2nd Earl Of Douglas James DOUGLAS

   Another name for James was The Black DOUGLAS.

  General Notes:

It fell about the Lammas tide / Battle Of OtterbourneBattle Of Otterbourne

Melody -

Ballad from: Child, vol. vi
It fell about the Lammas tide,
When the muir-men win their hay,
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride
Into England, to drive a prey.
2. He chose the Gordons and the Graemes,
With them the Lindesays, light and gay;
But the Jardines wald nor with him ride,
And they rue it to this day.
3. And he has burn'd the dales of Tyne,
And part of Bambrough shire:
And three good towers on Reidswire fells,
He left them all on fire.
4. And he march'd up to Newcastle,
And rode it round about:
"O wha's the lord of this castle?
Or wha's the lady o't ?"
5. But up spake proud Lord Percy then,
And O but he spake hie!
"I am the lord of this castle,
My wife's the lady gaye."
6. "If thou'rt the lord of this castle,
Sae weel it pleases me!
For, ere I cross the Border fells,
The tane of us sall die."
7. He took a lang spear in his hand,
Shod with the metal free,
And for to meet the Douglas there,
He rode right furiouslie.
8. But O how pale his lady look'd,
Frae aff the castle wa',
When down, before the Scottish spear,
She saw proud Percy fa'.
9. "Had we twa been upon the green,
And never an eye to see,
I wad hae had you, flesh and fell;
But your sword sall gae wi' mee."
10. "But gae ye up to Otterbourne,
And wait there dayis three;
And, if I come not ere three day is end,
A fause knight ca' ye me."
11. "The Otterbourne's a bonnie burn;
'Tis pleasant there to be;
But there is nought at Otterbourne,
To feed my men and me.
12. "The deer rins wild on hill and dale,
The birds fly wild from tree to tree;
But there is neither bread nor kale,
To feed my men and me.
13. "Yet I will stay it Otterbourne,
Where you shall welcome be;
And, if ye come not at three day is end,
A fause lord I'll ca' thee."
14. "Thither will I come," proud Percy said,
"By the might of Our Ladye!" -
"There will I bide thee," said the Douglas,
"My troth I plight to thee."
15. They lighted high on Otterbourne,
Upon the bent sae brown;
They lighted high on Otterbourne,
And threw their pallions down.
16. And he that had a bonnie boy,
Sent out his horse to grass,
And he that had not a bonnie boy,
His ain servant he was.
17. But up then spake a little page,
Before the peep of dawn:
"O waken ye, waken ye, my good lord,
For Percy's hard at hand." 18. "Ye lie, ye lie, ye liar loud!
Sae loud I hear ye lie;
For Percy had not men yestreen,
To fight my men and me.
19. "But I have dream'd a dreary dream,
Beyond the Isle of Skye;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I."
20. He belted on his guid braid sword,
And to the field he ran;
But he forgot the helmet good,
That should have kept his brain.
21. When Percy wi the Douglas met,
I wat he was fu fain!
They swakked their swords, till sair they swat,
And the blood ran down like rain.
22. But Percy with his good broad sword,
That could so sharply wound,
Has wounded Douglas on the brow,
Till he fell to the ground.
23. Then he calld on his little foot-page,
And said - "Run speedilie,
And fetch my ain dear sister's son,
Sir Hugh Montgomery.
24. "My nephew good," the Douglas said,
"What recks the death of ane!
Last night I dreamd a dreary dream,
And I ken the day's thy ain.
25. "My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me by the braken bush,
That grows on yonder lilye lee.
26. "O bury me by the braken-bush,
Beneath the blooming brier;
Let never living mortal ken
That ere a kindly Scot lies here."
27. He lifted up that noble lord,
Wi the saut tear in his e'e;
He hid him in the braken bush,
That his merrie men might not see.
28. The moon was clear, the day drew near,
The spears in flinders flew,
But mony a gallant Englishman
Ere day the Scotsmen slew.
29. The Gordons good, in English blood,
They steepd their hose and shoon;
The Lindesays flew like fire about,
Till all the fray was done.
30. The Percy and Montgomery met,
That either of other were fain;
They swapped swords, and they twa swat,
And aye the blood ran down between.
31. "Yield thee, now yield thee, Percy," he said,
"Or else I vow I'll lay thee low!"
"To whom must I yield," quoth Earl Percy,
"Now that I see it must be so ?"
32. "Thou shalt not yield to lord nor loun,
Nor yet shalt thou yield to me;
But yield thee to the braken-bush,
That grows upon yon lilye lee!"
33. "I will not yield to a braken-bush,
Nor yet will I yield to a brier;
But I would yield to Earl Douglas,
Or Sir Hugh the Montgomery, if he were here."
34. As soon as he knew it was Montgomery,
He stuck his sword's point in the gronde;
The Montgomery was a courteous knight,
And quickly took him by the honde.
35. This deed was done at Otterbourne,
About the breaking of the day;
Earl Douglas was buried at the braken bush,
And the Percy led captive away.



THE BATTLE OF OTTERBURN From The Border Minstrelsy, Sir Walter Scott's latest edition of 1833: the copy in the edition of 1802 is less complete. The gentle and joyous passage of arms here recorded, took place in August 1388. We have an admirable account of Otterburn fight from Froissart, who revels in a gallant encounter, fairly fought out hand to hand, with no intervention of archery or artillery, and for no wretched practical purpose. In such a combat the Scots, never renowned for success at long bowls, and led by a Douglas, were likely to prove victorious, even against long odds, and when taken by surprise.

Choosing an advantage in the discordant days of Richard II., the Scots mustered a very large force near Jedburgh, merely to break lances on English ground, and take loot. Learning that, as they advanced by the Carlisle route, the English intended to invade Scotland by Berwick and the east coast, the Scots sent three or four hundred men-at-arms, with a few thousand mounted archers and pikemen, who should harry Northumberland to the walls of Newcastle. These were led by James, Earl of Douglas, March, and Murray. In a fight at Newcastle, Douglas took Harry Percy's pennon, which Hotspur vowed to recover. The retreat began, but the Scots waited at Otterburn, partly to besiege the castle, partly to abide Hotspur's challenge. He made his attack at moonlight, with overwhelming odds, but was hampered by a marsh, and incommoded by a flank attack of the Scots.Then it came to who would pound longest, with axe and sword. Douglas cut his way through the English, axe in hand, and was overthrown, but his men protected his body. The Sinclairs and Lindsay raised his banner, with his cry; March and Dunbar came up; Hotspur was taken by Montgomery, and the English were routed with heavy loss.

Douglas was buried in Melrose Abbey; very many years later the English defiled his grave, but were punished at Ancram Moor. There is an English poem on the fight of "about 1550"; it has many analogies with our Scottish version, and, doubtless, ours descends from a ballad almost contemporary. The ballad was a great favourite of Scott's.

The embroidered gauntlet of the Percy is in the possession of Douglas of Cavers to this day.


Battle of Otterburn
Date - 19th August 1388
Combatants - Earl of Douglas (the Black Douglas) of Douglas,
Scotland .v. Sir Henry Percy of Northumbria
Setting - Otterburn, Northumbria, England

This battle was in reply to an English raid of three years previous. This time, the Scots were a more powerful force. The Earl Douglas, with 300 lances and 2000 infantrymen advanced as far as Durham to return laden with booty. In Newcastle, Douglas took the greatest prize - or loss- to a knight; the pennon of Northumberland's Sir Henry Percy. Douglas boasted he would place it on his tower in Dalkeith. Percy vowed it would never leave Northumberland, and Douglas challenged him to take it from his tent that night if he dared.

The English barons restrained Percy from such a foolhardy attempt. They suspected it to be a trap leading them into an ambush by a supporting army of Scots, for they had no intelligence as to the size of the Douglas' force.

However, on the 19th August, both sides met and fought in the moonlight. During the course of the battle, the Earl of Douglas, who was in the thick of the battle, suddenly fell to the ground with three spears protruding from his body. He was dragged to safety, and away from the sight of his troops. There, dying, he instructed his second-in-command - his son the next Earl of Douglas - to shout the Douglas war cry ('A Douglas, A Douglas !!'), and press forward into the battle again. This was done, and on hearing the war cry, Douglas' troops plunged forward and drove the English back. Sir Henry Percy was captured and the Scots won the battle. That is how - 'a dead man won the fight'!

Sketch Book of the North - The Black Douglas

Under the great eastern oriel at Melrose, where the high altar of the abbey once stood, lies buried the heart of King Robert the Bruce. Elsewhere, far off at Dunfermline, in Fife, the body of the Scots' King was entombed. Some seventy years ago, when workmen in that ancient Scottish capital were repairing the ruined church, they came upon a marble monument, broken and defaced. Digging below amid the mould of the sepulcher they found the skeleton of a tall man.

Fragments of cloth of gold lay about it, and the breastbone had been sawn through; and by these signs the workmen knew that they had found the resting-place of the King. There, as one who was present has said, after the silence and darkness of five centuries, was seen the head that had planned and changed the destinies of Scotland; there lay the dry bone of the arm that on the eve of Bannockburn had at one blow slain the fierce De Bohun. But the Bruce's heart, embalmed and cased in silver, bearing its own strange romantic story, lies apart in the Border Abbey. Around the place of its rest,
in that fallen and moldering fane, lie the race that took from the heart their armorial cognizance-the lords of the great house of Douglas.

Hot and stirring was the Douglas blood, and hardly a battlefield of the Middle Ages in Scotland but was stained with some of its best. Derived far back amid the mists of antiquity, none could tell how the race arose, and it was wont to be a boast with the house that none could point to its "first mean man." There is a tower in Yarrow by the Douglas (dhu glas, black water) Burn which is said to have been the stronghold of "the Good Lord James"; and amid the fastnesses of Cairntable in Lanark there is another Douglas Water and Douglas Castle. From one of these, no doubt, in ancient Scots fashion the family took its name; but when that happened, and what the story was of its early days, must remain a tale untold. The house's medieval greatness began, however, with the rise of Robert the Bruce, and from that time onwards its deeds mark with stain or blazon every page of Scottish history. Lords of the broad Scottish Border, east and west, their hands were sometimes stronger than the king's. At one time a Douglas could ride to the field with twenty thousand spears at his back, and the gallop of the Douglas steeds sometimes was terrible alike on the causeway of Edinburgh and on the moorland marches of Northumberland. Douglas Earls and Knights fought as leaders through all the wars of David Bruce. A dead Douglas in 1388 won the famous fight with Hotspur on the moonlit field of Otterbourne. At Shrewsbury, in the days of Robert III, Henry IV f England himself ran close to being hewn in pieces by the Earl of Douglas; and for gallantry on the battlefields of France this same great Earl was invested by the French King with the Dukedom of Touraine. The fame of Scottish chivalry for three hundred years was blown abroad under the Douglas name; for courtesies and blows alike were exchanged by the race on many battlefields besides those of the northern Borderland. Not that dark deeds are lacking in their history. Dark deeds belonged to their times. But in the tilting-yard or on the tented field were to be met no fairer foes. Nor was their heroism all of the sword-and-buckler order, or confined to one sex.

The finest thing recorded of the race, after all, was done by a woman. On that dark February night in 1437 when James I was murdered in the Blackfriars Abbey at Perth, when the noise and clashing was heard as of men in armor, and the torches of the coming assassins in the garden below cast up great flashes of light against the windows of the King's chamber, was it not a Catherine Douglas who, for lack of a bolt, thrust her own fair arm into the staples of the door?

The fortunes of the family culminated in the reign of James II.

Whatever its origin had been, in that reign the race had attained an eminence more dazzling, perhaps, than that of any subject before or since. Earls of Douglas and Wigton, Lords of Bothwell, Galloway, and Annandale, Dukes of Touraine, Lords of Longueville, and Marshals of France, they had intermarried more than once with the Scottish Royal House itself. Members of the family also held the Earldoms of Angus, Ormond, and Moray. What wonder that they lifted haughty heads, and began to look askance at the Royal power? Then it was that the Stuart King stooped to treachery, and then was done the darkest deed that ever sullied the Stuart name.

Already, in the boyhood of James, a youthful Earl of Douglas and his brother had been betrayed and slain by the King's Ministers. For this transaction, however, the King was in no way to blame. The young Earl was his guest in the Castle of Edinburgh, and when at the treacherous feast the black bull's head, the sign of death, was placed upon their table, James had wept piteously and begged hard for the lives of his friends. It was later, when another Earl was lord upon the Border, that the King made murder his resource. For this act, it must be said, James had strong provocation. Douglas had been honored by him, had been made Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, and had abused that honor. He had flouted the King's authority, and slain the King's friends, and, having been commanded by letter to deliver up to James's representative the person of a subject unjustly imprisoned by him, he delivered him up "wanting the head." Finally, with two great Earls of the North, he had entered into an open league against the King. All this, however, cannot palliate the King's resource, cannot absolve the tragic scene in
that little supper-chamber in the Castle of Stirling. There the great Earl was under the protection of the King's hospitality, when James, bursting into rage at his taunts and at his refusal to abandon the treasonous compact, suddenly cried, "By Heaven, my Lord, if you will not break the league, this shall!" and, drawing his dagger, stabbed Douglas to the heart.

This deed brought the family fortunes to a climax, and for three years Scotland was blackened by the raging of the Douglas Wars. From Berwick to Inverness the country was wasted by the struggles of the partisans. Stirling and Elgin were burned, and, amid famine and pestilence, the troubles of the wars of Edward seemed come again on Scotland: so great had grown the power of these Border lords. At last, however, the King and the Earl came face to face. Each led an army of forty thousand men, and only the small river Carron ran between them. By the combat of the morrow, it seemed, would be seen whether James Stuart or James Douglas should wear the Scottish crown. But the Earl's heart was seen to fail, and on the morrow, when he awoke, he found his camp deserted. Of all his host of the previous day not a hundred followers remained. Nothing was left him but flight; and, turning his back, as a Douglas had never done before, he made his way to England. Twenty years later, having been captured by one of his own vassals in a petty skirmish on the Border, he was sent to end his days as a monk in the Fifeshire Abbey of Lindores.

Thus ended the great line of the Earls of Douglas, a race whose history for three hundred years had been the history of Scotland, and whose foot had twice, at least, been set upon the step even of the throne. From the house's latter days of turbulence and ambition there is pleasure in turning back to those earlier years when the good Lord James rode at the Bruce's saddle-bow, and the patriotism of groaning Scotland rallied round the coupled names of Douglas and the King. No later deed can dim the luster of those years, and nothing in history can outshine the last scene in the life of the Knight who strove to carry the Bruce's heart to the Holy Land. Himself hemmed round by the Moors on that Spanish plain, in his effort, it is said, to succor a friend, the Earl took from his neck the casket containing the King's heart. "Pass first in fight," he cried, "as thou wert wont to do! Douglas will follow thee, or die!" Then, throwing the casket far among the enemy, he rushed forward to the place where it fell, and was there slain. Well would it have been for the race of Douglas had they ever remained true as their ancestor to the service of their King!

James next married Isabella Eupheme STEWART, daughter of King Of Scots Robert II STEWART and Elizabeth MURE, on 23 Sep 1371 in Scotland. (Isabella Eupheme STEWART was born in 1348 in Dundonald Castle, Dundonald, Ayrshire, Scotland and died about 1410.)