* Walsing, p. 364.

***** Vita Rir. Sec. p. 172, 173.

As Glendour committed devastations promiscuously on all the English,
he infested the estate of the earl of Marche; and Sir Edmund Mortimer,
uncle to that nobleman, led out the retainers of the family, and gave
battle to the Welsh chieftain: his troops were routed, and he was taken
prisoner:[*] at the same time, the earl himself, who had been allowed
to retire to his castle of Wigmore, and who, though a mere boy, took
the field with his followers, fell also into Glendour's hands, and was
carried by him into Wales.[**] As Henry dreaded and hated all the family
of Marche, he allowed the earl to remain in captivity; and though that
young nobleman was nearly allied to the Piercies, to whose assistance
he himself had owed his crown, he refused to the earl of Northumberland
permission to treat of his ransom with Glendour.

The uncertainty in which Henry's affairs stood during a long time with
France, as well as the confusions incident to all great changes in
government, tempted the Scots to make incursions into England; and
Henry, desirous of taking revenge upon them, but afraid of rendering his
new government unpopular by requiring great supplies from his subjects,
summoned at Westminster a council of the peers, without the commons, and
laid before them the state of his affairs.[***] The military part of the
feudal constitution was now much decayed: there remained only so much of
that fabric as affected the civil rights and properties of men: and
the peers here undertook, but voluntarily, to attend the king in an
expedition against Scotland, each of them at the head of a certain
number of his retainers. [****] Henry conducted this army to Edinburgh,
of which he easily made himself master; and he there summoned Robert
III. to do homage to him for his crown.[*****] But finding that the
Scots would neither submit nor give him battle, he returned in three
weeks, after making this useless bravado; and he disbanded his army.

{1402.} In the subsequent season, Archibald, earl of Douglas, at the
head of twelve thousand men, and attended by many of the principal
nobility of Scotland, made an irruption into England, and committed
devastations on the northern counties. On his return home, he was
overtaken by the Piercies, at Homeldom, on the borders of England, and
a fierce battle ensued, where the Scots were totally routed. Douglas
himself was taken prisoner; as was Mordac,