Otterburn: A Battle and Two Ballads
by Frank Jewett Mather Jr.
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1904), pp. 385-400
[Footnotes moved to the end]
OTTERBURN: A BATTLE AND TWO BALLADS
The names of Percy and Douglas evoke a whole world of heroic action to us who know them only in books. They signified, naturally, much more to the English herdsman whose cattle the Douglas had driven to the Tweed, to the Scottish farmer whose son had fallen on the Tyne. Their legend is epic in the North Country, as that of Roland in France, or that of the Cid Campeador in Spain. Nor have the Percy and the Douglas lacked their poets. Border tradition long remembered their deeds, which nameless minstrels early put into song.
But, unlike Roland and the Cid, these border heroes are near enough our own times to have had their chroniclers also. We know in some detail the facts of the war they waged across the "debatable land." We have, then, in their case, a rare facility for confronting tradition with history, the fact as it actually was with the fact as the heart of a people declared it should be. Of many fights in which a Percy met a Douglas, that of Otterburn has left the deepest mark alike on history and on legend. Sir John Froissart[1] tells the whole story as he had it from combatants of both sides. The famous ballads of "Otterburn" and the "Hunting of the Cheviot" (Chevy Chase) represent in different stages the tradition of this battle which obtained for two centuries and more in Northumberland.
The Battle
About midsummer of the year 1388 the Earl of Fife and the bastard Archibald Douglas led a great army into England by the west. They slew and burned as they went, till they reached Carlisle; and there we leave them, for, if they won great booty, they got little glory. It was otherwise with the followers of James Douglas, who advanced through Bamboroughshire to prevent an English counter invasion by the east. The Douglas force was small, some three hundred lances, knights, and squires, and three thousand common soldiers, all well-mounted. Passing the Tyne unfought, before the English were aware of his movements he had pillaged the fertile bishopric of Durham up to the walls of its episcopal city. The smoke of burning villages first told the story to Sir Henry Percy, captain of Berwick-on-Tweed and warden of the March es, as he lay at Newcastle. He dared not venture into the open, for he thought the great army was before him. But the Douglas was of no mind to withdraw with his enemy unbraved. He recrossed the Tyne unhindered and camped before Newcastle, "and there rested and tarried two days, and every day they scrimmished." In one of these single combats the seasoned Marchman Douglas won the pennant of young Harry Percy, whom he taunted in these words: "Sir, I shall bear this token of your prowess into Scotland and shall set it on high on my castle of Dalkeith, that it may be seen afar off." "Sir," quoth Sir Henry, "ye may be sure that ye shall not pass the bounds of this country till ye be met withal in such wise that ye shall make none avaunt thereof." "Well, sir," quoth the Earl Douglas, "come this night to my lodging and seek for your pennon. I shall set it before my lodging and see if ye will come and take it away." The proud challenge remained for the time unanswered; the pennon stood all night before Douglas's pavilion, while Percy chafed within the walls of Newcastle.
The Scottish raiders had accomplished their end, forestalling an English invasion; they had kept within stone walls a vastly superior force ; their leader had won in single combat the pen non of the English captain; having taxed to the uttermost a smiling fortune, it was high time to secure themselves be fore her face should change. The next day they marched to the northwest unmolested, stormed the castle of Pontland and burned it, with its dependent village. This only by the way, for they lodged at nightfall before the castle and town of Otterburn, thirty miles from Newcastle. That night, after an unsuccessful assault upon the castle, the Scotch lords in council were for withdrawing "fair and easily toward Carlisle" and the main force. It was sound advice, but the Doug las would none of it, choosing rather to await Percy, whom he had challenged. The more chivalric counsel prevailed. The army threw up lodges of boughs in a position well protected by marshes, and prepared to storm Otterburn Castle at daybreak.
In the meantime Sir Henry Percy and his brother Ralph had urged that the Scots be sharply followed and the shame of the captured pennon retrieved. More prudent heads, mistrusting a ruse to draw the garrison into the hands of the full Scottish army, restrained with difficulty their impetuous leader. "It were better," they said, "to lose a pennon than two or three hundred knights and squires and put all our country in adventure." The captain must recognize the force of such words, however much the knight (Hotspur already except in name) were stung by them. Imagine, then, the joy of the Percy, when country folk came in to tell that the Scots were in small force and might be overtaken at Otterburn that very night. Upon the hour he set out with six hundred spears, knights, and squires, and eight thousand footmen, nearly thrice the Scottish force.
The English, being much delayed by the footmen, reached Otterburn late in the evening. "The night was far on, but the moon shone so bright as an it had been in a manner day," says Froissart. "It was in the month of August and the weather fair and temperate." Mistaking the servants' lodges at the entrance of the marsh for the tents of the knights, the North Country men gave battle without any well-conceived plan. A rabble of panic-stricken hostlers and varlets swept back upon the tents of the Scottish men-at-arms, though a few of these humbler warriors stood bravely against Percy's overwhelming numbers. Confusion prevailed in the Scottish camp, a moment only, for the Douglas had anticipated just such an attack. Following the preconcerted plan, the whole Scottish army withdrew to a "little mountain," formed, and bore down on the English in flank. The field was stoutly contested, but the numbers of the English told heavily in their favor, and the Douglas in turn had lost his banner were it not for Sir Patrick Hepbourn and Sir Patrick his son, who "in the rescuing thereof did such feats of arms that it was greatly to their recommendation and to their heirs' forever after."
The issue long remained doubtful. There was gallant fighting on either hand. Douglas, seeing his men at disadvantage, cut his way deep into the press of English with a two-handed battle-ax, outstripping all his bodyguard except a single knight and a chaplain, who dealt as shrewd a blow as his lord. For a moment the crowd parted before the flashing ax; another moment and the Douglas had paid the penalty of reckless daring. He fell almost unheeded, pierced by three English lances. The foe passed on ignorant of the advantage they had gained. By him lay Sir William Hart, pierced with many wounds; over him the priest, Sir William of North Berwick, "a tall man and a hardy," stood off a thievish pack of camp followers. That deed won him later the archdiaconate of Aberdeen. When the lords of Scotland reached their chief they found him in evil case. It was Sir John Sinclair who first asked how he did. "Right evil, cousin," quoth the earl, "but, thanked be God, there hath been few of my ancestors that hath died in their beds ; but, cousin, I require you to think to revenge me. . . . I pray you to raise up my banner, which lieth on the ground, and my squire Da vie Collemaine slain; but, sirs, show ye neither to friend nor foe in what case ye see me in; for if my enemies knew it they would rejoice, and our friends discomforted." The Sinclairs and Sir James Lindsay advanced, raising the cry of "Douglas!" On all sides the Scottish leaders rallied to the standard. The English, wearied by the long march from Newcastle, first yielded ground, then broke and fled, leaving the two Percys in the hands of the Scotch. The banner and the name triumphed, while the Douglas lay dead. He who will know the whole story of the rout--how the Bishop of Durham, leading strong reinforcements, met the fugitives of Otterburn, and his army melted away without his trying to stay the panic (wherein "a man may consider the great default that is in men that be abashed and discomforted; "for if they- had held together they might yet have beaten the Scots), he that will learn who was intrepid in fight, who magnanimous in victory, may find it all in the living pages of Froissart.[2]
The victory of the Scots, if barren, was complete. By their own account they captured a thousand of the English, wounded as many, and killed some eighteen hundred more, disabling in all nearly one-half of the English host. Most glorious of all, they held for ransom, among other notable prisoners, the two Percys. Of the Scots, there was an admitted loss by death or capture of some six hundred. Since Bannockburn, says Froissart, "the Scots never had journey [campaign] so profitable to them." When tidings of it came to the great army be fore Carlisle, "how their company had distressed the Englishmen beside Otterburn, they were greatly rejoiced, and displeased in their minds that they had not been there."
The First Ballad--Otterburn.
The fame of this battle long endured on the border among both conquerors and conquered. It would seem, however, that the Scots had no need to magnify their victory; and the absence of Scottish ballads, except late and justly suspect versions, renders the study of the Scottish tradition impossible. On the English side of the border Otterburn must have been for long a name to pass in silence, though a name unforgettable. There was consolation in just one memory; the death of James Douglas. In this fact English chroniclers found mitigation of deplorable disaster. Already Walsingham, who certainly meant to write true history, tells that Douglas fell at Percy's hands; and other historians followed him, inevitably; for with Dame Gossip, says Mr. Meredith, it is "always the biggest foremost." Legend, her staider cousin, is no less a hero worshiper.
Legend mercifully rectifies the outrages of fact; and border song insensibly changed the bitter memory of Otterburn into one the North Country might cherish. This the minstrels- and the minstrels here means the people itself- brought about, through reshaping the battle that had been into the battle that should have been. The well-known ballad of "Otterburn" shows this process fully in train for the benefit of the children and grandchildren of those who were routed at Otterburn. The Douglas, says the ballad, harried Northumberland with his great host. When he had stripped it bare, he defied Sir Henry Percy before Newcastle.
To the Newe Castell when they cam,
The Skottes they cryde on hyght,
"Syr Hary Perssy, and thou byste within,
Com to the fylde and fyght."
The Percy answered the challenge proudly and appointed a field at Otterburn, "in the hygh way."
"There schall I byde the," sayd the Dowglas,
"By the fayth of my bodye:"
"Thether schall I com," sayd Syr Harry Perssy,
"My trowth I plyght to the."
So the Douglas withdrew to Otterburn; and there, according to plighted troth, the Percy followed him. The Scots were nearly five to one. Of the English there were
But nyne thowzand, ther was no moo,
The cronykle will not layne;
Forty thowsande of Skottes and fowre
That day fowght them agayne.
Yet the Percy, observing a delicate scruple--for the Douglas had challenged only the force in Newcastle--refused proffered reinforcement, and marched with only the garrison to Otterburn and to battle. The two captains exhort their men to fight stoutly. The standards advance; cries of "Saint George" and "Saint Andrew" fill the air.
The blodye harte in the Dowglas armes,
Hys standerde stode on hye,
That every man myght full well knowe;
By syde stode starres thre.
The whyte lyon on the Ynglyssh perte,
For soth as I yow sayne,
The lucettes and the cressawntes both;
The Skottes faught them agayne.
Sharp arrows fly; men at arms engage. The Percy and the Douglas meet, neither knowing the other, and exchange swinging blows, till the Percy deals the Douglas a deadly stroke.
The sworde was scharpe, and sore can byte,
I tell yow in sertayne;
To the harte he cowde hym smyte,
Thus was the Dowglas slayne.
The battle raged stubbornly about the dead leader, with whom fell many Scottish knights. At length, the English having played havoc with the Scots--
Of fowre and forty thowsande Scottes
Went but eyghtene awaye.
While of the English, too, there was left only a pitiful rem
nant. "Fyve hondert cam awaye," says the Ballad.
The other were slayne in the fylde,
Cryste kepe ther sowlles from wo!
Seyng ther was so fewe fryndes
Agaynst so many a foo.
A single stanza reviews the battle: Note. I have used Prof. Gummere's composite form of the two ballads.
Thys fraye bygan at Otterborne
Bytwene the nyght and the day;
Ther the Dowglas lost hys lyffe
And the Perssy was lede awaye.
But the Percy was soon exchanged for a Scottish prisoner, Sir Hugh Montgomery, mark that name, and the ballad ends with a prayer for the soul of him who long guarded the northern marches:
Now let us all for the Perssy praye
To Jhesu most of myght,
To brynge hys sowlle to the blysse of heven,
For he was a gentyll knyght.
Here is certainly a very different story from Froissart's. The defeat of the fourteenth century has become the victory of the fifteenth. Only the capture of the Percy clouds a day glorious in English annals. Facts, even deplorable ones, that attach to great names are subject rather to attenuation than to oblivion, and the capture of their great leader was not lightly forgotten in Northumberland. To do tradition justice, if it passes over the fact at full gallop, it presents it at least without extenuation. Yet it curiously robs Sir Hugh Montgomery of a fame that history has never denied him. It was he who took the Percy with his own hand. The ballad with a peculiar perversity makes him a prisoner exchanged for his own captive. But the chance is that this reversal of roles comes of no malice.
Tradition might admit that the Scots collectively had taken the Percy; no loyal North Countryman could concede for long that any individual Scot--no, not the Douglas even--was stout enough for that. The Percy's capture, then, became "depersonalized," granting the word, and Sir Hugh Montgomery simply received his ballad fate with other great Scottish lords ; in fact, fares better than most, for he js only captured, not killed. It seems almost a suspicious coincidence that Sir John Maxwell, Ralf Percy's captor, appears in the ballad among the Scottish slain; but I think the change is equally innocent. The more humiliating details of the fight border tradition was at no pains to learn, or, learning, to remember. The English, in fact about three to one, appear in the ballad as one to five against the Scots. Nor is this gross misrepresentation of the truth so unnatural as it seems. There were actually at the time of the battle upward of forty thousand Scots warring on English soil. The Douglas's small command had struck terror through two shires. Everybody had believed it to be the advance guard of the greater army, and only on the day of the fight had Percy learned the truth. It was not human nature to rectify such an error after the Scots had won, and all loyal North Countrymen were bound to disbelieve stout ly disquieting rumors that the enemy had been in small force. Though the Percy had never refused his father's reinforcements, as the ballad says, he had in fact gone on without waiting for the Bishop of Durham, which came to the same thing. The border chieftains did not fight by appointment; still the incident of the captured pennon made them personal rather than national foes, and gave to their contest that essential character of a duel which tradition increasingly emphasized. As for the incident of the pennon, the pennon itself probably disappeared in the confusion of battle. The Scots carried back no visible token of a discomfiture which the Percy's rising fame soon repaired. The borderland, regarding the incident as closed, willingly forgot it.
The ballad of Otterburn represents the first stage of the legend. From a disastrous defeat the battle has become a draw in favor of the English, who fought against overwhelming odds; and if the Percy had the ill luck to be captured, it was only after James Douglas had fallen to his sword. Legend might well have rested here; but Otterburn still contained features not wholly to the mind of the border. A new tradition was forming which should set these matters right, and the ballad of "Chevy Chase" was soon to give the legend its classical form, fixing for all time the ideal of a border fight.
The Second Ballad--Chevy Chase.
The second ballad has shifted the scene from Otterburn, on English soil, to the Cheviot Hills. The Douglas is no longer an invader, but a lord who guards his own preserves; the Percy is no longer defender of Newcastle, but a bold trespasser on the Douglas's domain. The fight between the two has lost largely its national significance; the Percy kills the Douglas deer, the Douglas defends his right ; the whole incident serves merely to bring the rival chieftains face to face.
The ringing lines with which the ballad opens cannot fall too often on English ears:
The Perse owt off Northombarlonde,
And avowe to God mayd he
That he wold hunte in the mowntayns
Off Chyviat within days thre,
In the magger of doughte Dogles
And all that ever with him be.
The fattiste hartes in all Cheviat
He sayd he wold kyll, and carry them away ;
"Be my feth," sayd the dougheti Doglas agayn,
"I wyll let that hontyng yf that I may."
For a whole Monday morning the English hunted at will, and the Percy was already mocking at the Douglas's forfeited word, when a squire caught the flash of Scottish spear points, and soon the advancing host. The Douglas in glittering armor rode before his men. Boldly he challenged the trespassers. Proudly the Percy gave back defiance for challenge. It were pity, said Douglas, that innocent blood should be shed for this personal grief. The Percy assented with a great oath; and the two captains prepared for single combat, while their men stood by. But the Percy had reckoned without his host. Before he had given or taken blow, a flight of cloth-yard arrows hissed toward the Scottish line. His archers could not abide the event, with an armed foe in range. The Scottish spearmen crashed into the mass of archers; the battle of Cheviot was on. It was no long time before the Percy and the Douglas met.
They smote each other
Tylle the bloode owte off thear basnetes sprente,
As ever dyd heal or rayn.
As the Douglas bid Percy yield him to King James, a random shaft pierced the Scotsman's breast. His last words were those of many a stricken leader:
"Fyghte ye, my myrry men, whyllys ye may,
For my lyff-days ben gan."
Very touching is the Percy's lament for his gallant foe:
The Perse leanyde on his brande,
And sawe the Duglas de;
He tooke the dede mane by the hande
And sayd, "Wo ys me for the!
To have savyde thy lyffe I wolde have partyde with
My landes for years thre,
For a better man, of hart nare of hande,
Was nat in all the north contre."
As the Percy mused for a little space, Sir Hugh Montgomery, who had marked his lord's fall, pushed through the English archers with couched lance, reached the Percy, and pierced him from breast to back. The next instant an English arrow quivered in Montgomery's heart, and its swan feathers reddened with his blood. Thus the Percy and the Douglas fell.
Towe bettar captayns wear nat in Christiante
Then that day slan wear ther.
Their men fought on desperately through the afternoon into the evening, and moonlight saw of fifteen hundred English only seventy-three survivors ; of two thousand Scotch, but fifty-five. There was sore weeping on the border for the death of so many brave men, a grief, too, that should pass their own generation.
The chylde may rue that ys unborne, says the balladist, with his nobly conventional phrase for a last ing sorrow. At Edinburgh King James wrung his hands despairingly at the irreparable loss of his single great captain; at "lovely London," King Henry the Fourth swore revenge for a brave leader, but felt his own prestige untouched. Two stanzas loosely connected with the ballad tell us that
Old men that knowen the grownde well yenoughe
Call it the battell of Otterburn.
And the joy of the whole ballad to a marchman is summed up in the penultimate stanza:
Ther was never a tym on the Marche-partes
Sen the Doglas and Perse met,
But yt ys mervele and the rede blude ronne not,
As the reane doys in the stret.
It would be interesting to follow the leading of Addison, in noting how the primitive ferocity which is not lacking in "Chevy Chase" is ennobled and beautified through chivalricvalor and large compassion; but our concern is chiefly with the story, which differs alike from Froissart's account and from the earlier tradition which we know in the ballad of "Otterburn." First and most important is the shifting of the scene to Scot land, while the whole incident of the hunting lends to the ballad a motive at once novel and picturesque. Even more characteristic of the later ballad is the fact that both leaders fall, and fall, though face to face in mortal combat, by the blind chance of battle. As in "Otterburn," there is no decisive victory for either side. The Scots are still in greater force, but the disparity is by no means so marked as before. Fifteen hundred against two thousand is a fight on nearly equal terms. The numbers on both sides are greatly reduced from the actual facts. Finally the reporting of the battle to the two kings, though an obvious patriotic retouch, is a feature peculiar to the later ballad.
Such discrepancy with the facts of Otterburn, or those of any recorded fight on the border, has led to the belief that the ballad is essentially a literary product?as fictitious as "Marmion," say. In the middle of the seventeenth century already Hume of Godcroft, compiling the annals of the house of Douglas, wrote that the song "which is commonly sung of the Hunting of Chiviot seemeth indeed poeticall and a mere fiction, perhaps to stir up vertue." Sir Philip Sidney had already borne witness by word and in body that the "olde song of Percy and Douglas" (it may have been "Otterburn," however) which moved his heart "more than with a trumpet" did indeed "stir up vertue;" perhaps most scholars of to-day would agree with Hume of Godcroft that the poem is a mere fiction. In fact, the hazy topography of the ballad, its gross anachronisms, such as making Henry IV., years before his accession, avenge the Percy by the battle of Homildon Hill (a fight the Percy lived to win himself in 1402), suggest that the poem is merely a cento of border traditions and based on no single historic event. And yet certain facts tell quite as strongly the other way. The author of the ballad certainly thought he sung of the fight at Otterburn, for he says as much himself:
Old men that knowen the grownde well yenoughe
Call it the battell of Otterburn.
And, since ballad-making is not a matter of deliberate and personal invention, it is probable that the singer merely put into rude verse a tale that was told at every northern fireside. Other things speak even more definitely for the close relation of "Otterburn" and "Chevy Chase." In both the minor characters are the same; and, with few exceptions, historical. Finally, many stanzas from "Otterburn" have been taken over bodily into "Chevy Chase," or else adapted with slight changes, which makes it appear that the author of the later ballad, believing firmly that he had the truer story of the fight, adopted all that he might of the older version, thus utilizing thriftily a ballad that his own was to supersede. Though "Chevy Chase" was an old song by the middle of the sixteenth century, there is every appearance that it was composed a generation later than the battle of Otterburn, which was sung by those who knew very well how and where the field of Otterburn was fought by those who, due allowance made for patriotic enlargement and suppression, told a story which some gray-haired survivor of the battle might have approved. Whereas he who first sung "Chevy Chase" as the veritable story of the famous fight must have aroused the protest of any who knew the truth, had any such heard him. The new legend, in fact, could hardly have arisen north of the Tyne, where old men still "knew the ground well," nor, in any case, till the fact it represented had passed over to the number of
Old, unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago.
As the Percy and the Douglas vanished from the border, and their deeds as brave knights, and valiant cattle lifters with al, receded into a vague antiquity, border tradition centered more and more upon what was after all the heart of the matter, that the Percy and the Douglas once met in mortal fight, strove as Scot and Englishman are wont to do, and parted with equal honor, if not fortune. Gradually those heroic formulas in which the border abounded replaced any few facts that lingered in current tradition, till nothing historical remained but the figures of the rival chieftains and the names of their brave followers. The hunt in Cheviot may even have remote historical warrant. Some mad borderman may have poached lordfully in Cheviot, to his own damage, and to the breaking of Scottish heads. Certain it is that the Scots gentlemen hunted over the border in Queen Mary's time. Carey, Earl of Monmouth, Warden of the Marches, writes significantly that the band of forty English that he sent after the trespassers to them "some hurt," though he had given order that his deputies "should shed as little blood as possible they could." Such an obscure fight, escaping formal record, might have left its mark first in local tradition; and finally must have been transferred from a nameless hero to the Percy, by that feudal right which compels all valiant deeds whatsoever to the service of a people's champion. But how, it may be objected, could popular tradition rob its idol of the glory of slaying its archenemy? How should tradition revert so strangely to fact? Montgomery, in the earlier ballad a captive, here becomes the slayer of the Percy. Really the Percy's captor, legend has more than repaid him with usury. Can it be that a later tradition, often far from historical, should correct by mere chance the injustice of an earlier; or must we believe that "Chevy Chase" was the work of a singer who, inventing for the most part, yet consulted his chronicles at times? Certainly no ballad in all Professor Child's stately collection seems less literary, and more truly of the people; and we shall be loath to believe that we have to do with any thing like conscious authorship. Nor is this necessary; for we may discern in every change the mind and feeling of the border folk among whom this legend quite unconsciously took form.
The battle of Otterburn was remote even when the first ballad was sung. Already memories of humiliation and defeat had been softened. But it was not yet time for magnanimity to a fallen foe, nor for any noble idealization of the English hero. The sting of defeat was too near, the terror of the Douglas's name too real to be contemplated calmly or generously. Did the Douglas fall? The glory of that must redound to the great earl Percy. The Scots put up a good fight? "Yes, but the rascals were five to one against us." The Percy was taken? "Yes, but he fought on the Douglas's terms, refusing reinforcements that would have made victory sure." So with irritated patriotism and ill-concealed resentment the bordermen argued about the battle of Otterburn until some one put it into rhyme for them, when they sung it instead.
With time came magnanimity. The Douglas and the Percy had become fully legendary, the record of their fighting, of their actual gains and losses, dimmed. This only remained in mind, that they had once fought valiantly on the border, and that their fairest field was Otterburn. With this as point of departure the sturdy bordermen wove gradually for the two heroes a battle thoroughly worthy of each. The supreme contest of the Percy and the Douglas was to be such as the border could approve such a fight as, with loyalty to a national hero intact, allowed unstinted admiration to a brave foe. The tradition represented in "Otterburn" had robbed Montgomery of his glory in the battle, other versions had done him greater justice, and the later ballad chooses the more generous story. We need not seek narrowly, nor can we, the contributory shares in this process of authenticated memories and of immemorial tradition. Suffice it to say that whatsoever thing the border folk had experienced or conceived concerning generous war fare, that has taken its place in the new legend. "Chevy Chase," then, is the ideal which the border folk of the late fifteenth century held of a border fight; an ideal which laid hold of two great names of history and retold after its own fashion the story of their last combat. Thus arose that happiest feature of the ballad that the two captains share a common death, no personal advantage accruing to either. It is thus that a fight to the death should end; the field cleared, neither side victor nor vanquished. Whoever has read the lines graven on the monument to Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec, Mortem virtus communem, famam historia, monumentum posteritas dedit, will have felt a thrill that greater words fail to evoke. History had refused Percy so fair a death. Hotspur died, as all the world knows, a rebel against the king. Legend has made good to him the injury of fact. Nothing less than a common death and a common glory befitted the great heroes of the border, and the ballad of the "Hunting of the Cheviot," the work of English hands, is their common monument.
Footnotes:
1. I have used the translation of Lord Berners as edited by Mr. G. C. Macaulay.
2. While at Orthex with Gaston de Foix, Froissart took down the tale from the lips of two squires of the Percy's host, one of whom the summer before had fallen prisoner to the Scots. Later Froissart heard the story of a knight and a squire of Scotland, who passed through Avignon. Sir John dwells on the narrative with loving care, for had he not campaigned in Scotland, where for a fortnight he had found shelter with Earl William Douglas at the castle of Dalkeith. There he had seen James, the future hero of Otterburn, "a fair young child." He loved, too, the utter disinterestedness of the battle. It was clearly fighting for fighting's sake, a good knight's, not a general's, combat. Percy had thrown away an army for a pennon, Douglas had given his own life and many a valiant Scot's, that the Percy might have satisfaction.