Dave Rishar
Silver Member
Do we know for sure that Keith's "small body of horse" as Cassell describes it in volume 1 of his "History of England" consists of only Scottish riders?
We don't anything anything for sure about that battle, including where it occurred. There are like five or six primary sources that mention it, and most of those were written by authors that were not alive when it happened.
On that note, is there even a single primary source documenting the battle in existence where the author was known for sure to have firsthand knowledge of the event? Sir Thomas Grey (the younger) would have heard about it from his father, who was in the thick of things the first day and was a prisoner for the second. As far as I know, that's as close as we can get to this battle: the retelling of a personal account of a hotheaded knight that was there, but probably didn't see too much of it.
For all that we don't know about this battle and the problems associated with the primary sources, I'd caution anyone against firmly asserting that anyone besides the English and the Scots were there.
EDIT: Moments after typing that, I had a humorous discussion about this with my girlfriend. Based on our most solid piece of evidence (a 2nd hand account many years after the fact), I suspect that in a court of law, we'd be unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Battle of Bannockburn even happened. Just for context when we're talking about who was and was not there.
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