page_title: Warfare in Medieval Scotland
section_title: Armies
hierarchical_section_title: Warfare in Medieval Scotland / Late Middle Ages / Armies
caption_attribution_description: English: Battle of Otterburn (1388). Miniature from Jean Froissart, Chroniques .
context_page_description: Warfare in Medieval Scotland includes all military activity in the modern borders of Scotland, or by forces originating in the region, between the departure of the Romans in the fifth century and the adoption of the innovations of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. In this period conflict developed from minor raids to major conflicts, incorporating many of the innovations of continental warfare.
  In the Early Middle Ages war on land was characterised by the use of small war-bands of household troops often engaging in raids and low level warfare. The arrival of the Vikings brought a new scale of naval warfare, with rapid movement based around the Viking longship. The birlinn, which developed from the longship, became a major factor in warfare in the Highlands and Islands. By the High Middle Ages, the kings of Scotland could command forces of tens of thousands of men for short periods as part of the "common army", mainly of poorly armoured spearmen and bowmen. After the "Davidian Revolution" of the twelfth century, which introduced elements of feudalism to Scotland, these forces were augmented by small numbers of mounted and heavily armoured knights.
context_section_description: Scottish victories in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries have been seen as part of a wider "infantry revolution", that saw a decline in the primacy of the mounted knight on the battlefield. However, it has been pointed out that Scottish medieval armies had probably always been dependent on infantry forces. In the late medieval period Scottish men-at-arms often dismounted to fight beside the infantry, with perhaps a small mounted reserve, and it has been suggested that these tactics were copied and refined by the English, leading to their successes in the Hundred Years' War. Like the English, the Scots deployed mounted archers, and even spearmen, who were particularly useful in the mobile raids that characterised border warfare, but like the English they fought on foot.
  By the second half of the fourteenth century, in addition to forces raised on the basis of common service and feudal obligations, money contracts of bonds or bands of manrent, similar to English indentures of the same period, were being used to retain more professional troops, particular men-at-arms and archers. In practice, forms of service tended to blur and overlap, and several major Scottish lords brought contingents from their kindred. These systems produced relatively large numbers of poorly armoured infantry, usually armed with 12–14 foot spears. They often formed the large close order defensive formations of shiltrons, able to counter mounted knights as they did at Bannockburn, or infantry assault as at Otterburn in 1388, but vulnerable to arrows (and later artillery fire) and relatively immobile, as they proved at Halidon Hill in 1333 and Humbleton Hill in 1402.
  
  There were attempts to replace spears with longer pikes of 15.5 feet (5 m) to 18.5 feet (6 m) in the later fifteenth century, in emulation of successes over mounted troops in the Netherlands and Switzerland, but this does not appear to have been successful until the eve of the Flodden campaign in early sixteenth century. There were smaller numbers of archers and men-at-arms, which were often outnumbered when facing the English on the battlefield. Scottish archers were mainly drawn from the border regions, with those from Selkirk Forest gaining a particularly reputation. They became much sought after as mercenaries in French armies of the fifteenth century, in order to help counter the English superiority in this arm, becoming a major element of the French royal guards as the Garde Écossaise.
caption: The Battle of Otterburn (1388) in a miniature from Jean Froissart, Chroniques
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