not go back. And in some shires the Scots have appointed and established bailiffs and officials. Thus no shire is properly kept save for Berwickshire and Roxburghshire and they only recently.16

With many of his barons hostile, King Edward was desperately trying to raise an army to cross to Flanders in support of the Count of that country, with whom he had formed an alliance against France.17 When he received Cressingham’s request he had no English to spare for Scotland. He therefore released a number of the Scottish nobles, among them the Earl of Buchan and Alexander Comyn, whom he had captured at Dunbar on condition that they returned to their fiefs to quell the disturbances and then followed him overseas with their feudal levies.18

But when the noblemen arrived in Scotland they found the disturbances very much more serious than they had expected. They sent various messages to King Edward expressing their loyalty and hopes of success, but in practice they remained inactive, waiting to see how matters would evolve and taking no steps to prevent their retainers drifting away to join the insurgents. Hugh de Cressingham had no doubt that they were playing a double game and warned the King to give no credence to their protestations. As an English chronicler shrewdly remarks, ‘even when the Lords were present with the King in body, at heart they were on the opposite side.’19

By early August Moray had broken out of the Mounth and seized all the English-held castles in the north, including Inverness, Elgin and Banff.20 Sir Henry Lathom, Sheriff of Aberdeenshire, had joined in the revolt and handed over the castle at Aberdeen.21 Wallace, having built up his forces in the forest of Selkirk, moved northeast after the capitulation of Irvine, cleared Perthshire and Fife and, after making contact with Moray on the Tay, settled down to besiege the castle of Dundee. The whole area north of the Firth of Forth, with few exceptions, was in Scottish hands.

At last the Earl of Surrey, whom King Edward had appointed his viceroy in Scotland, bestirred himself. He was now an elderly man whose long military experience had taught him that foot soldiers in their hundreds could be scattered like chaff by a handful of armed knights. He had little doubt that with the Scottish lords, the core of their chivalry, sitting on the sidelines or in prison or in the retinue of his master, he would brush aside the common folk of Moray and Wallace like a fly from his face.

Marshalling at Berwick a formidable host of heavy cavalry and footmen, he marched towards Stirling where the crossing of the Forth was the key to the north.

On hearing news of his approach, Moray and Wallace joined forces and moved south to defend this vital position. One cannot admire enough the courage and determination of these two young men who were going to pit their inferior forces, woefully lacking in mounted men, against the armed might of a rich and powerful kingdom. The posture they took up bore all the marks of brilliant generalship. Overlooking a loop of the Forth river which was crossed by a single bridge was an abrupt rock, the Abbey Crag, from which a neck of ground led back to the nearby Ochil Hills, giving a safe retreat in the event of failure. Below the northern exit of the bridge and the causeway that prolonged it, was an area of boggy ground almost entirely encircled by the Forth. On this crag the Scottish commanders deployed their men.

The English forces spent the nights of 9 and 10 September on the south side of the river. They were supremely self-confident. Hugh de Cressingham had already advised Percy and Clifford that there was no need for their additional support.

James Stewart and the Earl of Lennox, who had been hovering on the outskirts with a troop of cavalry, uncertain whether to join Moray and Wallace, rated equally low the chances of the Scottish forces. To avoid a butchery of their countrymen they approached the Earl of Surrey with the suggestion that they should inaugurate a parley. The earl agreed, but Stewart and Lennox returned from the Scottish leaders with a blank refusal. Two Dominican friars were then dispatched to Moray and Wallace with offers of generous treatment if they would yield. ‘Tell your commander,’ was their reply, ‘that we are not here to make peace but to do battle to defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom. Let them come and we shall prove this in their very beards.’22

Sir Richard Lundin, a Scottish knight, who had gone over to the English from Irvine in disgust at the dissension in the Scottish camp, asked the Earl of Surrey to send him up river with a detachment to a ford where he could cross with sixty men abreast and take the Scotsmen in the rear, but his suggestion was ignored and the earl retired to bed.23

At dawn on 11 September a party of English infantry were sent over the narrow bridge but were recalled because the earl had overslept. Hugh de Cressingham, fuming with impatience, urged that no more time should be wasted and the earl gave him the order to cross. Riding arrogantly two by two, the cavalry were led by him over the bridge. From early in the morning until eleven o’clock the column moved forward until Moray and Wallace decided that the time had come to split the English army. The main force of the Scots fell upon the leading ranks on the causeway while a picked body of men seized the bridgehead and began to cut away its timbers. Jostled from the causeway, the heavy horses of the armed knights plunged and wallowed in the deep mire on either side, unable to manoeuvre or charge, tumbling their riders to the ground. Behind them their comrades on the south side were powerless to help them for the bridge was destroyed.24

A bloody massacre took place. Hugh de Cressingham met his fate at the hands of the Scottish spearmen. His body was flayed and his skin in small pieces was sent throughout the country as tokens of liberation from the accursed regime of which he was the symbol.25 Only Sir Marmaduke Tweng managed to hew his way through his opponents and take refuge in the castle of Stirling.26

The Earl of Surrey had not crossed the bridge. Aghast at the slaughter beyond it, he lost his nerve and galloped in such haste to the border that his horse had nothing to eat between Stirling and Berwick and foundered on arrival.

The rank and file and the baggage trains of the English were less fortunate than their commander. As they retreated down the road to Falkirk, James Stewart and the Earl of Lennox, who were lurking in the woods on either side until the issue had been decided, poured out with their men to kill the fleeing groups and seize the laden wagons of booty.27

The repercussions of the English defeat were immense. For the first time an army of professional knights had been overcome by the common folk. The dissenting barons in England were so shocked that they patched up an agreement with the regency who were ruling in the absence of the King abroad, and all talk of civil war was suspended.

In northeast Scotland, the Earl of Strathearn, the Earl of Buchan and the Comyns and other noblemen in that area, who had been making face-saving gestures to suppress the patriots, threw off their allegiance to the English Crown. In the southwest, Robert Bruce, who had gone to ground after the capitulation of Irvine, emerged to rouse the men of Carrick and Galloway to such effect that Sir Robert Clifford made two punitive expeditions, before and after Christmas 1297, from Carlisle to Annandale to try to check his activities.28 Outside the strongest castles all English resistance ceased. Moray and Wallace were masters of the realm.

But Moray had been severely wounded at Stirling Bridge. He survived long enough to send a letter in his name and that of Wallace on 11 October 1297, to the mayors of the communes of Lübeck and Hamburg, that ‘the Kingdom of Scotland had, by God’s grace, recovered by battle from the power of the English and that, in consequence, the ports of Scotland were once more open to their merchants’,29 but soon afterwards he succumbed to his wounds.30

A famous folk hero, William Wallace, was now to take upon his shoulders the sole government of the realm. Behind him was the Church, manning the chancellery, the civil service of that time, which had been displaced by King Edward but now returned to its administrative duties. ‘The common folk of the land followed him as their leader and ruler’,31 but the most striking tribute to his personality and pre-eminence was the drawing together of the feuding magnates under his leadership in a common front against the English.

In March 1298 in the forest of Selkirk, which Wallace had made the base of his armed forces, the earls, barons and knights, the bishops, abbots and friars who were then in Scotland met to resolve the future of the realm. In the presence of them all, William Wallace was dubbed knight by Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick,* and by the general voice of those assembled proclaimed guardian of the kingdom.32 From that date edicts were issued in the name of ‘William Wallace, Knight, Guardian of the Kingdom of Scotland and Commander of its armies in the name of the famous prince, Lord John, by God’s grace, illustrious King of Scotland, by consent of the Community of that realm.’

Between the battle of Stirling and the Forest Parliament, Wallace had led his army south. There was famine in the lowlands. To gain corn and cattle he ravaged the northern counties of England from late October 1297 into the New Year until snowstorms and severe frost forced him back to Scotland laden with immense spoil. ‘During that time,’ writes the English chronicler Guisborough, ‘the praise of God ceased in all the monasteries and churches of the whole province from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Carlisle: for all the monks, canons regular and other priests, the servants of the Lord had fled, with one may say, the whole of the common folk from the face of the Scots.’33

During the absence of Wallace on this campaign, Bishop Fraser of St Andrews, who had remained in France since the parliament at Berwick in 1296, disenchanted by and hostile to King Edward, passed away. Acting on Wallace’s instructions, the St Andrews chapter elected in his place the Chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral, William Lamberton, friend and compatriot of Bishop Wishart. He was to become one of the key figures in opposition to English rule.34

Meanwhile King Edward had been having little success in Flanders to which he had sailed on 22 August 1297. Matters had come to a stalemate and on 9 October a short Armistice was signed between France and England which was then prolonged to 6 January 1299. King Edward had now the opportunity to turn his attention to Scottish affairs.

He landed in England on 14 March 1298 and by 25 May had transferred the headquarters of government to York, where it remained for the next six years. Scotland was to become the obsession of his remaining life and even beyond the grave, for it is said he gave instructions that on his tomb should be inscribed the vengeful words, ‘The hammer of the Scots’.

Such a hammer he now began to fashion. Writs were sent to his tenants in chief to join him with their vassals, horses and arms. Other armed knights were recruited at his own expense. A corps of Gascon lords, knights and crossbowmen were summoned from the duchy. Orders were given for the paid conscription of numerous Welshmen, archers and footmen.35 A fleet of ships was commissioned to ensure supplies. Reconciliation was arranged with the recalcitrant Earls of Hereford and Norfolk, respectively Constable and Earl Marshal of the Kingdom, and their powerful forces were put at his disposal.

A wave of patriotic fervour supported his preparations. From ecclesiastical pens issued a stream of propaganda. Wallace was depicted as an ogre of unspeakable depravity who skinned his prisoners alive, burned babies and forced the nuns of the Holy Church to dance naked before him.36 So when King Edward mustered his troops at Roxburgh on 25 June some 2500 heavy cavalry and 12,000 foot had answered his summons.

This vast army with its attendant baggage train set off along the Lauderdale route to Edinburgh. The clank of armed knights, the tramp of footmen, the creak of wagon wheels sounded in a silent land from which man and beast had vanished. There was neither fodder nor food nor information to be found. The inhabitants had fled to the forests driving their cattle and sheep before them, leaving behind a scorched and wasted land. By 15 July the English army had reached Kirkliston beyond Edinburgh. Here King Edward learnt that Dirleton and two other castles in East Lothian were held by the Scots and sent Antony Bek to capture them while he remained encamped.37

The whereabouts of Wallace and his men was still unknown. The food ships due at Leith had been delayed by contrary winds and the army was faced with starvation. The few ships that had struggled through happened to carry only barrels of wine.38 When this was issued to raise the spirits of the troops, the effect on the empty stomachs of the Welshmen, who always got the worst of the meagre rations, was disastrous. They got very drunk, brawled with the English soldiers, killed some and were killed in turn and then grew mutinous and threatened to decamp to the enemy.39

The whole expedition was in danger of collapse. Indeed, King Edward had already decided to return to Edinburgh when the ride of fortune, due no doubt to the intervention of Saint John of Beverley to whose shrine the King had made a pilgrimage on his way north, turned miraculously in his favour. Antony Bek returned with the news that Dirleton had surrendered and that the other two castles had been abandoned by their defenders; the food ships had made harbour at Leith and a message was received from the Earl of Dunbar that the Scots were only thirteen miles away in Callendar Wood beside Falkirk.

A wave of elation swept through the army. All discord ceased. The quarry had been viewed. The hunt was on. Immediately breaking camp, King Edward led his troops along the road to Falkirk and bivouacked just east of Linlithgow, each man sleeping on the ground with his horse beside him, the King among his men, the horses ‘tasting nothing but cold iron, champing their bits’.41

In the dead of night a cry of alarm aroused the sleeping warriors. The King had been trampled upon by his charger and was injured. But the King, despite two broken ribs, had himself hoisted into his high-back saddle and set his knights in motion through Linlithgow in the early light of morning. They had not gone far when the rising sun glinted on lances lining the top of a nearby hill, but as they pressed towards them the spearmen melted away. It was not until they reached the bank of the West-Quarter burn, where a halt was called for the King and Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, to hear Mass, that they saw in full daylight Wallace deploying his troops on the slope of Slamman Moor.42

Wallace’s main anxiety was the overwhelming superiority of the English cavalry, and he made his dispositions with this in mind. Immediately to his front was a boggy marsh, to his right scattered woodland and rocks and on his left the deepening valley of the burn. On the hard ground behind the marsh he drew up his men in four schiltrons (shield rings): packed circles of spearmen drawn up with their long spears slanting outward with butt on earth and the front rank kneeling. Round each schiltron wooden stakes were driven into the ground and roped together. Between the schiltrons he lined the Ettrick archers, equipped with their short bows, under the command of John Stewart, brother of James Stewart. On the crest of the hill behind he placed his slender force of cavalry, contributed by several earls: too few to be effective in attack but of decisive value in pursuit of a demoralized foe.43

Wallace’s logical action would have been to retreat before the English army, wasting the land as he went, and let hunger defeat the enemy, but there is reason to believe that he was overruled by his impatient troops and hence his famous valediction, ‘I have brought you to the ring: hop if you can’.44

On the English side King Edward divided his cavalry in four brigades of some six hundred knights each: the first under the Earls of Hereford, Norfolk and Lincoln, the second under Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, the third under his own command and the fourth in reserve under the Earls of Arundel, Gloucester, Oxford and Pembroke. He proposed, before joining battle, that there should be a pause during which men and horses, none of whom had eaten for twenty-four hours, should be fed. But his commanders were chafing for action and he yielded to their importunity.45

The first brigade charged immediately to their front but, checked by the bog, swung leftwards in a half circle. The second brigade swung likewise in a half circle to the right and the two horns converged behind the schiltrons and scattered the Scottish cavalry who fled into the woods behind. Then turning inwards they overwhelmed the Scottish archers whose arrows were not powerful enough to penetrate their armour and slew their commander, John Stewart.

The schiltrons were left exposed. Again and again they were charged by the mounted knights but their ranks remained unbroken. It was then that King Edward ordered up the Welsh longbowmen and the crossbowmen and slingmen of Gascony. A deadly hail of arrows, bolts and stones was poured into the schiltrons until the gaps in their ranks became too wide to be filled and the mail-clad knights broke into the weakened rings. Once the human fortress was breached hundreds upon hundreds of the Scottish foot were slain. Macduff and his two sons who had faithfully supported Wallace since they took arms against the English in 1297 were left dead upon the field. Wallace escaped into the surrounding woods with a handful of followers.46

The battle of Falkirk was notable for two innovations that were profoundly to affect military tactics until the introduction of gunpowder. Wallace’s hedgehog of spears shattered for ever the accepted principle that the foot man was always at the mercy of the mounted knight. This was again triumphantly disproved at Courtrai four years later when the pikemen of Flanders, with no longbow against them, broke the chivalry of France. King Edward’s brilliant riposte by switching from hand to hand fighting to the long-range missile marked the beginning of modern war and, when properly exploited, gave to England its great victories at Crécy and Agincourt in succeeding reigns.

King Edward had won a battle and destroyed the authority of William Wallace, but otherwise his expedition was profitless. Like Napoleon in Russia some five hundred years later, he had come unprepared for a situation in which people of the invaded land, to their own material loss, destroyed everything which could be of service to him. He was desperately short of supplies and unable to carry his pursuit further north.

After resting a fortnight in deserted Stirling while his ribs knit together, meanwhile sending a raiding party to set fire to Perth and St Andrews,47 which had been abandoned by the Scots as they retired beyond the Tay, he turned back towards his base at Carlisle with the intention of rounding up Robert Bruce and his men on the way. But Bruce, who had been making sporadic raids in the southwest from his headquarters in Ayr, was warned of his approach and slipped away into the wilds of Carrick, after burning the town and destroying its castle.48 When King Edward arrived he found an empty shell.

He proposed immediate pursuit. But his army was already short of commons, his tenants-in-chief who had done unpaid service demanded leave to depart, and he was left with no choice but to fall back on Carlisle, which he reached on 8 September, after seizing Lochmaben Castle,49 the ancestral home of the Bruces, which lay across his route.

From Carlisle, as his followers dispersed for the winter, he sent out fresh summonses to reassemble an army at that town on 6 June 1299 to renew the struggle.