Battle of the Passes

The Battle of the Passes was a battle in the Scottish Wars. On November 9th, 1298, the combined rebel forces of William Jamieson and Rickard Sutherland decisively defeated the Anglo-Scottish Army led by Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland in the first large-scale battle of the war.

Background
After the fall of series of English forts in the Highlands, Jamieson led his bolstered army on an offensive against the Loyalist clansmen gathered near Inverness. After defeating the loyalists in the Battle of Dingwall and being reinforced by a force of clansmen led by Rickard Sutherland, Jamieson and his army besieged Inverness, but the strong stone walls and the arrival Anglo-Scottish relief force under Henry Percy forced the rebels to retreat into the Highlands, where they were pursued by a large Anglo army. However, Percys, 'scorched earth,' tactics backfired, and within weeks his large army was starving. Retreating through the narrow Dromotcher Pass, his withdrawing army was blocked by Jamiesons rebel army a mere days march from safety.

The main battle
After a rainy night, the two sides drew up their forces in the pass. Jamiesons had formed a blocking force of one thousand clansmen, many armed with pikes, in the narrow pass, while Sutherland had taken five hundred clansmen on the mountains, hidden behind a rocky ridge. Jamieson himself led the blocking force, and at about 1300, after a short meeting between the two sides, the battle began with an English cavalry charge into the pass led by Edmund of York. However, the Scottish pikes blunted the charge and a melee ensued. After several hours of savage hand-to-hand fighting, the Sutherland clansmen charged over the lip of the mountain and trapped the beleagured English in the pass. Recognizing the threat of his main body being cut off, Percy ordered his longbowmen to fire into the melee, but they failed to drive away the Scots and after the loyalist Scots refusal to charge Percy fled the pass with his entourage and remaining reserve. The Englishmen trapped in the narrow pass were penned in and massacred, with the vengeful Scotsmen offering no mercy. By nightfall the entire English contigent of the army had been effectively destroyed.

Aftermath
The English army had been effectively destroyed, and Percy withdrew from Scotland, gathering the castle garrisons as he retreated. The destruction of the Northern Army brought Jamieson to world-wide attention, and in the aftermath of the English withdrawal he took Edinburgh with his reinforced clansmen, setting the stage for the next part of the war.