The military results of Bannockburn were of extreme importance.  The ablest of contemporary annalists aptly compared Bruce’s victory to the battle of Courtrai.  An even nearer analogy was the fight at Morgarten where, within two years, the pikemen of the Forest Cantons were to scatter the chivalry of the Hapsburgers as effectively as the Flemings won the day at Courtrai or the Scots at Bannockburn.  The English had forgotten the military lessons of Edward I., as completely as they had forgotten his political lessons, and their reliance on the obsolete and unsupported cavalry charge was their undoing.  Bruce, on the other hand, had improved upon the teaching of Wallace and Edward I. His use of his men-at-arms on foot anticipates the English tactics of the Hundred Years’ War.  The presence of these heavily armed troopers in his ranks gave him a strength in defence, and an impetuosity in attack, which made it a simple matter to break up the undisciplined squadrons opposed to him.  Bannockburn rang the death-knell of the tactics which since Hastings had been regarded as the perfection of military art.  The political lessons of the victory were of not less importance.  It is almost too much to say that Bannockburn won for Scotland its independence, for Scottish independence had already been vindicated.  But the easy victory brought home to men’s minds the full measure of the Scottish triumph.  It was already clear that so long as Edward lived, England would never make the continued effort which, as Edward I.’s wars both in Wales and Scotland had shown, could alone systematically conquer a nation.  Bruce’s difficulties were not so much with the English as with the Scots.  It was no small task to unite the English of the Lothians, the Welsh of the south-west, the Norsemen of the extreme north, and the Celts of the hills into a single Scottish nation.  He had against him the separatist local feeling which Scottish history and ethnology made inevitable, and it took time for him to obtain that prestige, which should hedge a king, and raise him above the crowd of feudal earls and clan chieftains, who thought themselves as good as the sometime Earl of Carrick.  Such dignity and distinction Bannockburn supplied, and such measure of national unity and strong monarchical authority as Scotland ever enjoyed, came from the triumph of him who became, even more than Wallace, the hero of the new nation.  For the next few years the Scots took the aggressive.  They induced the French kings to renew the alliance which Philip IV. had made with them in the early years of the contest.  They obtained papal recognition for their king and the withdrawal of the ban of the Church on Comyn’s murderer; they plundered northern England from end to end, and broke down Anglo-Norman rule in Ireland; they plotted for the resurrection of the Welsh principality; and, worse than all, they made common cause with the baronial opposition.  Hence it followed that the political results of the victory were as important