Robert the Steward appears to have been accused of having made no effort to save the King. David certainly seems to have suspected him; but it must be said that had he brought up his division again, he would probably have only added to the greatness of the disaster. He retreated in tolerable order, drawing to him as many as possible of the survivors from the other divisions, and the English were too weary to pursue. With David were taken the Archbishop of St. Andrews and several nobles, while the death-roll included more than thirty barons, including the Lord Marischal Keith and the Constable Hay.
This great disaster brought about a cessation of Scottish invasions for many years. David II. became more or less Anglicized during his long residence in England, and Robert the Steward, both as regent and monarch, was inclined to peace. The nobles, however, were warlike and turbulent, and the people did not love England. Several Border strongholds were still held by the English, and there was continuous skirmishing on the frontier, which, however, rarely assumed the dignity of national strife. The Black Death weakened both nations, and not until 1377 was the war renewed in earnest. Berwick-on-Tweed was taken and retaken. There was fighting on the sea, ending in the destruction of the Scottish piratical fleet under Andrew Mercer by the London merchant Philpot. The English invaded the Lothians more than once with no permanent results.
In 1385 Jean de Vienne, Admiral of France, landed in Scotland with 2,000 men-at-arms, 50,000 francs of gold, and a large supply of arms and armour. A great invasion of England was organized, and 30,000 men under De Vienne, James, Earl of Douglas, and other lords, entered Northumberland. So formidable did the invasion appear that the young King Richard II. himself took the command against the Scots. To the disgust of the French, the Scots retreated into Clydesdale, and, while the English burned Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee, made a retaliatory raid into Cumberland. They did not agree well with their allies, who, on their side, conceived a great dislike for the poverty of the country, as well as for the keenness of the people in respect of monetary transactions. They went home sulkily, De Vienne himself being pledge that the cost of their maintenance should be paid by France. Chance made the two nations allies, but the French themselves never seem to have made a good impression in Scotland.
In 1388 the Scottish nobles arranged—behind the King’s back be it noted—an attack on England to revenge the devastation of 1385. An army, vaguely said to have been 40,000 strong, under Robert, Earl of Fife, the second son of the King, invaded Cumberland, with the usual negative result; while a body of about 5,000, under Douglas, crossed the Tweed, and carried devastation to the gates of Durham. The Earl of Northumberland and his son Henry, the celebrated ‘Hotspur,’ were driven into Newcastle, and Douglas retired unmolested as far as Otterburn, some twenty miles from the Border. Here he was overtaken by a force under ‘Hotspur,’ and a furious engagement took place, which has been celebrated by Froissart in prose and in the famous ballad of ‘Chevy Chase.’ In the end the English were beaten off, and Percy and other knights fell into the hands of the Scots, who, however, had to lament the death of their leader.
In the following year Robert II. died. His feeble son John, ‘Robert III.,’ was anxious to keep the peace with England, and in this was backed by his brother and co-regent, Robert, Duke of Albany. In 1398 the heir-apparent, David, Duke of Rothesay, supplanted his uncle for a while, and inaugurated a vigorous anti-English policy. He alienated the powerful Earl of March by breaking off his betrothal to his daughter, and March fled to England. Henry IV. was anxious for peace, but the Scots appear to have been determined on war, and he made a brief expedition into Scotland in 1399. In 1402, after much desultory skirmishing, the Scots, taking advantage of Henry’s preoccupations, invaded England with a considerable army under Murdoch, Earl of Fife, son of Albany (who had overthrown and murdered Rothesay), and Archibald, Earl of Douglas, grandson of the hero of Otterburn. They advanced, ravaging in the usual manner, as far as the Tyne, and then turned homeward, pursued by a force under ‘Hotspur’ and the fugitive Earl of March. They were overtaken while encamped on Homildon, or Humbledon, Hill, near Wooler. Percy and March, adopting tactics curiously similar to those employed a century later almost at the same spot by Surrey, moved round the Scots’ position, and, by placing themselves on their line of retreat, forced them to abandon their booty and disperse, or fight.
The battle presents few features of interest; it was a mere counterpart in tactics of Halidon Hill and Neville’s Cross. The Scots were tormented in the old fashion by the archers, and Fife and Douglas failed to attempt the only possible, if forlorn, expedient to stay them—a determined charge of cavalry. Seeing the increasing disorder, Sir John Swinton, one of the bravest knights in the army, begged permission to advance, though only with his following of 100 lances. Sir Adam Gordon, his personal enemy, thereupon sought reconciliation with him, and the erstwhile foes, embracing on the field, placed themselves at the head of the band, which rode downhill among the archers, and perished to the last man. Driven to desperation by the murderous discharge, the Scottish masses at last lumbered clumsily down the hill, only to be massacred by the pitiless arrow flight, until in despair they broke and fled. The English men-at-arms hardly struck a blow. Fife and Douglas were both taken; the latter had received five wounds, and owed his life solely to his well-tempered armour.
Disastrous as Homildon had been, it cannot be said to have any decisive effects. The old frontier strife went on unchecked. The Scots recovered Jedburgh, one of the few posts still held by the English in 1409. A great invasion, organized by Albany in 1416, ended in a fiasco; and when James I. returned in 1424 from his captivity in England, hostilities had almost died away. This was largely due to the fact that several of the chief Scottish nobles, including Douglas, had gone to fight in the service of France against England. The result was that direct warfare on the Border tended to die out.