Qualla: Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402)

Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402): Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The field is still called Slaughter Field. It sits on the Kimmerghame Estate in Berwickshire, on land the Swinton family has held for generations, and on 22 June 1402 it was the place where 400 Scots returning from a cattle raid on Northumberland ran into trouble. The forfeited Scottish earl George de Dunbar had defected to the English king. With just 200 soldiers drawn mainly from the garrison at Berwick-upon-Tweed, he was waiting. By the end of the day the Scots had lost their leader, several of their nobles had been hauled off to English prisons, and a Border skirmish small enough that most history books forget it had sent enough of a tremor south that King Henry IV himself dropped what he was doing to deal with it.

Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402): An Earl Who Changed Sides

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

George de Dunbar, 10th Earl of March, was the man waiting on Nesbit Moor that summer day. He had been one of the most powerful magnates in southern Scotland, but a quarrel over a broken marriage betrothal with the rival Douglas family had driven him to renounce his Scottish alleg...

Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402): Two Hundred Against Four Hundred

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Scottish raid that summer was substantial. Around 12,000 troops had crossed earlier into Cumberland and pillaged the country around Carlisle. The smaller force returning across Berwickshire was a fraction of that, but at 400 men still outnumbered Dunbar's English two to one. ...

Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402): The Skirmish That Reached the King

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

News of the fight reached Henry IV at Harborough on 30 June, just eight days after the battle. The king was preparing to march into Wales to suppress the rebellion of Owain Glyndwr, but the scale of the Scottish incursion changed his calculations. He delayed his Welsh campaign to...

Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402): Slaughter Field

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What remains of Nesbit Moor today is the name. The field where the Scots fell is still called Slaughter Field, a piece of local memory that has outlasted the chroniclers' brief notices and survived in the working landscape of the Kimmerghame Estate. The Swinton family, whose name...

Battle of Nesbit Moor (1402): The Pattern of Border Warfare

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nesbit Moor was not exceptional. It was characteristic. For three centuries the Anglo-Scottish border existed in a state of permanent low-grade war punctuated by larger invasions, where the difference between an army and a raiding party blurred and where loyalty often followed fa...