On This Day in History: June 23

The Battle of Bannockburn

Subscribers can listen to the audio of this post here.

When the movie Braveheart came out in 1995, you couldn’t grab your phone and look something up. I was watching it on VHS with my new bride and became curious about where things were going. I paused the tape, grabbed my Dictionary of Wars by George Kohn off the shelf, and flipped to the stuff about William Wallace. “Uh, sweetie,” I said. “You need to prepare yourself for an unhappy ending to this movie.”

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 23, 1314--

The final scene—not Mel Gibson’s guts getting ripped out, but rather the Battle of Bannockburn—began on June 23, 1314. If you were wondering what Braveheart II: The Bravening would reveal, here you go.

It was The First War of Scottish Independence. Considering that the word “First” is used and Scotland is united with England now, you can imagine that this war wouldn’t be the final one between Brits. But that’s another tale or five.

How do you get “the” included between your first and last name? James the Fell has a cool ring to it. It makes my name no longer a complete sentence. And I’m quarter Scottish. Anyway, Robert the Bruce was a guy. A Scottish guy. King of Scotland guy.

He’d been king for seven years but didn’t have a firm grip on power. In 1313 he demanded that all those loyal to his predecessor, who had been ousted by invading English forces in 1296, had to be loyal to the Bruce or they’d lose their lands. The English King, Edward II, got wind of this and said, “Sounds like we have a badass over here” and decided to go fuck him up on the field of battle.

It was a “pitched battle.” That means not a chance encounter, but a more or less agreed-upon time and place to engage in the manly pursuit of seeing what your enemy’s insides look like when they’re on the outside. Despite Edward II having a force two to three times the size of the Bruce’s, things did not go well for Eddie.

Most medieval battles lasted a few hours, but this went on for two days. Fuelled by haggis and righteous indignation, the Scots did a heap o’ killin’, including eviscerating and capturing several English nobles. Edward and the English fled the field in disarray. Afterward, the Scots kept up the pressure for 15 more years, and in 1328 England recognized the independence of the Kingdom of Scotland, with the Bruce as its rightful king.

Subscribe for access to cool shit:

Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.