October 17, 1346. The King of Scotland was found hiding under a bridge because English soldiers spotted his reflection in the water. He had two arrows in his face. When they dragged him out he knocked two of his captor's teeth out. That is how David II, son of Robert the Bruce, ended up spending the next eleven years as a prisoner in England. The reason he was in County Durham at all was a letter from Paris. Edward III had just destroyed the French at Crécy in August, and Philip VI of France wanted the pressure taken off. So he leaned on the Auld Alliance and told David that northern England was, in his words, a defenceless void. It was not. That is the whole story in one sentence. David crossed on October 7 with around 12,000 men, a lot of them carrying French-supplied weapons and armour. What Philip either did not know or did not care about was that the English had left a northern command in place precisely because they expected this. Ralph Neville pulled together three or four thousand northern troops, picked up another three thousand Yorkshiremen on the march, and met the Scots west of Durham with maybe six or seven thousand men. Half the Scottish numbers. On worse paper. The Scots took the high ground, which sounds right until you look at it. The ground was broken, cut up with ditches and old field walls, and it was murder on a formation trying to move across it. And the Scots were not going to move. They remembered Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill, where charging English positions had got Scottish armies slaughtered, so they sat and waited for the English to come to them. The English, holding the better ground, also sat and waited. So for most of the day nothing happened. Two armies looking at each other. Then the English longbowmen walked forward and started shooting, and that broke the deadlock, because an army being shot at from a distance it cannot answer has to either advance or come apart. The archers drove off the Scottish light horse and put arrows into the flank of Moray's division. The Earl of Menteith led a cavalry charge at the archers to clear them, it failed, and he was taken. Worth noting that the English archers that day were not the veterans of Crécy. Those men were in France. A lot of these were in their first fight and the accounts call their performance uneven. It was still enough. The Lancashire longbowmen each got a £10 bonus for it, which in 1346 was a serious amount of money. Goaded into it, the Scots attacked. Moray's division went in first and the broken ground tore its formation apart before it arrived. English men-at-arms finished it hand to hand. Moray was killed. The third division, under the Earl of March and Robert Stewart, saw the first attack fail, took some arrows, and left. Most of them got away, which is the only reason Scotland had an army left at all. That left David II in the centre, standing, and the English came in on him with arrows and then with men-at-arms until his division broke too. Then the king of Scots was shot twice in the face. Surgeons got one arrowhead out. The other one stayed in his face. He lived with that for decades and with the headaches it gave him. The dead included the Constable, the Marischal, the Chamberlain and the Chancellor of Scotland. Four of the great offices of the kingdom, killed on the same afternoon. Also the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Strathearn, and Niall Bruce of Carrick, an illegitimate son of Robert the Bruce. More than fifty barons were killed or captured. Scottish chroniclers put the dead at about a thousand. Modern historians put it closer to three thousand with fewer than a hundred prisoners taken, which tells you what kind of day it was for the men who could not pay a ransom. And here is the cold part. Edward III did not want ransoms. He had the Scottish nobles shipped to London and refused to release them on parole or sell them back, because a Scotland without its leadership could not invade anybody. He even paid individual captors to buy out their own ransom rights, giving up money to keep men in cells. Menteith had previously sworn fealty to Edward. He was tried for treason and executed. John de Coupland, the man who pulled the king out from under the bridge and lost two teeth doing it, was knighted and given £500 a year for life. Edward offered to release David for £40,000 if Scotland would accept one of Edward's sons as heir to the Scottish throne. He made that offer three times. David refused it three times, from a prison cell, with an arrowhead in his skull. He was eventually released in 1357 for 100,000 marks over ten years. The truce that followed held for roughly forty years and effectively finished the Second War of Scottish Independence. The English also took the Black Rood of Scotland off him, a reliquary said to hold a piece of the True Cross, and gave it to the shrine of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral. 1346 is one of the most lopsided years in English military history. Crécy in August, Neville's Cross in October, Calais under siege the whole time. Two kingdoms wrecked in ten weeks by an island everyone had written off as overextended.