The appointment of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, to the position of lieutenant-general of the king's army against Scotland in February 1523 led to an intensification of the war against Scotland. Whereas George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, lieutenant-general in the north in 1522, made no attacks on Scotland, Surrey launched a series of well-planned raids aimed at turning the most fertile parts of the Scottish borders into wastelands. Surrey was an expert in this type of warfare. Over the previous decade, he had burned crops and villages in France, Ireland and Scotland. Yet the degree of devastation he inflicted on Scotland in 1523 was unlike anything seen in the region since the fourteenth century, and it (along with his scorched-earth campaign in France in the previous year) marked the beginnings of a new intensity in the violence of Tudor warfare, which was increasingly directed against civilians. While the punitive raids that Thomas Dacre launched into Scotland in the wake of Flodden in 1513 were undoubtedly destructive, they lacked both the scope and the intensity of those of 1523, when Surrey destroyed the most fertile parts of the Scottish borders in an act of environcide, whereby the environmental structure of the borders was destroyed (crops and villages burned, animals taken or killed, food and seed stores despoiled) to depopulate the region by creating an artificial famine. In regions of principally arable farming, such as those specifically targeted by Surrey, the populations received the bulk of their calories from products derived from crops. This was not environmental destruction as a collateral damage of a conflict, but one where the destruction of the environmental infrastructure was the principal target of the campaign. Whereas during the Dutch Revolt, rebellious cities destroyed dykes to create a defensive waste to prevent the Spanish besieging them, this negatively affected their own populations. In contrast, Surrey's strategy was a double win because it both created a defensive waste and achieved it at the expense of the enemy Scots, rather than impact on English frontier populations.

Surrey had initially implemented these methods in north-eastern France in the previous year in a scorched-earth campaign that was so destructive that seventy years later peasants in the region still remembered 1522 as ‘the year of the great fires‘(l’année des grands feux’).

In the previous chapter, we saw how the English attacked Scotland in 1522–24 for reasons of defence rather than conquest. Although these attacks were important for securing the frontier, they formed only one element of the wider English defence strategy. This chapter explores the wider operation of northern defences during a period of open conflict, when the kingdom was threatened with invasion. The first part of the chapter examines the chain of fortifications which ran along the 110 miles of England's northern frontier between the garrison towns of Carlisle and Berwick, many of which were in a poor condition in the 1520s. In addition to crumbling masonry and outdated designs, key northern fortifications, including Berwick, Carlisle and Wark, lacked guns and munitions to defend against the Scots. Yet despite the poor state of these fortifications, the government in London was reluctant to spend the sums needed to make them strong.

Beyond the state of the fortifications, there were problems with the garrisons who manned them. In comparison with the garrisons based on other Tudor frontiers – especially France – there are few studies of the northern garrison. This chapter examines methods the English crown used to mobilise the men required to defend the frontier with Scotland in the sixteenth century. Around the small core of permanent or semi-permanent garrisons in the north, large numbers of men were mobilised from the local population to defend the frontier on a short-term basis, especially during moments of increased threat, as in 1522–24. Northern tenants were typically obliged as part of their leases to provide military service for a set number of days under the warden or royal lieutenant in defence of the kingdom, which by the sixteenth century could include participation in raids into Scotland. Yet local populations increasingly took exception to the requirement to participate in military actions. This decay of border service, which has been examined for later periods in the sixteenth century, was already apparent by the 1520s. This longstanding system of border service was starting to break down in the early sixteenth century as a result of changes to land tenure, which led tenants to demand wages for military service that they had customarily provided without charge.

While the return of John, duke of Albany, to Scotland in November 1521 was principally aimed at restoring political order in Scotland by asserting his authority over his key rivals, particularly the Douglases and the Humes, nonetheless it had international repercussions. It angered Henry VIII, who believed that Albany had returned both to seize the Scottish throne and to menace England's northern frontier on behalf of Francis I. For these reasons, Henry made Albany's remaining in France the cornerstone of his policy towards Scotland from 1517. He told Francis I that the maintenance of the Anglo-French peace depended on the Valois monarch preventing Albany from returning to Scotland. The 1518 treaty of London, which was designed to generate a lasting peace between the major Western European powers, included a secret clause binding Francis I to ensure that Albany remained in France. Two years later at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Francis I reaffirmed his commitment to prevent Albany from returning to Scotland. In the months following this summit, Henry VIII continued to insist that Albany's detention in France was central to the peace – and he threatened to return to war if this agreement was not upheld.

While this understanding suited both Henry VIII and Francis I (if not the Scottish lords, who complained about the arrangement and requested Albany’s return), because they were seeking to maintain peace between their realms in the years following the treaty of London, a breakdown in relations between the Valois monarch and Emperor Charles V in 1521 destabilised the wider European peace. When Henry reaffirmed his claim that the French monarch was planning to send Albany to Scotland, Francis I, who wanted to prevent England joining Charles V in an invasion of France, stated that he would strip Albany of all his French lands should he return to Scotland. As well continuing to put diplomatic pressure on Francis to keep Albany in France, Cardinal Wolsey, chancellor of England, sought to pressure the Scottish lords to drop their calls for Albany's return by urging Henry VIII, in February 1521, to increase the size of northern garrisons and have them raid Scotland.

Yet the Tudor monarch was not ready for war with Scotland.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a renewed debate around the status of the Anglo-Scottish frontier and the wider political and social conditions which predominated in the borderlands of each kingdom. In a series of influential books and articles, Steven Ellis emphasised that the specific geo-political situation of the border, and especially the need to defend the frontier against enemy attack, produced a highly militarised society. Other historians, of both England and Scotland, including Anthony Goodman, Richard Lomas, Maureen Meikle and, most recently, Jackson Armstrong, in a challenge to the views of Ellis and others, have downplayed the violence and military character of the borders and have moved away from seeing the social structures of these regions as being tethered to needs of defence.

This study of the Anglo-Scottish war of 1522–24 tends to support the view proposed by Ellis that this was a highly militarised frontier which possessed distinct socio-political systems that were tied to the needs of war. While Goodman, Lomas and Meikle and others have argued that the Anglo-Scottish wars were not especially destructive, the regions they study, particularly those in the East and Middle Marches, lay at the very centre of the conflicts of the sixteenth century, with the violence visited on Teviotdale and the Merse in 1523 ranking amongst the most brutal found anywhere in Europe during this period. Although there has been a move to present the Anglo-Scottish border as a porous frontier where the populations on either side were closely connected, these neighbourly links imploded rapidly in wartime when frontier populations were co-opted into a national struggle. Borderers were responsible for inflicting the heaviest violence on each other during the war. On the English side, for example, we saw how the population of Redesdale played a central role in a war aimed squarely at their Scottish civilian neighbours directly across the frontier.

Beyond the specific conditions of the borderlands, some historians of Scotland have downplayed the effect which war with England had on wider developments in the kingdom during this time. In her study of sixteenth-century Scotland, Jenny Wormald writes ‘among other European countries, Scotland stands as being scarcely affected by war; while other kings might face enemies on several fronts, Scotland’s only enemy was England, and even then, periods of fighting were rare’.

During the war with England in the 1520s, the Scots mobilised men for both offensive and defensive purposes. The most intensive period of warfare came in 1523 when they suffered a range of devastating attacks and then launched their own large invasion of England following Albany's return to Scotland. Accordingly, the Scots needed to field large numbers of men. These preparations are very well documented in the contemporary evidence, which provides numerous insights into mobilisation methods in pre-modern Scotland. The first part of the chapter focuses on the preparations for Albany's march on Wark (September–October 1523), including: an examination of the French army which fought on the campaign; developments in artillery; and the methods Albany used to raise the Scottish host. The second part moves on to situate the evidence for Scottish mobilisation in 1523 within a wider context, drawing on contemporary evidence from other Scottish military campaigns. The third part of the chapter moves away from looking at the offensive capabilities of the Scottish army to consider the methods employed for the defence of the kingdom. Again, we have excellent evidence from 1523, which reveals the sophisticated arrangements put in place to defend the realm. Whereas the mechanisms employed to secure the immediate local defence of the borders have been studied previously, the evidence from 1523 reveals that there was also a comprehensive strategy looking to the security of the entire kingdom.

Albany's 1523 Invasion of England

French Participation

While there was direct French military participation in Scotland from the fourteenth century, the resources Francis I sent to assist Albany in the 1520s were far in excess of what his predecessors had offered. At the beginning of the war, it appeared as if the Scots were going to be left to fight the English alone as Francis neglected to send a significant number of soldiers to assist Albany with his Sep tember 1522 expedition to Carlisle, thus failing to fulfil the terms of the 1517 treaty of Rouen which bound him to send 1,200 men to Scotland upon the resurgence of the war with England. Although this omission is often attributed to bad faith on Francis I's part, with claims that the French king exploited the Scots for his own purposes, other reasons explain his actions. In the summer of 1522, the French were fighting English and Habsburg armies on multiple fronts.

While he was camping outside the ruins of Jedburgh on 23 September, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, received word that John, duke of Albany, had landed at Dumbarton on the previous day with a French army. He immediately broke camp and returned to England to prepare the defence of the north. Whereas Albany's previous visit to Scotland was motivated, initially at least, by a concern to restore domestic political stability and crush internal challenges to his authority, he returned in September 1523 specifically to invade England. Although Albany brought with him a large French army composed of seasoned soldiers, he faced considerable difficulty in preparing his invasion, particularly because he arrived late in the year – months later than he had planned to return – and towards the end of the campaigning season, which meant that he needed to raise men and supplies quickly before the onset of winter made the expedition unworkable.

The first part of this chapter explores how Albany tackled these challenges and set about organising the war. Although he ultimately failed to mobilise a sufficiently large host, nonetheless he marched his Franco-Scottish army to the border and laid siege to the English border fortress of Wark. Although he failed to take the castle, he caused considerable damage to its defences before returning to Edinburgh following the coming of Surrey's army. Although Albany's withdrawal is often presented as the moment that led the principal Scottish lords finally to abandon him, this chapter shows that a closer reading of the evidence demonstrates that in fact the Scottish nobles remained close to Albany and implored him to remain in Scotland as a governor. Moreover, while the failure of Wark is typically taken as the end point of the war, the second part of the chapter shows that the conflict continued for over a year more. It is important to consider the extended duration of the conflict because the traditional view that the war ended at Wark has given the impression that the Scottish army was antiquated and no match for the English. Yet the Scots took the offensive in 1524 and launched a number of devastating attacks on northern England, which Henry VIII's commanders struggled to repel.

Using the extensive Scottish administrative records detailing the preparations for Albany's invasion of England in 1523, this chapter uncovers the mechanisms used to supply Scottish armies. In contrast to other European states, the victualling of late medieval and early modern Scottish armies has received little attention. While a range of works examine the arms, armour and equipment of Scottish soldiers, little has been said about how they were fed. Certainly, a lack of surviving sources makes it difficult to see how pre-modern Scottish armies were victualled. As a result of this lack of work on provisioning, it is sometimes assumed that Scottish armies had no significant baggage train and that soldiers simply brought enough supplies to cover them for the period of their military service, or pillaged what they required, and that the crown took little or no role in the supply of goods.

Although men summoned to the host were asked to bring victuals with them, this formed only one element in the victualling of Scottish armies. A study of the administrative documents detailing Albany's 1523 campaign reveals that there was extensive state involvement in the supply of the army, which was based around a sophisticated system of coordinated planning that drew resources from across the kingdom. Rather than simply requiring the men summoned to the army to bring all the food they required for the duration of an expedition, Scottish rulers went to considerable efforts to gather supplies and transport them to the camp.

Supply Commissions

The supply of the army was often the matter which the Scottish ruler and his council discussed first and in greatest detail when planning a campaign. When preparing an army to send to the Western Isles in 1529, James V's council first secured victuals before summoning the host. When James prepared to lead another army to the borders in the following year, victualling was again one of the first matters his council discussed when planning the campaign. While the proclamations issued in October 1523 calling men to join Albany's invasion stated that they should bring food for thirty days, the council had already begun to prepare the victualling of the army at the beginning of August.

In November 1521, John Stewart, duke of Albany and regent for James V, arrived in Scotland after a four-year absence in France. Although Albany returned principally to restore domestic political order, nonetheless this action escalated tensions with Henry VIII, who demanded that Francis I keep him in France, and put Scotland on the road to war with England. The Tudor monarch had good cause to resist Albany's return. After imposing his authority over his rivals in Scotland, Albany attacked England in support of the Valois monarch, who was facing an invasion of his realm by English and Habsburg armies. Major Scottish armies marched on England both in 1522 and in 1523, when they were supported by the largest French force yet to set foot in Scotland. French monarchs had long encouraged their Scottish allies to invade northern England at times of invasion to force the English to split their forces. Certainly, the renewed threat from Scotland led to a major military mobilisation in England and a series of significant attacks on the Scottish borders. The effects of these military actions were devastating. Thousands of acres of farmland and scores of settlements, from small frontier villages to substantial towns and strongholds, were systematically destroyed by Tudor armies. The war’s effects were felt in England, too, as a result of numerous Scottish raids on frontier villages, while the major stronghold of Wark lay in ruins after being assaulted by Albany in November 1523. By the time the treaty of Berwick brought a formal end to the war in January 1526, both kingdoms had suffered considerably from the war and there was no clear victor.

Despite the impact which this long and significant conflict had on both kingdoms, it barely merits a passing mention in either the extensive literature on Anglo-Scottish warfare or in the national historiographies of both countries. In terms of the sixteenth century, Flodden dominates the study of Anglo-Scottish warfare and there are numerous books and articles, both popular and academic, about the campaign and the battle. The conflicts of the 1540s have also attracted some scholarly attention – though less than they merit – most notably Marcus Merriman's Rough Wooings, while Amy Blakeway and Richard Hoyle have written about the smaller conflicts of 1532–33 and 1558.