Robert The Bruce: King Of Scots. Ronald McNair Scott
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.
NOTES - CHAPTER 5
1 Scalaronica, 17
2 Guisborough, 294
3 Cal. Doc Scots, ii, 742
4 ibid., ii, 922, 931
5 Scalaronica, 18
6 Guisborough, 295
7 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 357
8 Lanercost, 163
9 Stevenson, ii, 114, Gal. Doc. Scots, ii, 852
10 Guisborough, 297–8
11 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 887
12 ibid., ii, 909; Stevenson, ii 192
13 ibid., ii, 910
14 Stevenson, ii, 205
15 Barrow, 120
16 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 917
17 Rishanger, 379
18 Guisborough, 297
19 ibid., 299
20 Barron, 33–57
21 Cal. Doc. Scots, ii, 972
22 Guisborough, 300
23 ibid., 300
24 Scalaronica, 19
25 ibid., 19
26 Rishanger, 180
27 Guisborough, 303
28 ibid., 307–8
29 Dickinson, 118