Who won the Battle of Falkirk in 1298?
King Edward I of England won. On 22 July 1298, near Falkirk, his cavalry and archers destroyed the army of William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland. The Scottish horse left the field early, English and Welsh bowmen broke Wallace's four rings of spearmen, and the defeat ended Wallace's guardianship.1
Ten months after William Wallace destroyed an English army at Stirling Bridge, Edward I came north himself. On 22 July 1298, the feast of St Mary Magdalene, his army found the Scots drawn up on rising ground near Falkirk, their spearmen packed into four great rings that the Scots called schiltroms. By evening the rings were broken and Wallace was a fugitive. This is the story of why the Guardian of Scotland chose to fight, how the English army nearly starved before it found him, how archers and stones did what mounted knights could not, and why a crushing victory still did not win Edward the kingdom. It belongs to our military history of Scotland and to the wider story of Britain at war. It is not the Falkirk of 17 January 1746, when a Jacobite army beat the government troops on Falkirk Muir.2
Why was the Battle of Falkirk fought?
Edward I had conquered Scotland in 1296. He sacked Berwick, crushed the Scottish host at Dunbar, took King John Balliol prisoner and ruled the kingdom through English officials. In 1297 risings broke out across the country, and on 11 September William Wallace and Andrew Moray destroyed the English army at Stirling Bridge. Wallace then spent the late autumn raiding and burning across the border in Northumberland and Cumberland.3
Edward had been campaigning in Flanders when Stirling Bridge was fought. He landed back in England on 14 March 1298 and turned the whole government toward Scotland. The Exchequer and the law courts were moved from Westminster to York, so that the king could fight in the north and still govern. Writs went out in April for a summer army to gather on the border.4
What did Wallace and the Scots want?
By the end of 1297 Wallace was Guardian of Scotland, and his aim was to keep the kingdom free for its absent king: his government acted in Balliol's name. Its support was uneven. Some knights and churchmen stood with him, but many of the great nobles held lands in England or had kin as hostages in Edward's hands, and Fordun, a Scottish chronicler, says Wallace brought the magnates under his rule whether they would or not. A Guardian who was not a magnate depended on winning.5
His strategy in the summer of 1298 was to avoid a pitched battle and let hunger do the work. The Scots fell back before Edward, stripped the Lothian countryside of food and waited for the invaders to starve. It very nearly worked. Fiona Watson argues that news of the famine in the English camp tempted the Scots to strike a blow that might drive Edward out for good, a reading the English chronicler Rishanger supports: the Scots, he says, gathered their greatest army in the hope of crushing the English while they were weak with hunger. The Battlefields Trust report adds that Wallace had planned a night attack on the English camp and had to stand and fight once it was betrayed.6
How did Edward I reach Falkirk?
The army gathered at Roxburgh in late June and early July and marched by Lauder to Kirkliston, west of Edinburgh, where it waited from 15 to 20 July for supply ships coming up the Forth.7
Contrary winds held the ships back for weeks, and in the camp men began to die of hunger. Bishop Antony Bek of Durham was sent meanwhile to take Dirleton and two other castles in East Lothian.8
When a few ships did arrive with wine, the king had two casks given to the Welsh, who were weakest. According to Walter of Guisborough they got drunk, fell on the English clergy in the camp and killed eighteen of them; English horsemen then rode into the Welsh and killed about eighty. The Welsh threatened to go over to the Scots. Edward's reply, as Guisborough reports it, was that both were his enemies and he would beat them on the same day. Rishanger adds that the Welsh hung back in the battle out of old hatred for the king.9
Edward had decided to fall back on Edinburgh when, early on 21 July, the Earls of Dunbar and Angus, Scots in his service, brought word that Wallace was camped near Falkirk, only a few leagues away, and meant to fall on the English camp by night. The king armed at once and marched.10
The army slept on the open moor near Linlithgow, shields for pillows, and in the night the king was hurt by his own horse: Guisborough says it trod on him as he lay, Rishanger that it threw him as he mounted and broke two of his ribs with a kick. He rode on all the same.11
How big were the armies at Falkirk?
The English army is unusually well documented, because its pay rolls and horse valuations survive. John Morris, reading the writs in 1901, counted about 12,500 foot summoned, 10,500 of them from Wales, and about 2,400 horse. Watson's later work on the Exchequer accounts found far more infantry in pay: 25,781 foot in the period up to 20 July, falling to 22,497 in the days covering the battle, with just over 1,500 men-at-arms. Hunger and desertion explain much of the drop. The Welsh were the largest single element in the foot.12
The cavalry fought in four divisions, recorded in a roll of arms drawn up for the campaign, the Falkirk Roll, which lists 111 bannerets. The first was led by the Earl of Lincoln with the Constable, the Earl of Hereford, and the Marshal, the Earl of Norfolk; the second by the Bishop of Durham; the third by the king; the fourth by the Earl of Surrey.13
No record of the Scottish army survives. Guisborough says prisoners spoke of about 1,000 armored horse and 300,000 foot, a number no modern writer accepts. Britannica gives about 5,000 foot and 1,000 horse, and the modern authors summarized by the Battlefields Trust range from 5,000 to 14,000. Modern writers agree that the Scots were outnumbered, and that they were mostly spearmen, with archers from the Forest of Selkirk and a small body of mounted nobles.14
How was the Battle of Falkirk fought?
Wallace had chosen his ground well. The Scots stood on firm, rising ground near Falkirk with a small burn and a stretch of marsh in front of them. He formed his spearmen in four schiltroms, great rings with the men set close together and their spears angled outward, placed his archers in the gaps between the rings, and kept his horsemen to the rear.15
Before the fight Wallace spoke to his spearmen in Scots. The chronicler Rishanger and the Northumbrian knight Sir Thomas Gray both preserve the words, roughly: I have brought you to the ring, now dance if you can. Gray adds that people were still quoting them long afterward.16
The English cavalry went straight in. The first division, under Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, rode at the Scots and found the marsh in its way; it had to swing round to the west. The second, under Bishop Bek, went round to the east. When the bishop told his knights to wait for the king, Ralph Basset of Drayton answered, in Guisborough's account, that it was not for a bishop to teach them war: he should go and say Mass.17
The Scottish horse fled almost at once. The English then rode down the archers between the rings. Sir John Stewart of Bonkill, the Steward's brother, who had dismounted to command the Selkirk bowmen, was killed among them. But the schiltroms held. The knights could not get in past the spears, and those who charged too rashly were killed at the spear points.18
Edward then did what the knights could not. He brought up his archers, who shot into the stationary rings at close range. The rings thinned and broke, and the horsemen rode into the gaps. Many Scots were cut down in the pursuit.19
How many people died at the Battle of Falkirk?
Nobody knows. The English chroniclers give vast numbers of Scottish dead: Guisborough more than 50,000 foot besides the drowned, Lanercost 60,000 or even 100,000. Sir Herbert Maxwell, who translated both Lanercost and Gray, called such figures preposterous, larger than Wallace's whole army, and judged Gray's estimate of more than 10,000 commons the more reasonable. The Battlefields Trust report records the losses simply as uncertain.20
The dead included Sir John Stewart, Sir John de Graham, called Wallace's right hand, and Macduff of Fife with many of his men. On the English side Guisborough and Lanercost name only the Master of the Templars, whom the records identify as Brian de Jay, while Rishanger says the Templar preceptor of Scotland died with him; Gough adds Alexander de Welles, prior of the Hospitallers at Torphichen. The English paid compensation for 111 horses killed, which both Morris and Maxwell take as the best measure of how light the English losses were.21
What happened after the Battle of Falkirk?
Edward pushed on to Stirling, which the retreating Scots had burned, and lay up there for a time to recover from his injured ribs. Raids and a long march followed, but the English could not feed an army in a wasted country, and in September the king was back at Carlisle.22
There the victory began to leak away. The Earls of Norfolk and Hereford, angry that the king had granted the Isle of Arran without their advice, went home with their men, and the army broke up. John Morris thought it a strange sequel to so striking a victory that Stirling Castle was in Scottish hands again little more than a year later.23
Wallace never again commanded a Scottish army. Not long after the battle, beside the River Forth, he gave up the guardianship; John of Fordun says he chose to serve in the ranks rather than lead nobles who had failed him. Before the year was out two of the greatest nobles in Scotland, John Comyn the younger and Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, were Guardians in his place.24
Wallace kept up the struggle for seven more years. In 1305 he was taken by Sir John Menteith, carried to London and condemned to death as a traitor.25
Who won the Battle of Falkirk, and why does it matter?
Edward I won a complete victory in the field. Wallace's army was destroyed, his authority went with it, and the English held southeastern Scotland through their castles for years afterward. The Battlefields Trust report judges that no other Scottish army able to face the English in the field could be raised for the rest of Edward's reign.26
But Falkirk did not conquer Scotland. Morris pointed out that an English army could win a summer campaign but could not keep the field through an autumn and winter, while the Scots still held the north. He added a warning: the first English charge had failed, and Falkirk might have been an earlier Bannockburn without Edward's own handling of the battle. Watson's verdict is sharper: Wallace, the supposed outsider, made the conservative mistake of offering battle to a larger army led by the king himself, and the aristocratic Guardians who followed him learned to rely on raids and harrying instead.27
Military historians have long read Falkirk as a lesson in tactics. Charles Oman called it the first engagement of real importance in which bowmen, properly supported by cavalry, played the leading part, and saw the same pattern repeated at Halidon Hill, Neville's Cross, Homildon and Flodden. The Oxford Companion to British History sums the day up in one line: superior archery and cavalry carried it for Edward. For how the bow compared with its rival, see longbow versus crossbow.28
How do the Scots remember Falkirk?
Scottish writers soon explained the defeat as betrayal. John of Fordun, writing in the late fourteenth century, blamed the envy of the Comyns, who he says left the field unhurt, and repeated a story that Robert Bruce, the future king, had gone with Bishop Bek's division on the flank march that took the Scots in the rear. No record confirms it. Henry Gough, who printed the campaign records, thought it more likely that Bruce's father, the elder Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, fought on the English side.29
Walter Bower, who later expanded Fordun's chronicle into the Scotichronicon, turned the defeat into a moral tale. In his chapter on the battle, which he calls the battle of the speckled chapel, the Latin rendering of Falkirk, Bruce shouts across a deep ravine to the fleeing Wallace, asking why he dared fight against the English king and the greater part of Scotland. Wallace answers that Bruce's own idleness and cowardice had driven him to it, and Bower says the words woke Bruce as if from a deep sleep. No English source has the scene, and Bower presents it as something that is said, not as record.30
The dead are still honored in Falkirk. In the churchyard of Falkirk Old Parish Church stands the monument to Sir John de Graham, a table tomb rebuilt in the eighteenth century over medieval slabs and caged in Victorian ironwork in 1860.31
Nearby, a slab is said to mark the grave of Sir John Stewart, and a granite Celtic cross raised by the Marquess of Bute in 1877 commemorates the men of Bute who died with him.32
Where was the Battle of Falkirk fought?
Nobody can point to the field with certainty. The traditional site lies on the north side of the old town, at Campfield, where the national record of Historic Environment Scotland places it, and where street names still recall the battle.33
The chroniclers say only that the Scots stood on hard ground on the side of a hill next to Falkirk, behind a marsh. Most recent writers, the Battlefields Trust report notes, prefer a site south of the town, on high ground below Callendar Wood looking across the valley of the Glen Burn. The report weighs both: the geology of the northern site, sand and gravel surrounded by silts and clays, fits the marsh in the sources better, while the southern site is the only one where battle archaeology could still survive, the north being entirely built over. Local historians add the Mumrills area and the ground by Woodend Farm as candidates, and the Oxford Companion to British History is content to place the fight near the River Carron.34
