hers, rode for Carlisle.
A detachment of three or four hundred men-at-arms and two thousand
combatants, partly archers, rode for Newcastle and Durham, with James
Earl of Douglas for one of their leaders. These were already pillaging
and burning in Durham when the Earl of Northumberland first heard
of them, and sent against them his sons Henry and Ralph Percy. In a
hand-to-hand fight between Douglas and Henry Percy, Douglas took Percy's
pennon. At Otterburn the Scots overcame the English but Douglas fell,
struck by three spears at once, and Henry was captured in fight by Lord
Montgomery. There was a Scots ballad on the Battle of Otterburn quoted
in 1549 in a book--"The Complaynt of Scotland"--that also referred
to the Hunttis of Chevet. The older version of "Chevy Chase" is in an
Ashmole MS. in the Bodleian, from which it was first printed in 1719 by
Thomas Hearne in his edition of William of Newbury's History. Its author
turns the tables on the Scots with the suggestion of the comparative
wealth of England and Scotland in men of the stamp of Douglas and Percy.
The later version, which was once known more widely, is probably not
older than the time of James I., and is the version praised by Addison
in Nos. 70 and 74 of "The Spectator."

"The Nut-Brown Maid," in which we can hardly doubt that a woman pleads
for women, was first printed in 1502 in Richard Arnold's Chronicle.
Nut-brown was the old word for brunette. There was an old saying that "a
nut-brown girl is neat and blithe by nature."

"Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie" was first
printed by Copland about 1550. A fragment has been found of an earlier
impression. Laneham, in 1575, in his Kenilworth Letter, included "Adam
Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie" among the light
reading of Captain Cox. In the books of the Stationers' Company (for
the printing and editing of which we are deeply indebted to Professor
Arber), there is an entry between July 1557 and July 1558, "To John
kynge to prynte this boke Called Adam Bell etc. and for his lycense
he giveth to the howse." On the 15th of January 1581-2 "Adam Bell" is
included in a list of forty or more copyrights transferred from
Sampson Awdeley to John Charlewood; "A Hundred Merry Tales" and Gower's
"Confessio Amantis" being among the other transfers. On the 16th of
August 1586 the Company of Stationers "Alowed vnto Edward white for his
copies these fyve ballades so that they be tol