Who won the Battle of Flodden?
England won. On 9 September 1513, near Branxton in Northumberland, an English army under Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, defeated the invading Scottish army of King James IV. James was killed with a large part of his nobility, the last monarch in Britain to die in battle, and Scottish dead are estimated at roughly 5,000 to 17,000.1
On a September afternoon in 1513, below Branxton Hill in Northumberland, the great army that James IV had led into England was broken in a few hours. King James IV died with a great part of his nobility. For Scots, Flodden became the national disaster, mourned in song. For the English, it was a victory won by a northern army while their king was abroad.
Why James IV invaded England
In 1513 Henry VIII crossed to France to fight alongside the Emperor Maximilian I. Louis XII of France asked his ally James IV to create a diversion by invading England, and James, bound to France by the Auld Alliance, agreed. Henry had answered Scottish ultimatums with contempt. France supplied bullion, weapons and military advisers, and James set out to drill his levies in Swiss long-pike tactics.2
Henry had expected an attack. He left Queen Catherine of Aragon to govern as regent and gave the north to Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, a veteran who had begun his career as a Yorkist. His family had lost the dukedom of Norfolk after Bosworth in 1485; Flodden would win it back.3
The campaign: Norham, Ford and Flodden Edge
The Scots crossed the Tweed on 22 August 1513. Their heavy guns forced Norham Castle to surrender within days, and Wark, Etal and Ford fell in turn. James then camped on Flodden Edge above the Milfield plain, a position contemporaries likened to a fortress, guarded by seventeen guns. Surrey proposed battle for Friday 9 September. Accounts differ on whether James accepted the date, but he refused to come down and fight on the open plain.4
The armies and commanders
Numbers are uncertain. English Heritage gives the Scots 30,000 to 40,000 men and the English about 26,000; the Northumberland historic environment record gives 35,000 to 40,000 against 26,000. John Sadler notes that most contemporary commentators put the English at 16,000 to 26,000.5
James marched with most of the Scottish nobility, and his army had been mustered in late July and given some training. Surrey's men were mostly northern levies under lesser lords and knights, raised only after the invasion, because Henry's great nobles were in France. The Scots had heavy guns but had sent many experienced gunners away with the fleet, while the lighter English field guns fired faster. The Scottish foot carried long pikes, which need momentum and firm ground; most English foot carried the bill, a heavy cutting blade on a pole.6
The flank march
Surrey would not storm Flodden Edge. He marched his army in a wide loop round to the north, threatening the Scots' road home and forcing James to abandon his camp for unsurveyed ground on Branxton Hill. Sadler notes that a gap opened between Surrey's division and his son's, but James let the English finish deploying, in line with Swiss doctrine.7
The battle, phase by phase
Fighting began in the late afternoon, soon after 4 pm according to the historian Kirsten Claiden-Yardley, with an artillery duel that the English gunners quickly won. English metal and Scottish stone cannonballs have since been found in the marshy ground near the battle site.8
Under fire, James sent his divisions down the slope. On the Scottish left, Lord Home and the Earl of Huntly broke Edmund Howard's men until Dacre's horsemen steadied the line. Home's troops then stood aside for the rest of the day, a choice Sadler regards with suspicion. In the center, the Earls of Crawford, Erroll and Montrose, followed by the king's own division, went down Branxton Hill against Lord Howard and Surrey.9
The turning point: pike against bill
At the foot of the slope lay a wet, marshy dip, deeper than it looked from above. The Scottish columns lost speed and order and had to struggle uphill again. Once the pikes stalled, the English billmen closed in, and many Scots dropped their pikes for swords. On the Scottish right, Sir Edward Stanley's troops scattered the Highland clansmen of Lennox and Argyll.10
James and his household fought their way toward Surrey's banner and were cut down in the thick of the fighting. By dusk the English held the field.11
Why did James IV lose at Flodden?
James lost because Surrey's flank march forced him off his fortified ridge onto unsurveyed ground, the English gunners won the opening duel, and the marshy dip below Branxton Hill broke the momentum his pike columns needed. In the close fighting that followed, English bills beat stalled pikes, and the king's place in the front rank cost him his life.12
Casualties
Estimates vary widely. English Heritage puts the Scottish dead at 5,000 to 17,000 and the English at about 1,500; Sadler gives around 1,000 English dead. Claiden-Yardley counts about 10,000 Scots, among them the king's illegitimate son Alexander Stewart, Archbishop of St Andrews, nine earls and ten lords; another account counts twelve earls. Sadler puts the total dead on both sides at perhaps as many as 8,000, while the local estate that maintains the visitor trail speaks of 14,000 from both nations.13
The Scottish side
For Scotland, Flodden was a catastrophe: the king, much of the nobility and thousands of ordinary men died together. James was the last monarch in Britain to die in battle. His heir, James V, was seventeen months old; the queen mother, Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, served as regent until she remarried and lost the post to the Duke of Albany, and years of faction followed.14
Scots remember the battle above all through The Flowers of the Forest. Its best-known words were written around 1756 by Jean Elliot, a judge's daughter, to a much older pipe tune, and published anonymously in 1776. The refrain mourns that “the flowers o' the forest are a' wede away”. Like Culloden, Flodden is remembered as a loss more than a lesson, the dark counterpart to Bannockburn.15
The English side
For England, Flodden was a victory won without the king, who was besieging towns in France. Queen Catherine is reported to have sent James's bloodstained coat to Henry as a token of victory. The decisive choice was Surrey's: rather than attack Flodden Edge head on, he risked a long march that briefly divided his army.16
In February 1514 Surrey was created Duke of Norfolk, and the Howard arms gained an augmentation of honor, the Scottish royal lion cut in half and pierced through the mouth by an arrow, still borne by the dukes today.17
Aftermath and consequences
The day after the battle a Scottish force tried to recover the abandoned guns and was beaten back; the guns were taken first to Etal Castle. James's body, found on the field and taken to Berwick, was embalmed and sent south and lay for years at the Carthusian priory of Sheen. A long royal minority left Scotland divided, and Henry encouraged pro-English factions while Lord Dacre kept the border unsettled. Yet the Auld Alliance with France survived. For the wider picture, see the greatest battles in British history.18
The battlefield today
The battlefield is on Historic England's register of historic battlefields, and its memorial is Grade II listed. A granite cross, put up in 1910 by the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, stands on Piper's Hill and honors the dead of both nations. Its site owes much to a Victorian vicar of Branxton who identified the knoll with the “Piperd Hill” where, according to the Tudor chronicler John Stow, James fell; archaeologists treat that claim with caution.19
A trail leads from the memorial across the field, the core of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum, a network of 41 sites created for the quincentenary in 2013. Nearby Etal Castle, taken by the Scots in 1513, has an English Heritage display on the battle.20
