thousand infantry, burst into Northumberland, rode south as far as
Durham, and laid waste the country. In one of their encounters before
Newcastle-on-Tyne the Earl of Douglas had a hand-to-hand combat with Sir
Henry Percy--- Hotspur,--who was overthrown, Douglas seizing his
pennon--the silken streamer bearing his insignia, which was fastened
near the head of his lance. In triumph he exclaimed: "I will carry this
token of your prowess with me into Scotland, and place it on the tower
of my castle at Dalkeith, that it may be seen from afar." "By God, Earl
of Douglas," replied Hotspur, "you shall not even bear it out of
Northumberland; be assured you shall never have this pennon to boast
of." "You must come then," answered Douglas, "this night and seek for
it. I will fix your pennon before my tent, and shall see if you will
venture to take it away." On the following evening the Scottish army
"lighted high on Otterburn," in Redesdale, and there Sir Henry and Ralph
Percy, with six hundred spears of knights and squires and upwards of
eight thousand infantry, fell upon the Scots, who were but three hundred
lances, and two thousand others. The fight that followed was one of the
most spirited in history, and ended in the death of Douglas, the capture
of Hotspur, the serious wounding of his brother, and the killing or
capture of one thousand and forty Englishmen on the field, the capture
of eight hundred and forty others in the pursuit, and the wounding of a
thousand more. The Scots lost only one hundred slain and two hundred
captured. "It was," says Froissart, "the hardest and most obstinate
battle ever fought." The tragic incidents of this encounter have been
kept alive not historically but poetically. It is the immortality of
song which preserves the memory of Otterburn. No contest was more
emphatically the "ballad-singer's joy." Two ballads, the one Scots, the
other English, give their respective versions of the event with those
natural discrepancies between the two, which may easily be accounted for
on patriotic grounds. That given in Scott's "Minstrelsy" is
unquestionably the finer, and contains the lines so often quoted by
Scott himself, and at no occasion more pathetically than during his
visit--pretty near the end--to the old Douglas shrines in Lanarkshire,
the locality of "Castle Dangerous":

"My wound is deep. I fain would sleep;
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me by the braken bush