either fight or flee.  Your grace shall tarry on this hillock, with my brother George; and I will either clear your road of yonder banditti, or die in the attempt.”  The earl, with these words, alighted, and hastened to the charge; while the Earl of Lennox (at whose instigation Buccleuch made the attempt), remained with the king, an inactive spectator.  Buccleuch and his followers likewise dismounted, and received the assailants with a dreadful shout, and a shower of lances.  The encounter was fierce and obstinate; but the Homes and Kerrs, returning at the noise of battle, bore down and dispersed the left wing of Buccleuch’s little army.  The hired banditti fled on all sides; but the chief himself, surrounded by his clan, fought desperately in the retreat.  The laird of Cessford, chief of the Roxburgh Kerrs, pursued the chace fiercely; till, at the bottom of a steep path, Elliot of Stobs, a follower of Buccleuch, turned, and slew him with a stroke of his lance.  When Cessford fell, the pursuit ceased.  But his death, with those of Buccleuch’s friends, who fell in the action, to the number of eighty, occasioned a deadly feud betwixt the names of Scott and Kerr, which cost much blood upon the marches[11].—­See Pitscottie, Lesly, and Godscroft.

[Footnote 10:  Near Darnick.  By a corruption from Skirmish field, the spot is still called the Skinnerfield.  Two lines of an old ballad on the subject are still preserved: 

  “There were sick belts and blows,
  The Mattous burn ran blood.”

[Footnote 11:  Buccleuch contrived to escape forfeiture, a doom pronounced against those nobles, who assisted the Earl of Lennox, in a subsequent attempt to deliver the king, by force of arms.  “The laird of Bukcleugh has a respecte, and is not forfeited; and will get his pece, and was in Leithquo, both Sondaye, Mondaye, and Tewisday last, which is grete displeasure to the Carres.”—­Letter from Sir C. Dacre to Lord Dacre, 2d December, 1526.]

[Sidenote:  1528] Stratagem at length effected what force had been unable to accomplish; and the king, emancipated from the iron tutelage of Angus, made the first use of his authority, by banishing from the kingdom his late lieutenant, and the whole race of Douglas.  This command was not enforced without difficulty; for the power of Angus was strongly rooted in the east border, where he possessed the castle of Tantallon, and the hearts of the Homes and Kerrs.  The former, whose strength was proverbial[12], defied a royal army; and the latter, at the Pass of Pease, baffled the Earl of Argyle’s attempts to enter the Merse, as lieutenant of his sovereign.  On this occasion, the borderers regarded with wonder and contempt the barbarous array, and rude equipage, of their northern countrymen Godscroft has preserved the beginning of a scoffing rhyme, made upon this occasion: 

  The Earl of Argyle is bound to ride
  From the border of Edgebucklin brae[13];
  And all his habergeons him beside,
  Each man upon a sonk of strae.