Aymer de Valence surprised Robert the Bruce's camp near Methven at dusk on 19 June 1306, scattering the army of a king who had been crowned twelve weeks earlier and turning him into a fugitive.
The Battle of Methven, fought on 19 June 1306 a few miles west of Perth, was not a battle in the sense that the Battle of Falkirk or the Battle of Bannockburn was one. It was a raid on a camp: Aymer de Valence, Edward I's lieutenant in Scotland, came out of Perth at dusk and fell on a Scottish army that had unsaddled, put down its weapons and gone looking for food.
The victim was a king of twelve weeks' standing. Robert the Bruce had killed John Comyn at Dumfries in February and been crowned at Scone in March; at Methven he lost his field army, several of his closest supporters and any prospect of holding Scotland by conventional means. The year that followed was the lowest point of his reign — brothers executed, women of his family imprisoned, the king himself a fugitive in the west — and the way he fought after it was decided by what happened here.
On 10 February 1306 Bruce met John Comyn, the head of the rival house and the man best placed to oppose him, in the Greyfriars church at Dumfries, and Comyn was killed there. It was murder, and sacrilege as well, and it forced Bruce to move before the consequences caught up with him: he was crowned at Scone on 25 March, with Isabella, Countess of Buchan, performing the office her family traditionally claimed, and he was excommunicated for the killing.
Edward I's response was not the measured reconquest of 1296. He appointed Aymer de Valence his special lieutenant and ordered the dragon banner raised, the signal that the ordinary conventions were suspended: no quarter, and everyone taken in arms to be put to death without trial. Valence, whose wife was Comyn's kinswoman, took Perth in June and held it. Bruce, with a following drawn largely from his own earldom and the men who had joined him at the coronation, came up to the walls and challenged him to come out and fight.
Valence answered that the hour was late and that he would give battle in the morning. Bruce accepted the answer, drew off about six miles to the wooded country near Methven and the River Almond, and made camp. His men took off their armour, turned the horses out and scattered to forage. Whether he had been given a promise or had merely assumed one is the point on which the sources divide, and it matters, because the whole moral weight of the story rests on it.
The chivalric version comes from John Barbour, whose verse life of the king, The Brus, was written about 1375 under Bruce's grandson: in Barbour the deferral is a formal undertaking and Valence breaks it. English record has no such undertaking and no reason to invent one, and a commander who had been told to give no quarter was unlikely to feel bound by the etiquette of the tournament. What is agreed is the event: as darkness came on, Valence brought his force out of Perth and struck the camp.
There was little fighting to describe. The Scots got what men they could into some kind of order and were ridden over; the rest were caught unarmed among the tents and the horse lines. Bruce himself was unhorsed in the press — Barbour says three times, and has him rescued each time, once by Sir Christopher Seton and once from the grasp of Sir Philip de Mowbray, who had recognised him and taken hold of his bridle.
The prisoners tell the story better than the casualties. Alexander Scrymgeour, who carried the royal standard, David de Inchmartin, Alexander Fraser, Hugh de la Haye, John de Somerville and Bruce's own chaplain were taken, along with Thomas Randolph, the king's nephew. Scrymgeour and Inchmartin were executed under Edward's order. Randolph, who afterwards served the English for a time before returning to his uncle, lived to command a division at Bannockburn — the clearest measure of how narrow the margin was between a lost cause and a won one. Bruce got away west with a few hundred men, among them his brother Edward and James Douglas.
The retreat became a disintegration. Moving west through Breadalbane, the remnant was attacked again in the summer at Dalrigh by the MacDougalls of Lorn, kinsmen of the murdered Comyn, and broke up for good. Bruce sent the women of his household north for safety under his brother Neil and the Earl of Atholl; they were seized at the sanctuary of Saint Duthac at Tain and handed to the English by the Earl of Ross.
Edward I treated them as rebels rather than noncombatants. Bruce's brothers Neil, and later Thomas and Alexander, were executed; his sister Mary and Isabella, Countess of Buchan, who had crowned him, were shut in cages; his daughter Marjorie Bruce spent eight years in English custody. The king vanished over the winter of 1306 into the western isles, and the received story of the spider in the cave belongs to this gap in the record, where later tradition supplied what the sources do not.
Methven taught Bruce the lesson Falkirk had taught the Scots eight years earlier, and this time it was learned. He never again gave an English commander the chance to fight him on ground and terms of that commander's choosing. When he returned in 1307 he fought in ambush and by night, in country he knew, against detachments rather than armies; he took English-held castles by escalade and surprise and then pulled them down so they could not be held against him again.
The refusal of pitched battle lasted until 1314, and even then it was forced on him: his brother's bargain over Stirling Castle committed him to meet an English army in the field, and he accepted it only after eight years of avoiding exactly that. The Battle of Bannockburn is the victory Scotland remembers, but the discipline that won it — schiltrons trained to move, prepared ground, an army that would not fight until the conditions were right — was assembled in the years after a king lost everything to a night attack outside Perth.