When the King of England invaded England.

The year 1400 was a bad one for England, which naturally encouraged the Scots to raid over the border. This time, however, things were different from the usual scheme of things for the Scottish raiders were acting without permission of the Scottish king, but in the name of the King of England.

King Richard II of England had long been behaving as a ruthless and savage tyrant, and so was becoming increasingly unpopular. In 1398 he banished without trial the popular Henry Bolingbroke, his own cousin and heir to the Duke of Lancaster. Early in 1399 the elderly Duke died. Richard at once announced that he was confiscating – again without any attempt at legal proceedings – all the lands, possessions and wealth of the Duke of Lancaster. Bolingbroke was to be left a penniless exile.

Naturally, Bolingbroke refused to accept this. On 4 July 1399 he landed on the Northumbrian coast with a small band of armed followers. He announced that he had come back to England to demand a fair, legal hearing of the confiscation of his inheritance. Richard sent out orders ordering the immediate arrest of Bolingbroke, but nobody took any notice. Towns and castles threw open their gates, magnates rushed to join his cause and before long men were openly calling for Richard to be dethroned and Henry to be made king.

England stood poised for civil war. Then Harry Hotspur Percy and his father the Earl of Northumberland declared for Henry, supporting the call to make him king. The mere fact of Percy support decided many waverers to support Henry. But the Percies did even more. They mustered the armed men from their estates and marched south to back Henry.

The news that the Percies were marching south with all their men was greeted with joy and amazement in Scotland. At once men began to arm for a raid into England. However, King Robert III had problems of his own and did not want to provoke trouble with England. Robert’s brother the Duke of Albany was engaged in an open and bloody feud with the king’s son and heir, David Duke of Rothesay. Another royal brother, Alexander, was busy trying to carve out an independent state in southwestern Scotland and had earned the name of Wolf of Badenoch for his ruthless violence. Robert, or rather the Council then ruling in his name, refused to approve war against England.

In February 1400 the by now deposed Richard II died, almost certainly murdered on the orders of Bolingbroke, now Henry IV of England. The body was buried without being laid in state. Within weeks of the news reaching Edinburgh an Englishman arrived to announce that the body buried in Westminster was false and that he was the true King Richard II. He told a long and involved story of his alleged escape from Pontefract Castle, which few people took very seriously.

However the pretensions of the imposter provided a useful cover for those hungry to raid England. Claiming that they were acting for this exiled monarch, the reiver families of the border armed for war.

These reiver families were organised into close-knit clans, each based around a major family which could raise fighting men, tribute and money. They led a semi-independent existence at the best of times and given the chaos in Scotland at this time were free to do pretty much as they pleased. The usual course of events was for them to extort money from the nearby lowland farmers under threat of destructive raids. The money was collected in black pouches, hence the term blackmail. If a payment was missed a raid would be carried out. The autumn was the favoured raiding season as the long nights gave cover for operations, the bad weather had not yet closed in and the cattle to be stolen were fat and sleek from summer grazing.

The reiver families of the Grahams, Armstrongs, Elliots, Crosarys, Bells and Batesons put aside their private feuds, of which there were many, to organise a major raid in September of 1400. Reivers rode hardy mountain ponies and went to war in light armour for their tactic was to move quickly, driving stolen cattle back home before the enemy could respond.

The massed reivers rode over the Cheviots, passing through Chatto before crossing the border by a high pass into the upper valley of the River Coquet. They then poured down from the wild hills to ran out across the lowlands around Rothbury.

But if the Percies had gone south, the Umfravilles had not. And this was Umfraville country. Despite Scottish hopes the system of watchers in the Cheviot valleys had been maintained. The man set to watch the Coquet saw the raiders and galloped off on his pony to warn the Umfravilles.

The nominal head of the family was young Thomas Umfraville, but he was only ten years old. Power over the Umfraville estates rested with his uncle Sir Robert Umfraville, brother of the Sir Thomas Umfraville who had fought at Otterburn in 1388. Sir Robert was made of sterner stuff than his brother, and was not a man to make a mistake.

As soon as he heard that the reivers were on the move, Sir Robert sent out riders ordering everyone to make for the nearest fortified town or castle with as much as they could carry. He also summoned the men of Northumberland to war. Sir Robert knew that speed was to be the deciding factor in the campaign to follow. He commandeered every horse he could find. Whether it was a war horse, a riding horse, a plough horse or a half-trained mountain pony, Umfraville took it and put a man on its back. Then he rode hard for the Coquet Valley.

Umfraville reasoned that the reivers would go back to Scotland the way they had come. Rather than try to stop them as they were spread across the countryside raiding, Umfraville planned to ambush them as they headed home and crush them once and for all.

The reivers were no fools. They too moved fast and soon the campaign became little more than a race for the border. It was a close run thing, but it ended at Fulhope Law.