However, while Stirling Bridge was a singular victory, there was no possibility that it would end the war. What it did, on the other hand, was to buy time for the Scottish leadership to rethink its possible response towards subsequent invading armies and to help develop a greater sense of national purpose.
During the next ten months Wallace did everything possible to gather together an army capable of meeting the English, who this time would be commanded by their king. Although initially retreating before the invaders and devastating the country as he went, Wallace eventually offered battle on a relatively modest hill near Falkirk, standing on the line of the Roman Antonine wall. Why he chose such a position has puzzled commentators not fully appreciative of the conditions needed for his spearmen, although several other important factors no doubt influenced his decision. He knew, for instance, that his delaying tactics had not only caused the English supply system to break down but the army’s morale had fallen to an alarming degree. He might also have had his choices limited by the nobles among his cavalry, for whom Wallace’s tactics of scorched earth and evasion were contrary to their chivalric codes of military behaviour. They might even have threatened to desert him if he did not stand and fight.9 Such nobles, including the proud and powerful John Comyn (the Red Comyn, John Balliol’s brother-in-law), were virtually certain to have chafed against being overborne by a modest squire, however skilled he might have shown himself the year before. With the Comyns the fact that Wallace’s feudal superior, James Stewart, was a supporter and friend of their rivals, the Bruces, would not have helped either. Wallace could not risk their non-co-operation nor, worse still, their defection. Finally, he also had good grounds for doubting whether he could keep such a large army in being much longer and whether he could raise a similar one in the following year. Unless Wallace could beat the English decisively at Falkirk, Edward I’s determination to subdue Scotland would keep him in the border regions with his household troops ready to resume operations over the next campaigning season when Wallace would be less well supported.
Although such factors undoubtedly played a significant part in persuading Wallace to fight at Falkirk it was his creation of schiltrons expressly designed to counter the English heavy cavalry that was likely to have weighed most heavily in his calculations. He placed his four detachments of spearmen numbering somewhat fewer than two thousand men each in a rough semi-circle on the forward edge of Mumrills’ small rounded crest. These soldiers with their twelve-foot spears and wooden targes were aligned in circular formation at the edge of which men knelt shoulder to shoulder with the butts of their iron-tipped spears resting on the ground. Immediately in support were a further two ranks with their spears either grounded and pointing outwards or, more likely, lifted into a horizontal position to fend off attacking horsemen. Additional men waited in the redoubts ready to make good any gaps appearing as men fell.
The schiltrons, or shield rings as the chronicler Guisborough called them, were in some respects like traditional Greek phalanxes, although unlike the Greek formations they were static. In the Scottish phalanx its members’ fighting qualities were enhanced by the contemporary practice whereby a proportion of knights chose to fight dismounted with their followers. Standing alongside their clan or household superiors such as MacDuff, the Earl of Fife, or Sir Nichol de Rutherford, who brought sixty followers with him, the spearmen would not have dared let their comrades down. The ordinary levies would also have been kept up to their task by Wallace’s drill sergeants placed at strategic points within the ranks. These were given wide authority by a leader whose own determination was evident by the gallows which he ordered to be erected in every town ‘on which all without a reasonable cause absenting themselves from the army under foreign pretexts should be hanged’.10
In theory if the spearmen held firm armoured cavalry would be unable to subdue them, being literally kept at spears’ length. In practice, the cavalry enjoyed additional support from their own infantry, including the deadly longbowmen. To counter these opponents Wallace buttressed his schiltrons with Scotland’s short bowmen. While their weapons’ range and penetrative power were markedly inferior, once the English had moved onto the small hill to close with the spear circles the short bows could come fully into play.
By skilful use of ground Wallace had thereby countered the superior range of the English archers but he had no equivalent means of helping his other fighting component, the Scottish light cavalry, heavily outnumbered by their English opponents. He had tried the only way he knew how to make good this deficiency by requesting assistance from the French nobleman, Charles de Valois, along with his heavy horsemen, but this had been refused. Nonetheless while completely outmatched by the English heavy cavalry the few Scottish horsemen were still important to Wallace to help counter the English infantry and bowmen. Their presence alone prevented the English footsoldiers from ranging freely over the battlefield.
Whatever his concerns about the other arms, the essence of Wallace’s army lay with his spearmen. There is little doubt he would have known about the earlier battle of Maes Moydog (1295) where the English had demonstrated how their skilful use of cavalry supported by bowmen could defeat a Welsh infantry army. Wallace knew he had to do better at Falkirk and therefore ensured his men would also be supported by bowmen as they stood on the forward edge of Mumrills hill. He knew that they awaited an army that was not only tired and weakened from lack of provisions but whose Welsh bowmen were mutinous. In such circumstances he had reason to hope the English would expend their energies against his resolute formations and that Scottish courage and determination would cause them to lose heart as had happened with the English main army at Stirling Bridge.
The weakness of such reasoning lay in his limited options if the English were not rebutted and gained the ascendancy. The schiltrons were admirably drilled to hold their ground but in the time allowed him and with his soldiers’ inexperience he had been unable to extend their movements to the more complex ones of moving off the field in a cohesive fashion or – if it had ever crossed his mind – the far more difficult one still of taking the offensive against their opponents.
In the early stages of the battle Wallace’s tactics seemed fully justified even when he faced the English cavalry totalling some 2400 riders formed into three divisions. Of these no less than 1300 were full-time (including some mercenaries from Gascony) together with 1100 nobles who, accompanied by their retinues, were honouring their feudal obligations to the king.11 He not only succeeded in beating off the first two attacks but he inflicted heavy losses on the aggressors.
The balance began to move in favour of the English after Wallace’s cavalry fled but even when his schiltrons lost their covering archers and were pinned down and surrounded by the English cavalry it took massed bowmen firing from the shortest range into their packed ranks to seal their fate. By this point, however, Wallace had no further alternatives. He was forced to watch the destruction of his army, and families across the whole of Scotland would be obliged to mourn men lost in the battle, including short bowmen who, until new archers had completed their comparatively lengthy training, were irreplaceable. Wallace himself was forced to give up the guardianship and during the next seven years before his terrible death at the hands of the English never again commanded any sizeable military force.
CHAPTER TWO
DIVIDED LEADERSHIP
‘For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound who shall prepare himself to the battle?’
1 Corinthians 14:8
THE SEVEN YEARS OR so between Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk and Robert Bruce’s final commitment to the nationalist cause proved cruel ones for Scotland, despite the country’s fleeting diplomatic and military successes which delayed Edward’s programme of conquest and at one stage even