Edward I broke William Wallace's schiltrons with massed archery near Falkirk on 22 July 1298, ending Wallace's ascendancy without recovering Scotland.
The Battle of Falkirk, fought on 22 July 1298, was Edward I of England's answer to the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Ten months after William Wallace and Andrew Moray had destroyed an English army as it filed across the Forth, Edward came north in person, found the Scots drawn up on the moor south of Falkirk, and broke them in a single afternoon with the arm Stirling Bridge had never allowed him to use: massed archery, shooting into infantry that could not move and could not shoot back.
The defeat ended Wallace's brief ascendancy. He escaped the field, but he gave up the guardianship of Scotland before the year was out and never again commanded a Scottish army in the open. It did not, however, hand Edward the country. Short of food and money, unable to garrison what he had beaten, he was back at Carlisle by September, and the war he believed he had finished in 1296 ran on for another thirty years.
Stirling Bridge had made Wallace the effective ruler of Scotland. Knighted, and appointed Guardian of the kingdom in the name of the deposed John Balliol, he governed a country from which English administration had largely been driven, and in the winter of 1297 he raided into Northumberland and Cumberland. Andrew Moray, who had shared the victory and the guardianship, died of wounds within weeks of the battle, leaving Wallace to hold the position alone — a commoner directing magnates who outranked him and had their own claims on the kingdom.
Edward I was in Flanders when Stirling Bridge was fought. He returned in March 1298, moved the exchequer and the law courts to York to run the war from the north, and mustered at Roxburgh in June with the largest army he had yet taken into Scotland. The campaign nearly collapsed before it found an enemy: the Scots stripped the country ahead of him, the supply ships failed to arrive, and his Welsh infantry, drunk on wine that did arrive, came to blows with the English and threatened to change sides. Edward was preparing to fall back on Edinburgh when word came that the Scottish army lay only a dozen miles off, near Falkirk. On the night before the battle, camped in the open, he was kicked by his own horse and broke two ribs; he mounted in the morning anyway.
Wallace formed his infantry into four schiltrons — rings of spearmen with their long spears levelled outwards at several heights, the front ranks kneeling, the whole formation fronted with stakes and cord. The schiltron was a defence against cavalry, and against cavalry alone it worked: a horse will not run onto a hedge of spear points. Between the rings Wallace placed his archers, the bowmen of Selkirk forest under Sir John Stewart of Bonkyll, and behind them a small body of mounted men-at-arms, the only cavalry Scotland could field.
The English army was the mirror image of that weakness. It brought over 2,000 armoured horse — more heavy cavalry than the Scots could have faced anywhere — and some 12,000 foot, in four divisions, one of them under Antony Bek, the fighting Bishop of Durham, another under John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, who had lost at Stirling Bridge the year before. Its decisive element was neither: it was the mass of archers and crossbowmen, Welsh and English, whom Edward had learned to use in his Welsh wars and who had no counterpart on the Scottish side once Stewart's bowmen were gone.
The English cavalry came on in echelon. The vanguard swung left to get round the marshy ground in front of the Scottish position, Bek's division worked round to the right, and the two closed on the schiltrons from either flank. The Scottish horse left the field at this point, with little or no fighting. Stewart's archers, standing in the open between the rings of spears, were ridden down and killed almost to a man, and Stewart was killed with them.
The schiltrons themselves held. Repeated charges broke on the spear points and cost the English heavily in horses, and for a time the battle stalled exactly as Wallace had planned it. Then Edward stopped sending cavalry at the formations and brought his archers, crossbowmen and slingers to the front. Against missiles the schiltron had no answer at all: it could not charge without dissolving, it could not retire without dissolving, it had lost the bowmen who might have shot back, and it stood in the open at a range the English chose. The rings were shot into gaps, and when the gaps were wide enough the cavalry and the infantry went in through them. Macduff of Fife and Sir John de Graham were among the dead. Wallace got away into the woods with part of his force.
The withdrawal of the Scottish cavalry is the most argued moment of the battle, and the argument is old. Scottish tradition made it treachery: the magnates, jealous of a knight of no great family who had risen to govern them, abandoned Wallace to be shot to pieces. That version reaches most readers through Blind Harry's The Wallace, a long narrative poem written about 1477, and it should not be mistaken for a source. Blind Harry wrote nearly two centuries after the battle, for a fifteenth-century audience, and invented freely; he is evidence for how Scotland remembered Wallace, not for what happened in 1298.
The record permits a duller reading. Wallace had a few hundred horse at most against more than 2,000 English men-at-arms, and a cavalry force at those odds that stayed on the field would have achieved nothing but its own destruction. John Comyn, the head of the family that would supply the next guardian, is named among those present in some accounts and absent in others, which is a fair measure of how thin the evidence is. What is certain is political rather than tactical: Wallace held the guardianship by acclamation and victory, not by birth, and Falkirk removed the victory. Whether the nobility deserted him on the field or merely declined to die for him, they did not keep him in office afterwards.
Edward could not convert the victory. He took Stirling, burned as far as Perth, St Andrews and into Ayrshire, and was forced back to Carlisle by 9 September for want of supply; he had to invade again in 1300, 1301 and 1303 before the Scottish leadership submitted in 1304. Wallace resigned the guardianship in December 1298, and it passed to men with the standing he had never had — the young Robert the Bruce and John Comyn, joint guardians who could barely work together. Wallace went abroad to argue Scotland's case at the French court and in Rome, returned to a hunted life, and was betrayed, taken to London and executed in 1305.
Falkirk is the first clear demonstration of what massed archery did to infantry that could not answer it, and English commanders remembered the lesson better than they remembered the battle: the combination of dismounted men-at-arms and concentrated archers that beat the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 is visible here first. The Scots learned the other half of it. Robert the Bruce refused pitched battle for years, and when he finally accepted one at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 his schiltrons had been trained to advance and manoeuvre rather than stand and receive, and his light horse rode down the English archers before they could do at Bannockburn what they had done at Falkirk. Where exactly the battle was fought is still disputed: the ground below Callendar Wood has the most support, with Campfield and the old Roman fort at Mumrills also proposed, and the monuments in the town — the graves of Stewart and Graham in the old parish churchyard among them — mark memory rather than a surveyed field.