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The Inventory of Historic Battlefields – Battle of Sauchieburn
The Inventory of Historic Battlefields is a list of nationally important battlefields in Scotland. A battlefield is of national importance if it makes a contribution to the understanding of the archaeology and history of the nation as a whole, or has the potential to do so, or holds a particularly significant place in the national consciousness. For a battlefield to be included in the Inventory, it must be considered to be of national importance either for its association with key historical events or figures; or for the physical remains and/or archaeological potential it contains; or for its landscape context. In addition, it must be possible to define the site on a modern map with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
The aim of the Inventory is to raise awareness of the significance of these nationally important battlefield sites and to assist in their protection and management for the future. Inventory battlefields are a material consideration in the planning process. The Inventory is also a major resource for enhancing the understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of historic battlefields, for promoting education and stimulating further research, and for developing their potential as attractions for visitors.
Designation Record and Full Report Contents
Name Alternative Name(s) Date of Battle Local Authority NGR Centred Date of Addition to Inventory Date of Last Update Overview and Statement of Significance Inventory Boundary Historical Background to the Battle
**_- The Armies
- Numbers
- Losses
- Action
- Aftermath and Consequences_** Events and Participants - Context Battlefield Landscape **_- Location
- Terrain
- Condition_** Archaeological and Physical Remains and Potential Cultural Association - Commemoration and Interpretation Select Bibliography **_- Information on Sources and Publications
- Full Bibliography
- Primary Sources
- Cartographic and Illustrative Sources
- Secondary Sources_**
SAUCHIEBURN
Alternative Names: Sauchie
11 June 1488
Local Authority: Stirling
NGR centred: NS 803 896
Date of Addition to Inventory: 14 December 2012
Date of last update: N/A
Overview and Statement of Significance
In 1488 a number of disaffected Scottish nobles rose against James III, with his son, James, Duke of Rothesay, who was only 15, as their nominal leader. The two sides met in battle just south of Stirling and the rebels prevailed. James III fled, and tradition has it that he was murdered by a priest as he lay injured in a mill after a fall from his horse. Neither the location nor the precise circumstances of James III death are clear, however with his death his son became James IV of Scotland.
The battle is significant as a new King comes to the throne of Scotland as a direct result of the conflict. It also one of the few battles where a reigning King of Scotland is killed as a result of the battle, although James III does not appear to have died in the battle itself but in his attempt to escape.
Inventory Boundary
The Inventory boundary defines the area in which the main events of the battle are considered to have taken place (landscape context) and where associated physical remains and archaeological evidence occur or may be expected (specific qualities). The landscape context is described under battlefield landscape : it encompasses areas of fighting, key movements of troops across the landscape and other important locations, such as the positions of camps or vantage points. Although the landscape has changed since the time of the battle, key characteristics of the terrain at the time of the battle can normally still be identified, enabling events to be more fully understood and interpreted in their landscape context. Specific qualities are described under physical remains and potential : these include landscape features that played a significant role in the battle, other physical remains, such as enclosures or built structures, and areas of known or potential archaeological evidence.
The Inventory boundary for the Battle of Sauchieburn is defined on the accompanying map and includes the following areas:
- Patches of surviving woodland, including Bar Wood, Auchenbowie Wood, Pleanbank Wood, and the surrounding areas, that may indicate the original extent of the Torwood.
- The Bannock Burn, including the ford at which James III is traditionally said to have been murdered.
Historical Background to the Battle
James III is said to have had up to 30,000 men, including Highland archers, with a mixture of infantry and cavalry; this seems an unusually high number for the period and there is only one source that gives any numbers. Opposing him was a rebel army of up to 18,000 men (again with the caveat that the numbers are probably subsantially overstated) under Angus, Hepburn and Hume (known as the Lords), including a large contingent from Dumfries & Galloway. The accounts suggest that the main part of the rebel army was mounted. It was nominally led by James’ son, the future James IV.
The two armies met at a point two miles from Stirling and a mile from Bannockburn, north of Torwood. The precise location is unknown but the general location is relatively clear. The fighting seems to have started with a charge by the Lords’ army that was driven back by archery, but a second assault by the Annandale men caused James III to flee the battlefield as it seemed as though they would break through. Despite his departure, the fighting continued for some time, although there seem to have been few casualties on either side. Eventually the Royalist army withdrew, possibly due to the rumour of James III’s death spreading among the army, and the Lords were left as the victors. The circumstances of James’ death are unclear, and it took some time to establish with certainty that the king had been killed. As a result of his guilt over the death of his father, James IV allegedly wore a heavy chain around his waist as penance for the rest of his life.
The Armies
James III : Lindsay of Pitscottie says that James had 30,000 men before the battle. Alexander Ruthven, Sheriff of Strathearn, brought
“…a thousand Gentlemen, well horsed with Jack and spear, a thousand Bows, a thousand half-long swords and Habergeons.”
According to Pitscottie, the order of battle was 10,000 Highland men with bows in the vanguard, which included the Earl of Huntly and the Earl of Atholl, 10,000 men of the ‘West-land’ and Stirlingshire in the rearguard, with the Earl of Menteith, Lord Erskine and Lord Graham leading, and the king himself was in ‘great battle with all the Borrows and Commons of Scotland, on the one Wing.’ On the king’s right-hand were Lord David, Earl of Crawford, and Lord David Lindesay of The Byres, with 2,000 horsemen and 6,000 Footmen from Fife and Angus; and on his left-hand and wing, Alexander Lord Ruthven, with 5,000 men from Strathern and the Stormont.’
The Lords : Pitscottie says that the king’s army was opposed by 12, horsemen and 6,000 foot and that the rebels were arrayed in three battles, with 6,000 men in each. The Humes and Hepburns had the vanguard with men of the Merse, Teviotdale and East Lothian. Next to them were the men of Liddisdale and Annandale and many of Galloway.
“And then came all the Lords that conspired against the king, and brought with them in company, the Prince, to be their Buckler and Safeguard.”
No numbers are given by the other main commentators. Pitscottie’s account suggests that the Lords were outnumbered by the Royalist army, but there is
no corroboration for this and it has also been argued that the Lords would probably have avoided battle if they had been significantly outnumbered.
Numbers
No further information.
Losses
James III was killed at some stage during the course of the battle, and is obviously the highest ranking casualty; Pitscottie said that whilst many were taken and hurt on both sides, few others were slain. He adds that he had heard of ‘No man of reputation that was slain at that time; but there were many Earls, Lords and Barons that were taken and ransomed.’
Buchanan, however, says that on the royal side Alexander Cunningham, Earl of Glencairn, died with a few of his vassals and kinfolk. Many were wounded on both sides.
Action
Graham, writing in 1960, noted that the only contemporary documents that allude to the battle are an Act of Parliament of 17 October 1488 and a grant of lands made in 1489. The former says
“…the debate and reason of the field of Stirling was proposed, in which the late James, king of Scotland, whom God absolve, father of our sovereign lord, happened to be slain...”
The grant of land alludes to the finding of Bruce’s sword, which James III is said to have carried ‘in war near to Stirling on St Barnabas’s day.’ These references do not mention Sauchieburn, or the way in which the king met his death.
The fullest account comes from Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, who completed his chronicle in 1576. He gives the date of the battle as 18 June, but St Barnabas’s day is 11 June. ‘Sauchieburn’ is never mentioned. He says that the king came to Stirling with his army, but had to spend the night in the town, having been unable to gain entrance to the castle, whose keeper, Shaw, had sided with the rebels. The king had also learnt that his son was with the rebels, having been taken, according to the keeper, against his will, although Buchanan says the keeper had in fact been bribed. In the morning his army moved out to Torwood, south of Stirling, ‘in arrayed battle, and there planted down till more came to him.’
The Lords’ army came forward to the Water of Carron, above the bridge, and ‘planted there’ that night. The following morning ‘there came wise Men, on both the sides, to treat of Peace’, but the king, seeing that his forces outnumbered the Lords’ moved his men forward to the fields and put them in order of battle.
When the king heard that his enemies were in sight he leapt upon the horse that Lord Lindsay had given him and rode forward. The Lords’ army was
and their neighbours from the western coasts, adding that they advanced boldly with longer spears than their adversaries and put the centre of the king’s army to flight. He differs from Pitscottie in saying that James fell from his horse whilst fleeing to one of his ships, stationed in the Forth, rather than to Stirling. He took refuge in some water mills ‘but being overtaken, he was slain there, with a few attendants. ’Buchanan says there were three who pursued him very closely (Patrick Gray, Stirling of Keir and a priest named Borthwick), but it is not known which of them killed him. He says that the report of James III’s death ‘although doubtful’ stopped the pursuit and slaughter of fugitives, for the nobles wished it to appear that the war was undertaken against the king only, and not against the people.
It should be noted that Graham, who pointed out that there is no contemporary account of the way in which James III died, believed that the account of his murder, first given by Pitscottie, is a piece of romantic embroidery, adapted from Boece’s account of the murder of Sir John Comyn as given in Bellenden’s translation of 1536. He illustrated this by comparison of the two texts which are strikingly similar.
Aftermath and Consequences
In Pitscottie’s account, the Lords, together with the prince, stayed at Linlithgow waiting to hear what had happened to the king. They were informed that he had been taken on board two ships under Captain Wood, a loyalist, who had recovered many injured men from the battle using small boats. Wood denied that the king was there and said they might search the ships if they wished. However, the Lords, unhappy with this response, summoned him to the Council, but he, knowing that the king had been murdered, was suspicious and only came because two Lords were sent as pledges to his ships until he returned safely.
Pitscottie’s account gives a sense of the relationship between James III and James IV. When Captain Wood presented himself to the Council, the Prince asked him if he were his father, to which the Captain replied that he was not, but was his true servant. Wood continued to maintain that the king was not in his ships and that he remained loyal to him. Although the Lords were unhappy with his response and attitude they had no alternative but to let him return safely to his ships, for fear of harm coming to their pledges, who would be hanged if the Captain suffered any harm. As it happened the pledges would actually have been hanged if the captain had been any later returning. The council sought ships and sailors to seize Wood, but such was his reputation, that none would, ‘not even if they had ten ships to his two... ‘
Buchanan says that James III was considered a tyrant, ‘a prince not naturally of bad disposition, but corrupted by evil communication’, adversely influenced by the Boyds and by ‘men of the very lowest description’, and also influenced by the example of many of his fellow kings in Europe. It was therefore voted in the next Convention of the Estates that he was justly slain, and an act passed to prevent all who had borne arms against him from being ever personally, or in their posterity, ‘disturbed on that account’.
Buchanan says that when the death of the king was finally confirmed the Lords organised a magnificent funeral for him, which took place at Cambuskenneth Abbey near Stirling on 25 June. Even after this the prince himself did not govern, even when he was crowned James IV, and instead power was wholly invested in Angus, Hepburn and Hume. However, in due course, James IV would exert his own authority and became an effective King of Scots.
Events & Participants
James III was an unpopular king for most of his reign, which lasted from 1460 to 1488. Amongst other things, his preference for his own favourites, many of them commoners, alienated many of the nobility and members of his own family. His early desire for an alliance with England also contributed to this unpopularity; despite the fact that his nobles were extremely reluctant and the English were suspicious of his motives, James insisted on trying to get an alliance. In 1482, he lost Berwick to the invading English, with whom his brother Alexander had allied himself; when he raised an army, again promoting his favourites, many of the nobility turned against him in open rebellion. James’s favourites were murdered and he was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. Even after this he continued to seek an alliance with England, continued to promote his favourites and became estranged from his wife and eldest son, James. The fact that James IV allegedly mistook Captain Wood for his father after the battle indicates the lack of relationship between the two James. It is not clear to what extent the young James, later James IV, was an active participant against his father or simply a pawn used by the rebel nobles to legitimise their rebellion.
James IV would become known as a ‘Renaissance King’, patronising the arts and sciences, although his guilt and grief at his father’s death was so great that he wore an iron belt of penitence around his waist for the rest of his life. He signed a peace treaty with Henry VII of England in 1502, and married his daughter Margaret in 1503. However, bound by the Auld Alliance treaty of 1295, he sided with France in its war with England and led his army south in the summer of 1513. The Scots were routed at Flodden Field on 9 September 1513, where James was killed, along with many of the Scottish nobility and thousands of his countrymen.
Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Angus, was one of the leaders of the rebellion against James III. Known as ‘Bell-the-Cat’ for having taken the risk of attacking James’ favourites and executing them (the name is derived from one of Aesop’s fables, The Mice in Council ), Angus was one of the Scottish nobles who supported the English invasion of 1482-3 when Edward IV of England seized Berwick. Initially, Angus was one of James IV’s guardians but his relations with the young king quickly became as troubled as they had been with James III, and Angus was on several occasions allied with England against the Scottish Crown. He was absent from the army at Flodden in 1513, but lost two sons in the battle.
Colin Campbell, 1st Earl of Argyll, was a strong supporter of James II against the Black Douglases and was created an earl by James III. He was Lord
pursuit had begun whilst fighting continued in the wood, or if in 1488, ‘Tor Wood’ denoted an area of woodland or park which stretched further northwards than it does nowadays. The latter point is reasonable, as the accounts of Bannockburn in 1314 make it clear that Tor Wood extended much further north at that date, but the problem with Graham’s location is that it ignores the measurements given in the sources, which are that the battle took place one mile from the field of Bannockburn and two miles from Stirling. While any location derived from this information will necessarily be very rough, it does suggest a location on the south side of modern-day Bannockburn. If that is correct, then the most likely place for James’ army to have mustered initially is on the hill above the Bannock Burn, with the fighting taking place on the ground to the south.
Graham placed the mill where James was allegedly murdered at Bannockburn, and that the ruined ‘Beaton’s mill’ at Milton which was reputed to be the site of the murder was not only in the wrong place, but was actually an ordinary small cottage, probably of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and certainly not medieval.
Terrain
The ground where the fighting is presumed to have taken place is relatively high and forms part of the ridge of high ground on the southern side of the Carse. The northern edge includes a hill which stands above the oldest part of Bannockburn village, with the ground sloping relatively gently to the south and east. To the south, the ground continues to slope down towards the river Carron, with ridges of higher ground to the east and west. It forms a broad valley that was probably part of Tor Wood in the medieval period.
Condition
The ground is remarkably open and well preserved given the proximity to Bannockburn and Stirling. There are portions of the battlefield that have been developed for housing, some of which are likely to have been part of the fighting. The presence of housing on some of the battlefield, together with the proximity to Bannockburn, means that the battlefield is likely to be at risk of further housing development. The modern M80, M9 and the A872 roads also run through the site.
Archaeological and Physical Remains and Potential
There are no physical remains currently known from the battlefield. However, the fighting will have generated a reasonable amount of material, as there was significant use of archery by James III’s Highland troops, along with hand to hand fighting as the armies came together. The area most likely to have been the scene of the fighting is relatively undeveloped so there is a reasonable expectation that there will be artefactual material remaining from the battle.
The only human remains known from the battle are those of James III himself, which were buried at Cambuskenneth Abbey. It is unclear from the primary sources what the death toll was in the battle, but it seems to have been quite
low. Accordingly, there is a relatively low potential of human remains from the battle.
The mill where James III is supposed to have been murdered no longer stands, and was apparently replaced with a farm house. A metal detector survey at Milne Park Road, Bannockburn, Stirling, was carried out for Bett Homes in April 2011 as the site was considered to be potentially part of the Bannockburn battlefield and perhaps of the Sauchieburn battlefield. While no material relating to the Battle of Bannockburn was found, two unidentified heavily worn coins, which may be late medieval, could possibly be contemporary with the Battle of Sauchieburn in 1488, though there were no other artefacts of this date. A metal detector survey and historic building recording undertaken in 2002 on the mill to the west of the site did not produce anything of note.
Cultural Association
The traditional location of the death of James III is at Milton Mill on the Bannock Burn. There is a plaque commemorating the event, but the stories surrounding his death are all later and of dubious authenticity. There are no ballads or poems about the battle, although there is a suggestion that Robert Henrysoun’s poem The Taill of Schir Chanticleir and the Foxe contains a verse referring to James IV and the death of his father. However, the dating of the poem is uncertain and it may not refer to these events at all.
Commemoration & Interpretation
No monument to the battle is known. The body of James III was brought to Cambuskenneth Abbey, near Stirling, and interred with the body of his wife Margaret, who had died two years earlier. On Queen Victoria’s orders a tomb to the pair was erected there in 1864, which she financed.
There is a plaque at the ford where James III is supposed to have been killed, marking the presumed location of the mill that was present at the time of the battle. There is no extant evidence of the mill itself, while the story of the King’s murder remains unproven.
Select Bibliography
Graham, A. 1960.‘The battle of ‘Sauchieburn’’, Scott Hist Rev , 39 (128), 89-
Lindsay of Pitscottie, R. 1728. The History of Scotland; from 21 February, 1436 to March 1565. Basket & Co, London. 87-97.
Full Bibliography
Information on Sources and Publications
Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie (c.1532-1586) was the son of William Lindsay of Pyotstoun, and a cousin of Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres. Nothing is
