Battle of flodden 3o§ 



behind tlieiii. Those guns were sent to Etal, and eventually 

 to Berwick. The English, on the other hand, were in no 

 condition to follow up their victory ; and after creating forty 

 Knights on the field, Surrey disbanded his army to find 

 their way home as best they could. If any difficulty had 

 been experienced in calculating the number of combatants, it 

 was very much greater in regard to the losses. Estimates 

 of historians differed widely. Probably those of the Scots 

 were between 8,000 and 10,000 ; of the English far fewer. 

 But what made the day of Flodden so memorable and 

 disastrous to the Scots, was the high rank of many of 

 the victims. Besides the King and his son, the Archbishop 

 of St. Andrews, forty-six persons of eminent rank, the flower 

 of the Scottish nobility, lay dead on the field. On the other 

 hand, only five Englishmen of i-ank were slain. It had been 

 customary to suppose that with the development of modern 

 engines of war, the horrors of it had proportionately increased. 

 Nothing more terrible, however, can be imagined than the 

 experiences of -1:0,000 or 50,000 men, locked closely together 

 for nearly two hours in deadly hand-to-hand conflict ; and the 

 horrors of the sequel must have been vividly increased by 

 the fact that on that day the wounded, or most of them, 

 had to be left to die. There wei-e no medical appliances 

 to speak of, no ambulance, scarcely any surgeons. Anaesthetics 

 were undreamt of, and the treatment was necessarily of the 

 rudest and most barbarous nature. The body of the ill-fated 

 King was found next day, stripped naked by plunderers, amid 

 a heap of slain, and was taken to Berwick where it was 

 embalmed and enclosed in a leaden coffin.*^ It was eventually 

 deposited in the religious house of Sliene in Surrey, after 

 the dissolution of which, in the reign of Edward VI., it was 

 entirely lost sight of. aS'ic transit ! 



' * It is impossible to determine the exact place whei-e King James 

 fell. Local tradition, and some investigators fix the site of the modern 

 vicarage as the spot. Stowe says "the King vyas slain on Pipard's Hill." 

 Jones locates the concluding struggle around the Southern base of that 

 hill. On some part of the range represented by a straight line connecting 

 the hill and the vicarage — about 500 yards — the finale must almost 

 certainly have taken place. 



