The bridge that broke English power
The Battle of Stirling Bridge on 11 September 1297 was the first major Scottish victory in the Wars of Independence and one of the most dramatic military engagements in medieval European history. William Wallace, a minor Lowland knight, and Andrew Murray, a Highland nobleman, destroyed an English army that outnumbered them by sending it to its death on a narrow wooden bridge over the River Forth.
The English commander, the Earl of Surrey, was complacent. He had been ordered north to crush a Scottish rebellion that the English regarded as a nuisance. His army was large, professional, and equipped with heavy cavalry — the armoured knights that were the medieval equivalent of tanks. Surrey sent his army across the bridge in a single column, two abreast. It was a crossing that would take hours.
Wallace and Murray waited. They let half the English army cross, then attacked. The Scots poured down from the Abbey Craig — the hill where the Wallace Monument now stands — and struck the English as they emerged from the bridge. The English soldiers who had crossed were trapped in a loop of the river with no room to deploy. Their cavalry could not charge in the marshy ground. The Scots cut them to pieces. The bridge collapsed under the weight of soldiers trying to flee, and hundreds drowned. Among the dead was Hugh de Cressingham, Edward I's tax collector in Scotland, who was so hated that the Scots reportedly flayed his skin and made belts from it.
Stirling Bridge proved that the English could be beaten. It shattered the myth of English invincibility and inspired a nation. Wallace was knighted and declared Guardian of Scotland. Andrew Murray, tragically, was mortally wounded in the battle and died of his injuries within weeks. The Wallace Monument, built on the Abbey Craig overlooking the battlefield, is one of the most powerful landmarks in Scotland — a permanent reminder that Scotland's independence was won by ordinary people willing to fight against impossible odds.