200 till thair cuntre syne went thai. Life and goods were granted them on surrender (Stevenson, p. 5). Cf. previous note.
203 soyn eftir. But, according to the account in Stevenson, King Robert assisted at the attack on the castle. See on 198.
222 At = that. “That he took in hand to hold Berwick.”
224 Bath the castell, and the dungeoune. In his former references Barbour has used the term “castle” to include both the tower or “donjon” or keep and the surrounding wall, apart from the wall of the town proper. The wall (or “wallis”), he says in 169, 170, was not then in a very defensible state. Here he goes back to an older and more technical usage before these two independent elements—donjon and enclosure fortified with a wall—had quite coalesced. The evidence for this differentiation is given at length by Mr. Round in his Geoffrey de Mandeville, Appendix O. One of the citations is precisely parallel to Barbour’s expressions here, the description of a grant of Dublin—town, castle, and donjon—in 1172 to Hugh de Lacy:
“Li riche rei ad dunc baillé (has then entrusted)
Dyvelin en garde, la cité
E la chastel e le dongun,
A Huge de Laci le barun.”
These, then, are the three elements here: the town, which had its own wall; the “castle,” strictly speaking, or walled enclosure; and the “donjon” within the latter.
226 Ryde in-till Inglande. The Lanercost writer places this raid in the month of May, and, it would seem, after the fall of the castle (see on line 198). The Scots on this occasion penetrated England farther than usual, reaching Ripon, Knaresborough, and Skipton, in Craven—i.e., covering a large part of Yorkshire (p. 235). The Gesta de Carn. also dates this raid in May, “soon after Easter,” and says the Scots went as far as Bolton Abbey (p. 55).
227 gret plente of fee. They brought back “a crowd of cattle past numbering” (Lanerc., p. 236). They searched the woods of Knaresborough for the cattle hidden there, and got possession of them (p. 235).
228-9 sum cuntreis trewit he For vittale. I.e., “he made a truce with some districts in return for a supply of victual.” The Scots spoiled Ripon, but refrained from burning the town on payment of 1,000 marks (Lanerc., p. 235).
236 But burges and but oblesteris. Skeat takes exception to “burgesses,” but the town had previously been defended by the burgesses (cf. on 15), and some, no doubt, were willing “to obey” the Scots (cf. on 128). E reads burdowys, which Jamieson supposed to mean “men who fought with clubs,” while Skeat suggests that it is “burdouis for burdonis—i.e., mules!” Mules are a less probable part of the garrison than burgesses. “Oblesteris” are arblasters—i.e., crossbow-men, a minor but constant part of both English and Scottish armies of the time.