Part II
Chapter 7
Edward I, being the man he was, wholeheartedly encouraged the use of the longbow, having seen for himself how effective it could be when properly handled; its potentialities had been brought to his notice by some of the extremely able soldiers who had fought for both sides during the civil wars in the 1260’s. He used the traditional enmity of the Scots for the English to provide arrow fodder for the longbow in the experimenting hands of the English archers. These early Anglo-Scots battles seem to have made no impression upon these responsible form ilitary affairs in France. When the now well-tried techniques were used in the early battles of the Hundred Years War they seem to have taken the French completely by surprise.
Following their victory over the English at Stirling Bridge on 13th September 1297 the triumphant Scots so ravaged the English border counties that the enraged Edward was forced to conclude a hasty treaty with the King of France and rush home. He reached England in mid-March 1298; instantly he summoned the barons and their captains to meet him at York on the Feast of Pentecost. The army assembled. In June Edward led his forces into Scotland by the eastern borders with the idea of marching into the western counties and crushing the rebellion of the Scots, as he termed the affair.
The army he reviewed at Roxburgh consisted of English, Welsh and Irish infantry, with a powerful body of mailed, mounted and well-disciplined cavalry, the veterans of his French wars; in addition he had with him a mounted corps of Gascons. They probably numbered 10,000 foot and about 2,500 horses. To oppose them William Wallace, the Scots leader, collected a force largely composed of armed peasantry organised as spearmen and armed with pikes some eleven feet in length. He also had a group of archers from the Ettrick Forest and a force of about 500 cavalry under John Comyn, son of the Lord of Badenoch. They were considerably less in number than the English army, but they had great confidence in their leader, who had positioned them in a very strong site to await battle.
That the Scots were formidable opponents is borne out by the very discerning opinion of the archer in Conan Doyle’s book, The White Company:
‘“I have heard that the Scots are good men of war,” said Hordle John.
‘“For axemen and for spearmen I have not seen their match,” the archer answered. “They can travel, too, with bag of meal and grid-iron slung to their sword-belt, so that it is ill to follow them. There are scant crops and few beeves in the borderland, where a man must reap his grain with sickle in one fist and brown bill in the other. On the other hand, they are the sorriest archers that I have ever seen, and cannot so much as aim with the arbalest, to say nought of the longbow. Again, they are mostly poor folk, even the nobles among them, so that there are few who can buy as good a brigandine of chain mail as that which I am wearing, and it is ill for them to stand up against our own knights, who carry the price of five Scotch farms upon their chests and shoulders. Man for man, with equal weapons, they are as worthy and valiant men as could be found in the whole of Christendom.”’
Their position was fronted by Darnrig Moss, a marsh through which no cavalry could pass; the flanks had been skilfully protected by field-works of wood palisades driven deep into the earth and roped together. Here the Scots spearmen were formed into four great masses, known as schiltrons, of circular form and ready to face outwards in any direction. The spearmen, when ready for action, would level their long pikes from the hip to repel cavalry; the immediate front ranks would kneel on the right knee, against which the butt of the spear was placed; thus a bristling wall of sharp spear-points presented itself in whatever direction the cavalry might choose to attack. Between each of the schiltrons was placed a band of the Ettrick archers, whilst the cavalry remained close at hand in reserve.
On the morning of the battle Edward had to be painfully assisted in mounting his horse; during the previous night, whilst sleeping with his men on the bare heath alongside their chargers, he had been trodden on by the horse, so that three ribs were broken. Patched up by the surgeons, he laboriously but resolutely mounted and showed himself to his troops. He ordered the banners to be unfurled, the trumpets to sound, and the army rolled forward towards the forest of Falkirk. On reaching the summit of the heights of Callendar, the whole English army halted; at their feet lay the fertile carse of Falkirk, and the vast oak forest known as the Torwood stretched away to where the towers and town of Stirling rose in the sunshine. The river Forth flowed like a thread of blue and silver between forests in all the glorious foliage of summer. In the immediate foreground, midway between Falkirk and the river of Carron, the weapons of the Scots army gleamed and twinkled in the sun’s rays.
The English army celebrated Mass, conducted by the Bishop of Durham clad in full armour with a sword by his side and a shield slung at his back. The array that surrounded the militant churchman was impressive – the banners bore the arms of Edward … gules, three lions passant regardant; and those of St. Edward the Confessor – a cross fleury between five martlets or. The tunics worn over the mail shirts were elaborately painted and blazoned; those curious ornaments called ailettes were worn on the knights’ shoulders. The barrel-shaped helmets were surmounted by their crests; skull-caps, spherical and conical, were worn by the infantry; the lances had little emblazoned banners hanging from their heads. The Scots’ banners showed the Scottish lion rampant, and the silver cross of St. Andrew; Wallace himself wore a helmet surmounted with a dragon crest.
Then, as had been ordered, the English army advanced in three columns of horsemen, with the archers disposed between them. The first column was led by the Earl Marshal; the second by the fighting Bishop of Durham and the third by Edward in person. The mediaeval knight seldom took the trouble to examine the ground over which he was to fight, consequently the first column, riding furiously forward, dashed pell-mell into the marsh. The heavily armoured men and horses floundered wetly in the morass, English and Gascon alike, whilst the Scots archers poured arrows into them and caused considerable casualties. The rearmost ranks of the column, seeing the danger, swerved to their left to find firmer ground, then, closing their files, crashed into the Scots formations. Wallace looked around him and cried loudly:
‘Now! I haif brocht ye to the ring – hop gif ye can!’
The unwavering barrier of outstretched spears in the hands of sturdy and resolute Scots brought the knights of the first column to a shuddering halt, so that they milled, cavorted and plunged across the front of the position as they tried to force their way through, reaching out to strike at the dismounted Scots before them. Seeing the error of the first column, the Bishop of Durham’s second group avoided the marsh and wheeled to the right so that they threatened the Scots’ left flank. The small body of Scots cavalry eyed with some misgivings the approach of this vastly superior mounted force and wavered, then a few turned and fled, panic set in and the whole force fled from the field without striking a blow; a disaster later reputed to have been due to the treachery of their leader, Comyn.
Notwithstanding this, the Scots infantry remained steady and unbroken, presenting a threatening and ominously unwavering front. The experienced Bishop saw that this was the Welsh hedgehog all over again and realised that it would be prudent to wait until the archers came up with the King’s division. He halted his force and they sat looking at the grim Scots formation; after a few minutes Radult Basset de Drayton, for a time the English governor of Edinburgh Castle, scornfully bellowed:
‘Stick to thy mass, thou Lord Bishop! We shall conduct the military operations of this day!’
The Bishop bridled – brandishing his sword, he cried:
‘On then, for this day we are all bound to do our duty as good soldiers!’
Spurring his horse, he led his column ponderously towards the enemy, to fall heavily on the Scots left whilst the remnants of the Earl Marshal’s column assailed their right. The Scottish pikemen stood firm, shoulder to shoulder; again came the milling, scuffling and plunging of injured horses as knights bumped and got into each other’s way but without forcing the position at any point. The English horsemen drew back, their horses breathing heavily. They gathered themselves and charged again … and again … and again … but they still had not broken through the levelled pikes when the King came up, leading the infantry and the remainder of the cavalry around the end of the marsh. He took in the situation at a glance; brought his archers forward so that they were within point-blank range of the Scots masses, a manoeuvre made possible because the Ettrick archers with their leader, the young Knight of Bonhill, had all been killed or had fled when ridden down by the English cavalry.
At the King’s orders, the archers concentrated their rain of arrows on particularly stubborn points of Scots resistance; a hail of clothyard shafts poured unceasingly into the unarmoured ranks of the Scots, mercilessly bringing them crashing to the ground. Very soon the ‘wood of spears’ began to waver, to become thinner and less threatening as man after man dropped to the ground with an arrow projecting from his unprotected body. Deserted by their cavalry and their own archers destroyed, the Scots infantry levelled their pikes over a breastwork of their own dead and dying as they made desperate attempts to hold their ground. But their numbers were thinning fast and they were becoming unsteady; their morale was wavering as they lost heart at the hopeless prospect of fighting against the hissing death that came at them from beyond their reach. Here and there a man crept away from the formations, soon the trickle became a stream and disorder became evident.
Seeing that the moment was ripe, Edward threw in the cavalry of his own division; they thundered across the torn ground in a sudden charge, to dash through the gaping ranks of Scots pikemen and to lumber through the scattered ranks laying about them with lance, sword and axe. Once inside the pikes, there was nothing to stop the knights; they wallowed in a dreadful slaughter of their lighter-armed enemy. Fighting bravely, wielding his great two-handed sword, Wallace slugged his way from the field accompanied by a handful of faithful followers. His army was shattered and of those who escaped the shambles many were drowned crossing the river Carron in headlong flight to the north.
To the defeated Scots there was the minute consolation that before being vanquished they had come within sight of victory; the monumental stubbornness of the schiltrons had proved a match for cavalry charges far more violent than anything seen in the Welsh wars. In spite of the fact that archers supplemented by cavalry had proved that they could beat such tactics, the formation tried out by the Welsh and perfected by Wallace was to be the basic method of infantry fighting up to the early nineteenth century at Waterloo, outlasting the heavy-armed cavalry and long surviving the introduction of firearms.
Falkirk was the first engagement of any real size or importance in which archers, properly supplemented by cavalry, played a leading part. So striking was the demonstration of the devastating effect of the longbow that no English commander could fail to be impressed or to see the tactical lesson that had been set out before him.