Seven years of peace followed, during which Scotland was drilling and gathering strength under Bruce, while England was torn and weakened by internal quarrels between the king and his dissolute favorites on one side, and the lawless and tyrannical barons on the other. By the fall of 1313 the Scotch had cleared the English garrisons out of all their castles save Stirling, and that, the key to the borders, they besieged. “Its danger roused England out of its civil strife to a vast effort for the recovery of its prey.” The army gathered to this task comprised thirty thousand horsemen, and seventy thousand English, Welsh, and Irish footmen, raw, undisciplined, disorderly; while Bruce’s army numbered only thirty thousand, nearly all on foot, but they were inured to war and reckless fighters, those wild clansmen. The little burne (brook) of Bannock (pancake) runs through a swamp near the rock on which Sterling Castle stands. Bruce chose his position, as he fought the battle, with a genius for arms which showed him to be the first soldier of his age. On his right flank was the creek and marsh, on the left the ledge of rocks and castle, in the rear a wooded hill. The ground in front was cut up by patches of forest and undergrowth and swamp-holes, so that no large body of the enemy at once could come at him. This robbed the English of much of their advantage of numbers. Other precautions, it will appear, took away also the superiority of his enemy in the matter of cavalry. The battle which took place here has been much written and sung about, but rational explanations of its surprising outcome are hard to find. We may seek them in the disorganization and disaffection of the English army and the incapacity of its command; in the contrary circumstances on the Scotch side; and in four striking reverses which befell the English. But as these reverses were due to superior generalship and better fighting on the Scotch side, we may as well put the credit where it belongs, with Bruce and his compatriots. The first of these four reverses took place the night before the general engagement. Edward had sent ahead a detachment of eight hundred knights to relieve the besieged English in Sterling Castle, and hold it as a base of operations. To send so weak a force upon so important a task marked the incapacity of the English generalship at the outset. But the movement was well executed, for the first Bruce knew the squadron was on his flank and between him and Sterling. Riding up to Earl Randolph, his nephew, who had been cautioned against this very manœuvre, he cried, “Randolph, you are flanked. A rose has fallen from your chaplet.”