In the midst of the Norman campaign, Philip urgently besought David, King of Scots, to make a diversion in his favour.  Since 1341 David, then a youth of seventeen, had been back in Scotland.  Prolonged truces gave him little opportunity of trying his skill as a soldier, and his domestic rule was not particularly successful.  The full effects of the Franco-Scottish alliance were revealed when, early in October, the Scottish king invaded the north of England, confident that, as all the fighting-men were in France, he would meet no more formidable opponents than monks, peasants, and shepherds.  The five days’ resistance of Lord Wake’s border peel of Castleton in Liddesdale showed the baselessness of this imagination.  At its capture on October 10, David put to death its gallant captain, a knight named Walter Selby.  Then the Scots streamed over the hills into Upper Tynedale, and soon devastated Durham.  Such of the border lords as were not with the king in France had now prepared for resistance.  Beside the Nevilles, Percys, and other great houses of the north, the Archbishop of York, William de la Zouch, took a vigorous part in organising the local levies, and in a very short space of time a sufficient army assembled to make head against the invaders.  From their muster at Richmond, the northern barons marched into the land of St. Cuthbert, many priests following their archbishop as of old their predecessors had followed Melton or Thurstan.  On October 17 the forces joined battle at Neville’s Cross, a wayside landmark on the Red hills, a rough and broken region sloping down to the Wear, immediately to the west of the city of Durham.  Neither host was large in size, and each stood facing the other, with the archers at either wing, after the fashion that had become Scottish as well as English.  For a time neither army was willing to begin.  At last the English archers, irritated at the delay, advanced upon the Scots with showers of missiles.  Then the struggle grew general and after a fierce hand-to-hand fight the English prevailed.  David was taken prisoner and was lodged in the Tower, and many of the noblest of the Scots lay dead on the field.  The diversion was a failure; the local levies had proved amply sufficient to cope with the enemy.  In thus playing the game of the French king, David began a policy which, from Neville’s Cross to Flodden, brought embarrassment to England and desolation to Scotland.  It was the inevitable penalty of two independent and hostile states existing in one little island.

So war-worn were the victors of Crecy that all the profit they could win from the battle was the power to continue their march undisturbed to the sea coast.  On September 4, Edward reached the walls of Calais, the last French town on the frontiers of Flanders, and the port whose corsairs had inflicted exceptional damage on English shipping during the whole of the war.  With a keen eye to the military importance of the place, the King abandoned the easy course of