15/07/2026
In 1513, Flodden killed nearly every grown man in Hawick. In 1514, the town's teenage boys captured an English flag. Over five hundred years later, riders still carry it through the streets to prove the town survived.
The Battle of Flodden was catastrophic for the Scottish Borders — entire towns lost most of their fighting-age men in a single afternoon. Hawick was among the hardest hit. The following year, with almost no adult men left to defend the town, a group of young "callants" — teenage boys and young men — rode out and ambushed an English raiding patrol at a place called Hornshole, defeating them and capturing their flag. That skirmish became the founding legend of the Hawick Common Riding, still led today by an elected "Cornet" who carries the flag through the same ceremonies.
Other Border towns built their own versions of the same memory. Selkirk's Common Riding traces back to a single man — the town's only Flodden survivor — who returned home carrying a captured English standard. To mark how few had come back, he reportedly cast the flag low around his head instead of raising it high, a gesture of mourning that survives today as the "Casting of the Colours."
Now eleven Border towns hold their own Common Ridings each summer, with hundreds of mounted riders retracing the old boundary patrols and "bussing" the burgh flag with ribbons — a tradition borrowed from a knight's lady tying hers to his lance before battle. Diaspora Scots travel back from across the world to watch.
Flodden nearly ended these towns. The Common Ridings made sure no one forgot how close it came.
