Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
virtual state of siege.
King Edward, still busy with preparations for his expedition to France, decreed that the rest of Scotland now had to be brought to heel; Wallace and his rebels had to be crushed and extirpated. He instructed his two lieutenants in Scotland, the veteran Earl of Surrey (the victor at Dunbar the previous year) and the Treasurer of Scotland, Hugh Cressingham, to raise an army from the north of England; they were to march north to give support to the key fortress in Scotland – Stirling – and to deal with Wallace, who was by now besieging another major English-held castle, at Dundee. With that, Edward set sail for France.
When news reached Wallace that a huge new English army was on the move north he broke off the siege of Dundee Castle and sent word to Andrew Murray in Inverness to come and join him. The rebel forces met up at Perth and together the two young generals led their troops to Stirling, there to await the inevitable confrontation with the approaching English army.
The Battle of Stirling Bridge (11 September 1297)
High above the crest of the Abbey Craig north of Stirling, 226 steps up the circular stone staircase of the National Wallace Monument, the look-out platform offers a breathtaking panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. To the south-west, like a galleon breasting the sea, Stirling Castle stands proud on its dolerite eminence; in between lies the flat carseland through which the stripling River Forth snakes eastwards in a series of huge meanders. For centuries this area was of immense strategic importance as the key to the Highlands, the sole route to the north of Scotland and the scene of many battles; until the opening of the Kincardine Bridge in 1936, Stirling was the last place at which the river could be crossed before it widened into the Firth of Forth.
The Battle of Stirling Bridge took place near the Old Bridge over the Forth which connects the town to the causeway leading west towards Bridge of Allan; that stone bridge, built in the late fifteenth century, replaced the ancient, narrow wooden bridge (‘bryg of tre’) about which the battle hinged. Recent underwater research has revealed traces of massive stone piers which pinpoint the precise site of the ancient bridge which straddled the thirty-metre-wide river diagonally, only a few metres upstream of the present bridge, in a straight line towards the Abbey Craig.
Wallace and Murray arrived at Stirling before the English did. They took up position near and on the Abbey Craig, which gave them a clear view of the approaching army. It was not a particularly large force, but it was formidable nonetheless; making due allowance for the usual exaggerations of contemporary or near-contemporary accounts, it has been estimated at some two hundred knights and mounted men-at-arms and ten thousand foot-soldiers, against the waiting Scottish force of thirty-six cavalry and eight thousand foot, made up of lesser gentry, burgesses and countrymen.
On the eve of the battle James the Steward and Malcolm, Earl of Lennox, who were (nominally, at least) attached to the English army, volunteered to go and parley with the Scots, but their overtures were brusquely rebuffed. Two friars were then despatched to renew the offers of peace, but once again the offers were refused by Wallace: ‘Tell your commander that we are not here to make peace but to do battle, to defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom. Let them come on, and we shall prove this in their very beards.’ That evening the Earl of Surrey gave orders for the English army to cross the bridge next morning for a frontal attack on the Scots, and retired for the night to Stirling Castle.
At dawn next morning (11 September) the English infantry began to cross the bridge and were deploying on the marshy ground on the north side of the river when they were recalled: the elderly Earl of Surrey had not risen from his bed, and the action was postponed. When Surrey eventually arrived, he saw the lightly-armed Scottish army arrayed near the slopes of the Abbey Craig half a mile away, and summoned a council of war. Some of the Scottish knights in his army urged caution, arguing that the bridge would be a death-trap because it was so narrow; on the other hand there was a ford farther upstream where cavalry could cross sixty at a time, and could then attack the Scots from the flank while the main army was crossing the bridge. This sensible tactical advice was rejected, but there was still considerable altercation about whether to cross or not. Eventually Cressingham, the hugely obese Treasurer of Scotland, urged Surrey to hurry up, since a flanking movement would probably make the Scots retreat and thus prolong the war, which was costing a great deal of money. And so they began the slow process of crossing the bridge – slow, because no more than two or three horses could ride over it abreast. By midday less than half of the army had reached the other side.
On the north side of the river the Scots can scarcely have believed their luck. All they had to do was wait until a significant (but not too large) part of the English army had crossed on to the marshy meadowland on the north bank. At just the right moment a horn was sounded, and the massed ranks of Scottish spearmen surged down and along the raised causeway (the modern Causewayhead) towards the bridge. The marshy ground was hindering the deployment of the English cavalry, and neither the floundering horsemen nor their supporting infantry could withstand the onslaught. The end of the narrow bridge, quickly surrounded by Scottish pikemen, offered no escape route for the packed mass of panicking troops, and the Scots had a field-day of slaughter. The Earl of Surrey could only watch helplessly as nearly half of his seasoned, powerfully-equipped host was cut to pieces or drowned in the deep waters of the Forth in the space of an hour. Only one group of English knights, led by Sir Marmaduke Tweng, managed to force a way back to the bridge and over it to safety. Surrey thereupon ordered the bridge to be broken and set on fire, to forestall any attempts by the Scots to use it for pursuit, and headed back to Berwick, leaving Tweng to take charge of Stirling Castle.
The rout was spectacular, and total. Cressingham, who had crossed the bridge at the head of the English knights, was an early victim of the carnage. Realising that he was doomed, he charged the massed spears of the Scottish ranks, where he was pulled from his horse and butchered; the English Lanercost Chronicle said that his body was flayed and his skin used to make a baldric for Wallace’s sword. According to the English chroniclers, a hundred English men-at-arms and five thousand foot-soldiers perished that day. Meanwhile James the Steward and the Earl of Lennox, opportunist as ever, turned their coats and fell upon the retreating baggage train of the English and plundered it of much of its cargo.
It had been a dramatic victory, an achievement of immense psychological importance to the rag-tag people’s army of the Scottish resistance. Not one of the powerful Scottish magnates had been present to lead it; they were either languishing in English prisons or had compromised themselves through the oaths of fealty and the hostages they had given to Edward of England. In one frenzied hour the legend of English invincibility had been broken by the common people of Scotland. It was a great Scottish feat, but it was hardly a great English defeat – indeed, one of the English chroniclers described it as a confusio, a battle without a clear result. The Scots had not beaten the full might of the English war machine, one of the most powerful in all Europe; they had not beaten Edward of England himself.
Wallace and his gallant young co-commander Murray were now the de facto joint rulers of Scotland, working in the name of John Balliol, the deposed king, and the people all over Scotland rallied to them – including most churchmen, and some at least of the nobility. There was much work to be done, both military and administrative. But the Battle of Stirling Bridge had not been won without cost: Murray had sustained terrible wounds in the fighting, and his life was hanging in the balance. Nevertheless, the work was put in hand. Wallace and Murray sent letters in Latin to Scotland’s trading partners in the Hanseatic League, at Lübeck and Hamburg, inviting them to resume trading – ‘for the kingdom of Scotland, God be thanked, has been recovered by war from the power of the English’. One of these missives has providentially survived the centuries; it was sent to the merchants of Lübeck on 11 October 1297 by ‘Andreas de Moravia and Willelmus Wallensis, commanders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland, and the community of the same kingdom’.
In November, Andrew Murray died of his wounds, and Wallace was left to carry on as the sole ruler of the realm. Some argue that it was Murray who had tempered Wallace’s inspiring enthusiasm with strategic and tactical skill, and