Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 308 - The Battle of Flodden Field

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Scotland invades England with one of the largest armies in Scottish History and nearly wipe out their own government in the process. Sources: https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/Marmion--A-Tale-of-Flodden-Field/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070227045328/http://www.ourpasthistory.com/England/the-battle-of-flodden-field-or-branxton-moor Peter Reese. Flooden: A Scottish Tragedy Ida Taylor. The Life of James IV William Welsh. Butchered At The Battle of Flodden. Military Heritage Magazine. Volume 22, No. 4

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lines led by donkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always

been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me in the Velveteen content cave of the Trashfuture Studios is Tom. What's up, buddy? I'm in the deep, fried and battered content cave. The purple curtains are still my favorite part

and nobody will be able to enjoy those other than me because I'm looking at you through the camera, but you should just know that he is wrapped in a velour fucking Mike hole. I don't know. You know, for someone who writes for a living, not well, recent sales numbers will prove that I am correct. I'm good Joe. I'm heading home tomorrow for a

little bit. It's my birthday soon as well. I'm going to spend my birthday surrounded by other bald middle aged men and shocks. So I'm looking forward to that. Great shocks meet up. Literally like, because shocks is going to be in London. We're going to see Cox Spar together. And I was explaining to someone like, yeah, it's going to be a room full of about 2000 middle aged to mid middle aged to mid fifties and older bald men in like way too tight jeans and Doc Martens. So you're going to paint them jeans on. So you're going to go cocksparing in a cocksparing in a room full of men in

tight pants. Yes, exactly. Oh yeah. It's like men who, uh, and that's great because like, um, I love like a lot of skinhead stuff and thank God a lot of these guys bought nice clothes in the 80s and kept them really well and then unfortunately got too fat to wear them anymore. So they sell them on all vintage and I buy you know vintage really good quality Fred Perry stuff for like £2 each. There's a there's a store near me that sells Fred Perry which I don't own any it's not really my thing.

But it's just called the British Clothing Store. I remember passing that shop when I was in Den Haag and I took a picture of it, it was like somehow every country has weebs for other countries and the Netherlands has British weebs. They also have American, there's also an American clothing store, which I assume is just all of the other clothing stores smashed into one. No, it's just like T-shirts with John Cena on it from like the early 2000s. Fuck yeah. I mean, that's where I do all my shopping. It's like affliction T-shirts, you know, Rockstar Energy branded clothing. Monster.

Monster. That was the big one. I remember when Monster Apparel was huge in like the mid 2000s, 2010s, and people would have the stickers on their fucking cars, too. I imagine if you had like a tricked out like jacked pickup truck, because that's what these stickers always appeared on. Either that or sports cars that people couldn't afford. Not nice ones like a Nissan 300 or something.

And there's just like a Coca Cola sticker on the back. Like is that cool to you? You're doing that with Monster Energy, man. Like oh dude, check out my sick Honda Skyline with this Pepsi bumper detail decal. Like I'm the fucking coolest. Like world's greatest rebrand that like Monster rebranded as the drink of choice for dudes who steal Cali Converters or work in GameStop to like people who like go to the gym and are going to have a heart attack by like 35. Well I got a few more months left in me before my heart attacks

coming. Speaking of GameStop one of my first jobs ever was actually a GameStop and it was my first GameStop, one of my first jobs ever was actually a GameStop and it was my first, it was my first time in my life I was ever the victim of an armed robbery. Now for people- Sorry, sorry, we're not blasting past you, you used to work at GameStop. I worked there for precisely two months and I was fired. What era, what era were we talking? Oh this, I would have been 16, so this is 2005. So this is like peak Halo 2 years. Yeah, probably something like that.

I don't have many memories of that GameStop other than my manager smoked the worst schwag weed ever in the alley out back and kept giving it to me, which was weird because he was in his 40s and I was, you know, 15, 16. And I was the victim of my first ever, I was the victim of an armed robbery while I was there. And it was the dumbest armed robbery that I've ever been a part of for sure. I've been a part of many, just one. But I was in the back room, uh, cause you know, when you trade in games, they get, um, put into different like sleeves.

Like they don't get put in the cases. That part is important. All the plastic cases you see on a GameStop. Well, I don't know how many people still shop at GameStop to be completely honest. I haven't bought a physical video game in fucking years. I mean, to be fair, GameStop mainly now sell like my my hero academia merch or like Funko Pops. So it's Hot Topic.

Yeah, it's like it's Hot Topic without the Nightmare Before Christmas shit year round. Yeah, it's Hot Topic for people with Discord Nitro. Fuck, it's me. shit year round. Yeah, it's hot topic for people with Discord Nitro. Fuck, it's me. Also, hot topic is also just hot topic for you as well. Not anymore. I was recently in the United States again and I went to a hot topic for old

times sake and I felt uncomfortable. That's called being 35. But a guy came in. But like I was saying, there's no games in the cases on the walls at a GameStop. Anybody who's been to a GameStop knows this fact because you go and pick up a case, you bring it to the front counter,

and then we have to go get the game and put it inside. It is specifically so you can't shoplift or just take things off the wall, right? And this guy comes in, has like a revolver, and he sticks it directly in my coworker's face. And I just hear screaming coming from the front, because I'm in the back doing the shitty sleeves thing, because they didn't trust me in the money counter,

because I couldn't, like I'm a fucking dumbass man, I can't do math. So you don't want me handling your change. Hence why I majored in history, not fucking science. But I hear screaming and I open the door, and this dude is obviously tweaked out of his mind because he's very jumpy He's never he's obviously never robbed anybody before he'd be better at it and he's just like justiculating wildly with this gun in his hand and he produces like a Pillowcase and he just starts shoving the cases from the wall

Into it like he's stealing because each one of those games is you know $60 yeah and you could sell them online and get a few bucks here and there but he's just stealing empty plastic cases and then he just runs the fuck out he doesn't rob the till he just has a long code with 60 copies of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas on the inside but just the empty cases and then the cops come and you know my manager who was out in the alleyway I thought of San Andreas on the inside. But just the empty cases. And then the cops come and, you know, my manager, who was out in the alleyway smoking swag weed, comes in high out of his mind

because he's had to smoke like a QP of this stuff just to get a buzz. And like, so what was the value of what was stolen? He's like 75 cents, give or take. So my question, did the manager, manager A have a shitty goatee, B a shitty ponytail or C both? Shitty ponytail, chin strap beard. Oh god. He looked kind of like the comic book guy from The Simpsons. Actually Joe, you will find there's no games in the cases. Worst robbery ever. No, Tom. Uh, yeah, like it's. Yeah, that is the first time I've ever had a gun shoved in my face.

And yeah, I hope he's doing well. Probably he probably isn't. The robber or the manager? Oh, the robber. I think I obviously needed drug money pretty badly. Yeah. He needed drug money way more than I needed those empty plastic cases. He could have just went around the back and like robbed the manager. He could have just robbed the till. There are several. I mean, this is early 2000s.

We're still doing a lot of transactions of cash. Yeah. And that's the the lightest robbery that happened in that GameStop that day. But it's a he didn't plan that one out very well, I will say, you know, like, you know, like we're going to talk about in this podcast, planning is important. Yeah. I mean, like if I was that guy, what I would do is I would wait outside the GameStop and watch people going in and wait for the person who obviously has a bagful of games they're going to trade in and then steal their 15 quid from them when they come back out. I will say of all the places in the United States that you could rob,

a place that you could be almost guaranteed that nobody inside is going to have a gun is a GameStop. We need to arm GameStop. At least back then, it was all teenagers and then the manager who almost certainly had some kind of felony charge on his record that precluded him from firearms ownership. Yeah, I'm just going to say it. People who work in GameStop, braver than the troops. I don't know. It's not a hard job, man. Both equally, you know, ripped to the gills on caffeinated energy drinks.

And doing way too much weed in the back alley, yeah. Both taking a shitty job while they're still a teenager. I mean, the next job I did get was joining the army. It's a gateway drug. There you go. Yeah. But I did get fired. I guess I It's a gateway drug. There you go. Yeah. But I did get fired. I guess I have to explain why I got fired now because that's kind of a cliffhanger.

I got caught with weed at work because I bought weed from the manager and then I, of course, being the fine subcontracting citizen that I am, attempted to then sell it to another employee who reported me to set manager and then he fired me. But like this is, you know, you are embodying GameStop's whole business model. Hey man can I get some weed? Ah, the best I can give you is in-store credit. You're like, he's like, I ain't got any weed.

I got a lot of copies of Halo 2, though. You want some Funko Pops? Trading in your Funko Pop collection at GameStop for an ounce of weed. When I worked there, it was so long ago, you could still buy a physical PC game disc there. Yeah, Jesus, that would have been around the time when like the physical release of World of Warcraft happened as well. I did not work there when that happened.

I missed out on that. Thank God. Now, not connected to anything we're talking about at all. I tried really hard to prepare this thing, but really doesn't work. Tom, somehow we've gone this far in the podcast without really ever talking about Scottish history. Yeah. I don't know how. I actually work for, I know, what's a group of people that hate the Scots? Uh... Other than the British, it's low-hanging fruit. The Welsh, maybe?

Okay, I work for Big Wales, and they told me to never report on Scottish history. And also, coincidentally, Welsh history, because I can't pronounce fucking anything in that corner of the UK. Hence why my pleas for us to cover William Wallace have been ignored thus far. Yeah, it's because I work for, what was his name? Rob, King Rob.

King Robert, I don't fucking know. Fuck, I don't know. Haggis McSwordsguy? My knowledge of British history is limited so much because I refuse to learn any of it. Robert the Bruce! That was his name! Got it, I got there eventually.

Alright. So, prime your best, most offensive Scottish accents, crack a can of Bucky because we're about to talk about the battle of Clawdon. Buckfast doesn't come in cans. Why not? It feels like it should come in cans. It's made by monks.

That's the weirdest thing I'm going to learn about today. Wait, you don't you didn't know Buckfast was made by in a monastery? No, I thought Buckfast is the Scottish equivalent for loco. It kind of is. But yeah, Buckfast tonic Wine is made by. It's called the Tonic Wine. Yeah, it's like made by a load of monks in a fucking in Buckfast Abbey. Those monks wear monster energy drink apparel.

Just wearing your tonsure. That's Brandon with monster. Unleash the beast Singing in canter. Yeah, book fast tonic wine is made by monks. You know more about Scottish history than I do. Take it from here. I've drank a lot of book fast. I haven't yet.

And if we ever for some reason end up in Scotland, because from my understanding that's the only place that it's sold. I will try some. If we ever do a live episode for Lions led by Robots, I will make you drink Buckfast on stage. I feel like that's going to be illegal from wherever we do the show, because it won't be in Scotland.

Um, technically there is a legal thing about Buckfast because like, there's two different types of Buckfast. There's the one in the brown bottle and the one in the green bottle, and one of them has less caffeine content in it. One has more Shrek than the other. Ah Donkey! It's got layers! But yeah, some countries can't sell the high caffeinated Buckfast because it's like, one, it can give you a heart attack and two- That's the one I want. I can't remember, there's a certain amount of percentage of like violent crimes that happened in Scotland that are attributed to consumption

of book fast. I mean, they did the same thing with four Loco to be like people are doing crazy ass shit. Like we've never mixed fucking caffeine and alcohol together before. Yeah. But like four Loco isn't like a nationally loved treasure in the U S the same way strongly disagree. Okay, okay. Scott's an American, sound off in the comments. This is like epic rap battles of history. It makes them just slurring their words and pissing themselves. I drink so much Bukfast I start rapping like MF Doom.

Now we're going to be talking about the Battle of Flawdon, otherwise known as the Battle of Flawdon Fields, or that time that the King of Scotland virtually nuked his own kingdom trying to tell the Brits to fuck off. The history of the Battle of Flawdon is rooted in Scotland's attempts to become an independent kingdom like that of its neighbors in England and France. Previous to the 11th century, Scotland was mostly a group of minor kingdoms ruled by their own kings, all trying really hard to stab one another. Though by the early medieval period and especially after the rule of King David I, Scotland was truly a unified functioning individual kingdom. Of course, the English looked at this and saw it as a threat because they had seen

Scotland as rightfully there since pretty much forever, thankfully something that is no longer the case. This led to constant problems between the two of them. For example, in 1290, the Scottish Queen died, leading to a group of Scottish nobles begin bicker with one another over who would take over, and that led things wide open for the English to swoop in and put their own usurper on the throne. Scotland, trying to resist the English, looked towards the one kingdom that they knew would be on their side whenever anything went sideways with the English. I'm gonna guess I was about to say is like, who hates the English more than the Scots?

The English. Who hates England more than the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, Germany to some extent, but Germany didn't exist at this stage. It's the French and the Spaniards as well. The Spaniards hate the English and have for hundreds of years. You know, and they still kind of currently do, but for different reasons, mostly real estate. The fifth crusade existing in Benidorm. The next crusade is just gonna be over the British dudes who voted for Brexit despite living in Spain and Oran houses in Majorca. No, they're gonna increase the price of a pint by like, two cent on those beachside

pubs in Benidorm. And then we're going to get the next crusade. But like instead of wearing like the tunic with the George's cross on it, it's just going to be the world's most sunburned fat dudes. They're going to like apply like sun cream on their bodies so they have the George's cross burned onto their body. Now, France and Scotland came together and signed what had become known as the Auld Alliance. Of course, France is not doing this as a favor.

The Auld Alliance was their baby and they would use it to influence Scotland to be a thorn in the side of the English. You might recognize this as they become a French proxy. Ah, something that never happened again. Nope, never. And this is exactly what they did, though having France as an ally did little to stop the warfare between the Scots and the English. Border raids, naval raids, full scale war, all of these were commonplace.

And by the 1500s, it had been going on and off for about 200 years. Now, the idea with this alliance with France is like, if it truly kicked off between us just stabbing one another over some like border villages, France would have to get involved. And that had kind of worked. It had stopped things from escalating to being like truly threatening. So the English and the Scots signed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1502, a treaty that might have the most bullshit name in the history of treaties. Yeah, it's really bold calling it that. It's like the opposite of nominal determinism. It lasted like 20 minutes.

The ink wasn't even dry. It did seem for about five minutes that the two sides were really going to stick by this thing because certain tenets in the treaty made it so it really did seem like it was going to work. For example, the King of England, Henry VII, gifted his daughter Mary to the Scottish King, James IV, for marriage. You know, that's a good way to bring the two sides together. The treaty also saw that the King's northerners would ever be able to make war on one another and to further reinforce this treaty whoever broke it, whatever side broke that treaty, the pope would then excommunicate the offending side. The pope is like the referee he's like you know Bruce Boffer.

Somehow this still didn't work even the power of the pope in the 1500s was not enough to keep the Scots and the English away from one another which which kind of surprised the Pope, to be completely honest. Yeah, and also, you know, at this stage, the Pope still had power over the two of them because Protestantism wasn't really a thing yet. Yeah, he's got a few more good years left in him. The same kind of constant irregular harassment war continued. Border conflicts, raids, things like that, but nothing real, nothing that was truly threatening again, and nothing that anybody was gonna trigger

the excommunication clause over. And this was just considered par for the course and mostly acceptable by the two sides. Borders weren't changing hands, large scale wars, and the mustering of armies that came with those, which caused a lot of fucking money, which would in turn implode treasuries, you know. None of those things were happening.

So it's considered, you know what, this is fine. We're not having to spend all of our, you know, savings account on scraping together some farm kids to go kill one another. Then Scotland's alliance with France popped back up into the picture. The Italian wars have been burning through Europe and they involve both England and France with England pro Pope France anti Pope but not that kind of anti Pope just against the Pope not the full anti Pope no not like the guy who calls himself the Pope and lives in like Nebraska or whatever which that guy does exist I think he died recently actually yeah there

was an American anti Pope he had like his family as congregates and that was it. He had a whole website and everything. It was what? And the website looked like he was made an angel fire like 30 years ago. I mean, like, look, America really is the land of people declaring themselves with titles. So like, yep, go off, King. I mean, my personal favor is the homeless guy in San Francisco declared himself emperor. That guy ruled. Maybe we should listen to him. Oh this is like Civil War era. Maybe he's like the Highlander, he just exists. Wait, are you saying that the immortal God Emperor from Warhammer 40k is real but he only exists as a homeless American guy in the Bay Area? I mean like that's very fitting for our current reality. In 1511 the English were recruited American guy in the Bay Area.

In 1511, the English were recruited to join the Holy League by Pope Julius II in order to become an active participant in the War of the League of Cambrai. The French got pissed and activated the old alliance, demanding that the Scots go to war against the English as a distraction in order to pull men and material away from their war efforts on the mainland. The Scottish King James was hesitant, getting dragged into a Continental War against the Papacy looked like a bad deal for him all around, you know, getting excommunicated is bad for business.

James had done a lot of footwork to get closer to the Pope over the years, namely talking about wanting to launch a solely Scottish crusade against the Ottomans and had been named a protector and defender of the Christian faith by the pope only a couple of years before. He was getting in that quality poping time, you know? I mean, like, listen, we're still experiencing that crusade with Scottish guys going to Turkey to get hair plugs and their teeth done. That's the real crusade that lives on today is everyone's flying on Turkish hairlines or flying back with their little donut on their head. Or that that might just be that that is a true Ottoman soft power victory.

Yeah. Yeah. The Ottomans like they've effectively won history because now the entirety of Western Europe is dependent on them for getting like teeth that look like Wrigley's chewing gum. Yeah those look bad. Veneers look terrible. And like most people get them and they're like too big for their mouth so they can't like fully close their lips and it looked really funny. It looks like their father was like a donkey or something. This is why people's reaction to, you know, us not being able to culturally appropriate anything anymore is like,

we're not allowed to dress like Paul Wall and have grills. So instead, we're going to Turkey and we're getting fake teeth to show how wealthy we are. Instead, we should go back to letting white people have grills as a kind of we should go back to letting white people have grills as a kind of sinecure or, how we apply true sanctions to the Turkish economy. We need to get rid of the veneers and let people, white people wear grills again because one,

it makes everyone look swagged out and two, it hurts the Turkish economy. I support veneers, but only because you never know when you're going to be caught in a situation where you have to chew through a brick wall. No, but this is the thing is like the veneers are actually like they're meant to be like not that durable. What's the point? I don't know. I don't fucking know. I don't get it.

Where grills just everyone needs to get grills and stand that reminds me there was a grill place right outside of Fort Hood which is I believe now called Fort Cavesos but it was my last duty station and it was called like the 21st Street Grillist and it shared a storefront with boost mobile which is the perfect one-two punch. Incredible, incredible. Everybody needs to look like Paul Wall. The French man just smoothed over this, you know, whole I don't want to get involved in this war less the Catholic Church turned against me by offering him soldiers to help out

as well as a massive amount of money. Now, this money wasn't to like the Scottish Treasury. It was a personal bribe to the Scottish king and it was massive. And it also included, you know, we're going to give you all of this gold and we'll also buy you a navy. And you can use the navy to transport the gold to meltdown to make grills. We're finding the foundation so what we all know as the Scottish monopoly on grill making. Shrek had the best grill. Shrek iced out. Anytime you look at him you got froze. Iced out Shrek. Iced out Shrek. He's out Shrek. I said Shrek. He's too like the thogonomics cover pose

He's the third member of UGK was Shrek This is the dumbest shit I don't get don't look at my teeth. You might get froze It's not fucking onion on Mars. it's a fucking iced out rollie. I think we're just explaining how Shrek got divorced. Fionna's gone to Turkey, she's getting hair plugs as well. Everyone's getting hair plugs. And all of these bribes, you know, grill based, navy based, whichever, they worked really,

really well. And meanwhile, the English King Henry was insistent that he lead the invasion of France himself and left the Earl of Surrey back in London to defend the realm, but mostly to lead the defence of the English North, should the Scots get a little bit feisty. Descend, if you will. The Scots are descending. I like the side. No funny thing about like Scottish warrior history is a lot of

like the precursor to like modern Scotland was the Pictish people. It was like very far north Scotland and like Julius Caesar encountered them. And like wrote wrote about how they had like tattooed bodies and all sorts of stuff like, yeah, no, that wasn't true. Like, and people still believe this to this day. I mean, I would like to believe that the Pictish and early Scottish people were just covered, had to toe in monster energy drink tattoos. But it's hardly the first time that like an outsider went to the shores

of another country and had to blow up, church up their writing to make what he was seeing look as quote unquote barbarous as possible. Because look how enlightened we are. Everyone outside of our realm must be barely people. And they tattooed their skin, they fuck in the open, they barely wear clothes, whichever it may be. And like, I don't know why Romans didn't complain about any of those things.

They did that most of the time too. Yeah. William Wallace really wasn't wearing like a kilt and a sparring chain. He was actually wearing. He wasn't wearing a kilt. Kilts weren't invented yet. He was wearing like a Paul Wall style long line tee, a monster energy fitted snapback and grills.

I got to keep bringing this back. The basketball shorts that are so long they end just above the shoes. Yep, yep. He couldn't afford forces, but he had fine puma's. He was wearing those D3 Osiris's. William Wallace the monster drinking sneakerhead. You should have seen his section on girl tape too. Fucking hate you. Directed by like I don't know fucking Lance Bangs.

Wait like Lance Bangs the jackass guy? Yeah he did loads of skate videos as well. Same as by Jones. Yeah that's right he did. I just assume as well. Yeah, yeah, that's right, he did. I just assume he vomited in the background of all those two. No, I think you're thinking of Lester Bangs. He died at 32. No, Lance Bangs, he's still alive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He does like arcade fire videos and stuff now. I don't know. God, what a strange career arc. I'm William Wallace. I welcome to Scotland Willy Wallace crawls into a shopping cart and then his friend just slams him into a curb. Hi, I'm Steve Oh, and welcome to Scotland returning wee man into haggis and then we're going to eat him alive RIP Ryan Donma. Oh, yeah, it sucks. Now the French were pissed about this entire thing

They thought their alliance with the Scots would mean that the English wouldn't bother them for fear of a Scottish invasion, and it turned out that the French had miscalculated, as the English and King Henry specifically weren't really worried about the Scots at all, and to underline this point, when the French sent a messenger to the King's invasion force telling them, you should turn around or the Scots are gonna invade you from the north he literally just ignored them. He didn't believe that the Scots wouldn't do it or couldn't do it he simply thought the Earl of Surrey could probably handle and it'll be fine. Meanwhile the Scots were already mobilizing their forces and they were

going all out. King James ordered all men between the ages of 16 and 60 to report for duty within 20 days. He also previously established a crowned owned armory which could churn out plate armor for his infantry in preparation for having to deal with the dreaded English longbow, something that anybody who fought the British at this point had experience with. Yeah, see, instead of they'd invested in inventing tactical grills, they could have caught the long, the arrows with their teeth. Exactly.

Like, a longbow arrow just flying towards you and just ricochets directly off your face. Yeah, you just smile at it. Now, despite having this government-owned armor factory factory as much as one would exist in the 1500s He still couldn't pump out enough for his whole army. So it was relegated just for the people in the first ranks so like when the longbow arrows start raining down on them the Vanguard of every infantry force would be somewhat protected, and I assume everyone behind them just has to get really small and hide behind his friend, you know?

On top of that, the Scots, with French help, had also standardized the weapons their soldiers would carry, settling on massive pikes measuring five yards, or 18 feet, depending on which source you use. These fuckers were long. How the fuck does one person use that? I mean they're not super heavy. I mean they're just a stabbing tool. It's still 18 feet long! It's not the most wieldy weapon on earth and this is we'll come back to this. The Scots also included an artillery section of 29 different guns ranging from siege cannons to much smaller ones called culverins which would range from kind of like a two-man musket to

something a little bit larger but the Scots did not have a lot of history or skill using gunpowder weapons, so they had a French advisory team teach them how. This is normally where I point out that the Scots were mustering teenagers to old men and everybody in between that nobody knew what the fuck they were doing, but you'd be wrong. Instead, King James thought ahead, and the French sent 40 pike warfare experts ahead of time to begin training not only the conscripts but also the Scottish commanders who would be leading them. These guys famously would later feature as experts on Deadliest Warrior.

Oh you see, the pike is a very long weapon but it's very effective because your enemy has to get within 18 feet to stab you. If you just go pock-pock The enemy is dead is very long weapon and also very sensual it is a Using the pike is like caressing a beautiful woman with a massive cock It's a beautiful woman who is shaped like an 18 foot long pole. Ah Yes, those kind. That later on that woman will go on to be called the Brigitte Bardot.

I should call her. No, you're probably thinking, wow, all this good planning doesn't sound like something we would normally talk about. Well, hold that thought. Now for people who don't know, a pike is a weapon of movement, not a weapon of static fighting. For a formation of pikemen to be effective, the army must be charging or facing down a charge. This is not like you don't get trapped in a slugging deathmatch armed with an 18-foot-long

pike. And I know this is old news for all those pikeheads out there, but you know just saying for all of us plebs Sorry, sorry to all the pike heads out there. It's very hard to swing an 18 foot pole Yeah, it's uh People are probably thinking that this looks more like a phalanx style combat where two sides are slamming into another and stabbing with each Other and with spears and whatnot, but that's not what they were trying to do, because they're not carrying shields. They they're a whole goal is to charge at the enemy formation, drive them from the field or force the enemy to charge them into a wall of pikes.

There's no middle ground with pikes. Yeah, the English soldier is like doing, you know, in Dark Souls, where the enemy has like a really well telegraphed slow attack and is just doing a perfect parry. They trained heavily on that, I'm sure. They got really good at hitting or two. Now there were elements of the Scottish army that wouldn't be armed with pikes, namely the Highland men. The king just let them do and be armed with whatever the fuck they wanted. Huge claymores, battle axes, bows, whatever. Their battle plan just was go nuts guys.

Yeah, then they had to face down Gryllium Wallace. Gryllium Wallace is another merch design that we could create that if you wore it in public, you either run into a listener of the show and they immediately know what that is or everyone just thinks you're the dumbest fucking person on earth. I feel like Gryllium Wallace could be up there with the gangsta SpongeBob or the gangsta Bugs Bunny and says, Lord forgive me, I'm about to go back to the old me. I'm all aboard of the Gryllium Wallace. Stay north because my mouth stay froze.

Fuck off! Now, most importantly, the French trainers stress the point. Point, get it? Because we're talking about pikes! Yeah. I get shitty puns too, asshole. Anyway, they warn the Scots, do not get bogged down. You need to charge, or face down a charge, or do not commit to battle.

If you did, you would lose. Foreshadowing is a literary device, I'm not going to say the thing. By August, King James had assembled the largest, most well-trained and well-equipped army that the Scots would ever deploy, period. And specifically against the English. 42,000 well-trained, well-armored, well-armed, and well-supported men. However, there were glaring flaws in James' army. For example, none of his men were paid even a cent. And then there was their feudal obligation to their king, you know, their conscription

decree. It was good for 40 days. Oh, I feel like this is going to last a little bit longer than 40 days. Well, if you don't see any of this as being a problem, then congratulations either did King James, who is absolutely full of himself, and he was already kind of well known for being an arrogant dickhead even in the best of times and now with this massive army at his back it only made the situation worse. He didn't take suggestions well and instead he insisted he knew best when it came to everything. He even ignored his own French advisors who were supposed to be there to make

sure he didn't trip over his own dick onto a pile of pikes. And when he ordered his army across the northern English border to begin their raiding, you could immediately see this begin to pop up. At first things went well, as the English would need more time to gather their men and their strength, but with each success the Scots achieved, King James grew more and more full of himself. This is when like French advisors were like, okay we need to start planning for an actual battle because like we're using a very specific weapon, you need to get them trapped in a way where our weapons work for us. He was like, nah fuck you guys, I know what I'm doing. He didn't even start sending Scouts ahead anymore. And this led to a situation where 500 of his men

walked into an ambush of English longbowmen and were killed. They didn't have the grills in. If they had the grills in, they wouldn't have died. Yeah, this wouldn't happen if they would listen to Gryllian Wallace. Yeah, listen to Gryllian Wallace, literally you are smiling in the face of death. Actually, that is the virtual side.

Grillian Wallace on the back. I smile in the face of death. Despite this, James kept his army in the north of England because his goal was to draw the English forces as far away from London as possible so he could destroy them in the field and then leave the road wide open for further advances in the future, he assumed heavily supported by the French. And he marched on the eastern Till River and began to sack and loot towns and castles that he found along the way. However, James ran to his first real problem when fat with sick English

loot sacks, I assume with like pound signs on them or whatever, about half of the Highland men simply fucked off and went home. They're like, I got my I got my fucking mortgage right here, dog. I'm going home. Me and my girls were going home. Yeah, fucking dead right. They got their money for grills. They'd go back to Scotland to get the grills. No, I would have thought they were given the grills as like military issue. Remember, they ran out of supplies, so only the first rank of people

get the tactical grills. Only the officers got grills. Yeah exactly. These salt of the earth enlisted linemen, they had to go save up. They had to steal from multiple English villages just to save up for one grill. Yeah they're getting it tooth by tooth. For only five cents a day you can make this Scottish highland man's dream come true and supply his family with a grill. And then there's just like definitely some guy that I'd run into in a pub who's like,

yeah, these grills have been in my family for like 700 years. This is my family tartan. He just smiles and shows his teeth. And it's just like red green diamonds. And it's just like red green diamonds So when these guys all left that meant he lost a full one-third of his army Then it began to rain now rain is never good when you're in the field when you're campaigning And it's even worse when you know roads are hardly a thing and you're on at best on horseback You know mean tens of thousands of men all working down the same shitty dirt track road rapidly destroys the road. It turns into nothing but horse shit and mud. And this forces James

to pull his army up around a hill called Flawdon Edge to wait for the rain to lift. Meanwhile, Surrey was just figuring out England had been invaded. He made for Durham, and he collected what was known as the Banner of St. Cuthbert. Now, this was a banner the English saw as a holy relic that had been carried into battle against the Scots forever. And I guess it was only carried into battle against the Scots because its magical banner powers didn't work against anybody else. Like, no, this is specifically anti-Scottish magic. You know what? Fuckin' I wish Saladin had across Europe and gotten to England. Jesus

Christ, I hate this country so much. Someone go get our anti-Scottish wizard. No, no, no, it doesn't work on anybody else. The fucking anti-Scottish wizard trying to manifest into his fucking orb, for god's sake. He concentrates, he sends up the English version of the Spirit Bomb, and simultaneously every bottle of Bucky in Scotland explodes. That's all he can do? He's been training his whole life for this moment. There is actually a typo in the spell book and it was like, oh, that was the bookie exploding

spell. Sorry, sorry. What other ones do you have? Uh, I think I can make it rain? Um, uh, uh, if you bring me loads of myrrh, I can make grills? I can make rent go up in Enboro. Oh, no, he's a magical landlord. Kill him. Oh, God, magician. Like having a landlord is bad enough. Imagine like your landlord was like some zealous pen and teller.

He does like, what's this behind you? And he pulls out an eviction notice. It's like, oh, fuck. Magical Greg evicting you and poof, all your belongings are on the street. I don't know what it is about a magician named Greg that I find so funny. It's the least magical name in the world. This is like, you know, I went to magical community college. My my professor's

name was wizard Frank. So Frank, that's the wizard I had to be afraid of? Like, careful, he majored in anti-Scottish magic. Going like to a really shit version of Academy Gullia instead of becoming a clown, you just become a really bad magician. Hey, at least I can respect clowns even if I don't want to be near them. Yeah. With the invasion of England going on for 10 days now, Suri finally made it to his army in Newcastle on August 30th, 1513.

He commanded about- What are you up to? You are not looking fucking lush like. What are you doing in Newcastle? The only thing I know about Newcastle is the beer. That's all I got. Nuki Brown's nice. You guys call it Nuki Brown. That's adorable. Also Geordie Shore. It's like Jersey Shore but set in Newcastle. I can't tell if that's more or less depressing. Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh least Jersey Shore ended like decades ago. Is that shit

still going on? No, no, no. Jersey Shore only ran for five seasons. When is Paulie D gonna show up to this battle? I assume when he gets parole. No, Paulie D never went to prison. Really? Honestly, that's surprising. I just assumed. I'm sorry. I assumed every member of that cast is bound for a jail cell at some point. The anti-Scottish wizard once again fucking up a spell and instead of summoning a fireball he just summons Snooki and J-Woww. Look, I believe in strict arms control, but only arms control in that a wizard named Greg can't summon the situation into Scotland. Yeah!

So they summon Mike the Situation? Uh... You know, Surrey commanded about half of the number of men that James did, only around 22,000. His men were split between regular infantrymen, longbowmen, and a small number of cavalry. His infantry were armed much differently than the Scots. The weapon they would be carrying was the bill, or the bill hook. The bill was effectively a traditional spearhead with a curved blade underneath. It looked like a farm tool, and

it was one, effectively. Yeah, but it's used for like turning soil. Yes. And it meant a soldier carrying it could stab like a spearman, slash like a swordsman, and also use the hook to snag enemy weapons or even people by their armor and drag them down to the ground to be finished off. It was a super versatile quality weapon. And since it was a military version of an agricultural tool, most people were already at least familiar with it.

And it was much easier to use. Unlike a pike, it didn't require tight fitting drilled and unified formations. Like the famous longbowman, the infamous longbowman who trained their whole lives to use it, effectively by the time a man was stuffed into an army holding a bill hook, he was pretty goddamn familiar with that weapon. Yeah. Yeah, the longbow men just showing up with one massive arm like Glenn Quagmire and that one episode of Family Guy. I would fucking hate to be an English longbowman if only because when they dug up their skeletons,

one of their forearms is completely torched from using it. It's like covered in micro-fractures and whatever. It's like, look, just give me a billhook and send me using it. It was like covered in micro fractures and whatever. It's like, look, just give me a billhook and send me to die. It's fine. Yeah. It's like that meme about shadowed a hedgehog. Sorry, what? You don't know the meme about shadowed a hedgehog where he like breaks his bones every second

and becomes like immortal. No, no, I don't. Do you want me to read it out to you? No! The English also had fewer guns than the Scots, only about 22 of various different sizes, though all of them were smaller than the ones that the Scots had. They were all under the command of a guy named Sir Nicholas Appleyard. However, the small guns had one major advantage.

They were easier to be moved around the battlefield battlefield and their gun crews were much better trained. All things will become very important in a little bit. I don't mean to make Surrey sound like he was some god king of preparedness or whatever, or that England had concrete plans in place for when Scotland invaded. They absolutely did not. For starters, all of England's best troops

were away with the king, planning for the invasion of France. Surrey got people not good enough for that venture or raw conscripts with zero experience. Furthermore, he had no supplies. I don't mean his supply lines were stretched thin or whatever. He literally didn't have one. Those what? He had no supplies.

Okay, what the fuck? So when you when you showed up for service in the in Surrey's army, right? You get conscripted. You get a rusty bill hook and nothing else. There is no armor to spare, no time to make any, no time to stockpile food, nothing. They didn't even have fucking blankets, which is bad because it's August and the cold season cold and rainy season specifically This is England. We're talking about northern England is rapidly approaching So Surrey's plan if they didn't immediately win a victory was this like fuck them conscripts. I don't know

But anyway those shadow the hedgehog God's sake. But anyway, about Shadow the Hedgehog. Oh, fuck off! Are you still talking about Shadow the Hedgehog? I've spent the past like five minutes trying to find this. So after 50 years, I started to feel like I was losing my sanity. So I started to break my fingers and I would just break my fingers and set them again. I started breaking all my bones.

I broke every bone in my hands. I broke both my arms separately. Then I started to break my own ribs. I broke my emphemers. It took a while and then I healed them and broke them again. After five hundred, after five thousand years, my bones were all scar tissue. They had all grown so solidly back together that I was unable to move. And after another five thousand years of furious infinitesimal movement, I built up enough muscle mass to spontaneously break any bone in my body and then I could move again my body had done so much healing that I almost healed instantly this is all I do now

every time I move my body my bones shatter and heal back into my neck shape if I take a single step every bone in my leg splinters and then reforms I don't know what pain is because I have been alive for 10 million years. Yeah, Marilyn Manson did the same thing so he could suck his own dick. Then came the bad news. Suri got word of the Scots' location. He was on the high ground and was just very easily defended. And since his force was much smaller, there was absolutely zero way he was gonna advance up that hill and fight the Scots.

He would have to lure them away in order to meet them in the field before his men began to run low on whatever the fuck it was that they were foraging from nearby fields. The finest grasses in the meadow, I assume, just all the conscripts milling about the fields like cows chewing on the cud you know?

Conscripts have four stomachs. They have to send out like sheep dogs to gather up the conscripts out of the fields. I mean isn't that just NCOs? Yes it is, it's NCOs. So on September 7th Surrey ordered his men to march in what looked like a large flanking maneuver crossing the Till River and hiding his forces behind a hill called the Watchlaw. This would not only block the Scots' view of his forces so he could continue to move them back across the river and right smack dab in the middle of James' line of communication

back to Scotland, and he was already in place before the Scottish scouts noticed that he was there. Then the English army formed itself up for battle near the village of Brankston. French advisors and his own Scottish lords warned King James that following them out to battle would be exactly what the English wanted him to do, and they were very clearly baiting him by cutting off the route back home because the advisors also point out like, we are secure on this hill. We have tons of supplies.

They can simply wait the English out. There's no reason to go charging out into open battle, which would only benefit the English than to stay here in a defensive position that they cannot attack. Time is on our side. James promptly looked them in the eye, told them to go fuck himself, and then ordered his forces to break camp at Flaudens Edge and make Fort Braxton to fight the British. Yeah, he was just like, why would I listen to a pussy ass bitch when my neck on froze like this? I wouldn't listen to these French advisors that a single one of you has a grill that a single one I

Will only listen to my advisor Lord Gucci Mane He advises me he's handing me a letter I should get an ice cream cone tattooed on my face He he tells me that this incredible beverage he calls Sizzurp is incredible for my tactical mind except my heart feels quite slow and I have been gotten a I have gotten a great stomach. Our tactical supplies of lean are running low. I would actually love the idea of giving like a 15th century king lean. I mean, they were

doing shit that's probably equally as bad as lean anyway, but it's just funny. I mean they're drinking like cut wine like it was water because water would kill them. I mean like all the popes in the like fucking 19th and 20th century were like drinking cocaine wine. Fuck yeah. I would like to go back in time, meet Alexander the Great and gift him a jug of lean. No, give Alexander the Great a cup of lean, a like freshman vape, and like, I don't know, a porn mag from 2004. That would absolutely blow his mind. He's like, wait, you have pictures of this?

I don't have to carve this on walls anymore? This rules. We don't have flavors like this in Macedonia. Our only flavor is potato. Does this vape come in potato flavor? We only have savory vapes around the front. Now the king

ordered the remaining Highlanders to take up the left flank, soldiers under the command of three different nobles to take up the center, and the king himself would take the right flank. Both sides then did the exact same thing, deployed their artillery to the front line in front of their soldiers to begin shooting at one another. The later English guns were able to get into position much faster and began hitting the Scottish guns before they were even set up. And also help with the cruiser well trained enough to actually hit them while the Scots began to fire and missed

virtually everything sending cannonballs harmlessly into the dirt in front of the English lines. Then a cannonball smashed directly into the face of the Scottish artillery commander sending him to the great haggis in the sky. into the face of the Scottish artillery commander, sending him to the great haggis in the sky. The Scottish guns were blown to pieces, and then the Scot gunners realized that they were absolutely doomed if they stayed around their cannons and hauled ass, leaving the English gunners to then turn their cannons on the front rank of the Scottish pikemen. The English were comfortable just sitting back and lobbing cannonballs at the Scottish, and the pikemen are forced to stand there and take it, getting crushed under the weight of bombardment. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself.

This has to suck even worse because these cannonballs aren't exploding or anything. You're just getting like absolutely ethered, getting hit center mass with a cannonball to the chest, tearing through you or bounces across the ground and rips your fucking leg off. The only thing they'll ever find in a couple of hundred years is your grill. I mean, I feel like this is like they had to invent the cannons. The British, the English had to deploy the cannons because the only thing powerful enough if it hits the grill, it will just take their head clean off their fucking shoulders.

The grill still in perfect condition. Immaculate. The grill is immaculate. Everything else turned to mulch. King James wanted the English to attack him, but now it was pretty clear that they would not. They didn't need to. And now the pikemen were wavering, getting like absolutely pulverized by cannonballs, and they're demoralized and pissed off they're forced to sit there through this entire thing. And King James is starting to wonder that his men were going to desert and run away rather than wait for their turn to mulch by a cannonball. It was clear to James that he would have to take out the English guns first, so he ordered his left flank to advance.

And this is as effective and successful as the Scottish are going to be for this entire battle. The Scottish Highlanders smash through the English conscripts like they are hardly even there, hacking and slashing at the English flank with their claymores and battle axes, all while screaming bloody fucking murder. Even the sight of them terrified the English, who were forced to stab and slash at them with their bill hooks multiple times just to bring down a single man. Yeah, they're all they're all yacked off that lean.

The Scottish lean powered berserker gang. And all you hear is just like booming out of a speaker in the sky as little ugly mains no slack in my Mac. Meanwhile, the English soldiers are like, bitch, I'm a rose and lugubrious. The English soldiers are so fucking scared that I feel like that there's no music anymore. It's just the shrieks of terrified dying conscripts. You were about to be killed by weaponized buck fast. This side of the English line was held by Surrey's youngest son, so he quickly ordered in his reserves to stabilize the line and save his son's life before he was split in

half by a Scottish buster sword. But the Scottish attack continued, its center advanced pikes outward, and this is where things immediately go wrong. Remember how I talked about how movement was important for the use of pikes? Well foreshadowing is a dev- I'm not doing it. Well, King James didn't notice before deploying his men, you know, on account of not scouting ahead still, but directly in front of him was a marsh. Ah, this is going to go very well.

So his men were now bumbling through it, getting stuck in the mud, the ranks broke down as they struggled, and then the English center began to rain longbow arrows down onto them. Once it crossed the marsh, the Scottish center had to advance up a hill called Pipes Hill. They did so under a hail of arrows, but their pike formation had completely and totally broken down along the way as they were forced to drag themselves through the mud. Soon the Scots are throwing away their pikes and drawing out their backup swords. This leads to another problem. What are their enemies armed with? Bilhooks. They have a length advantage on you if you're holding a sword, and the only

advantage you had was the length of your pikes. But now you're advancing up a hill armed with a sword, and now the English have bilhooks and they're fighting downhill towards you. Everything has gone wrong immediately. Yeah, you're losing the game of mine is bigger than yours. All three of the Scottish nobles in the command of the center fell under a hail of arrows and a face full of bill hooks. Watching his center vanish, King James sat there and had a choice.

Withdraw and save what was left of his army, or send everyone else in, including himself, into the swirling mass of the Death Marsh. Of course he ordered his men in, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. He ordered the rest of his men right through the same goddamn swamp he ordered the first wave in, seemingly having learned nothing. And remember, he's close enough where we can see everything going wrong on the hill.

These pikes don't seem to be working. What could fix this problem? More pikes. You know, I think James would have benefited a little bit by spending some time playing some, you know, tabletop RPGs, maybe some Hearts of Iron 4. Nobody ever benefits from playing Hearts of Iron 4. Yeah, no, it just turned you into a Nazi. Yeah, like, you know, if I was in his shoes and I just sent a large group of men to their death because of where I sent them, I would not be overly eager to go there again. At least myself. Like, yeah, I've played a lot of Total War games. I have hemorrhaged many, many armies and very stupid and badly planned out ideas.

Right. But never once am I in them, right? I don't even put my King who's not a real person in there cause like they're worth something. Yeah. James, you should be playing like, you know, a cracked version of like Age of Empires 2 on a gateway PC in like 1999. You would have learned so much more and you could have won this battle. There's, there's like five different ways he could have won this battle. First of all,

by not fighting it and being smarter, but you know, Trying to go for a diplomacy victory. He should have gone for a cultural victory and built the world's biggest buck fast bottle jutting out of London like the pyramids. Replace the shard in London with a giant book fastball. Like there's one thing is sending wave after wave of people you don't care about into a lost cause. And then there's something else that comes to sending yourself in.

It's a level of disconnection and hubris that comes ascending yourself in. It's a level of disconnection and hubris that is just wild to me. Yeah, it's like really cutting your nose off to spite your face, except your face is your life and your nose is an Englishman stabbing you in the heart. Catching a billhook directly to the brain stem. Yeah. The same thing happened with this next wave. Storming into the mud, slowing down, formations breaking apart, all forward momentum of the pikemen being lost, all being turned into pincushion by longboats and their faces being torn off of farm tools.

And you know what? A couple of hundred years later people would just call that a tough mudder. That's true. Now, I'm going to do the flawed in the Flaughton Hill Tough Mudder, where me and like five friends are just going to rain arrows down on you. Now, obviously, they'll be blunted. Otherwise, we go to prison. But the bill hooks will be real. And then, you know, for the low, low price of 500 euro per ticket,

you can prove that you're a man. Or you could go to therapy. It's up to you. We know which one you're going to pick. Sign up today. As King James and his men struggled up the hill towards the bows, the English infantry pulled back, giving the bowmen more time to get those reps in. You know, volume is important.

James must have been thinking, now is when my reserves will come in behind me and sweep the field. But they never did. The reserves led by the Earls of Lennox and Argyle simply never showed up. And an interesting note of history, to this day, nobody's entirely sure why. It could have been something very simple, like King James never actually giving them orders to come in, or when they should come in, just assuming they'll pick the right time.

That's the most likely reason. Or another reason, which is also pretty likely in my opinion. From where they were sitting, they saw the battle was lost and committing their men would just add to the chaos and also would kill them personally. So they fucking stayed back. King James saw that, you know, my reserves aren't showing up. I might be fucked here. So he sent orders to his other lords, lords Home and Huntly, to immediately rally their

soldiers and send them to his aid. Home took one look at the situation that the king had gotten himself into and said, fuck, no, I'm not going in there. Lord Huntly then began to scream at him. And according to several sources, threatened to kill him should he continue to refuse the king's orders, but he was like, no, man, I ain't going. You can go if you want. However, Lord Huntly knew if I go in there without him, I'm fucked, too.

So he also stayed back. One lord who immediately listened to King James order, however, was the Earl of Bothwell, who ran charging into battle a full hour after King James had. And remember, this is they're all still stuck in there getting killed with longbows and bill hooks. This has been going on for hours at this point. However, the Earl of Bothwell is kind of an idiot. He could have sent his forces in some kind of flanking maneuver, literally any kind of

maneuver other than going straight up the hill. So take some pressure off King James and the other troops caught in the death march, which know rapidly growing with corpses at this point. Instead he piled his forces through the same exact goddamn swamp right into the growing mosh pit of death that King James's men were all stuck in. And if that wasn't bad enough things are about to get way worse for the Scots because you see at the beginning of all this Surrey had sent one of his commanders Lord Stanley and his forces, away from his army. And then they got lost. They couldn't find Suri's army.

They were just kind of wandering around. They finally hired a local villager like, hey, there's a battle going on nearby. Where the fuck is it? And the villager's like, oh yeah, there's like 50,000 people murdering one another over there. We'll take you over in that direction. Finally, by 630 p.m., hours after the battle had begun, he managed to find the battlefield and he happened to pop out behind a hill and some trees where the Scots couldn't see them. So then they charged into battle.

First, they hit the Scottish reserves who had been refusing to go in, causing them to break and run from the field before they even like start crossing swords. They see them coming like, yo fuck this we're gone. Then they closed in on King James's rear, fully encircling the Scottish force, trapping them on the downside of a slope in the swampy ground at the bottom. At some point around 7 p.m. 30 that, King James was dead, either from an arrow to the face or a billhook in his fleshy nooks and crannies, we're not entirely sure which.

It took some time for the rest of the Scottish soldiers to notice that their king was dead, at which point all of the remaining morale and will to fight collapsed entirely. The battle was over. The Scottish army was entirely crushed 14,000 Scots lay dead in a field, but that isn't even the worst part I mean that is bad, but among the dead was virtually the entire Scottish government The king was dead as was almost all of the Scottish clergy who went into battle with them Warrior priests yeah, they tried to be paladins and so they just died. That should have stayed as a cleric. With them went 21 Earls, 14 of the 20 lords of the Scottish Parliament, 300 of the kingdoms

landed gentry, and to add to that tally Lord Holme, the man who refused to commit his forces, survived but then was executed for treason for not going into battle, so tally that in with him. Scotland was annihilated after, like the government, everything, every single institution in the kingdom was in tatters, and King James' 17-month-old son was named King. And the surviving Scottish nobility was so busy screaming at one another they couldn't organize a response to their own crushing defeat. And then to add salt in the wound, the war on the continent eventually made the entire battle completely meaningless because the next year the Holy League would disband, France and England would make peace, and the English demanded that France stop helping

Scotland and the French were like, yeah okay. Yes, kind of a battle for nothing. A battle for nothing, over nothing, and for no reason. But you did lose an entire government in it, so who's to say it's good or bad. And would lead to the rise of Grealian Wallace. That's right. Scotland had found themselves locked into what amounted to be a proxy war, and suffered the worst military defeat in their history, and the only thing they had to get, the only thing that they got for this entire thing was a stupid baby king. Though, fun fact, James' son, the new King James V, would also die during a war against the English, though

not in the way his dad did. James V's army marched off into battle, and then, you know, he fell sick from ye olde wasting disease and died in bed. And then his army was crushed in the field while he was dying. Also like his father, an infant took the throne after he died, his daughter, Mary, when she was six days old. Baby king and baby queen, everything's coming up Scotland, surely nothing bad will come from this. And that is the Battle of Flauddenfield.

So, Tom, we do a thing on this show called Question from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support the show through Patreon, and then you can go on our Discord channel and you'll see a little thread called Questions from the Legion, you can put them there. You can ask us on Patreon,

or you can stuff them into a bottle of Buckfast and invade Northern England if you drive far enough south and get to London you can give it to Tom and today's question from the Legion is what do you rate your chance in fighting against Steven Seagal? ooo are we talking about Steven Seagal like now? I'll go either way if it's now 100%

I don't even like saying now cuz he's like an elderly old fat guy I'll beat up a fat old guy. To be fair. He is accused of some pretty heinous thing. So I'm okay with it Yeah, and even Steven Seagal in his prime is remember like his entire backstory is full of shit Yeah, and also he knows Akito, which isn't even real. There's not a single you know, yeah, like Steven Seagal, like the only thing that he contributed to society was that one reggae song that he wrote.

Are you are you talking about the Steven Seagal song? Me want the punani perhaps. Yes, I am talking about that. That is the only contribution of cultural significance of his career. I would say there's two things. There's also the time he tried to get in a fight with Judo Jean LaBelle and he was choked out and shit himself. That is a cultural touchstone he's given us all. Like, look, you know, it's bad enough getting like beaten up, but getting the literal shit

kicked out of you, like literally you lose so bad you shit yourself Jean LeBell is an honest guy. I believe he's passed now, but He's never one to like really at least from my understanding. He's not one to like lie about things I have been choked out quite a few times as someone who does Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It comes with the territory I have never shit myself. Judo Jean LeBel choked out Steven Seagal so bad he shit his pants. In an actual fight, this isn't like he ambushed him and choked him out. It's cause Steven Seagal believed he was drinking his own Kool-Aid and got his ass stomped in and then his pants full with shit.

Like if you want an assessment of Steven Seagal's character like... He's also been accused of some horrific shit which I don't want to get into so fuck Steven Seagal. No, no, I was gonna say this is a man who has now sought asylum in Russia. Is that him or JCVD? No, that's definitely Steven Seagal. He has some bullshit government job. He hangs out with like Lukashenko and shit. Hehehehe. Steven! Do you like potato? There's a very famous video of Lukashenko giving Steven Seagal a carrot.

Uh, and then eating it. And saying how it makes him feel so much stronger and shit like that. Steven! This carrot, it is a gift from Belorussian people. Do you like tractors? Yeah, that's pretty much what the video is. It's absolutely baffling. It's so strange. And Steven Seagal went from being also like, I think I've talked about this before in the

show. We did an episode about one of Steven Seagal's movies years ago. I believe it was Under Siege when he was a cook in the Navy, but he was actually a Navy seal undercover or some shit It was terrible. But He once went in Saturday Night Live as a host and was so intensely unfunny That they could not make it work despite all of and this is back when Saturday Night Live was at least Decent they still couldn't write jokes that he could deliver and he kept threatening people

Backstage of whatever they had Steven Seagal write a joke, the whole punch on it was like, and then I beat his ass. That was like his whole thing is like, I just want to beat people up. It was like, sir, this is, this is a sketch comedy show. Yes. What the fuck are you talking about? Steven Seagal and Belarus, AKA the scrappy do of geopolitics. No, that's disrespectful to scrappy do of geopolitics. No, that's disrespectful. The scrappy do fuck Belarus. Mince gets no respect. I should say the government of Belarus

have nothing against any country, only governments. Tom, that is a podcast. You have a different podcast. Plug your show beneath skin show with the history of everything told through the history of tattoos and also glue factory, a comedy podcast from some friends of the show from Trashfuture. This is the only podcast that I host, but if you like what we do here and you think that's worth your time and money,

you can support us on Patreon where you have years and years worth of bonus content. You have early episodes, you have Discord access, you have videos of our live show as well as audio of our live show. You get first dibs on merch and live show tickets and they come up and you get all that for five bucks. So do that and leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts, it helps us immensely. Until next time, drink lean, become a Highland Berserker.

I'm getting a note from our lawyer, don't do that.