Games of Otterburn 1388 (56 page)

“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 only 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.