On 14 September 1402 English archers destroyed a Scottish raiding army standing motionless on Homildon Hill near Wooler, and the quarrel over the ransoms of the earls taken there drove the Percys into revolt against Henry IV within a year.
The Battle of Homildon Hill was fought on 14 September 1402 on the slope of a hill near Wooler in Northumberland, now called Humbleton, and it is the clearest demonstration in the whole Anglo-Scottish war of what happened to men who stood still in front of English archers. A Scottish army under Archibald, 4th Earl of Douglas, coming home from a raid, found the Percys across its road, took the high ground as Scottish armies had been doing since the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, and waited. The English did not attack it. They sent their archers to within bowshot and shot into the packed formations until the formations disintegrated.
The battle produced almost no English casualties, very few named Scottish dead, and an extraordinary haul of prisoners: Douglas himself, wounded five times and blinded in one eye, with the earls of Fife, Moray, Angus and Orkney and some eighty knights. Those prisoners are why the battle matters beyond the tactics. Henry IV, who had not been there, forbade the Percys to ransom them, and the family that had put him on the throne three years earlier went into open revolt within eleven months.
The campaign began as a reprisal. In June 1402 a Scottish raiding party was destroyed at Nesbit Moor by George Dunbar, Earl of March — a Scottish magnate who had changed sides and taken service with Henry IV in 1400 after the Douglases outbid him for a royal marriage, and who knew exactly how Scottish armies fought because he had commanded one at the Battle of Otterburn. Douglas answered in September with a full noble host, crossed the border, and rode as far as Newcastle without meeting an army.
The trouble came on the way back. The Percys — the Earl of Northumberland and his son Hotspur, with Dunbar advising — gathered the northern levies and put themselves between the Scots and the Tweed near Milfield, where Douglas had camped in the low ground with his plunder. Seeing the English come on, the Scots gave up the flat and climbed the slope of Homildon Hill, which is the decision the whole battle turns on: it was the correct move against cavalry and the worst possible one against archery.
Hotspur wanted to charge up the hill. Dunbar, by the account in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, took his bridle and stopped him, and the English archers went forward instead, climbing the neighbouring slope until the Scottish formations were inside their range. The Scots were drawn up densely on open ground with their own archers few and outranged, and they had nothing to shoot back with. Thomas Walsingham, writing at St Albans, describes arrows falling so thickly that they pierced armour, which is the standard claim of every English chronicler about every English victory and should be read as an impression of volume rather than a ballistic report; what is not in doubt is that the Scots stood and were shot, because there is no account of the English men-at-arms doing any serious fighting at all.
One man refused to wait. Sir John Swinton — in Bower’s telling, which was written some four decades later — called out that it was better to die in the melee than to be shot down like deer, and rode at the archers with about a hundred followers, Sir Adam Gordon among them. They were killed to a man. After that the hill emptied: the formations broke, men ran for the Tweed and drowned in it, and the English rode down the rest. Douglas, who had a suit of plate said to have taken three years to make, was hit five times and lost an eye.
What the English took at Homildon Hill was not ground, or a campaign, but people. Douglas was captured, and with him Murdoch Stewart, Earl of Fife and son of the governor of Scotland; Thomas Dunbar, Earl of Moray, whose kinsman had helped destroy him; George Douglas, Earl of Angus; Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney; and about eighty knights. Scotland’s dead were fewer than its captured, and the losses that hurt were the ones that walked south alive.
Prisoners of that rank were, in the ordinary course of border war, the point of fighting. A captor kept his prisoner’s ransom, and the Percys had just taken the most valuable collection of Scots since David II of Scotland was led off the field at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. The crown’s right to reserve prisoners of royal blood or strategic importance was real, but it was exercised in return for compensation, and everyone in the north knew what the Percys expected.
Henry IV forbade the ransoms. His reason was defensible — he did not want Douglas and four earls back in Scotland with armies at their backs while he was fighting Owain Glyndŵr in Wales — and the order was given at the parliament that met that autumn, where he had the prisoners brought to him. To the Percys it was the last of a run of injuries: they were owed large sums for wardenship of the marches, the crown was slow paying for a war it wanted fought, and Hotspur’s brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer had been left to rot in Welsh captivity without royal help while the king took the prisoners Hotspur had won.
In July 1403 the Percys rose. Hotspur released Douglas, who a year earlier had been his prisoner, and took him along as an ally; Northumberland failed to arrive; and at Shrewsbury on 21 July Hotspur was killed by an arrow, the young Prince of Wales was hit in the face by another and survived, and Douglas was captured for the second time in eleven months. The house that had made Henry IV king was broken in stages after that — Bramham Moor in 1408 finished it.
Homildon settled nothing between the kingdoms. There was no invasion of Scotland behind it, no treaty, no transfer of territory; the border went on as it had, with wardens, raids and ransoms. Its consequences were all internal to England, and they ran through Shrewsbury to the long Lancastrian insecurity that Shakespeare later mined: Henry IV, Part 1 opens with the news arriving from "Holmedon", the king envying Northumberland such a son and grudging him the prisoners in the same breath, which is a fair summary of what actually happened.
Douglas’s own road ran on much further. Ransomed at last, he took a Scottish army to France for Charles VII, was made Duke of Touraine, and was killed at the Battle of Verneuil on 17 August 1424 by the same combination that had beaten him at Wooler — massed archery against a force that came on into it. On the hill itself there is a Bronze Age standing stone, the Bendor Stone, that the neighbourhood long pointed out as the battle’s memorial; it stood there two thousand years before Douglas did.