Battle of Stirling Bridge The Battle of Stirling Bridge was a battle of the First War of Scottish Independence . On 11 September 1297 , the forces of Andrew Moray and William Wallace defeated the combined English forces of John de Warenne , 6th Earl of Surrey , and Hugh de Cressingham near Stirling , on the River Forth . The main battle . The Earl of Surrey had won a victory over the aristocracy of Scotland at the Battle of Dunbar and his belief that he was now dealing with a rabble proved that he had greatly underestimated the Scottish forces . The small bridge at Stirling was only broad enough to allow two horsemen to cross abreast . The Scots deployed in a commanding position dominating the soft , flat ground to the north of the river . Sir Richard Lundie , a Scots knight who joined the English after the capitulation at Irvine , offered to outflank the enemy by leading a cavalry force over a nearby ford , where sixty horsemen could cross at the same time . Hugh Cressingham , King Edward ' s treasurer in Scotland , was anxious to avoid any unnecessary expense in prolonging the war and he persuaded the Earl to reject this advice and order a direct attack across the bridge . The Scots waited as the English knights and infantry made their slow progress across the bridge on the morning of 11 September . The disorderly Scottish army of 1296 was gone : Wallace and Moray ' s hold over their men was tight . They had held back earlier in the day when many of the English and Welsh archers had crossed , only to be recalled because Surrey had overslept . The two commanders now waited , according to the Chronicle of Hemingburgh , until " as many of the enemy had come over as they believed they could overcome . " When the vanguard , comprising 5 , 400 English and Welsh infantry plus several hundred cavalry , had crossed the Bridge , the attack was ordered . The Scots spearmen came down from the high ground in rapid advance towards Stirling Bridge , quickly seizing control of the English bridgehead . In the narrow space of the bridge , the massed English cavalry were incredibly vulnerable to the line of Scots spearmen holding the end of the bridge Surrey ' s vanguard was now cut off from the rest of the army . The heavy cavalry to the north of the river was trapped and cut to pieces ( due , in part , to the strewing of caltrop s to unseat the cavalry making them easy targets for the Scottish forces ) , their comrades to the south powerless to help Hugh de Cressingham , whose body was subsequently flayed and the skin cut into small pieces as tokens of the victory . The Lanercost Chronicle records that Wallace had " " a broad strip [ of Cressingham ’ s skin ] . . . taken from the head to the heel , to make therewith a baldric k for his sword " " . Losses among the infantry , many of them Welsh , were also high . Those who could throw off their armour swam across the river . Surrey , who still had a pitiful contingent of archers , had remained to the south of the river and was still in a strong position . The bulk of his army still remained intact and he could have held the line of the Forth , denying the triumphant Scots a passage to the south ; but his confidence was gone . After the escape of Sir Marmaduke Tweng , an English knight from Yorkshire , Surrey ordered the bridge ' s destruction and retreated towards Berwick , leaving the garrison at Stirling Castle isolated and abandoning the Lowlands to the rebels . James Stewart , the High Steward of Scotland , and Malcolm , Earl of Lennox , whose forces had been part of Surrey ' s army , observing the carnage to the north of the bridge , withdrew . Then the English supply train was attacked at " The Pows " , a wooded marshy area , by James Stewart and the other Scots lords , killing many of the fleeing soldiers . The location of Stirling Bridge at the date of the battle is not known with certainty , but four stone piers have been found underwater just north ( ) and at an angle to the extant 15th - century bridge , along with man - made stonework on one bank in line with the piers . The site of the fighting was along and either side of an earthen causeway leading from the Abbey Craig , atop which the Wallace Monument is now located , to the northern end of the bridge . The battlefield has been inventoried and protected by Historic Scotland under the Scottish Historical Environment Policy of 2009 . Aftermath . The Battle of Stirling Bridge was a shattering defeat for the English : it showed that under certain circumstances infantry could be superior to cavalry . It was to be some time , though , before this lesson was fully absorbed . Contemporary English chronicler Walter of Guisborough recorded the English losses in the battle as 100 cavalry and 5 , 000 infantry killed . Scottish casualties in the battle are unrecorded , with the exception of Andrew Moray . He appears to have been injured in the battle and died of his injuries around November . Wallace went on to lead a destructive raid into northern England which did little to advance the Scots objectives , however the raids frightened the English army and stalled their advance . By March 1298 he had emerged as Guardian of Scotland . His glory was brief , for King Edward himself was coming north from Flanders . The two men finally met on the field of Falkirk in the summer of 1298 , where Wallace was defeated . The battle in fiction . The heroic exploits of Wallace were passed on to posterity mainly in the form of tales collected and recounted by the poet Blind Harry , the Minstrel ( ? - 1492 ) whose original , probably oral sources were never specified . Blind Harry was active some two hundred years after the events described in his " The Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion Sir William Wallace " , c . 1470 . The tales were designed to entertain the court of James IV ( r . 1488 – 1513 ) and are undoubtedly a blend of fact and fiction . Like most of his episodes , Blind Harry ' s account of the battle of Stirling Bridge is highly improbable , for example his use of figures of a biblical magnitude for the size of the participating armies . Nevertheless , his highly dramatised and graphic account of the battle fed the imaginations of subsequent generations of Scottish schoolchildren . Here is his description : On Saturday they [ Moray and Wallace ] rode on to the bridge , which was of good plain board , well made and jointed , having placed watches to see that none passed from the army . Taking a wright , the most able workman there , he [ Wallace ] ordered him to saw the plank in two at the mid streit [ middle stretch ] , so that no - one might walk over it . He then nailed it up quickly with hinges , and dirtied it with clay , to cause it to appear that nothing had been done . The other end he so arranged that it should lie on three wooden rollers , which were so placed , that when one was out the rest would fall down . The wright , himself , he ordered to sit there underneath , in a cradle , bound on a beam , to loose the pin when Wallace let him know by blowing a horn when the time was come . No one in all the army should be allowed to blow but he himself . The day of the great battle approached ; for power , the English would not fail ; they were ever six to one against Wallace . Fifty thousand made for the place of battle , the remainder abiding at the Castle ; both field and Castle they thought to conquer at their will . The worthy Scots upon the other side of the river , took the plain field on foot . Hugh Cressingham leads on the vanguard with twenty thousand likely men to see . Thirty thousand the Earl of Warren had , but he did then as wisdom did direct , all the first army being sent over before him . Some Scottish men , who well knew this manner of attack , bade Wallace sound , saying there were now enough . He hastened not , however , but steadily observed the advance until he saw Warren ' s force thickly crowd the bridge . Then from Jop he took the horn and blew loudly , and warned John the Wright , who thereupon struck out the roller with skill ; when the pin was out , the rest of it fell down . Now arose an hideous outcry among the people , both horses and men , falling into the water . ( . . . ) On foot , and bearing a great sharp spear , Wallace went amongst the thickest of the press . he aimed a stroke at Cressingham in his corslet , which was brightly polished . The sharp head of the spear pierced right through the plates and through his body , stabbing him beyond rescue ; thus was that chieftain struck down to death . With the stroke Wallace bore down both man and horse . The English army although ready for battle , lost heart when their chieftain was slain , and many openly began to flee . Yet worthy men abode in the place until ten thousand were slain . Then the remainder fled , not able to abide longer , seeking succour in many directions , some east , some west , and some fled to the north . Seven thousand full at once floated in the Forth , plunged into the deep and drowned without mercy ; none were left alive of all that fell army . As well as the bridge ploy , Wallace ' s use of a spear appears to be a fictional element . As the son of a minor laird , he would have been trained in arms , and as a commander it is unlikely he would have wielded the weapon of the common footsoldier . It cannot of course be ruled out that he would have used one in the heat of battle . A two - handed claymore , purporting to be Wallace ' s , which may contain original metal from his sword blade , was kept by the Scottish kings and is displayed as a relic in the Wallace Monument which was built at the summit of abbey craig the hill that would later be known to the locals as " boner hill " . The potency of these tales can be gauged from the following statement by the poet Robert Burns , writing some three centuries after they were first related . The two first books I ever read in private , and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read again , were " The Life of Hannibal " and " The History of Sir William Wallace " [ a modernised version of Blind Harry by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield ] . Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe , and wish myself tall enough that I could be a soldier ; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins which will boil along there till the flood - gates of life shut in eternal rest . The Battle of Stirling Bridge is depicted in the 1995 film " Braveheart " , but it bears little resemblance to the real battle , there being no bridge ( due mainly to the difficulty of filming around the bridge itself ) and tactics resembling the Battle of Bannockburn . The main strategic events of the battle ( but obviously not the detail ) are followed in Robyn Young ' s novel " Requiem " .