nner and shout 'Douglas!'
and let neither my friends nor my foes know of my state, lest the one
rejoice and the other be discomforted." His dying commands were obeyed;
and while his battle-cry was raised anew, his dead body was laid by a
"bracken bush," and the fact of his death concealed from friend and foe
alike. The furious onslaught of the Scots now carried all before them;
and Hotspur fell a captive to the sword of Sir Hugh Montgomery, a nephew
of Douglas, after a fierce hand-to-hand encounter. The two chief English
leaders being captured, the day, or rather the night, was with the
Scots, in fulfilment of an old prophesy that "a dead Douglas should win
a field."

"This deed was done at Otterbourne
At the breaking of the day;
Earl Douglas was buried at the braken bush,
And the Percy led captive away."

When the fray was over, the two sides treated their captives with
knightly courtesy, many being allowed to go to their homes until they
recovered from their wounds, on giving their word of honour to send the
amount of their ransom, or themselves return to their captors.

The Bishop of Durham, immediately after having had some refreshment at
Newcastle, had set out to join the Percies; but as he and his men
neared Otterburn, they met so many fugitives who gave them anything but
reassuring accounts of the fortunes of their friends, that half of his
force melted away, and the Bishop had perforce to return to Newcastle;
it was scarcely to be expected, indeed, that everyone should have that
thirst for hard blows which distinguished the knights and their
immediate followers. The Bishop, however, made one capture--Sir James
Lindsay, who had ridden so far in pursuit of Sir Matthew Redman that he
found himself amongst the force advancing under the leadership of the
warlike prelate.

When the Scots retired from their camp, they took the body of Douglas
from the "bracken bush" where it lay, and carried it away for burial in
Melrose Abbey; and Hotspur, as the price of his ransom, built a castle
for Sir Hugh Montgomery.

After this there was peace on the Borders for the next ten years or so,
when the game began again as merrily as ever. When Sir Thomas Gray was
absent from his castle of Wark-on-Tweed, attending Parliament, the Scots
came down upon it and carried off his children and servants. Sir Robert
Umfraville met and checked another company that were harrying
Coquetdale. In the year 1400, Henry Bolingbroke him