Iain A. MacInnes. Scotland’s Second War of Independence, 1332–1357

There are considerable challenges in studying Anglo-Scottish warfare in the fourteenth century. Although there are contemporary English chronicles, all the Scottish accounts were written well after the events they describe. English record sources are remarkably full, but there are no contracts, payrolls, or similar documents from the Scottish side. It would not be possible to construct a large database of Scottish soldiers, as has been done for their English counterparts. Nevertheless, in Scotland’s Second War of Independence, 1332–1357, Iain A. MacInnes manages admirably to reconstruct the Scottish military achievement of the second quarter of the century, and to set it clearly in a European context. A well-balanced chronological survey sets the Scottish war within the broader setting of the Hundred Years’ War, while the next chapter, on the organization of war, covers many issues, from military obligation to supply. MacInnes argues that inadequate training and poor equipment led to the defeat of large Scottish armies in the 1330s. Thereafter, much smaller, but far superior, Scottish forces achieved much by adopting tactics of surprise, and of battle avoidance. The retinues of knights and lords formed the basis of these increasingly professional forces. Apart from their far more limited use of archers, Scottish armies in the field did not differ very greatly from English ones. The problem of the paucity of evidence is apparent when MacInnes suggests that the horses used by the Scots differed little in quality from those of their opponents, for he has the values of no more than seventeen horses to go on, whereas the known values of English mounts run into many hundreds.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Battle · Commonwealth · Context (archaeology) · EPIC · Independence (probability theory) · Literature · Military service · Obligation · Political science · Scots · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Surprise · War of independence · Chinese history and philosophy · Classics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History