Battle of Stirling Bridge

In September 1297 an English army under the Earl of Surrey and the treasurer Hugh de Cressingham came north to end a rising, and found the Scots drawn up on rising ground across the Forth. The only crossing was a wooden bridge wide enough for two horsemen abreast, and after a morning of hesitation Surrey sent his men over it anyway. Wallace and Moray waited until enough had crossed to be worth killing and not enough to win, then took the bridgehead and cut the army in half. The vanguard was destroyed against the river with the rest of the English army watching from the far bank, unable to reach them. It was the first time in that war that a Scottish force beat an English army in battle.

Andrew Moray commanded jointly with Wallace, raised the rising in the north independently, and was probably the more experienced soldier; he died of his wounds within weeks and has been steadily written out of the popular story ever since, which is one of the cleaner examples of how a single surviving commander captures a battle's memory. The Victorian rediscovery of Wallace, crowned by the National Wallace Monument on Abbey Craig overlooking the field in 1869, fixed the nationalist reading that still dominates. Braveheart removed the bridge entirely, which is a reasonable shorthand for how far popular treatments drift from the tactical point. The medieval bridge's exact position is still argued over, with geophysical survey and old timber finds upstream and downstream of the surviving fifteenth century crossing both offered as evidence.