ery expedient to restore
peace with Scotland, made vigorous preparations for war; and besides
assembling an English army of near sixty thousand men, they invited back
John of Hainault, and some foreign cavalry whom they had dismissed, and
whose discipline and arms had appeared superior to those of their own
country. Young Edward himself, burning with a passion for military fame,
appeared at the head of these numerous forces; and marched from Durham,
the appointed place of rendezvous, in quest of the enemy, who had
already broken into the frontiers, and were laying every thing waste
around them.

Murray and Douglas were the two most celebrated warriors, bred in
the long hostilities between the Scots and English; and their forces,
trained in the same school, and inured to hardships, fatigues, and
dangers, were perfectly qualified, by their habits and manner of life,
for that desultory and destructive war which they carried into England.
Except a body of about four thousand cavalry, well armed, and fit
to make a steady impression in battle, the rest of the army were
light-armed troops, mounted on small horses, which found subsistence
every where, and carried them with rapid and unexpected marches, whether
they meant to commit depredations on the peaceable inhabitants, or to
attack an armed enemy, or to retreat into their own country. Their whole
equipage consisted of a bag of oatmeal, which, as a supply in case of
necessity, each soldier carried behind him; together with a light plate
of iron, on which he instantly baked the meal into a cake in the open
fields. But his chief subsistence was the cattle which he seized;
and his cookery was as expeditious as all his other operations. After
flaying the animal, he placed the skin, loose and hanging in the form of
a bag, upon some stakes; he poured water into it, kindled a fire below,
and thus made it serve as a caldron for the boiling of his victuals.[*]

* Froissard, liv. iv. chap. 18.

The chief difficulty which Edward met with, after composing some
dangerous frays which broke out between his foreign forces and the
English,[*] was to come up with an army so rapid in its marches, and so
little encumbered in its motions. Though the flame and smoke of burning
villages directed him sufficiently to the place of their encampment, he
found, upon hurrying thither, that they had already dislodged; and he
soon discovered, by new marks of devastation, that they had removed to
so