Bannockburn & the Rise of Bruce

1. Bruce's consolidation campaign, 1307–1314

When Card #7 closed, Bruce had won at Loudoun Hill (May 1307) and Edward I had died (July 1307). What followed was not immediate national liberation but a grinding seven-year campaign in which Bruce first had to win a civil war against fellow Scots before he could turn fully on the English. Through 1307–08 he broke his domestic rivals: he devastated the lands of the Comyn Earl of Buchan (the "herschip of Buchan") and, in August 1308, defeated the MacDougalls of Argyll — kinsmen and allies of the murdered John Comyn — at the Battle of the Pass of Brander, a narrow defile below Ben Cruachan, capturing their stronghold of Dunstaffnage. This effectively ended organised internal opposition.

Bruce then methodically reduced the English-held castles: Perth was stormed in January 1313, Dumfries fell in February 1313, and in the spring of 1314 came the two most celebrated captures — Roxburgh by James Douglas (19 February, his men crawling up in the dark) and Edinburgh Castle by Thomas Randolph (14 March), whose party scaled the north face of the Castle Rock at night guided by William Francis, a former garrison soldier who knew a secret path.

Crucially, Bruce did not garrison these fortresses. He pursued a deliberate policy of "slighting" — demolishing captured castles so they could not be reoccupied and used against him. As one Scottish Historical Review study of the campaigns puts it, "In 1314 the English-held castles of Roxburgh, Edinburgh and Stirling were seized and destroyed by Robert Bruce… the pinnacle of a policy by which Bruce systematically slighted the castles he seized in Scotland." At Edinburgh the destruction was so thorough that, by tradition, only St Margaret's Chapel was left standing. The strategic logic was sound: lacking the manpower to hold a network of static strongpoints, Bruce denied them to the enemy, forcing any future English invasion to fight in the open with no secure bases to fall back on.

2. The siege of Stirling and the Midsummer agreement

By 1314 only Stirling and Berwick remained substantial English strongholds. Around Lent 1314, Bruce's brother Edward Bruce was besieging Stirling Castle, held for Edward II by Sir Philip de Mowbray. Unable to take the great fortress by assault, Edward Bruce struck a chivalric bargain with Mowbray: if no English relieving army came within three miles of the castle by Midsummer's Day (24 June) 1314, Stirling would be surrendered to the Scots.

It was this deadline that forced the confrontation. Historians have long debated whether Edward Bruce's agreement was wise or reckless. According to Barbour, King Robert rebuked his brother's "folly," and many modern accounts follow this line: the pact effectively handed Edward II a fixed date and a fixed objective, compelling a major invasion and surrendering the initiative that Bruce's cautious guerrilla strategy had carefully built up. Others note that similar conditional-surrender arrangements had already delivered castles such as Dundee (c. 1312) without a battle, so the tactic was not unprecedented — the gamble was simply larger at Stirling. Either way, the pact converted a slow strangulation into an all-or-nothing pitched battle, exactly the kind of set-piece the Scots had avoided since Falkirk in 1298.

3. Army sizes reassessed — correcting the myth of the numbers

This is where popular history has done the most damage to the truth. Barbour's fourteenth-century poem claimed the English host "exceeded 100,000," and later romantic writers repeated wildly inflated totals; even the nineteenth-century "sceptical" ceiling of 50,000 is now regarded as far too high. These figures should be discarded.

Modern scholarship is far more modest and cautious. The consensus range places the English army at roughly 15,000–20,000 — commonly around 2,000–3,000 heavy cavalry (knights and men-at-arms) plus perhaps 13,000–16,000 infantry, including a body of Welsh archers — and the Scottish army at roughly 6,000–8,000, overwhelmingly spearmen, with no more than about 500 light horse under Sir Robert Keith and only a handful of archers. Specific historians' estimates illustrate the spread:

- Aryeh Nusbacher (The Battle of Bannockburn 1314) gives the English force leaving Berwick as roughly 2,000–3,000 horse and 16,000 foot. - Chris Brown, in Bannockburn 1314, frames it as "a mere 7,000 followers of Robert the Bruce" defeating "more than 15,000 of Edward II's troops." - G.W.S. Barrow, the foundational modern authority (Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland), decisively rejected the old inflated figures, putting the Scots at around 5,500–6,500 (about 500 mounted) against an English army several times larger but well under 20,000. - Michael Brown and Fiona Watson frame the modern position cautiously: as Watson puts it, "modern researchers estimate that the Scottish faced English forces one-and-a-half to three times their number," with a Scots army of "around 7,000 men, including no more than 500 mounted troops." - The Battlefields Trust is more minimalist still: "A more likely estimate for the Scottish army would be 6,000–8,000 men and perhaps 8,000–10,000 for the English, though with possibly only a few thousand English involved in the main action." Its battlefield report offers headline figures of "English: around 13,000 including up to 2,000 cavalry; Scottish: probably circa 6,000, including 500 cavalry."

The honest position is that no reliable count exists, but that the English substantially outnumbered the Scots — probably by something between one-and-a-half and three to one — while both armies were an order of magnitude smaller than legend suggests. The decisive factors were terrain, discipline and morale, not overwhelming Scottish numbers (the Scots were the smaller army) nor mythical English masses.

4. Day One (23 June): de Bohun's death and Clifford's repulse

Two celebrated episodes mark the first day. As the English vanguard came up the old road through the New Park, Bruce — mounted on a small palfrey, lightly armed, and carrying only a battle-axe while inspecting his lines — was spotted by Sir Henry de Bohun, nephew of the Earl of Hereford, riding a heavy warhorse (destrier). De Bohun lowered his lance and charged. Bruce stood his ground, at the last moment turned his nimble mount aside, rose in the stirrups and split de Bohun's helmet and skull with a single axe-blow, shattering the haft. The story is well attested but comes chiefly from Barbour, writing decades later; near-contemporary sources agree de Bohun died fighting Bruce with an axe, but the vivid detail is Barbour's. It should be treated with appropriate caution — but the essential fact of the duel is broadly accepted.

The more militarily significant event of Day One came on the Scottish left/eastern flank. An English cavalry detachment under Sir Robert Clifford and Sir Henry de Beaumont attempted to skirt the Scottish position and reach Stirling, riding towards St Ninians. Bruce sent Thomas Randolph's schiltron to intercept. Unsupported by archers, the English horsemen could make no impression on the disciplined ring of spears; the schiltron held, then drove them off, some fleeing to the castle and some back to the army. This was a foretaste of Day Two: it proved that a well-drilled schiltron could not only withstand cavalry but defeat it. That night, the Scottish knight Sir Alexander Seton defected from the English camp and told Bruce of the enemy's low morale, urging him to attack.

5. Day Two (24 June): the main battle and Scottish tactics

Overnight the English army moved down onto the low, wet ground of the Carse, boxed in between the Bannock Burn and the Pelstream Burn — soft, pool-dotted, ditch-veined ground, disastrous for heavy cavalry and cramped for a large army. On the morning of Midsummer's Day, Bruce made the bold decision that defined the battle: instead of waiting on the defensive as Wallace had at Falkirk, he advanced his schiltrons offensively out of the shelter of the woods and onto the plain. The Scots paused to kneel in prayer; Edward is said to have thought they were begging for mercy, to which a Scottish knight in his own army, Sir Ingram de Umfraville, reportedly replied that they sought mercy from God, not from him.

The constrained ground did the rest. English cavalry charges could not break the moving hedgehogs of spears; the great mass of English infantry and archers behind could not deploy or bring their numbers to bear, jammed between the advancing Scots and the burns. The archers who might have shredded the schiltrons — as English longbowmen had at Falkirk — were never effectively brought into play in the crush. Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, commanding in the van, was unhorsed and killed early in the fighting (reportedly having quarrelled with Edward the previous day and ridden in without waiting to don his surcoat). As the Scots pressed forward the cry went up, "On them! On them! They fail!" and the English lines began to buckle and collapse in on themselves.

6. The "sma' folk" episode examined

The most famous — and most doubtful — moment of the rout is the appearance of the "sma' folk": the Scottish camp followers and non-combatants who had been kept back (traditionally at Gillies Hill). At a critical point they are said to have surged over the ridge with makeshift banners, and the English, mistaking them for a fresh Scottish army, broke entirely. This is a stirring story, but its sourcing is weak. It appears first in Barbour's The Brus (c. 1375) and is absent from the near-contemporary accounts. Historians tend to accept or dismiss it according to where they place the battlefield. The most honest treatment presents it as semi-legendary embellishment: the English rout was real and probably already under way, and whether a crowd of servants tipped the psychological balance cannot be confirmed. (A separate, wholly unsupported modern claim that Knights Templar fought at Bannockburn should be rejected outright; no serious historian endorses it.)

7. Edward II's flight

With the field lost, Edward II was pulled from the fighting by his bodyguard — the Earl of Pembroke reportedly seizing his rein — and Sir Giles d'Argentan, reckoned one of the finest knights in Christendom, turned back into the melee and was killed. Edward rode first to Stirling Castle seeking shelter, but Mowbray refused him entry (or advised against it), pointing out that the castle was about to be surrendered and the king would simply be captured. Edward then made for Dunbar, pursued by James Douglas; from Dunbar the loyal Earl Patrick provided a ship that carried him to Bamburgh in Northumberland, and so back to England. The sequence — Stirling, Dunbar, ship — is well attested.

8. Casualties and immediate outcome

Casualty figures are genuinely uncertain and the medieval numbers unreliable. The English clearly suffered far worse, especially in the rout, when men drowned in the burns and the Forth or were killed struggling back towards the border. Chroniclers' totals vary wildly (Barbour's 30,000 English dead is impossible). Modern analysis is more cautious: Peter Reese, in Bannockburn (2003, p. 174), argued that "it seems doubtful if even a third of the footsoldiers returned to England" — a fraction which, applied to an English infantry force of roughly 16,000, yields the often-cited figure of about 11,000 English foot killed. (It should be stressed that this ~11,000 is a derivation from Reese's fraction, not a figure he states outright.) English losses among the nobility were heavy and better documented: contemporaries record around 700 knights and men-at-arms killed (Walsingham), with a large number of nobles — perhaps 500 men of rank — captured for ransom, the most prominent being the Earl of Hereford, later exchanged for Bruce's captured wife, daughter and the Bishop of Glasgow. Gloucester and Clifford were among the dead; Bruce had their bodies returned honourably to England. Scottish losses appear to have been comparatively light, with only two knights of note (Sir William Vipont and Sir Walter Ross) named among the dead.

The immediate outcome was clear-cut: Stirling Castle surrendered as agreed; Bruce's Scottish enemies were driven from the country; his kingship was secured in practice; and Edward II's authority, already fragile, was gravely undermined.

9. Why Bannockburn did not end the war

Here lies the central corrective. For all its decisive tactical and symbolic weight, Bannockburn did not end the Wars of Independence, and it did not win English recognition of Scottish independence. Edward II refused to renounce the English claim to overlordship, and the papacy still would not recognise Bruce as king. Fourteen more years of intermittent warfare, cross-border raiding and diplomacy followed. England did not formally acknowledge Scottish independence and Robert I as king until the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328 — and even that settlement was repudiated by Edward III in 1332–33, opening a Second War of Independence. The popular belief that Bannockburn "won the war" is one of the most persistent misconceptions in Scottish history — reinforced by films such as Braveheart, which the National Trust for Scotland's own Bannockburn material describes as "the epic (and epically inaccurate) Hollywood movie."

10. Bridging to 1320: the road to Arbroath

After 1314 the war continued on multiple fronts. Bruce pressed his advantage with raids into northern England and opened a second front in Ireland: in 1315 his brother Edward Bruce landed in Ulster, was proclaimed and then crowned High King of Ireland, and campaigned for three years amid a catastrophic European famine before being defeated and killed at the Battle of Faughart, near Dundalk, on 14 October 1318. In 1318 the Scots also finally recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed. Yet Pope John XXII, pressed by Edward II, still declined to recognise Bruce, summoning him and four Scottish bishops (November 1319) to answer for breaking a papal truce and excommunicating them when they refused. It was this diplomatic crisis — continued English intransigence and papal hostility — that formed the direct context for the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, the subject of Card #9.