Manifestly these copies, so far, are not independent. But now Herd’s copy begins to vary much from the English.
In both ballads a boy or “berne” speaks up. In the English he recommends to the Scots an attack on Newcastle; in the Scots he announces the approach of an English host. Douglas promises to reward the boy if his tale be true, to hang him if it be false. The scene is Otterburn. The boy stabs Douglas, in a stanza which is a common ballad formula of frequent occurrence—
The boy’s taen out his little pen knife,
That hanget low down by his gare,
And he gaed Earl Douglas a deadly wound,
Alack! a deep wound and a sare.
Douglas then says to Sir Hugh Montgomery—
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And bury me at yon bracken bush,
That stands upon yon lilly lea. (Herd, 4–8.)
Hume of Godscroft (about 1610), author of the History of the Douglases, was fond of quoting ballads. He gives a form of the first verse in Otterburn which is common to Herd and the English copy. He says that, according to some, Douglas was treacherously slain by one of his own men whom he had offended. “But this narration is not so probable,” and the fact is fairly meaningless in Herd’s fragment (the boy has no motive for stabbing Douglas, for if his report is true, he will be rewarded). The deed is probably based on the tradition which Godscroft thought “less probable,”—the treacherous murder of the Earl.
In the English ballad, Douglas marches on Newcastle, where Percy, without fighting, makes a tryst to meet and combat him at Otterburn, on his way home from Newcastle to Scotland. Thither Douglas goes, and is warned by a Scottish knight of Percy’s approach: as in Herd, he is sceptical, but is convinced by facts. (This warning of Douglas by a scout who gallops up is narrated by Froissart, from witnesses engaged in the battle.) After various incidents, Percy and Douglas encounter each other, and Douglas is slain. After a desperate fight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, a prisoner of the English,
Borrowed the Percy home again.
This is absurd. The Scots fought on, took Percy, and won the day. Walsingham, the contemporary English chronicler (in Latin), says that Percy slew Douglas, so do Knyghton and the continuator of Higden.
Meanwhile we observe that the English ballad says nothing of Douglas’s chivalrous fortitude, and soldier-like desire to have his death concealed. Here every Scottish version follows Froissart. In Herd’s fragment, Montgomery now attacks Percy, and bids him “yield thee to yon bracken bush,” where the dead Douglas’s body lies concealed. Percy does yield—to Sir Hugh Montgomery. The fragment has but fourteen stanzas.