All at sea

With yesterday being Talk Like a Pirate Day, I found myself thinking of the famous Scottish privateer Sir Andrew Barton, the villain of Child Ballad 167, Andrew Bartin.
To cut a long ballad short, Sir Andrew had been given a letter of marque by King James IV of Scotland, allowing him to carry out attacks on Portuguese shipping. Since Portugal was England's oldest ally, Henry VIII of England charged Sir Edward Howard and his brother Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk to rid the seas of this menace. This they do, but only after a vicious sea battle in which Sir Andrew is slain, though not before declaiming that he's not dead, it's only a flesh wound:

‘Fight on, fight on, my merry men all,
A little I am hurt, yet not slain;
I’le but lie down and bleed a while,
And come and fight with you again.

It's worth remarking here that this is the same Thomas Howard who, as Lord High Admiral of England who led the men of the English fleet to fight at Flodden. Everything's connected.

The Death of Richard III

I went to a talk on the final minutes of Richard III in Cramond Village Hall this morning. This was an updated version of the talk that Bob Woosnam-Savage, Curator of European Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries in Leeds had given at the Leicester conference on March 2nd this year.
It's quite remarkable how the king's skeleton keeps providing more information for investigators. Part of this is because we know more about the lifestyle and status of Richard than we do about most of the people that archaeologists are usually able to study, and part because we know about the particular circumstances of his death.
As an example, we know that there's no possibility of Richard having been struck by arrows, but his skull had injuries of a type identified as arrow wounds by the team who worked on the Towton dig. These wounds now look much more likely to have been inflicted by daggers, evidence of close-up and personal fighting.
Also worthy of mention are the roundworms that were found in the area of the king's abdomen, and the proposed study of the plaque on his teeth which might reveal what he had been eating in the weeks or days before his death. Archaeological science is progressing very fast these days!
A couple of other things worthy of mention are that the Bosworth battlefield is yielding a large amount of shot, more than any other European battlefield site yet examined, indicating that there were far more cannon and handgonnes in use in the 15th century than the historical sources mention, and that the account of Richard's death recorded by Jean Molinet fits the information now being given up by the king's skeleton far more closely than any of the other sources and needs to be reassessed in the light of this.

Over at the National Library of Scotland website there's a fascinating collection of more than 1800 scanned and transcribed broadsides called The Word on the Street. It covers more than two and a half centuries of events from the 1650s right up to the 1910s.
More than half of the broadsides are ballads on topics of every kind, accidents, wars, crime and criminals, and so on, but the one that caught my eye today was this one, on the execution of David Myles, hanged in Edinburgh for the crime of incest on 27th November 1702.
The content isn't especially unusual for broadsides of this kind, consisting mostly of Myles confessing his sins from the scaffold and giving 'satisfaction' to the onlookers, unlike his sister, hanged the previous week for incest and infanticide. The interest lies in something rather more gruesome. David Myles was to be the subject of Edinburgh's Incorporation of Surgeons' first public dissection.
To advance the science of anatomy and the study of medicine, the Incorporation had constructed a new anatomy theatre in 1697 and secured an agreement from the Town Council to supply them with the corpse of one executed criminal each year for the purposes of public dissection. Over the course of a week, Myles' body was dissected by a series of experts on surgery and anatomy, concluding on the 8th day with an epilogue delivered by Archibald Pitcairne, one of the great physicians of the day, and who had been professor of medicine at Leiden before returning to Edinburgh. This public dissection was quite important for the teaching of anatomy in Edinburgh, and so the Incorporation didn't dispose of Myles's corpse in the usual fashion, but retained it in the form of an anatomical preparation. And so it is that over three centuries on, he can still be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

More sole survivors

I recently wrote about Randolph Murray's return to Edinburgh with the Blue Blanket after Flodden, the sole survivor of the City Band. There is, of course, a rather more famous sole survivor of Flodden associated with Selkirk. This individual is said to have returned to the town carrying with him a captured English banner which he cast down silently before the townsfolk. He then either collapsed from exhaustion or expired immediately, depending on which version of the story you happen to be reading. This event is marked every year in Selkirk as part of the Borders Commons Riding season. The banner itself survives to this day in Halliwell's House Museum in Selkirk, and is an English banner of the correct vintage, now known as the Macclesfield Banner
But what was this solitary rider's name? There is a statue outside the Victoria Halls in Selkirk, erected in 1913 to mark the 400th anniversary of the battle, known as the Fletcher monument (above), following a local tradition that his name was Fletcher. Walter Elliot, that tireless collector of Borders lore, has remarked that there are no contemporary records of a sole survivor of whatever name returning to Selkirk with the banner nor was anyone of that surname mentioned as living in or near the town in the period.
A different tradition records that the sole survivor was the town clerk Sir William Brydon,fletcher by trade, who had led the men of Selkirk at Flodden and who was knighted by James V in 1535 for his actions there. Sadly, this also appears to be untrue. Brydon does appear in contemporary documents and was indeed the town clerk in 1513, but in not mentioned as having a Flodden connection. Some documents do indeed style him "Sir William Brydon", but not as "Sir William Brydon, knight", which means that he was a priest of some sort.
It's not impossible that he fought at Flodden–other priests certainly did, and there is still a sword extant that is said to have belonged to him–but there's no contemporary record of this either. So, perhaps the truths of the sole survivor story are artistic rather than historical.
This is a shame, because otherwise it would be a nice piece of synchronicity. There is another very well-documented case of a sole survivor of a disastrous military expedition, a Scottish surgeon who arrived at Jalalabad on the 13th of January 1842 to report the total destruction of the army commanded by General Elphinstone during the famous Retreat from Kabul, part of the First Afghan War. And the name of this man, commemorated in Lady Butler's Remnants of an Army (below)?
It was William Brydon.

[pictures from Wikipedia Commons]