Flodden Field [Child 168]

DESCRIPTION: King James vows to fight his way to London. Queen Margaret tries to prevent him, and Lord Thomas Howard supports her. James vows to punish them when he returns -- but he never returns; the English slay him and twelve thousand men at Flodden
AUTHOR: unknown (see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: c. 1597 (see NOTES); the text in Child's Appendix is from the Percy Folio and elsewhere
KEYWORDS: war royalty family promise death
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Sep 9, 1513 - Battle of Flodden. James IV and the pride of Scotland's chivalry die in battle with the Earl of Surrey's English army
FOUND IN: Britain
REFERENCES (10 citations):
Child 168, "Flodden Field" (1 text plus long appendix)
Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume I, pp. 313-340, "Fflodden Ffeilde" (1 text)
Ritson-AncientSongsBalladsFromHenrySecondToTheRevolution, pp. 208-212, "Floddon Field" (1 text)
Sidgwick-BalladsPoemsIllustratingEnglishHistory, pp. 70-71, "Flodden Field" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Michael Brander, _Scottish and Border Battles and Ballads_, 1975 (page references to the 1993 Barnes & Noble edition), pp. 67-68, "Flodden Field" (1 text)
APPENDIX: "Now Let Us Talk of Mount of Flodden"
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #3779
MANUSCRIPT: {MSPercyFolio}, The Percy Folio, London, British Library MS. Additional 27879, page 117
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 293, folio 55
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, Ms. Harley 367, folio 120
Roud #2862
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Flowers o' the Forest" (subject)
NOTES [513 words]: Child's only text of this is from Thomas Deloney's Pleasant History of John Winchcomb (the other versions, including the Percy Folio version, are of the appendix text). Ritson credits the piece to Deloney (1543?-1600?). E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1945, 1947, observes that Deloney may well have printed the text with some "improvements." It would be very interesting to know what was Deloney's source -- it might well have been nearly contemporary with the actual battle of Flodden.
King James IV was unusually long-lived for a Stewart king; he lived all the way to forty (1473-1513). But it wasn't for lack of trying; he twice went to war with England. The first attempt, in support of Perkin Warbeck, was in 1502, and accomplished nothing.
To cement the post-1502 peace, James IV married Margaret Tudor, the elder daughter of England's King Henry VII. (This was the marriage that eventually brought the Stewarts to the throne of England.) But that didn't prevent his warmongering. In 1513, the new English king Henry VIII was away in a sort of a mock campaign against France. James decided to go to war.
Unfortunately for James, the defense of the border was in the hands of Thomas Howard, then Earl of Surrey (1443-1524). Surrey was the son of John Howard, Richard III's Duke of Norfolk, and had fought for Richard III at Bosworth. But with Richard dead, Howard was given a partial pardon (being given the Surrey earldom though not the Norfolk dukedom). This may have been because, with Richard and the elder Howard dead, Surrey was the best soldier in England.
Surrey wanted to go to France with Henry (according to Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, 1941 (I use the 1990 Book-of-the-Month club edition), p. 155, he was "choking with rage and grief" at not being allowed to join the invasion). But he ended up getting his chance to fight.... It was Surrey who led the army which intercepted the invading Scots.
The English and Scottish forces are believed to have been about equal in size, but Surrey outmaneuvered the Scots and inflicted a crushing defeat, killing James, the cream of his army, and about a third of his troops -- a defeat which came to be commemorated in the popular lament "The Flowers o' the Forest." Surrey lost perhaps 5%-10% of his own men.
Scotland -- as always when a new monarch came to the throne -- was plunged into chaos. The border was safe for many years. Surrey received the Norfolk dukedom, which has remained in the Howard family ever since.
The probable earliest copy of this, Harley 367, was assembled mostly from papers which had been in the possession of John Stow (died 1605). Stow is most notable for an edition of Chaucer of singularly low value -- he seems to have reprinted his text without deliberate change from the earlier edition of Thynne. Parts of Harley 367 are in Stow's own hand, whatever that tells you. It also contains a copy of "The Song of the Lady Bessy," for more about which (and about the manuscript) see the notes to "The Battle of Bosworth Field." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: C168

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