Chapter V: JED (continued), FERNIHIRST, RAID OK THE REDESWIRE, OTTERBURNE (2)

With hand to hand fighting so close and so fierce as here befell at Otterburne, the slaughter could not fail to be very great. According to Godscroft, the English alone lost one thousand eight hundred and forty killed, and over a thousand wounded. The total Scottish loss in killed, wounded and missing appears to have been less than half that of the enemy in killed alone. The English lost also over a thousand men who were captured by the Scots; indeed, the latter had so many prisoners that they were greatly put to it to know what to do with them at the moment when the Bishop of Durham with his ten thousand fresh troops came on the scene and seemed likely to renew the battle. Many of the prisoners were men of distinction. Percy himself was taken by the Earl of Montgomery; his brother, Ralph Percy, by Sir John Maxwell; Sir Matthew Reedman, governor of Berwick, by Sir James Lindsay. And many another Scottish knight or squire held his brother of England to ransom.

Froissart describes more than one picturesque incident of the fight, and none, surely, is more vivid and alive than that in which he tells how Sir Matthew Reedman, Governor of Berwick, fled From the field, pursued by Sir James Lindsay. When all was done that man could do, and all was done in vain, Sit Matthew turned to save himself. Lindsay chanced to be near at hand, and saw him gallop out from the stress of battle. "And this Sir James to wyn honour, followed in chase.... and came so nere hym that he myght have stryken him with his speare if he had lyst. Than he said, 'Ah, sir knyght, tourne, it is a shame thus to flye: I am James of Lindsay: if ye wyll nat tourne I shall stryke you on the backe {159}with my speare.' Sir Matthew spake no worde, but strake his horse with the spurrs sorer than he dyde before. In this manner he chased hym more than thre myles, and at lasts sir Mathue Reedman's horse foundred and fell under hym. Than he stept forth on the erthe, and drewe oute hys swerde, and toke corage to defende hymselfe; and the Scotte thought to have stryken hym on the brest, but sir Mathewe Reedman swerved fro the stroke, and the speare poynt entered into the erthe: than sir Mathue strake asonder the speare with his swerde. And whan sir James Lynsay sawe howe he had loste his speare, he caste awaye the trounchon and lyghted afote, and toke a lytell batayle axe that he caryed at his backe, and handeled it with his one hande, quiekely and delyverly, in the whiche feate Scottes be well experte. And than he sette at sir Mathue, and he defended hymselfe properly. Thus they tourneyed toguyder, one with an axe, and the other with a swerde, a longe season, and no man to lette them. Fynally, sir James Lynsay gave the knyght suche strokes, and helde hym so shorte, that he was putte out of brethe, in such wyse that he yelded hymselfe, and sayde: 'Sir James Lynsay, I yelde me to you.' 'Well,' quod he, 'and I receyve you, rescue or no rescue.' 'I am content,' quod Reedman, 'so ye deale with me lyke a good campanyon.' 'I shall not fayle that,' quod Lynsay, and so put up his swerde. 'Well, sir,' quod Reedman, 'what wyll you nowe that I shall do? I am your prisoner, ye have conquered me; I wolde gladly go agayn to Newcastell, and within fyftene dayes I shall come to you into Scotlande, where as ye shall assigne me.' 'I am content,' quod Lynsay: 'ye shall promyse by your faythe to present yourselfe within this iii wekes at Edenborowe, and wheresoever ye go, to repute yourself my prisoner.' All this sir Mathue sware and promysed to fulfyll. Than eche of them toke their horses and toke leave eche of other."

They were to meet again, however, in less than the stipulated time. Sir James turned his horse towards Otterburne, {160}intent on rejoining his friends. But a mist came down over the hills and blotted out the moorland; he could only feel his way in the direction he desired to go. And when at length through the haar and thickness there came to his ears the muffled sound of voices, the ring of bridles and snort of horses, in full assurance that the sounds came from a body of his own men returning from pursuit of the broken English, he rode confidently forward, it was to find himself face to face with five hundred horse under the Bishop of Durham. And said the Bishop to Lindsay: "'Ye shall go with me to Newcastell.' 'I may nat chose,' quod Lynsay, 'sithe ye wyll have it so; I have taken, and I am taken, suche is the adventures of armes.'

"'Whom have ye taken': quod the bysshop. 'Sir,' quod he, 'I toke in the chase sir Malhue Redman.' 'And where is he?' quod the bysshop. 'By my faythe, sir, he is returned to Newcastell; he desyred me to trust hym on his faythe for thre wekes, and so have I done.' 'Well,' quod the bysshop, 'lette us go to New castell, and there ye shall speke wyth hym.' Thus they rode to Newcastell toguyder, and sir James Lynsay was prisoner to the Bysshop of Durham." So the twain met again, and "'By my faythe, sir Mathewe,' said Lindsay, 'I beleve ye shall nat nede to come to Edenborowe to me to make your fynaunce: I thynke rather we shall make an exchaunge one for another, if the bysshoppe be so contente.'" Whereupon, Reedman---as has ever been the wont of Englishmen--proposed that they should mark the occasion by a dinner; and, says Froissart, "thus these two knyghts dyned toguyder in Newcastell."

He was not a valiant person, apparently, this Bishop of Durham. Had he been a very militant Prince of the Church, it had surely gone hard now with the Scots, for, outnumbered as they had been throughout the fight, they were sore spent ere ever the Bishop hove in sight with his ten thousand fresh troops, and it could scarcely have taken very much to drive them from the field in headlong rout. But the English leader was not a very intrepid man; and when he found the Scots {161}drawn together in a position so defended by swamp and morass that entry could be forced only by the one way, the Bishop hesitated. Then the Scottish leaders ordered their "mynstrels to blowe up all at ones, and make the greatest revell of the worlde"; for, as Froissart says, "whan they blowe all at ones, they make suche a noyse that it may be herde nighe iiii myles of; thus they do to abasshe their enemyes, and to rejoyse themselfes."

The instruments used were horns, we are told. Had they been bagpipes, one might perhaps have understood the consternation of the English. Says Froissart: "Whan the bysshoppe of Durham, with his baner, and XM men with hym, were aproched within a leage, than the Scottes blew their homes in suche wise that it seemed that all the devyls in hell had been amonge them, so that such as herde them, and knewe nat of their usage, were sore abasshed." Nevertheless, the Bishop, with his host in order of battle, advanced to within about two bow-shot of the Scots, and there came to a halt in order to reconnoitre their position. The more he looked at it, the less he liked it; losses were certain to be heavy, victory by no means assured. So the English drew off; and the Scots, we are told, "wente to their lodgynges and made mery."

Then, the next day, having burned their camp, they marched unmolested back up the Rede valley into Scotland; and with them they bore the honoured bodies of Douglas and of others who had fallen in the fight. Percy went with them, a captive, and many another distinguished Englishman against his will sadly followed the victors. But those prisoners who were too badly hurt to endure the march into Scotland were sent under parole back to Newcastle, among them Sir Ralph Percy, who was returned in a horse litter. Huge sums are mentioned as having been paid in ransom by the English prisoners, the estimate of some writers reaching the extravagant figure of £600,000, a sum that in those days would have enriched the entire Scottish nation beyond the dreams of avarice. Even that number of pounds {162}Scots (equal to £50,000) seems beyond reason. Froissart's 200,000 francs (£8,000 in our money) is probably about what was paid--in that day a most handsome sum.

A cheerful little village is the Otterburne of the present day,--even though there are not wanting evidences that some part of it, down by the inn, for example,-has planted itself in too close proximity to a river and a burn which still, as in those early eighteenth century days of "Mad" Jack Hall, are capable of sudden and vindictive flood. As regards the battlefield, however, there is not a great deal to see. The so-called Percy's Cross, which stands in a thin clump of trees to the east of the road three-quarters of a mile on the Scottish side of the village, is a comparatively modern erection. The true site ot the original "Battle Stone," according to maps of date 1769, was about a couple of hundred yards more to the east, and there it stood, or rather, lay, till 1777, when the then proprietor of the land, a {163}Mr. Ellison, put up the cross now standing, within view of the new turnpike road which was then being made up the valley of the Rede. Mr. Ellison used the ancient socket of the original cross, but the rough pedestal on which the socket stands has nothing to do with the old memorial.

Nor has the present shaft, which, says Mr. Robert White in his "History of the Battle of Otterburne" (1857), was nothing but "an old architrave which had been removed from the kitchen fireplace at Otterburne Hall. This stone, the cross-section of which is fifteen and a half by eight inches, still shows a bevelled corner throughout its length; besides, two small pieces of iron project from one of its sides, which, in its former period of usefulness, were probably connected with some culinary apparatus. On its top is another stone, tapering to a point, which completes the erection. The entire length of the shaft above the base is nine and a half feet. The socket is a worn, weather-beaten {164}sandstone, about two feet square, without any tool-marks upon it, and appears to have been in use much longer than any of the stones connected with it."

A still more modern memorial of the battle is a large semicircular seat cut in freestone, bearing on darker coloured panels various inscriptions, which stands by the road-side a little farther to the north. This was erected in 1888 by Mr. W. H. James, then M.P. for Gateshead. It may be noted that one of the panels gives the date of the battle as _tenth_ August, 1388, which is almost certainly a mistake.

Douglas, of course, had satisfactory reasons for camping that night where he did,--reasons not unconnected probably with the question of shelter from English arrows. A wood protected him, it is said. Had he gone four or five miles farther on up the valley, he might have occupied the old Roman camp of Bremenium, a strong position, not sheltered from arrow-flight by trees, it is true, but protected on two sides by what in old days must have been swamps, and surrounded by a heavy wall which, even in its present condition, would be, to a defending force, a considerable protection in hand to hand fighting. Five hundred years ago, before the day of agricultural improvement and the custom of using ancient monuments as a quarry, such a defence must have made the camp a place of very considerable strength. Portions only now remain of the formidable wall which originally protected Bremenium, but enough stands to show what its strength must have been in the days when the Roman Legions manned it. The face is composed of great blocks of hewn freestone, accurately fitted; in height it must have been about fourteen feet, in thickness something like seventeen,--the inner portion, of course, being rubble work; outside there were two or more fosses. One of the gateways is still intact to a very considerable height, but the camp as a whole has to a most pitiable extent been used as a quarry, perhaps for hundreds of years. Even yet, one doubts if it is held quite sacred from vandal raids. As late as 1881, when {165}members of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club visited the camp they found masons deliberately quarrying stones from one corner of the wall, in order to build a hideous modern cottage, and I daresay some of the houses in the immediate neighbourhood may be composed entirely of stones taken from the old walls. The writer has not seen the Roman tombs which exist about half a mile to the east of the camp. The largest of these is said to have still two courses of stones standing, besides the flat stones of the foundation. This tomb has in front a small carving, regarding which Dr. Collingwood Bruce, in "The Roman Wall," suggests that it may have been intended to represent "the head of a boar--the emblem of the twentieth legion." The writer is given to understand that the carving bears no resemblance whatever to the head of a boar. A coin of the Emperor Alexander Severus was found in this tomb, together with a jar containing calcined bones, and a coin of the Emperor Trajan was found in the camp.

How many of Douglas's wounded, one wonders, were carried from the field of battle over to Southdean, and, succumbing there to their wounds, were buried at the church? Two or three years ago, when the ash-trees were cut down and the grassy mound carted away that had so long concealed the ruins of the old building, quantities of human bones were dug up within and about the walls, some of the skulls showing unmistakably that the owners had died no peaceful death. No doubt the main body of the Scottish army would follow the dead Douglas to his tomb in Melrose Abbey, and would therefore never come so far west as Southdean, but the severely wounded would naturally be left wherever they could be attended to. It is certain that the Southdean district was in old days much less sparsely populated than is now the case; two important yearly fairs, for instance, used formerly to be held at Lethem, (three miles nearer the Border than Southdean,)--where also, on a knoll still called the Chapel Knowe, was a chapel, subsidiary to the church of Southdean. These fairs were for the sale of {166}"horse, nolt, sheep, fish, flesh, malt, meal," and all sorts of merchandise, and in the permit to hold the Fairs Lethem is described as being "by reason of its situation, lying near the Border, a very convenient and fit place for traffic and trade."

The church of Southdean, therefore, as its ruins indicate, was probably of considerable importance, surrounded by a settlement of some size, where wounded men might well be left to take their chance of recovery. Whether the Scots returned from Otterburne up Rede valley and over the pass by way of Catcleuch Shin, or (as is more probable) followed the Roman Road which passes Bremeirum Camp and runs over the Cheviots some miles to the east of Carter-fell, and thence crossing Kale, Oxnam, Jed, and Teviot, goes in more or less direct line towards Newstead and Melrose, it would be easy and natural for them to detach a party with the wounded, and perhaps with the bodies of some of the more notable dead, to {167}Southdean. And those of them who died there would of course be buried in or close to the church.

During the excavations, it is of interest to note that numbers of skulls were found all together at one spot, pointing to the probability of many bodies having been, from some common cause, buried in a common grave. The inference seems not illegitimate that this cause was the fight at Otterburne. The English appear to have carried away from the field many of their dead, as well as their wounded:

"Then on the morne they mayde them beerys

Of birch and haysell graye;

Many a wydowe, with wepynge teyrs

Ther makes they fette awaye."

It is not unlikely that the Scots also brought away some, at least, of their dead, and, as Southdean was the nearest spot in their own country where they could find consecrated ground, the probability is that these bodies, as well as those of the wounded who died later, would find rest there.

In his "History and Poetry of the Scottish Border," Professor Veitch mentions that "a recent discovery made at Elsdon Church, about three miles from the scene of conflict, may be regarded as throwing some light on the slaughter. There skulls to the amount of a thousand have been disinterred, all lying together. They are of lads in their teens, and of middle-aged men; but there are no skulls of old men, or of women. Not improbably these are the dead of Otterburne."

The length of the old building at Southdean, including tower and chancel, was ninety-seven feet, and the nave was about twenty-three feet in width. Many notable things were unearthed during the work of excavation, those of most interest possibly being a massive octagonal font, cut from one block of stone, and a small stone super-altar incised with the usual five crosses.

At Southdean, as elsewhere, the old church has for generations been used as a quarry. The retaining wall of the adjacent {168}Newcastle road is full of dressed stones taken from the building, and others, some of them carved, have been built into the walls of an adjoining barn. Certainly our ancestors in this instance had more excuse than usual to offer for their depredations, for the building was a hopeless ruin. The roof of the church fell in one Sunday in the year 1689, and the walls--not unhelped by human hands--speedily followed suit. Stones from the principal doorway seem to have been used in 1690 in the building of a new church at Chesters. That too is now in ruins.

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