John de Warenne routed the Scottish host at Spottsmuir near Dunbar on 27 April 1296, a rout in a single charge that opened Edward I's conquest and cost John Balliol his crown within ten weeks.
The Battle of Dunbar, fought on 27 April 1296 on the moor at Spottsmuir, was the only field action of Edward I of England's conquest of Scotland, and it lasted about as long as one charge. The Scottish army, coming to relieve Dunbar Castle, held strong ground until it mistook an English column struggling across a stream for an army in flight; it abandoned the high ground to pursue, met a reformed line, and broke.
Almost nobody died. What the battle destroyed was not an army but a government: a hundred or more Scottish lords, knights and esquires went into English castles as prisoners, the earls among them, and the political class that might have organised resistance was removed in an afternoon. Within ten weeks John Balliol had surrendered his kingdom, the Stone of Scone was on its way to Westminster, and Edward believed the war was over. It had barely started.
Edward I had been asked to judge the Scottish succession after the death of Margaret, Maid of Norway, and had used the invitation to extract recognition as overlord before finding for John Balliol in 1292. He then governed Scotland as an overlord in fact: hearing appeals from Scottish courts at Westminster, summoning the king of Scots to answer in England like a defaulting tenant, and demanding Scottish troops for his war against France. In 1295 a council of twelve took the government out of Balliol's hands and made the treaty with Philip IV of France that later generations called the auld alliance.
Edward answered with an invasion. He stormed Berwick, Scotland's richest burgh, on 30 March 1296 and allowed a massacre that was still being talked about a century later. Dunbar Castle, held for the English interest by Patrick, Earl of March, was handed over to the Scots by his countess while he was away with Edward, and the king detached John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, to take it back. The Scottish army marched to relieve it, which is how the two forces came to meet on the high ground above the Spott Burn.
How large the armies were cannot be recovered, and the sources do not agree about what kind of battle this was. The fighting the accounts actually describe — a column of men-at-arms losing formation while crossing a gully, reforming on the muir and charging once — is a cavalry action of hundreds rather than a clash of hosts, and the single named Scottish casualty supports that. Other accounts give Warenne a thousand horse and ten thousand foot and the Scots several thousand more, and cannot be ruled out.
The chronicle figures are worthless as arithmetic and revealing as propaganda. English writers reported over ten thousand Scottish dead at Dunbar, a number that fits nothing in the narrative of the battle but fits the sack of Berwick a month earlier very well; a Scottish host of forty thousand belongs to the same order of invention. What is not in doubt is the composition of the loss. Nearly every prisoner named is a magnate: the earls of Atholl, Ross and Menteith, John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, and about a hundred and thirty knights and esquires.
The Scots took position on rising ground to the west, and it was a good one. To reach them Warenne's cavalry had to cross a gully cut by the Spott Burn, and no formation crosses broken ground in order; his ranks came apart in the descent and the climb, and from above the movement looked like an army coming to pieces. The Scots read it as a retreat and left the hill to chase it, in what the sources describe as a disorderly downhill charge rather than an attack.
Warenne's men reformed on the level of Spottsmuir and came on in good order into a crowd. The Scots were routed in a single charge, and the pursuit did the rest. Sir Patrick Graham, a Lothian knight, is the one notable Scottish death recorded, which is why the battle reads as a political catastrophe rather than a military one: the army was not destroyed so much as captured.
Edward I came in person the next day and Dunbar Castle surrendered to him. The garrison and the men taken on the field went south to English prisons — among them Sir Andrew Moray of Petty, justiciar of Scotia, and his son, sent to the Tower of London and to Chester Castle respectively. The son escaped over the following winter, raised the north in 1297, and shared the victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge: the most consequential prisoner Edward took at Dunbar was the one he did not keep.
The rest of the kingdom folded without fighting. Roxburgh surrendered, Edinburgh held only briefly, and Stirling was found abandoned with a porter left to hand over the keys. Balliol, who had retreated to the north-east, submitted in stages through the summer: at Kincardine on 2 July he confessed his rebellion, at Stracathro on 7 July he renounced the French treaty, and at Montrose on 8 July Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, cut the royal arms from his surcoat in front of the court — the humiliation that gave him the nickname Toom Tabard, the empty coat.
Edward carried off the apparatus of Scottish kingship as well as the king. The Stone of Scone went from the abbey to Westminster with the Scottish records and regalia, and some 1,900 landholders were made to swear fealty in the rolls of homage known as the Ragman Roll. Balliol went to the Tower, then to papal custody, then to exile in Picardy, and never returned; Scotland was to be administered as a land, not a realm, under an English lieutenant, treasurer and justiciar.
The completeness of the collapse explains the shock of what followed. Edward had beaten the Scottish nobility so thoroughly, and imprisoned so much of it, that when risings began in 1297 they were led by men outside that class or outside his reach — William Wallace in the south, the escaped Andrew Moray in the north — and they were fought in the name of the king Edward had deposed. Dunbar removed Scotland's leaders without settling the question of who ruled Scotland, and the war it was supposed to end lasted until 1328.