Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

The corpse of the King of Scots is brought to York, because he had said that he would come before the feast of Michaelmas to the city of York, having captured it.

Comment

Comment

Hall unfortunately doesn’t mention York. Catherine of Aragon was at this stage regent, Henry VIII being in France:

Well known it was by them that fought, and also reported by the prisoners of Scotland, that their king was taken or slain, but his body was not found till the next day, because all the mean people as well Scots as English were stripped out of their apparel as they lay on the field, yet at the last he was found by the Lord Dacre, who knew him well by his privy tokens in that same place where the battle of the Earl of Surrey and his, first joined together.

This King had diverse deadly wounds and in especial one with an arrow, and another with a ball as appeared when he was naked. After that the body of the King of Scots was found and brought to Berwick, the Earl showed it to Sir William Scott his Chancellor, and Sir John Forman his sergeant-porter, which knew him at the first sight and made great lamentation. Then was the body bowelled, embalmed, and seared, and secretly amongst other stuff conveyed to Newcastle… After this noble victory the earl wrote first to the Queen which had raised a great power to resist the said King of Scots, of the winning of the battle, for then the body of the King of Scots was not found, and she yet being at the town of Buckingham had worded the next day after that the King of Scots was slain and a part of his coat armour to her sent, for which victory she thanked GOD, and so the Earl after that the North part was set in a quietness, returned to the Queen with the dead body of the Scottish king and brought it to Richmond (Hall 1809).

Rumour that not the Scots but the English had been soundly beaten spread quickly after the battle and was satirised by Henry VIII’s court poet, John Skelton:

Lo, these fond sots, and trattling Scots,
How they are blind in their own mind,
And will not know their overthrow
At Brankston Moor. They are so stour,
So frantic mad, they say they had
And won the field with spear and shield.
That is as true as black is blue,
And green is gray. What euer they say,
Jemmy is dead, and closed in lead,
That was their own king: fie on that winning! (Skelton 1568)

Also:

Katherine of Aragon, the victor of Flodden, reportedly sent James IV's bloody tunic to her husband Henry VIII to fly as a banner in his campaign against the French https://t.co/BxYSWHUOs0

— Dr Francis Young (@DrFrancisYoung) September 9, 2021

Richard Jackson, a 16th century schoolmaster of Ingleton, wrote a Ballad of Floddon Field. See also.

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Original

[Report sent to Venice, at Michaelmas, 29 September:] Cadaver Scotorum Regis adductum est Eboratum, ideo quod venit ante festum divi Michaelis civitatem Eboracensem, quam dixerat se capturum.

28 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Battle of Flodden (3) ·
• Catherine of Aragon (1) ·
• Edward Hall (2) ·
• England (12) ·
• Henry VIII (1491-1547) (16), ruled 1509 until his death, initiator of the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority and introducing the theory of the divine right of kings, dissolved convents and monasteries, invested heavily in the navy ·
• James IV of Scotland (2) ·
• John Skelton (1) ·
• Kingdom of England (4) ·
• Kingdom of Scotland (3) ·
• London (74) ·
• Michaelmas (6), feast principally of St. Michael on 29 September, one of the four quarter days of the financial, judicial, and academic year, in medieval England the beginning and end of the husbandman's year, hence hiring fairs at this time ·
• Newcastle upon Tyne (8) ·
• Northumberland (5) ·
• Richmond, London (1) ·
• Scotland (37) ·
• Thomas Dacre, 2nd Baron Dacre (1) ·
• War of the League of Cambrai (1) ·
• 📌York (164) ·

All tags.

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