enemy.  But not only was the English plan of battle foolish it was also carried out weakly.  Warenne overslept himself, and his subordinates wasted the early morning in useless discussions and altercations.  When at last he woke up, he rejected the advice of a Scottish knight to send part of his cavalry over the river by a ford which thirty horsemen could traverse abreast, and ordered all his troops to cross by the bridge.

Wallace, seeing that the enemy had delivered themselves into his hands, remained in the woods until a fair proportion of the English men-at-arms had made their way over the stream.  He then suddenly swooped down upon the bridge, cutting off the retreat of those who had traversed it, and blocking all possibility of reinforcement.  After a short fight the English to the north of the Forth were cut down almost to a man.  The English on the Stirling side, seeing the fate of their comrades, fled in terror, and their Scots allies went over to their country men.  Among the slain was the greedy Cressingham, whose skin the Scots tanned into leather.  Warenne did not draw rein until he reached Berwick, and in one day all Scotland was lost.  The castles of Roxburgh and Berwick alone upheld the English flag.  Wallace and Moray governed all Scotland as “generals of the army of King John”.  Within a few weeks of their victory, they raided the three northern counties of England.

Wallace had freed Scotland, but his wonderful success taught the contending factions in England the plain duty of union against the common enemy.  A new parliament of the three estates was summoned for September 30.  The opposition leaders came armed, and declared that there could be no supply of men or money until their demand for the confirmation of the charters was granted.  No longer content with simple confirmation, they drew up, in the form of a statute, a petition requiring that no tallage or aid should henceforth be taken without the assent of the estates.  This was the so-called statutum de tallagio non concedendo which seventeenth-century parliaments and judges erroneously accepted as a statute.  The helpless regency substantially accepted their demands, and, on October 12, issued a confirmation of the charters, to which fresh clauses were added, providing, with less generality than in the baronial request, that no male-tolts, or such manner of aids as had recently been extorted, should be imposed in the future without the common consent of all the realm, but making no reference to tallage.[1] Liberal supplies were then voted by all the three estates, and Winchelsea, who all through these proceedings acted as the brain of the baronage, exerted himself to explain away the last of the clerical difficulties raised by the Clericis laicos.