Here, at Jedburgh, "upon the approachment of the men to their entries, the Scots fled from their ordnance, leaving them unshot, into the woods thereabout, with all other people in the same town." Thereafter, having caught and slain something over one hundred and sixty Scots, with "the loss of six English men only," Abbey, and Grey Friars, the town, and "divers hostel and fortified houses" were sacked and given to the flames, "the goods of the same toune being first spoyled, which laded, at their departing, five hundred horses." Again, in his notice of the capture of Skraysburgh, "the greatest towne in all Teviotdale," we are told that "it is a marvellous truth.... not one Englishman was either hurt or wounded." A craven band, those Scots, it would appear, fallen strangely from the level at which Surrey had found them so few years before--{102} "the boldest men and the hottest that ever I sawe any nation"; far sunk, too, beneath the level of their immediate descendants, the men who turned the day in the fight of the Redeswire in 1575. And yet one remembers to have heard of a certain fight about this period, in the near neighbourhood of Jedburgh, at a place called Ancrum Moor, when Angus, Arran, and Scott of Buccleuch, with a force numerically very inferior, turned the tables on the "auld enemy" to a lusty tune. It may all be quite accurate, of course, this story told to Lord Russell, but it smacks somewhat of a tale told by one who himself was not a very bold fighting man. The warrior whose place is ever the forefront of the battle is not the man who belittles his enemies, nor is he usually one who regards with complacency the sufferings of helpless women and children. Accurate, or not, however, Hertford seems to have had a partiality for harrying this district and slaying its hapless people, for he returned the following year with a larger following--a mongrel gang, in which Turks and Russians were almost the only European nations unrepresented--and completed his work of destruction so far as it lay in his power. He could not utterly destroy the glorious Abbey, but the Brethren were scattered, never to return, and so far as it could be done, the building that for four hundred years had sheltered them was wrecked. Mute now the solemn chants that had been wont to echo through its dim lit aisles, gone for ever the day of matins and vespers; in Jedburgh the sway of the Church was over. Black with the smoke of sacrilegious fires, stained by the flames that had licked its desecrated walls, still a rudely fitted fragment of the great Abbey for a little time continued to be used by worshippers; for the rest, the building would appear to have been regarded chiefly as an excellent and useful outlook or watch tower.