summed up their creed, then and ever. There were of them, now, but two thousand at the most, opposed to an army many times their number one man as against four, or perhaps even {095}as one to five. Yet so stubborn was their resistance, so fiercely they fought, that at the last it was only by the aid of fire that this wasps' nest was laid waste. Driven back at length by superior numbers, forced to retire to the towers and to the Abbey, the attack could be pushed home no farther till Surrey gave orders to set fire to the town. Even then, Jedworth held out till far in the night, when the entire place was little more than a smouldering heap of embers. "I assure your Grace," wrote the Earl to his King, "I fownd the Scottis at this tyme the boldest men and the hottest that ever I sawe any nation, and all the journey upon all parts of the armye kepte us with soo contynual skyrmish that I never sawe the like."... "Could 40,000 such men be assembled," he says in the same letter, "it would bee a dreadful enterprise to withstand them." If valour alone could have won the day, to the men of Jedburgh had now been the victory. They fought like fiends incarnate. The Devil himself, in truth, must have been amongst them, for, says Surrey farther: "I dare not write the wonders that my Lord Dacre and all hys company doo saye they sawe that nyght six tyms of sperits and fereful syghts. And universally all their company saye playnly the devyl was that nyght among theym six tyms." Thus was Jedburgh wiped out, "soo surely brent that no garnysons nor none others shal bee lodged there unto the tyme it bee newe buylded." And to rebuild equal to what it had been, would surely be no light undertaking, for, says Surrey, "the towne was much better than I went (weened) it had been, for there was twoo tymys moo houses therein than in Berwicke, and well buylded, with many honest and faire houses therein sufficiente to have lodged a thousand horsemen in garnyson, and six good towres therein, which towne and towres be clenely destroyed, brent, and throwen downe." The slaughter of Jedworth's defenders no doubt must also have been great. But that the inhabitants were not indiscriminately put to the sword is evidenced by the fact that some time during {099}the night, wlien Lord Dacre's picketed horses--terrified no doubt by the same Scottish devil that had troubled the hearts of the storniers in the town--suddenly stampeding, galloped wildly through Surrey's camp, over two hundred of them, bursting in amongst the still burning houses, were caught and carried off by the Scottish women who still clung to the place--"keening," probably, over their devastated hearths. In all, before this stampede ended, Surrey lost upwards of eight hundred horses; for when the maddened beasts came thundering through his camp, the English soldiers, imagining that they were being attacked by a fresh army of Scots, loosed off into the mob flights of arrows, and fired