Chris Brown - Bannockburn 1314: The Battle 700 Years On

As ever, there are several individuals whose interest, information and encouragement demand recognition. In the academic sphere, these include Professor Mason and Dr Reid of the Scottish History Department at St Andrews University, who brought a much needed degree of raddure to my PhD studies, repairing the damage and demoralisation caused by a long period of desultory and incompetent supervision. I cannot thank them enough for reawakening a passion for medieval Scottish history that had come very close to being utterly extinguished. I am also indebted to the unfailingly helpful and cheerful archival staff at East Register House and Kew. I also owe a great debt to the many scholars who have written about Scotland, England and France during the fourteenth century, and in particular to the small group of scholars who, since the 1960s, have brought the study of medieval Scotland out of the murk of romance and myth and into the mainstream of medieval historiography Professors Barrow, Duncan and Nicholson.

I am also grateful for the patience and understanding of my wife, Pat, and my children and their partners Robert, Colin, Christopher, Charis, Alex and Juliet. They have all had to put up with endless ramblings about the nature of medieval society and war. I have no idea how they have coped, but they have.

I would like to point out that my understanding of the battle is a product of how I see the source material, the terrain and the practice of war at the time of writing. It is perfectly possible that developments in archaeological techniques, a spate of new finds, or even a previously unknown piece of source material may yet emerge which might compromise or confirm the evidence on which all of the existing studies of this battle have depended.

Chris Brown, Kennoway, 2008

It is relatively rare that one has the opportunity to construct a second edition to a history book, rarer still if the volume is concerned with medieval or military history and almost unheard of for a book on medieval Scottish military history. As we approach the 700th anniversary of the battle and, of course, the referendum on Scottish independence it is inevitable that there should be a growth in interest in an event that has been so significant for Scots for such a long time. It is all too easy to inflate the importance of the battle as a military and political phenomenon, and forget that King Roberts war would not be concluded for more than a decade.

After 1314 the war was not generally conducted in Scotland, but in Ireland and England, and at one point there was a very real possibility that it would spill over into Wales as well. King Robert also had to face domestic opposition. In 1320 he was threatened by a widespread conspiracy of nobles whose intent was to replace him with Edward Balliol, son of the unfortunate King John.

Despite the political credibility gained through his military successes somewhat diminished by failure in Ireland Robert was not, strictly speaking, the legitimate king. Until the death of Edward Balliol in 1354 both he and his son David II continued to be usurpers, a fact that Edward III did his level best to exploit in his efforts to gain control over Scotland in the 1330s and 1340s.

Equally, there is no escaping the sheer artistry of King Roberts victory at Bannockburn. The defeat of the English in such a great encounter gave him political credibility at home and abroad and went some way toward confirming the innate superiority of the infantry over the cavalry. Well trained, well led and well motivated, the man on foot demonstrated that he was more than a match for the armoured knight; the lessons delivered by Robert I at Bannockburn, and then developed by men such as Henry Beaumont and Edward III at Dupplin and Crcy, would have a profound and permanent effect on the practice of war right across Europe.

Why write a book on Bannockburn at all? We can never hope to achieve a complete and undisputed understanding of any historical event, let alone a battle.

Bannockburn was only one battle in a very long war, or rather, a long series of wars, though all of them have the same issue at stake the conquest or independence of Scotland as a political entity. The rarity of major battles of manoeuvre is such that none of the larger battles of the Wars of Independence can be considered typical, so Bannockburn is not really representative of the general course or nature of the conflicts. Bannockburn was far from being typical in scale; in the half century between 1296 and 1346 there were only a handful of general engagements that involved more than a few thousand men Stirling Bridge, Falkirk, Halidon Hill and Nevilles Cross and the latter is, arguably, not really a battle about the survival or otherwise of the Scottish kingdom, so much as a facet of the Hundred Years War. Even the capture of King David did not really pose a threat to the independence of his realm. Despite their defeat, the Scots seem to have had no shortage of confidence in their ability to withstand Edward III, and Edward himself seems to have taken little or no interest in restoring the short-lived administration which had held much of southern Scotland in the 1330s for the English crown.

Operationally, Bannockburn was far from being typical of the general conduct of the war. There are examples of a similar tactical policy in action at the battle of Loudon and elsewhere. Myton

The battle occurred nearly 700 years ago, and so it should come as no surprise that the evidence tends to be limited, both in terms of quantity and quality. Even when studied in relation to the terrain, the material is often less informative than we might hope, indeed, study of the site may actually bring other factors into mind which might otherwise have escaped us. Relating written accounts to modern maps can be a frustrating and not necessarily a rewarding exercise. We may be confident that the burn we find on a map is the one referred to by this or that writer, but is it still in the same place? Has its course, width or current been affected by the construction of roads, railways or housing? Were its banks more treacherous in the past than they are today? Crucially, even if we are utterly certain that this is the burn that a given force crossed on a given day, we cannot be so certain that it did so at any particular point in the waters course.

Maps or diagrams of battles often present difficulties of their own. The symbols used to denote formations on the battlefield seldom bear any in-scale resemblance to the size or shape of those formations. To some extent this is obviously a matter of ensuring that the reader can identify the formations; a product of showing the course of the battle in a map that is too small to allow the unit symbols to be depicted in the same scale as the geographical features. This is not a problem unique to battle diagrams; the symbol used to denote churches by the Ordnance Survey is not related to the physical size of the church in question. The combat elements of medieval armies were little more than specks on the landscape; they were not large and the majority of the men fought in very close order something approaching one square metre per man for close-combat infantry, and perhaps six to eight square metres for every man-at-arms. It is quite possible that the entirety of Edward IIs army at Bannockburn could have been seated in Wimbledons Centre Court, which has a capacity of 16,000 and that all of King Roberts spearmen could at a pinch have stood on one full-size rugby pitch.