The Battle of Flodden, 1513
John McEwen describes the events of September 9th, 1513, as Scotland lost her King and suffered appalling losses during a disastrous battle that “remains in large measure a mystery.”
Some two miles south-east of Coldstream in the county of Northumberland, and in view of the main road along which the buses run nightly between Edinburgh and London, on a grassy knoll stands a granite cross bearing an inscription and a date. The inscription reads: To the brave of both Nations; and the date: September 9th, 1513.1 This stone marks the spot where, at the close of that fatal day, all that were left of the Scottish nobility, fighting in defence of their mortally wounded King, perished to a man under the halberts and arrows of Surrey’s English levies.