Or so he thought. To be fair, the flame of Scottish national independence had never burned very brightly. A fractious nobility, as much Norman as Scottish, was part of the reason; so was the fact that the very idea of a Scottish nation was still evolving. But neither had Edward extinguished it. It continued to smolder, awaiting the proper moment. It was not long in coming. In May 1297, William Wallace entered the story.
Of Wallace’s life prior to 1297 little can be said with any precision. He was of a landowning family, probably vassals of James Stewart, the hereditary steward of Scotland. His father may have been named Alan, or possibly Malcolm. He might have been born in Ayrshire, or somewhere else. He probably had brothers.
He was a huge man, at least six and a half feet tall (you can find chroniclers who claim seven) with a huge beard, enormous charisma, and absolutely no fear in battle. When he appeared in the forest of Selkirk in 1297, after the disastrous sack of Berwick and the defeat of Comyn the preceding year, he must have seemed to have been sent by God.*
Certainly his appeal was enhanced by the fact that Edward’s 1296 invasion failed to convince the Scots of the hopelessness of their position. Perversely, Scotland’s lack of a real national army meant that it couldn’t give the English much of a fight, but also meant that it couldn’t suffer a decisive defeat. And that meant that Edward’s strategic objective—an obedient subject people—could be achieved only by destroying the morale of the Scots. In that, even before the appearance of Wallace, he failed; despite the humiliation of “Toom Tabard” and the Ragman Roll, the uprising was never completely suppressed by the English, particularly in the north. Balliol may not have commanded an enormous amount of loyalty to his person, but as the king of Scotland, he retained a reservoir of devotion from, among others, Wallace himself. And he was not alone; at almost precisely the same moment Wallace arrived in Selkirk Forest, Andrew, the earl of Moray in Scotland’s far northeast, also rebelled against English rule in Balliol’s name, attacking and eventually capturing Castle Urquhart on the western shore of Loch Ness, and burning English ships at anchor in the harbor of Aberdeen.
The conventional story of Moray and Wallace is the stuff of muscular legend: the rural peasantry of Scotland fighting harder for their independence than their calculating nobles, since only the former could see further than their own family interests. There’s an element of truth in that, but not a very large one. While Wallace was, indeed, able to call soldiers to his flag based on Scottish national pride (apparently because he felt it so strongly himself), Scotland’s villeins and freemen took their lead from somewhere else: the Scottish Church.
Under a feudal system, ecclesiastical lords shared the rights of secular ones—they held courts, ran markets, and held farmland as fiefdoms—but without the central feudal obligation of direct military service. Moreover, they were at least nominally subject to supranational authority, through their bishops to the pope.* With the first glimmerings of true nationalism, though, the churches took on more and more of a national character; and the Scottish Church—obsessively, but accurately—feared English dominance over Scottish clergy. It is no accident that in June 1297, only a month after Wallace’s first appearance in the historical record, Robert Wishart, bishop of Glasgow, allied with him. Joining them would be Wallace’s feudal overlord, James Stewart; Macduff, son of the earl of Fife; and the erstwhile commander of Berwick Castle, Sir William Douglas, who, as a cousin to Moray, served as a bridge between the two insurrections.
Almost immediately upon learning of what he saw as Douglas’s treachery Edward commanded the younger Robert Bruce to seize Sir William’s castle, Douglasdale, thus presenting the twenty-two-year-old earl of Carrick with an almost ridiculously dramatic choice: Should the young knight—who was not only Norman by heritage and education, but also French-speaking, a lover of tourneys, and lord of substantial estates in England—follow his father’s allegiance to Edward? Or pursue his grandfather’s ambition for the Scottish throne? The original decision to join Edward had been in opposition to Balliol, but Balliol had become irrelevant. Bruce’s family had been exiled from Scotland by the Guardians, and seen their lands restored by the English invasion.
Here was the critical decision of Bruce’s life. After a sham assault on Douglasdale Castle, he assembled his followers in south-central Scotland and gave a speech:*
No man 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.
Edward commanded more obedience from his other vassals. John de Warenne, earl of Surrey and viceroy of Scotland, was ordered to march his own knights northeast from Yorkshire to Berwick, there to link up with the city’s garrison. Two others, Henry Percy and Robert de Clifford, were sent north along the western route and by the end of June had arrived at Irvine, as had, from a different direction, Bruce and a few hundred of his followers. There they found the Scots’ coalition already fraying. Wallace and Moray, it turned out, were fighting on behalf of the absent (and abdicated) Balliol. Stewart and others supported Bruce. Douglas refused to commit to either.
So the forces began to parley. Percy and de Clifford were under orders to avoid risking their troops, since not only was Edward facing a possible rebellion of his own back in England, but he was still in Flanders, trying to shore up his coalition against the French. The English force at Irvine was, outside of the garrison at Berwick, Edward’s only organized body of troops in the north. Similarly, the Scots were in a weak situation that could only be improved by negotiating. Which they did, for more than a month, ending with the Scottish surrender that became known as the Capitulation of Irvine.
The capitulation wasn’t especially sincere: neither Bruce nor Douglas agreed to provide hostages as demanded, though both lost the lands they held in fief from Edward. Based on subsequent events, it looks a lot more like a ruse de guerre than a surrender . . . and while Bruce and Douglas were keeping the forces of Percy and de Clifford at Irvine, the real rebellion simply moved on. Moray and Wallace had slipped away from Irvine, and between August and October 1297 raided Glasgow, Forfar, Montrose, Inverness, and Urquhart, which meant that by the fall, virtually all of Scotland north of the Firth of Forth was no longer controlled by the English.
That didn’t mean it was held by Wallace. One of the lessons of insurgency is that it’s easier to deny territory to your opponent than to control it yourself, particularly when your opponent occupies every important fortification in the disputed region. Neither Wallace nor Moray had the siege engines—the catapults and trebuchets—needed to batter down the walls of English-held castles, the sappers to undermine them, or the patience to blockade them.
Unable to dislodge the English garrisons from Scotland’s castles, Moray and Wallace, along with James Stewart and two thousand foot soldiers, marched south to the town of Stirling. The town, on the Firth of Forth, and the gateway to Scotland’s north, was a key objective for Surrey’s army, now marching north from Berwick, and whoever arrived first would be able to choose the ground where they wished to fight. Wallace’s forces won the race, and deployed their army—the aforementioned two thousand foot soldiers—in a line on the Abbey Crag, a rocky ridge on the north side of the Forth, with the bridge over the river in front and solid ground behind, securing an orderly retreat if needed. On September 10, they faced Surrey’s forces as he assembled them on the opposite side of the Forth: at least two thousand heavy cavalry, and more than eight thousand infantry, including a thousand or more archers. James Stewart, understandably anxious about the mismatch of forces, counseled negotiation, but was overruled by Wallace, who declared, “We are not here to make peace but to do battle to defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom.”
It’s not a criticism of Wallace’s heroism or skill to note that he was fortunate in his adversary that day. Hugh de Cressingham, Edward’s de facto viceroy in Scotland, wanted a quick victory, and
rejected a plan to use the English cavalry to attack the flank of the Scottish line by crossing the river at a downstream ford; the initial sally over the bridge by the English foot had to be repeated when Surrey overslept, and called them back. When, in the late morning of September 11, the English finally began crossing again, this time in earnest, they had to do so over boggy ground, and across a bridge that could accommodate only two horses abreast. The Scots waited patiently until half the English army—five thousand infantry and a few hundred horse, led by Cressingham—had crossed, at which time a few dozen men, hidden at the crossing, cut away the causeway’s supports. With the English split in two, Wallace and Moray led a charge down the crag and attacked Cressingham’s force before they could form any kind of defense. Though the English foot still outnumbered their opponents, the Scots had what tacticians call local superiority: strung out, with the Forth at their backs, and unable to offer protection to one another’s flanks, each pocket of a few dozen English soldiers could be isolated and cut to pieces by a hundred or more of Wallace’s spearmen. Surrey, watching the massacre from the south side of the river, panicked, and ordered a retreat of the remaining English forces back to Berwick. Cressingham was killed, his body flayed, and pieces of his skin were sent throughout Scotland as a signal of the rebellion. According to the Chronicle of Lanercost, Wallace used one long strip of Cressingham’s skin as a “baldrick for his sword.”
The victory at Stirling Bridge was total, and it inspired Scotland’s fence-sitting nobility, particularly both John Comyns, one the earl of Buchan and the other the lord of Badenoch. But despite the overwhelming disparity in casualties—the best estimates have Surrey losing upward of five thousand men, while Wallace’s losses numbered in the hundreds—the victory had other costs. The English invading force had lived off the land and severely depleted the Scottish crops just prior to harvest; the lowlands between Berwick and the Forth suffered a sharp but local famine through the fall and winter of 1297. The forces remaining at Stirling were rapidly running short of food and forage, and Wallace, in response, took his troops into northern England, confiscating all the Northumbrian grain he could carry and all the cattle he could drive, and carrying both as plunder back to Scotland.
Just as distressing as the lack of food was the loss of the earl of Moray, second only to Wallace as a leader of the rebellion, and certainly the one with the most strategic perspective: the best understanding that a war for Scottish independence was just as much about economic autonomy as military victory. His last official act, before he died from the wounds he received at Stirling Bridge, was the letter he and Wallace sent, on October 11, to the “worthy and beloved friends, the Mayors and citizens of Lübeck and Hamburg” (the key ports on the Baltic), notifying them that Scottish ports were once more open to trade with the Hanseatic cities.*
Also significant: in the letter, Wallace and Moray described themselves as “commanders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland, in the name of the famous prince lord John [Balliol], by God’s grace illustrious king of Scotland, by consent of the community of the realm.” The conflict was drawing a new portrait of just what that “community of the realm” was all about—whether it denoted the land, which was the traditional basis of feudal manorialism, or the people. In the old version, the people were secondary to the land, and their labor (and military service) followed whoever had the land in fief. The rebellion sundered that connection, since his troops fought for Wallace not as vassals but as Scots, and won their victory at Stirling Bridge not for a feudal lord, but for the community of the realm. Scotland, almost accidentally, had become an incubator for the infant idea of nationalism.
By the spring of 1298, William Wallace, whose family came of the lowest nobility in Scotland, became its de facto ruler. Sometime before March, Scotland’s greatest warrior was finally knighted; certainly by an earl—very likely by Robert Bruce—and named “William Wallace, Knight, Guardian of the Kingdom.”
The first act of the new Guardian was the formation of a new privy council that included Bruce, members of the Comyn family, and William Lamberton, a Benedictine monk and chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral whom he named bishop of St. Andrews, and so the effective head of the Scottish Church. King John Balliol continued to reign, but he no longer ruled (if, indeed, he ever had). Scotland’s new Guardian was now the country’s ruler, and, proving that he understood the niceties of Scotland’s strategic and diplomatic position, Wallace proposed both a plan for a mutual aid treaty with France (to ensure that Edward would face attack from the south if he invaded Scotland) and charged Lamberton, the new bishop, with enlisting the pope against England when he reached Rome for his consecration.* Given that doing so required traveling past hostile English and—whenever the historic alliance between Scotland and France wasn’t at its strongest—French armies, the journeys were the opposite of easy.
Far more ominously, at almost the same moment that Lamberton was named bishop of St. Andrews, and Wallace Guardian of Scotland, Edward I had returned to England from Flanders. After learning of the disaster at Stirling Bridge and Wallace’s subsequent raids into Northumbria, he made a quick peace with Philip IV of France and raced home to find that the Scottish threat had, perversely, eased his ability to raise money for a punitive expedition. A year before, in order to pay for both Surrey’s Scottish expedition and the alliance against France, the king had, by November 1297, demanded lay subsidies—essentially property taxes on all the moveable goods in the kingdom; that is, everything but real estate—amounting to more than £200,000. As a reminder that Edward’s kingly authority wasn’t any more absolute in the fourteenth century than King John’s had been in the thirteenth when he had been compelled to sign the Magna Carta, the English nobility forced Edward to sign a document known as the “Confirmation of the Charters.”* The Confirmation obliged Edward to foreswear taxing without the “will and assent of the Church, the earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other free men of the kingdom.”
After Stirling Bridge and Northumbria, and helped along by propaganda describing Wallace as a savage who flayed prisoners, killed babies, and raped nuns, assent was forthcoming. Edward announced a huge conscription of English troops and hired mercenaries from his feudal lands in Gascony and Wales until his total force numbered nearly fifteen thousand: twenty five hundred cavalry, and at least twelve thousand infantry (including more than two thousand Welsh bowmen). On June 25, 1298, he mustered them at Roxburgh and marched north, intent on earning the title he reputedly wanted inscribed in his tomb: “Hammer of the Scots.”
His target was Edinburgh, but Wallace, badly outnumbered, avoided the English forces with constant westward marches. The obvious strategy was to remain out of reach of the superior army until it ran out of supplies and went home. And for a while, it worked. But although they could burn Scottish villages and fortifications (the king reportedly commanded one of his lieutenants, Sir John Fitz Marmaduke, “You are a bloodthirsty man, I have often had to rebuke you for being too cruel. But now be off, use all your cruelty, and instead of rebuking you I shall praise you”), they could not feed themselves from the lands they burnt. Edward’s army was chronically short of food, despite the king’s plan to resupply by sea. The Welsh archers, newly conquered and restive, threatened to desert to the Scots, and after a brawl with the English, were charged by the English cavalry, leaving eighty of them dead.
Why Wallace finally decided to give battle—despite his well-deserved reputation as an irregular fighter—is unclear, but on July 24, 1298, he arrived at Falkirk, thirteen miles west of Edinburgh, and waited.
The following day, Edward and his army arrived to find the Scots deployed into four schiltroms: infantry rings with spears facing outward, and front ranks kneeling. Each phalanx was protected by a series of wooden stakes hammered into the ground, and angled so as to disembowel a charging horse. In between each of the schiltroms, Wallace placed his bowmen, with his relatively small force of a few hundred cavalry on a hill be
hind. The Scottish spearmen, many of them veterans of Stirling Bridge, were both disciplined and confident of victory.
Their adversary, however, was no Hugh de Cressingham, or duke of Surrey. Edward of England was one of the most experienced and canny tacticians of his era, a victor in dozens of battles against everything from French castles to Arab light cavalry. The king responded to Wallace’s deployment by dividing his own heavy cavalry into four columns and sequentially charging them against the Scottish line. They were unable to break the schiltroms, or even get past the stakes protecting them, but that wasn’t their purpose. They were sent to scatter Wallace’s mobile force and destroy his missile artillery: his archers.
The Scottish archers were overmatched. Their weapons were only about four feet long, and simple physics meant that the six-foot longbows carried by Edward’s Welshmen (and the crossbows of his Gascon mercenaries) would easily outrange them. Without Scottish cavalry to worry about, the English king (whose horse had fallen, breaking two of the royal ribs) was able to place his archers in the front line, where they could fire each of the two dozen three-foot-long arrows they carried into battle into the schiltroms. And then reload and do it again.
Several hours of devastating volleys later, the schiltroms were fully exposed, allowing cavalry to charge through. Thousands of Scots died where they stood, including the earl of Fife. Though defeated, Wallace managed to escape; in legend, at least, with the help of Robert Bruce, who burned the town of Carrick and disappeared into the woods surrounding it.
The battle of Stirling Bridge stands as one of only a handful of times since the height of the Roman Empire that spear-wielding infantry defeated heavy cavalry. In the same vein, Falkirk is remembered because of the dominance of combined arms, particularly infantry-protected archers.
But there’s another reason to recall Stirling and Falkirk. During the rebellion of 1296, John Balliol and Scotland’s ruling council mobilized their army in the traditional way, calling for both “free service” and “Scottish service.” The first was a call for freemen—freeholders, knights, sergeants, and nobility—to appear with arms appropriate to their respective ranks: knights in full armor, on warhorses protected by mail, and sergeants and freemen on horses “armored” in boiled leather. “Scottish service” referred to everyone else: men without horses, serving as infantry and wearing no body armor, wielding a spear or a “Lochaber ax”—a six-foot-long halberd, with a blade on one side and a hook on the other, well-designed for pulling a man from his horse. The troops Wallace led to victory at Stirling Bridge, and to defeat at Falkirk, on the other hand, weren’t called to arms by “free service”; most of the knightly class in Scotland were unavailable because of the enforced homage required by the Ragman Roll (and, in any case, Scotland’s last king was out of the country, the de facto prisoner of Edward Longshanks). The Scottish army was exclusively called to “Scottish service.” The system that had evolved to manage and defend the arable land of Europe during its explosive growth during the Medieval Warm Period—feudal manorialism—was being undermined by a new kind of nationalism, at just the moment in history when four centuries of mild weather was coming to an end.
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