William Wallace

by Andrew Fisher

  The English advance was proving something of a disaster. If Edward’s army was formidable in appearance and size, it was suffering both the consequences of a Scottish policy of scorched earth and the failure to maintain its own supplies. One version of events gives Edward at this point in the campaign some two thousand horse and an infantry force in the region of twelve thousand.30 The cavalry were a committed unit, half provided by those same earls who had brought the country not long before to the verge of civil war, the rest recruited by commissioners of array. Of the infantry, the greater part did not share the patriotism of the earls nor the mercenary devotion of the other horse, for they were either Irish or Welsh and would soon show themselves unreliable. When, on 20 July, the army reached Temple Liston, Edward was forced to order the plunder of nearby Kirkliston, which belonged to Bishop Lamberton, in the hope of relieving the hunger of his soldiers. It was no more than a temporary expedient. The few transport ships which made their way to Leith brought wine, not corn.31

  While Edward was at Temple Liston, a revealing incident occurred.32 He dispatched Antony Bek, bishop of Durham, to seize certain castles held by the Scots. Bek’s men had no food other than the peas and beans which they lifted from the fields. With such a weak force and without siege engines Bek could see no hope of carrying out his instructions. He sent to Edward for new instructions. Edward’s reply was indicative of his state of mind; to Bek’s messenger he said: ‘Go back and tell the bishop that as bishop he is a man of Christian piety, but Christian piety has no place in what he is doing now.’ To the messenger himself, Sir John FitzMarmaduke, Edward addressed these still more chilling words: ‘And as for you, 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. Take care you don’t see me until all three castles are burnt.’ It was as if Edward regarded the Scots as being fit only for the harshest of treatment even at this early stage. FitzMarmaduke carried Edward’s answer to Bek. In fear of their king and with the lucky arrival of food ships to encourage them, Bek’s troops dealt speedily with the castles.

  The success of Bek’s men was not enough to raise the morale of the English army for long. Food was still short. Many of the Welsh infantry were literally dying of hunger. Edward now committed one of those errors which so damage his reputation as a soldier. He ordered that the Welsh should be given wine. This, far from solving the problem, inflamed them. Drunk, they fought with the English and a number of priests were killed. Edward could not prevent his knights from attacking the Welsh. Of the latter, some eighty were killed and the rest put to flight. The Welsh spent the night apart from the rest of the army, threatening to change sides. Strangely, Edward claimed to be indifferent. For him the Welsh were still enemies, it seemed; let them join the Scots. ‘With God’s help’, he said, ‘we shall then defeat the whole lot of them in one go.’ No doubt this was bravado. Nevertheless, for the great general he was held to be, Edward, on this campaign, appears vulnerable and inept. Whatever misfortunes attended the passage of the supply ships, he had relied too heavily on this source of provisions. He miscalculated the mood of the Welsh and neglected the elementary task of ensuring their loyalty. If it is true that he learned from his campaign and was never again to repeat the mistakes he committed there, it is also true that he was only rescued from his own blundering by outside intervention.

  That intervention came on 21 July.33 So desperate was the English position that Edward had decided to retire upon Edinburgh as a preliminary to abandoning the invasion. What happened is told in detail in Guisborough, our most complete source.34

  It is ironic that it was two Scottish earls, Patrick of Dunbar and Gilbert de Umfraville of Angus, who brought to Edward the opportunity to redeem his reputation. Both had remained faithful to Edward, but the modern mind would find it less than easy to understand that allegiance. With them they had a scout or spy, it is not clear precisely which, who lifted Edward’s heart with these words: ‘My lord king, the Scots army and all your enemies are no more than eighteen miles from here, just outside Falkirk … They have heard that you intend to retreat to Edinburgh, and they mean to follow you and attack your camp tomorrow night, or at least to fall on your rearguard and plunder your vanguard.’ The significance of this description of Wallace’s intention, although taken from the account most often used by historians of the period, is overlooked. It tells us clearly that Wallace did not intend the pitched battle which followed but aimed to use the English retreat in the most obvious way, the way which, in other circumstances, Wallace, a master of improvisation, would have chosen.

  But he was to be denied the fulfilment of his plan. He was not given the time to make the sortie from what we must see as a fortified camp at Falkirk. He had pulled the English forward to the point where, weakened and in retreat, they would offer an easy target for one of those mounted assaults at which he was adept. Edward was saved by the two Scottish earls. He did not hesitate. His words tell of his relief: ‘May God be praised, for He has solved all my problems. The Scots will have no need to follow me, for I will march to meet them at once.’ Telling his troops to arm themselves, but without, it seems, informing them of their destination, he led them in the direction of Falkirk. That night the English host camped on the Burgh Muir, to the east of Linlithgow.35 Edward clearly still expected just such an attack as he had been warned of by the Scottish earls; his men were to rest with their horse beside them.36

  During the night Edward was slightly injured when his own horse trod on him. The news of the accident was enough to panic his army which feared both betrayal and an attack by the enemy. Their reaction was so extreme as to suggest that had Wallace been able to carry out his first intention, he would have had little difficulty in inflicting severe damage on the English. Edward, however, despite the pain from his ribs, dealt more successfully with the panic than he had with the problem of the Welsh. At dawn the English marched through Linlithgow. They soon came in sight of the enemy; on the top of a hill they saw many spearmen. At this the English moved forward in the belief that what they had seen was the main Scottish army. The spearmen, however, retreated and were lost to sight.

  This incident has not been considered worthy of much attention. Yet it may be of consequence to an understanding of the battle of Falkirk. What was this body of spearmen? It was large enough to cause apprehension among the English, who took it for the Scottish army. It could have been a late addition to Wallace’s forces; if so, such an arrival would in all probability have been noted in accounts of the battle. In the absence of proof, it is possible to advance a tentative theory: that Wallace, in keeping with his intention, as expressed in Guisborough, of attacking the English while they were in retreat, had begun to move away from Falkirk with that in mind. The spearmen, therefore, would be a contingent sent from the fortified site or camp as part of Wallace’s plan. This would be consistent with the argument that he was, as at Stirling, intent on improvisation rather than on a setpiece battle. The spearmen, on seeing the English army, would therefore retire on the main Scottish army, bringing with them the unwelcome news of Edward’s approach. Thanks to the report he had received, Edward had quite literally stolen a march on Wallace. The latter was forced to abandon his original intention. His army was forced to fight on terms which he had not chosen. That it fought so well tells us that it had been trained with the utmost efficiency.

  Wallace’s army on the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, Tuesday 22 July, was the product of two basic determinants. It was predominantly composed of infantry. Scotland was too poor to be able to afford the maintenance of a large force of heavy armoured cavalry on the English model. Such few heavy cavalry as were present were in the gift of the nobles. We shall return in due course to the vexed question of the role of the nobles and their cavalry. If Wallace had always relied after Lanark on mobility to create the maximum effect, his men’s mounts must have been light, unarmoured, their function the ancient one of transpor
t to the site of whatever action he intended. At Falkirk, given the circumstances in which he was now to fight, these skirmishers – they cannot properly be called cavalry – would be dismounted and integrated into the mass of the infantry. It was upon the infantry that the outcome of the battle would depend.

  After his raid into England, Wallace had begun the long process of creating a standing army. To do so, he used the power of his personality, the requirement that every man between the age of sixteen and sixty serve in arms to defend his country, and that weapon to which he never scrupled to have recourse, fear. Once Guardian, he had the further advantage of authority. The numbers who accepted the call to arms cannot have been great, but their lack of experience, their indiscipline, and the natural fear of the conscripted soldier would make Wallace’s task other than difficult. His was, it must not be forgotten, the role of a commander without professional training. No doubt he could employ willing officers, men who had seen service in the earlier part of the war. The question of whether these officers included a contribution from the nobles must remain moot. If, as Barrow says,37 the earls of Atholl, Menteith, Buchan, Lennox, and Carrick were among the contributors to the Scottish army, it is a far step from that to assigning to them and their like the positive role of training the army. Responsibility for the training was Wallace’s, as was the burden of defeat. The total number of troops available to him at the beginning of the battle is impossible to state accurately. We lack the kind of information which permits conclusions to be reached, as in the case of Edward’s army, with any degree of confidence, and the figures given for the Scottish dead by English commentators38 far outstrip any numbers open to Wallace. But we can say that the Scots must have been vastly inferior to the English in all component parts, cavalry, foot and archers. Of the three the foot were his supreme arm, and unlike the other two elements their contribution at Falkirk was exceptional. Over the foot he exercised the necessary control from the outset, and we need not rely on Bower’s fanciful account39 to understand that he had made good use of time to prepare the schiltroms which were the backbone of the Scottish army at Falkirk. The contribution of the Scottish cavalry and archers was, as we shall see, a different matter; their failure to carry out their role was crucial.

  He had prepared the Scots, in a relatively short space of time, not only for the tactics at which he himself was so adept, but for exactly the test which now faced them. That is, the army was to stand on the defensive to receive the principal English weapon, the heavy cavalry. His dispositions are well recorded in the account found in Guisborough. Wallace had divided the infantry into four schiltroms, the first known mention of what became a standard feature of the war with England but so obvious a tactic as certainly to be well-established. Each of the four, Guisborough tell us, ‘was made up wholly of spearmen, standing shoulder to shoulder in deep ranks and facing towards the circumference of the circle, with their spears slanting outwards at an oblique angle’.40 The hedgehog-like appearance of the schiltroms would be frightening, as it was intended to be. The schiltrom could be switched from the defensive to the offensive, as Robert I was able to do at Bannockburn. The twelve-inch, iron-tipped spears of the infantry were a powerful deterrent to the cavalry, and at Falkirk, as again at Bannockburn, inflicted severe injury on the horses themselves. If, as almost happened, the English cavalry charges were held, the infantry would be converted into an advancing force whose weaponry, once its momentum had gathered, would be irresistible.

  The infantry’s defensive position had been further strengthened by a fence of stakes. Each of the four schiltroms was surrounded by this enclosure, the stakes, linked by ropes, pointing towards the English. If these enclosures baulked the cavalry, they would then be thrown aside to allow the infantry to proceed to the second stage, the attack. We do not know how many men stood on this day in each of the schiltroms. As the Scottish army is unlikely to have exceeded that of the English, each of the schiltroms would scarcely have contained more than two thousand men. Wallace had with him a small body of archers, men from the Forest of Selkirk. Archery was not a branch of warfare in which the Scots ever excelled. It does the men of Selkirk no disservice to say that their role at Falkirk, although an honourable one, was less significant than that of Edward’s bowmen. These, Welshmen and others armed with the longbow and Genoese mercenaries using the crossbow, could only be effectively countered by cavalry. We shall see how the precaution which Wallace had taken to nullify the menace of Edward’s bowmen was thwarted.

  Wallace’s fortified camp, now a battle formation, was well sited for its new purpose. Its rear was protected by Callendar Wood. In front was the Westquarter Burn. The Scottish position on the south-east side of a hill near Falkirk was rendered stronger still by a boggy loch between it and the advancing English.41 Wallace’s choice of site has been criticised.42 If it was not ideal, and inferior to that selected at Stirling, it proved almost as successful as on the earlier occasion. We must assume from what we know of Wallace that had he meant to fight at this point in the campaign, he would have arranged matters differently.

  When the English saw Wallace’s dispositions, the more sensible among them must have appreciated its strength. In Guisborough we read that Edward himself was against an immediate assault.43 Conscious as he was that his men had not eaten for some twenty-four hours, he proposed a halt. It is impossible to believe that he was not affected at least as much by what awaited him. His opinion was not shared by his subordinates. Edward, surprisingly, could not restrain them. The earls of Norfolk, Hereford, and Lincoln, among others, refused to heed their king. Ignorant of the water obstacle which lay between them and the Scots, the English vanguard moved forward but were forced to swing west round the bog.44 They must have presented an attractive target to the Scottish archers stationed between the schiltroms. Since there is no mention of the archers at this juncture, the opportunity does not appear to have been taken. On the opposite flank the knights were as enthusiastic as the vanguard. The flavour of their mettle emerges from the words of Ralph Bassett to their nominal commander, Bishop Bek. The bishop, trying to ensure some discipline, was roundly told to mind his own business and to repeat the mass he had said before the battle.

  The obstacle of the bog safely negotiated, the cavalry attacked the schiltroms. At the first contact the Scottish horse fled. The inevitable charge of treachery followed in Scottish accounts.45 Whatever the motives of the cavalry, their flight was a disaster for Wallace. It was bad enough that they had not struck a blow. Worse, their absence was to allow free rein to the English archers. At Bannockburn Robert I kept in reserve a cavalry force of some five hundred under the command of the marshall of Scotland, Sir Robert Keith. Its task was to interrupt the work of the English archers. In the event Keith did more; he broke the lines of archers and they took to their heels. Their loss to Edward II was one of the turning points of Bannockburn. The presence of the future king of Scots at Falkirk is problematical.46 He cannot have been ignorant, however, of its various phases. If Bruce learned much from Wallace, the use of horse against bowmen was one factor marked in his mind after Falkirk.

  With the Scots cavalry gone, the schiltroms were isolated If the disappearance of Comyn and the horse removed from Wallace a potential defence against the English archers, his hopes were frustrated by the ineffectual Scottish archers. These were led by Sir John Stewart of Jedburgh, brother of James the Stewart. Sir John had been a prominent figure in Scottish affairs for some time. In 1291 he had, with his brother, then a Guardian, and others such as Bruce, lord of Annandale, and Balliol, lord of Galloway, sworn fealty to Edward at Upsettlington. He is to be found on the Ragman Roll five years later. When the opportunity came in 1297, he joined in the unsuccessful magnate rebellion which came to an end at Irvine. His courage, and that of the men under his command at Falkirk, has ensured his reputation as a patriot.47 He and they, and with them the men of Bute who perished at their side, are properly commemorated in a monument erected in 1877. There is no need to ques
tion the courage of Sir John Stewart and his men. They stood against, and fell, under the might of the English cavalry. They were as devoted to their cause, and as doomed, as the men in the schiltroms. But unlike the latter, there is, apparently, no positive role in the battle to be allocated to the archers under Stewart. It is widely accepted that they could not match the English in power or accuracy. The English longbow was indeed a fearsome weapon; its greatest days lay ahead, in the wars between England and France. But the role of the longbow at Falkirk has been persuasively challenged.48 Slingers and crossbowmen participated on the English side, and to considerable effect.

  What, then, had Stewart and his archers done as the battle unfolded? Their courage apart, there is no contemporary evidence to enlighten us. Wallace had placed them between the schiltroms, but to what purpose? The Scots, it will be remembered, had the advantage of a strong defensive position. Between them and the English lay an obstacle, of which the English were initially unaware. The English cavalry, halted in their headlong charge by water, must have been within range of Stewart’s archers. The Scottish bow, shorter than the English, is considered inferior. But the power of a bow depends on the pull exerted. The English archers pulled the bow to its furthest extent, to the ear, the Scots to the chest. This, of course, limited the range but it is not clear why, at Falkirk as on other occasions, the Scots did not follow the English lead. Wallace was a prudent, far-sighted man in military matters. It is not unreasonable to argue that he had given John Comyn the younger the role – of dealing with the archers – emulated by Bruce at Bannockburn. For whatever reason, Comyn left the field at an early stage in the battle and the opportunity to negate the threat posed by Edward’s archers was lost to Wallace. What part had he, in his plan for the battle, given to Stewart? We do not know, but we can suggest that the archers, unlike the schiltroms, need not have adopted the passive role of awaiting the English assault. The first rush, under the headstrong earls, Norfolk, Hereford, and Lincoln, must have presented a tempting target to Stewart and his troops. But Stewart remained, as far as we are aware, detached from this phase of the battle. The English cavalry recovered, with devastating consequences for the Scots. Why did Stewart’s archers not produce the necessary impact? As commander, Wallace must accept ultimate responsibility for this aspect of Falkirk, as with others. But we have no means of knowing what his relationship was with Stewart or whether Wallace had sufficient influence with the brother of James the Stewart to direct his actions. Sir James Stewart was emphatically no Comyn. He died heroically but his standing as a patriot depends on the manner of his death rather than on his contribution to Wallace’s plan for the battle.