The Flo'ors o' the Forest

Flodden monument

 A cold winter's day for a walk around a bleak windswept hillside is not the most enjoyable of outings but it seemed fitting for a visit to the site of the bleakest day in Scottish history.

Branxton Moor...Flodden field...the defeat inflicted on the armies of James IV by the English forces of Catherine of Aragon acting on behalf of her husband Henry VIII who was fighting in France defending Italy and the Pope from the French. The Scottish war wasn't even the main campaign.

Scotland had been in a "golden age" under the cultured, clever young king. The Highlands had been brought under control and diplomatic relations  had established an uneasy peace with England and support for the "Auld Alliance " with France. The arts and science flourished, seats of learning were established and enhanced. All was to be lost in the greatest blunder in the long list of blunders in Scottish governance.

James for all his attributes was not a good commander being brave but, at times, foolhardy and impetuous. In a chivalrous but unnecessary letter, he gave warning of his decision to invade. His progress was slow giving his opponents time a-plenty to prepare.

The superior force of the Scottish army was ranged on the top of Branxton Hill armed with fifteen foot long pikes which were used like a giant hedgehog allowing the schiltron to advance against an enemy which couldn't engage them behind their jagged exterior.

Looking up the slope of Branxton Hill

Looking down from the position of the Scots army.The dip between the two slopes is discernible.

After the battle had commenced, troops commanded by Lord Home on the flank had success against the English with this tactic and, encouraged by this, the main body moved down from the hill to engage the centre.

Unfortunately, they didn't know that at the foot of the slope just before the ground rose again was boggy morass into which they plunged knee-deep unable to make progress while the rest came crowding in from behind. Their wall of pikes was a now hindrance and they were slaughtered by the billhooks of the enemy.

James bravely rushed into the fray and became the last British monarch to die in battle. With him died the flower of the Scottish nobility, the clergy, the legislature, clan chiefs and nobles as well as thousands of his loyal subjects.

This left the country with an infant for king and a near collapse of the administration. A country that didn't really recover from the disaster of Flodden until James's grandson, James VI, united the warring kingdoms ninety years later.

James's body was never properly identified though Lord Dacre took what he believed to be it to London where it was embalmed but later lost during the Reformation.

The Kings Stone

There is a Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stone called the King's Stone near the A697 road to Branxton where James is said to have died but it is quite a distance from the battlefield and the brave James is almost certain to have died on Branxton Moor among his troops.

Some of the dead were buried around Branxton church

13th C chancel in Branxton church

As I walked around the battlefield, the place still a desolate emptiness about it that couldn't be entirely due to wind chill.

The drainage ditch

The line of the ditch marks the marshy killing ground of the battle

Taking the trail to the top of the hill I passed over a muddy, reedy ditch. The ditch that now drains the marshy ground between the two slopes, the ground were thousands of young men struggled to pull their feet from the clinging mud while their compatriots on the wet slope behind slithered and slid into their backs all the time wrestling with the now useless pikes. A ditch that marks the spot where they were butchered. How ironic that the Flo'ors o' the Forest were a' wede away because in 1513 there was no ditch to drain the bog

A nation devastated for want of a ditch.

Footsteps of Flodden revisited

  The exhibition on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots at the Scottish National Museum is superb.  The timelines of her convoluted personal and political life are easy to follow and  make it clear that so many of the problems that beset her reign were the unforeseen and, in some cases, unforeseeable, results of  her or someone else’s actions.

http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum/upcoming_exhibitions/mary_queen_of_scots.aspx



Mary seems to have inherited her impetuosity from her grandfather, James IV, the  calamitous loser at the Battle of Flodden, an event that scarred Scotland for years.    Not so much from the slaughter of the nobility,  most of whom were only motivated by self interest and acquisition, but for the loss from the clerical and commercial classes. This set back for decades, the economic and intellectual life of the country, that had been flowering under the Renaissance ideals of James.
By the time Mary came to the Scots court,  it appeared unsophisticated  and dominated by the uncouth ruffians that passed for  the aristocracy, though the Reformation had brought the beginnings of  that far seeing experiment - a school in every parish- that was to lead to widespread literacy and, eventually, to the Scottish Enlightenment but what a struggle it was to get there.
 It is five hundred years since  James ‘s disastrous foray across the border to Flodden Field and, last weekend, a walk was arranged along  thirteen miles of the route taken from Edinburgh across the Lammermuirs to the mustering point at Ellemford on the Whitadder.  

http://www.lammermuirlife.co.uk/In-the-Footsteps-of-Flodden.cfm

 Play-lets and  encounters were set up to entertain the walkers and to give a voice to the “others”.. the camp followers, the commoners,  those pressed into service, those on the make…the ones that don’t appear in  the historic accounts.

In the Footsteps of Flodden - A knight and his servant have thoughts on their situation!

In the Footsteps of Flodden- a "penny-jo" accosts two young recruits on the march!

The day finished with “ Ghosts” a tribute to all the young men killed in battle since 1513,  in all the wars and campaigns. Men who were conscripted, duped or pressed into service of arms with no choice but to obey.   The finale was that ultimate in laments, The  Floor’s o’ the Forest, made all the more evocative by the soft summer rain that set in as the walk finished.



To paraphrase, or misquote, both Toynbee and Hubbard… history, like life, is just one damn thing after another.  In  most of Scottish history.. and probably the rest of humanity as well…it seems  to lurch from one calamity to the next with not much in the way of  reasoning or logic.  The religious or political philosophy that  there is a plan, divine or otherwise, behind it all, seems wide of the mark.    History like evolution , doesn’t seem to have any fixed aim or ending.  It just proceeds with sudden leaps or turns when a variation  of the norm occurs.
Even our planned walk had its twists, false starts and repeat performances but, by and large, it could be counted a success which is more than can be said for Mary Queen of Scots or James IV…their achievements were overshadowed by their mistakes.
 Poor old James, invaded another country, thought it would all be over in a few days, didn't have a real objective, didn't have an exit strategy,.......history doesn't always repeat itself but it does rhyme as somebody once said.  Somebody also said it is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.
 If only only we could learn from history but we never do so we seem doomed to repeat it ...and usually at the expense of young lives.

In the Footsteps of Flodden

2013 is the quincentenary of the battle of Flodden the most disastrous event in Scottish history.  Amongst the many events to mark the anniversary is a dramatised walk along the route taken by the Scots army to muster at Ellemford on the banks of the Whiteadder Water.   
  
http://www.lammermuirlife.co.uk/In-the-Footsteps-of-Flodden.cfm 

Having got involved in drafting some of the vignettes to be performed at the rest areas on the walk, I thought I ought to revisit Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion: a Tale of Flodden Field  for a bit of inspiration.

I didn’t find inspiration but an interesting diversion that has nothing to do with Flodden but one that the Shirra had obviously heard and couldn’t resist working into his story.

Marmion, the flawed hero-villain of the story, has lodged for the night in the inn at Gifford where the innkeeper tells him the tale of Sir Hugo de Gifford, 13^th century Lord of Yester Castle, reputed to be a wizard, a necromancer who had raised “the dread artisans of hell” to build Goblin Hall beneath his castle

 

To hew the living rock profound

The floor to pave, the arch to round

There never toiled a mortal arm

It all was wrought by word and charm

 

The remains of Yester Castle

Sir Hugo had apparently employed French masons but the local populace, astonished by the unbelievable standard of the workmanship… and possibly, hearing the speech of the workers… were sure it was the work of goblins, an illusion that Sir Hugo would have willingly fostered.

The vaulting that amazed the locals

His host tells Marmion how, three hundred years before the ill-fated foray to Flodden, Alexander III, the last of the Celtic kings of Scotland, had sought the magic powers of Sir Hugo to predict the outcome of his fight against the Danes.

 The magus had directed him to combat, within an ancient ring-fort, with a wight that “treads its circle in the night”.    The king defeats the creature and foresees his victory against the Norsemen.

Marmion  feels he must try the same, to predict the outcome of Flodden.  On his return he says nothing but his squire notes that his “falcon crest was soiled with clay”.   An ill omen.

 

 The ring-fort is now an aerial shadow on a golf course; Yester Castle has long crumbled to ruin, its place taken by the elegant 18^th century Yester House; but the   subterranean Goblin Ha’ remains…a testimony to the expertise of Sir Hugo’s artisans …or his diabolic  arts.

Yester House