But while Henry was plying his apostles against Tournay, some still older enemies of the nation had formed a very different opinion of the English. For in September, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, met the Scots at Flodden Field, and dealt them a blow from which they never wholly recovered. The odds against the English were heavy, for they could bring but twenty-six thousand men against forty thousand or, as some say, eighty thousand Scots, and the position taken up by James the Fourth was so strong that Surrey could not venture to attack it. With ready intelligence he made a detour from south to north of the Scottish host, and James, who had not attempted to molest him during the movement, hurried down, fearful of being cut off from his base, to meet him in the open field. The sequel is an example of the helplessness of pedantry, even of the newest pattern, in the face of genuine military instinct. The Scotch had studied the methods of the landsknechts; they were armed principally with pikes; they were drawn up in five huge battalions, after the Swiss model, and they advanced to the attack in silence "after the Almain manner." Lastly, they had with them some of the finest artillery hitherto seen.[99] Yet all this availed them nothing. The English too were formed, after a method which had lately come into fashion, in two divisions, fore-ward and rear-ward, each with two wings; but Surrey boldly wheeled both into one grand line,[100] holding but one small body of horse in reserve, and appears to have overlapped the cumbrous masses of the enemy. There is no need to give details of the battle; it began between four and five in the evening and was over in an hour. The English leaders seem to have shown not only bravery but skill. The English archers as usual wrought havoc against unarmoured men; the English bills got the better of the Scottish pikes, and the English light cavalry, admirably handled, twice saved the infantry from defeat. Ten thousand Scots were slain, and James himself, with the head and heir of almost every noble house in Scotland around him, lay covered with ghastly wounds among the dead. He had, from some whimsical return to an obsolete practice, dismounted his men-at-arms, who, in obedience to the new fashion which counselled protection against the new-fangled bullets, were clad in the heaviest armour. Arrows fell harmlessly from them, and even bills could not cut them down with less than half a dozen strokes; but they could not fly, and the bill-men did not weary of killing. And so on Flodden Field was shown a forecast of what was to be seen later in Italy, when infantry, finding men-at-arms prostrate on the ground, hammered them to death like lobsters within their shells before they could break through their armour.