Scotland: The Story of a Nation

SCOTICHRONICON, BOOK 11, CHAPTER 28

William Wallace, in fact, belonged to one of the minor knightly families which made up the feudal following of the powerful Stewart family which had been granted the lands of modern Renfrewshire by King David I. The Wallaces seem to have come to Scotland with the Stewarts; the name ‘Wallace’ may be a corruption of ‘le Waleys’, suggesting that they could have come from the Welsh Marshes.

Little is known about William Wallace’s early life – even the date of his birth is uncertain. Most scholars now accept a date of around 1272, which would put him in his mid-twenties when he first ‘raised his head’ in 1297. The rest comes mainly from Blind Harry. According to him, William was the second son of a small landowner, Sir Malcolm Wallace ‘of Ellerslie’, but even that place-name is the subject of fierce debate: it could be the town of Elderslie near Paisley in Renfrewshire, or the obscure estate of Ellerslie/Elderslie near Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. Both lay claim to be the birthplace of Wallace, and there are numerous traditions and plaques and trees (both past and present) which purport to back them up.

Wallace seems to have fallen foul of the English regime early, according to Blind Harry. In Dundee he is said to have killed, in a street confrontation, a young man named Selby, the ‘overbearing’ son of the English constable of the castle there. He managed to make his escape from Dundee, but from then on he was an outlaw, a notorious fugitive with a reputation for lethal brawling. Later, when he was fishing on Irvine Water, he is said to have killed a couple of English soldiers who demanded that he give them his catch.

Blind Harry had many such tales to tell, of violent exploits and brutal encounters, of merciless killings and miraculous escapes. Many are commemorated in the names of woods and caves and other hideouts all across the south and west of Scotland.

To the English, Wallace was merely a brigand; but his brigandage appealed to a deep-seated Scottish resentment of English domination and of the obeisance of Scotland’s leaders to King Edward of England. Legends began to accrete around Wallace’s name, and his activities became synonymous with patriotism (not that the word ‘patriotism’ existed then). What was believed to drive him was a fierce love of liberty for his suffering country, an absolute dedication to the idea of independence for the Scottish nation. It was said that in his boyhood he had learned from his uncle, a priest in Dunipace, a Latin precept which inspired all his achievements: Dico tibi verum, libertas optima rerum (I tell you truly, liberty is the best of things).

Wallace was now a fully-fledged guerrilla (or terrorist, depending on your point of view), implacably dedicated to the destruction of the English troops who garrisoned Scotland’s towns and castles, with a formidable band of disciplined, battle-hardened followers at his back. He ranged the countryside with his men, murdering Englishmen at every opportunity, attacking and capturing castles apparently at will. He seems to have had all the attributes of a born leader: charisma, bravery, nerve, decisiveness, imagination, the ability to inspire men to follow him and a formidable physical presence. All the Scottish sources – including the immense dimensions of his reputed sword – attest to his exceptional strength and size. The Scotichronicon described him thus:

He was a tall man with the body of a giant, cheerful in appearance with agreeable features, broad-shouldered and big-boned, with belly in proportion and lengthy flanks, pleasing in appearance but with a wild look, broad in the hips, with strong arms and legs, a most spirited fighting-man, with all his limbs very strong and firm.

According to Blind Harry’s The Wallace he was all of seven feet tall (nine quarters of the Scots ell of thirty-seven inches):

IX quartaris large he was in length indeid.

Thryd part that length in schuldrys [shoulders] braid [broad]

was he.

The turning-point in Wallace’s spectacular career as a guerrilla fighter came, according to Blind Harry, after he had secretly married a beautiful young heiress named Marion Braidfoot, of Lanark. At the time, Lanark Castle was the seat of an English sheriff, Sir William Heselrig. One day in May 1297, when Wallace was paying a visit in disguise to his wife (who had recently given birth to a daughter), his presence in Lanark became known to the soldiery. He and his followers managed to make good their escape after a typically bloody fight, whereupon Heselrig exacted prompt retribution by having Marion seized and cruelly put to death.

In a murderous fury of grief Wallace struck back at once. That very night he and his men infiltrated the town in ones and twos, then formed up for a surprise attack on the sheriff’s residence. They burst into the castle, where Wallace slew Heselrig in his bed; when Heselrig’s son rushed to his father’s assistance Wallace killed him too, then he and his men went on a rampage of slaughter, cutting down every Englishmen in sight. William Wallace had ‘lifted his head’ with a vengeance.

News of the killing of William Heselrig and the massacre of his entire garrison sent shock-waves all the way to London. At Wallace’s arraignment there in 1305, amid all the general charges of murder, arson and sacrilege, the first specific indictment was that he had attacked, wounded and slain the Sheriff of Lanark ‘and, in contempt of the king, had cut the said Sheriff’s body in pieces’. In the English sources, the attack on Lanark Castle seems to have been regarded as the trigger for a general revolt against English domination.

Insurrection was now in the air. The ‘official’ rebellion, known today as the ‘aristocratic’ or ‘noble’ revolt, was being orchestrated by two former Guardians – James Stewart (the Steward) and the Bishop of Glasgow (Robert Wishart). Surprisingly, one of the magnates involved was Robert Bruce, the young Earl of Carrick, whose father’s request to King Edward had been so cuttingly snubbed (see Chapter 9 (#uba4d0175-ef7d-5312-b738-2df3be9932b3)). The ‘aristocratic’ revolt soon fizzled out, however, in humiliating circumstances: an English force led by Sir Henry Percy and Sir Robert Clifford crossed the border early in July and surrounded the confederation of rebellious nobles and their followers encamped at Irvine, on the Ayrshire coast. After lengthy negotiations the Scots surrendered without a fight on 7 July 1297, giving hostages for good behaviour on condition that they would not have to go to fight for Edward in France. Among those who renewed their pledges of loyalty to King Edward was Robert Bruce, the Earl of Carrick.

Much more significant was a rising in the north-east of Scotland. It was led by a young man named Andrew Murray (de Moray), son and heir of a leading baron of the Comyn family. Father and son had been captured at the Battle of Dunbar and imprisoned; Murray junior, however, escaped from Chester Castle and made his way back to his father’s castle at Avoch, in Ross-shire. In the summer of 1297 he was leading a Comyn rebellion in the north-east; one by one he captured the English-held castles in north-east Scotland – Urquhart, Inverness, Elgin and Banff – and soon he was in control of the whole of Moray and Aberdeenshire.

Wallace himself had not been idle. After a foray into the south-west of Scotland he moved north with a hand-picked body of cavalry to Scone, where the English Justiciar of Scotland, William Ormesby, was holding court and outlawing all those who would not take an oath of fealty. Ormesby’s troops melted away at Wallace’s approach; the Justiciar fled precipitately to Edinburgh to raise the alarm and thence to the safety of his estates in Northumberland. Scotland was now in a ferment. Bands of armed rebels roamed the countryside, and the English troops withdrew to their forts and castles in a 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 that his loss was to prove fatal to the Scots when the crunch came in the Battle of Falkirk in 1298 (see below) – but that can only be a matter of speculation.

Meanwhile Wallace built on his victory at Stirling by leading a large and unruly army into Northumbria and Cumbria on an orgy of vengeful pillage which included Lanercost Priory, near Carlisle – which would not have endeared him to the monks there who were writing up the annals of the time. Only fierce snowstorms brought an end to the harrying of the northern shires, and by Christmas the Scots had withdrawn.

Wallace’s position in Scotland seems to have been made official when he was knighted by an unnamed earl, according to the Scotichronicon, and gained (or took) the title of sole Guardian; in a Latin charter dated 29 March 1298 he styled himself ‘Wilhelmes Wallays, Knight, Guardian of the Kingdom of Scotland and Leader of its armies, in the name of the illustrious Prince, Lord John [Balliol], by the Grace of God King of Scotland, by consent of the Community of that Kingdom’ and ‘by consent and assent of the nobles of the said Kingdom’.

It was too much to hope, however, that all the leading magnates of Scotland would acquiesce to being ruled by someone whom they regarded with contempt (not unmixed with jealousy, perhaps, and even guilt) as a low-ranking young upstart. Someone like Wallace, in their eyes, had no business whatsoever to be leading the Scottish army – that was the role of the nobility. Much has been made of the pusillanimity or even downright treachery of many of the Scottish magnates, but they were caught in a difficult and dangerous situation. Most of them had estates in England as well as in Scotland; they owed allegiance as vassals to two overlords, two kings, and were looking to preserve themselves, their estates and their families. In the 1290s they must have felt, pragmatically, that the future lay rather with the powerful King Edward than with the cause of an independent Scotland espoused by Wallace. The concept of ‘nationalism’ scarcely existed in those days. The Scottish nobility did not, and probably could not, share the stubborn and ferocious resentment which fuelled Wallace’s hatred for all things English: Wallace, the extremist partisan leader, could identify with the dispossessed, the abandoned, the perpetual victims of warfare.

The real test was yet to come. The defeat at Stirling Bridge had been a terrible blow to England’s pride. As soon as Edward had extricated himself from his war with Philippe the Fair in March 1298, he hastened back to England: it was time to deal once and for all with this brigand who had dared to usurp his authority in Scotland. He moved his capital – exchequer, law courts and all – to York and summoned his magnates to a council of war there in May; the Scottish nobles cannily found reasons not to attend, and had sentences of forfeiture passed on them. The campaign was planned down to the very last detail. Finally, on 3 July, Edward crossed the Tweed near Coldstream and started moving slowly through Scotland with a mighty army: 1,500 mounted knights and men-at arms in four brigades, with twelve thousand battle-seasoned foot-soldiers, including a large contingent of Welsh and English archers.

Despite all the meticulous planning, the logistical organisation of moving and victualling such a huge army through hostile territory broke down. The Lowlands of Scotland were bare – the Scots had devastated their own fields and foodstocks in a scorched-earth policy to deprive the invaders of any sustenance. It was said that in all Lothian the English had been able to find only one skinny cow. The momentum of the march began to falter. The army had to stop at Kirkliston, a few miles west of Edinburgh, to await provisions from ships coming up from Berwick; most of the ships never arrived, because of bad weather, and those which did carried wine, not wheat. Soon the great army was hungry, mutinous and riddled with disease; there were furious drunken altercations between the Welsh archers and the English foot-soldiers, leading to brawls in which many died, including some priests who tried to separate the combatants.

It was now an army in deep trouble. Furthermore, Edward had no idea what the enemy was up to – for all he knew, the Scots army might be planning to mount a massive raid into England in his absence. On the morning of Monday, 21 July, he was on the point of falling back to Edinburgh to try to feed and calm his demoralised troops, when two Scottish earls (Dunbar and Angus) sent word to his camp that the Scottish army had been sighted within striking distance, only twenty-nine kilometres away, lurking in the great forest near Falkirk. ‘Praise be to God,’ Edward is alleged to have said, ‘who has brought me out of every strait. They shall have no need to follow me, for I shall go to meet them and on this very day.’

With that he marched his army westwards towards Falkirk. That night he bivouacked on the Burgh Muir south of Linlithgow, in the fields of the present Burghmuir Farm. In case the Scots tried to surprise them with a night raid, the English lay down in combat readiness, the knights with their huge stallions tethered at their sides. At some time during the night, it seems, King Edward was injured by his charger, breaking two ribs. Alarm spread through the uneasy, wakeful army: was the king dead? To calm his men’s fears, the elderly Edward (he was now nearly sixty) hauled himself into the saddle; sitting ramrod straight, he gave the order to break camp at once and move on to engage the enemy.

The Battle of Falkirk (22 July 1298)

Notwithstanding this unwillingness of the great nobility to support him, Wallace assembled a large army; for the middling, but especially the lower classes, were very much attached to him. He marched boldly against the King of England, and met him near the town of Falkirk.

TALES OF A GRANDFATHER, CHAPTER VII

High on a hill to the south-east of Falkirk a mounted patrol of Scottish spearmen caught sight of the English host moving in their direction through the early-morning mist. By the time a detachment of English cavalry had galloped up the hill to engage them, according to the English chroniclers, the Scots had disappeared. Local tradition has it that the leader of the patrol was none other than Wallace himself, perched on a great boulder on a ridge where the village of Wallacestone now stands. The boulder itself has disappeared, but in its place is a tall pillar, erected in 1810, dedicated to the memory of William Wallace.

From that vantage point, Wallace (or whoever else might have been leading the patrol) would have had a commanding view of the surrounding countryside: to his right the English army moving inexorably forward, to his left the Scottish army also, perhaps, on the move – but not, it would seem, yet aware that the English were almost upon them.

We can only speculate about what went through Wallace’s mind when he saw, or was told of, the English advance. Had he expected to see the English army on its way back towards Edinburgh, providing his forces with an easy target for harassment and ambush? Or did he welcome the opportunity of a great showdown with an army which, according to intelligence from his spies, was exhausted and demoralised? Or … or … or?

All conjecture apart, the fact is that on the morning of 22 July 1298, Wallace drew up his army on the slope of a hill somewhere in the Falkirk area, with a forest behind him and a stream with a low-lying boggy meadow in front of him.

What sort of a force had he been able to muster to face the armoured might of England? After his autumn foray into the north of England, Wallace – who now had the authority given to the Guardian of Scotland – had devoted considerable time to enlisting and training a standing army from the Lowlands and Borders for the defence of the realm. The Scotichronicon gives details of his conscription policy – a policy which cut right across the customary obligations of feudal duty of a man to his master – and the meticulous chain of command from groups of five right up to the general himself.

The nucleus of this army was based on spearmen: trained infantry equipped with twelve-foot spears and deployed in huge ‘schiltrons’. These were, in effect, oval-shaped phalanxes – formations of massed ranks, bristling on all sides with spears like monstrous hedgehogs. Each schiltron might consist of 1,500 to two thousand spearmen. In addition, there was a corps of skilled archers from Ettrick under the command of James the Steward’s brother, Sir John Stewart of Jedburgh. Where Wallace’s army was sadly deficient, however, was in heavy cavalry, the armoured squadrons of experienced fighting knights which Edward of England could require as a feudal obligation; the Scots horse were more lightly armed – skirmishers rather than cavalry. So when the two armies faced up to one another on the battlefield at Falkirk, there was a very considerable imbalance in military power as well as in numbers.

The site of the battle cannot now be determined with any certainty, alas. The English chroniclers provided a description of the topographical features, but this was general enough to fit a number of candidate places; there are no prominent landmarks, as at Stirling, which would help to pinpoint the spot, and the battle has been sited in various corners of the Falkirk district. However, the course of the battle, when it was joined, seems clear enough from the detailed English accounts.

The Scottish army was drawn up in four (perhaps five) massed schiltrons, each protected by a ring of sharpened wooden stakes roped together. Between the schiltrons were the Ettrick archers, and at the rear was a small force of cavalry provided by the nobility, under the command of Sir John Comyn, the ‘Red Comyn’ of Badenoch. It has been estimated that the Scots were outnumbered by two to one, at least, by the English host.

Before the battle began, Wallace is said by the English chroniclers to have shouted to his schiltrons, ‘I have brought you to the ring – now dance if you can.’ As a battle slogan to enthuse an army, it had a curiously resigned ring to it which chimed ominously with the peril of the situation.