He thought Douglas had arranged the torture personally and it gnawed at his belly more than his hunger that was due to his refusal to eat.
When George got to his brother John they hugged as brothers do to celebrate their continued life on the earth. Then John told George about the withdrawal of the English foot and knights back to Newcastle.
“By God, they’re gettin’ away?” exclaimed George.
“Lost the battle, they figure,” John opined.
“Let’s take a portion of our knights and assign a contingent to each scavengin’ party to hit them on the road at various points,” suggested George.
“How many ye figure?” asked John.
“As many as we can spare,” came back George, “‘cause I’m fixin’ to run these English bastards… off the land!”
John smiled for he realized the squeeze strategy George had in mind. “Give me a bit of time to get our men together and on the far side. Then run the bastards off the land!”
George returned the smirk.
John handed him two twisted pieces of dried meat and a fresh skin of water which he gladly took and repaired to the still raging battle below with some plans on how to scare the shit to the britches of the English there still fighting who were aware they had no backup replacements.
It was a retreat strategy on the part of the English with the shell of a fragile egg the only thing that stood in the way of a clearly defined victory for Scotland.
August 20 - Morning
Along the Newcastle Road
It was the brothers, John and Walter Sinclair who led the first of the scavenging parties across the tops of the hills following the road out of Otterburn Village.
The hunters could see the retreating English army, the bulk of which was no further along than Elsdon Village some three miles away from Blakeman’s Law with scattered groups of frightened footmen beyond that village.
John Sinclair drew rein and Walter came to his side.
“Yon’s the first of them,” said John pointing downhill and to his right.
What they saw was the first group led by Sir Ralph Eure of the hastily planned withdrawal of the English to try to avoid an uncontrolled massacre as they retreated.
“Do we get ahead of them?” asked Walter, the younger brother.
“We’ll give them a wee toot now,” answered John cunningly smiling. He pulled his hunting horn from behind his arm and with his contingent following suit they set up a cacophonous racket.
Down on the road Sir Ralph halted to listen. He instinctively knew it to be the Scots on the hunt but did not know anything beyond that.
“Yonder they are!” said a man from the rear of the fractional English contingent.
The men in Eure’s command looked up the hill to plainly see the Scots looking down on them.
“Dangerous bastards,” growled Eure.
“Want to send archers after them?” said Sir Thomas Abingdon coming to Eure’s side.
“We’ll stay together,” determinedly spat Eure jerking his stallion’s head forward and kicking him to a trot.
The others followed their liege.
“Now we got them!” said John.
“How so?” asked Walter, mystified.
“Ye take the most of the men and make it around the backside of that ridge yon,” he pointed, “and surprise them right before the village… I’ll hit them from behind and we’ll kill them all!... Well, don’t kill the ones that can pay a ransom,” he added.
Walter nodded and wheeled to cull out his thirty-five or so for a two sided attack then he quickly left according to John’s plan.
Abingdon kept his eyes to the north hills and he saw a glimpse of what he thought was a Scottish rider. “They’re comin’ around ahead of us now,” he advised Eure.
Eure turned and saw the smaller contingent coming off the hill toward them. “‘Ppears we’ve got a fight on our hands.”
“What about… ?” his question was quashed by Ralph who rode past Abingdon and on to the rear of his nearly two hundred man contingent picking his men-at-arms and their positions in a fight line as he went.
Boldly, John Sinclair’s fifteen careened down the gentle slope dipping in and out of tree and shadow and tooting their horns all the way.
The Scots came to the roadway and halted.
“Reckon they’re not in the attackin’ mood?” asked Abingdon.
Eure’s mind came to a sudden and panicked epiphany! He wheeled his horse just in time to see his rear ranks get hit with arrows in their backs.
He looked ahead to see John Sinclair not making a move.
He heard more screams from behind him.
He thought to spread out to the sides of the road but there was nothing but brambles and briers on either side.
He called on his archers to shoot at John’s fifteen. As soon as they strung their bows they became targets for Walter’s bowmen positioned higher up. The wounded yelped when they were hit. A few of them hung on by their saddlebow while the most who were hurt fell from the backs of their mounts and on to the road among the excited horse’s hooves.
Walter’s archers loosed another volley of arrows and more of the men-at-arms, who thought they had gotten away considerably free of more battle, fell dead.
“Wheel!!” loudly shouted Eure. “Wheel and run!”
His contingent turned and more found their death place in the dirt on that road.
“Run for your lives!!” ordered Eure as he kicked his own destrier in the slats.
The backside turned to be the front was not so quick to hear the order and understand it so they got off to a slow start.
Walter’s men-at-arms with their spears came down to the road and lowered their lances.
Eure could not get his spears in that front because he had thought he was going to attack from the other side. Poleaxes and guisarmes were no match for good old fashioned spears with a long shaft and a sharp pointed head.
Walter’s spearmen made their run.
The English had no choice but to run with their inappropriate pole weapons against them.
It was a terrible mess for both sides took a brunt of a beating. Englishmen as well as Scots died and fell under-hoof and into the briars.
Eure kept pushing against Walter’s larger portion of the men hoping he could break free and escape the running of the Scottish gantlope more than once.
It was the turn for swords and daggers to be the weapons used as the men hit each other hard, each fighting for ambiguous glory but neither side willing to give in because of a kind of temporary madness.
Then it was John’s moment to move when he saw the two nobles in a position where they could be separated from their troops. Amid the wounding screams of terror, hoots of small victories and the war cries of, “Douglas!! – Douglas!!” John’s fifteen made a swift approach separating and capturing the two English knights from their men with little trouble.
Sir Ralph Eure was reluctant to yield even with a blade to his throat but as he watched more good men die on both sides from the skirmish he did yield and the remaining English warriors were taken prisoner.
The Scots picked up their dead and wounded and followed the same trail back to Blakeman’s Law as they had come. They passed other scavenger bands heading out in a regular sequence to make their own captures of escaping enemy.
Earl George had poured every man possible into the original battlefield arena. As a ruse, George himself wore the surcoat of Sir James Douglas who had not been seen since the high point of the moon on the night last and with his banner again waving high and proud within the powerful din of his war chant of, “Douglas!! – Douglas!!” the remaining leaderless English fighters who comprised the whole of the ‘shell’ panicked and ran back toward Otterburn making the road out of Blakeman’s Law an even tighter compression of men to fall to the Scottish scavengers.
Like a whirlwind, the field of battle was suddenly clear of English. The precious land so courageously fought for then belonged onl
y to the dead whose inanimate corpses mingled their drying blood without further argument.
George respectfully removed Douglas’ surcoat and passed it over to Sir John Maxwell saying, “See if our brave Sir James Douglas is among the dead… for if he is not he has been captured… We must know.”
“I understand, Milord,” answered Maxwell in a quiet tone as he took the blue and white surcoat with the red heart of King Robert the Bruce sewn thereon and folded it within his crossed arms.”
August 20 - Late Morning
On the Road toward Blakeman’s Law
At the behest of Bishop Skirlaw, it was Boynton who got from his saddle and hunkered to look deeper into the bush, “You’re right Your Grace,” he said in a loud voice, “‘Tis for certain a man!”
With no more prompting than that the man stood immediately erect paying no attention to the brier thorns tearing at his flesh and ragged clothing. He had his arms held high and his fingers splayed out to show he had no hint of a weapon. He cried out pitifully, “No kill me, Milord!! I kill no one in the fray!!”
“Who is he, Sheriff?!” asked Skirlaw bluntly.
“Appears to be of English peasantry, Your Grace,” answered Boynton, “and he thinks we’re the Scotch.”
Skirlaw’s nostrils flared and his mouth curled downward in frustration. “Held up in my sacred duty by a… a common peasant,” he said to himself as he kicked his destrier hard to continue his journey to Otterburn.
Boynton stood and climbed aboard his own destrier before he was run over by the knights following their leader.
The scared man moved not a muscle as he remained as he had jumped from the bush except the blood trickled down from the stinging thorn cuts to which he ignored in favor of the possibility of being killed by any of the passing troops.
Skirlaw’s contingent had gone no more that another mile when they ran into a group of fast walking English foot soldiers who were retreating from the battle.
Skirlaw held his hand aloft and drew rein. His contingent stopped.
“Ask them about the battle, Boynton,” demanded the bishop in a voice just loud enough to be heard by the sheriff.
Boynton obeyed saying, “You men with Hotspur?”
“Yes, Milord,” said the one seemingly in charge of the group. “The battle is done and we were ordered to retreat.”
“Retreat?!!” interrupted the bishop loudly.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he directed his remarks then to the bishop, “‘Twas Lord Eure who ordered us to the road. Go as fast as we could to Newcastle, he said.”
Skirlaw looked up the road as it traversed the valley way and saw it was clear and so asked, “Where is Lord Eure?”
“Scotch came out of the hills and killed a’plenty of his men and took a’plenty more away as prisoners!”
“You see this?” asked Skirlaw.
“Yes, Your Grace… You can see the dead ‘bout three miles up road if you have the mind to keep a’goin’ in that direction.”
“And you’re not?”
“There’s many an English layin’ dead ‘twixt here and there,” said the soldier, “They do not need our dead bodies to add to the pile.”
The bishop sneered at the soldier’s attitude. He turned his nose toward Otterburn and kicked hard to show he had no fear.
Well within the hour the contingent ran across the stripped corpses of the English soldiers killed by the Sinclair brothers at the foot of the Elsdon hills. He was by then inured to the idea that there were plenty of dead English in his path. His heart quivered but his head hardened his heart with chanted words of encouragement to keep his destrier moving toward Otterburn no matter what he witnessed along the road.
Above the hill were two Scottish scouts watching the oncoming troop. They also observed many of the bishop’s men turning their horses and disappearing into the wilderness. They watched long enough to understand that it was no battle ruse but a desertion in the ranks to which Bishop Walter Skirlaw had no conspicuous notion as to its happening.
One of the scouts wheeled his nimble little horse around to report back to Sir George Dunbar at Blakeman’s Law. The second man remained to see what other machinations might appear that would interest Sir George. He watched as more made their way across the wild terrain toward their homes in Durham and York not wanting any more to do with Skirlaw’s folly.
The bishop had gotten no further than the eastern outskirts of Elsdon Village when he was overrun by the escaping English who were in such a panic he had no way of rationally presenting to them a case for returning to the battlefield with him and his men to continue the fight.
It was about then that Sir Thomas de Boynton turned in his saddle to see how their contingent was faring as they were buffered against the escaping footmen from the battle when he noticed that at least half of the bishop’s men were gone. He gulped in silence as his mind reeled to understand the implications that may befall his own head before he spoke.
“Let the brave through!!” shouted Skirlaw as the escaping crowds thickened so that he had made little progress.
The bishop growled to display his aggravation but secretly was glad for the blockage of his progress. His pretense would never be recorded for the annals of history and he knew if he was not killed in combat on that day he too would not remember his deepest thoughts that nagged at his rational mind at that moment.
At length Boynton spoke up saying, “Your Grace, your men behind you are not nearly so many as once they were.” He had hoped he had couched his words so that all ownership of the condition was placed on the shoulders of the bishop.
The bishop jerked his head back along the road whence they had just traveled and saw that indeed his loss of armed men had seriously eroded. It was the Newcastle desertions all over again and suddenly it seemed to him that there were so few anymore who were willing to fight for the glory of God’s causes that he felt alone in his ride toward the Scottish army. He drew rein and came to a state of prayer there in the midst of it all.
Suddenly he was jarred from his malaise by Thomas Boynton poking him on the shoulder and saying, “We can go on now, Your Grace.”
Skirlaw shook his head as if he had napped in the saddle and looked up. The road was clear. “Where’s the Scotch?!” he asked almost as if it was a new day.
“Yon ahead, Your Grace,” answered Boynton with a smile hoping that none of the blame for the disappearance of the lattermost troops would rub off on him. He had seen the Scots on the crest of the hills above. He wondered why they had not attacked the contingent and took that as a good sign. He also knew the Scots many times moved along the back side of the hill leaving only a few on the open ridge so that an enemy had no notion as to their actual numbers. On the other hand, they just might be only the few he had observed.
Walter Skirlaw again dug his spurs into his destrier’s rib flesh moving toward Blakeman’s Law. Sir Thomas wondered about that as well but he had little recourse but to follow for the bishop held his destiny for the afterlife firmly in his hands and he did not want to do anything to upset that current delicate balance in the mind of the bishop.
On Blakeman’s Law, George had gotten the scout’s report that the bishop was on his way and so did prepare for his arrival.
George had little more than nineteen hundred men still alive and a full two hundred of them were wounded so they had no way to participate in a battle of any manner.
Three to four hundred of his men were still out over the road to Newcastle scavenging prisoners while another fifty or more were helping Maxwell with the grim task of body sorting on the battlefield.
He left the great lot of English prisoners guarded by another four hundred of his men and that left a very thin line of Scottish spearmen and knights to form his defenses.
To serve as a flanking measure Earl George did get Maxwell’s fifty to lay low in the wood beside the battlefield where Douglas had emerged during the battle to flank Hotspur’s fighting force.
His less than one thous
and men lined the inside of the wattle fence and pushed their bloodied spear-points over the top and patiently waited for the arrival of the Bishop of Durham and his estimated three thousand man army to fight again over the same ground that still was littered with the dead.
Nevertheless the Scots stoically waited.
Skirlaw passed through Otterburn at a trot, slowing only long enough to get the sign from the top of the tower house that the Scots were further up the road. With every hoof-beat of his horse Skirlaw became more determined to overcome the cunning Scots and win the day for England.
As the contingent continued on toward Blakeman’s Law the more dead he found cluttering his way to where it was hard to keep the horses from having to step on the dead men whether they were prone to it or not. Some of the horses and riders were lost due to such stumbling.
Suddenly the ears of the bishop perked as he heard the voices of the thousand and more hunting horns blaring their angry din of discontent against his arrival.
He hesitated for only a moment but then continued in his quest against not only the Scots but his own drama he had clashing within himself.
Just as suddenly as the horns had started they fell to silence.
The bishop did not know whether to be relieved or wary but he did not lessen his resolute pace.
Within minutes he arrived at the eastern entrance to the battlefield and halted without warning. Boynton and the following knights spread out on both sides of their commander and to a man were horrified at the deliberate carnage before them.
On the far side of the field and up the hill a bit stood the Scots, still stoic and still prepared.
George ordered the hunting horns to again blow. Not only from the front line but the men holding the English prisoners in check began blowing their horns and the scouts on the hill and the returning scavenger troops within earshot took up the horn as well.
For Bishop Walter Skirlaw the noise was becoming unbearable. His mind harkened back to Durham a few days thence when he heard the same cacophony seemingly coming from a bank of fog covering the town. He remembered when the fog lifted the streets below him were littered with the dead and wounded fomenting guilt that still racked his tottering mind.
Games of Otterburn 1388 Page 29
