Three days later the Northumbrian barons did homage to him at Felton. No immediate results, indeed, followed from this new league; the garrison of Norham seem to have been as loyal as their castle was strong; at the end of forty days {Nov. 28} Alexander raised the siege and returned home,[1154] just as John was on the point of receiving the surrender of Rochester; and for more than a month no further movement took place in the north except an obscure rising at York.[1155] When at the opening of 1216 John entered Yorkshire, the terror of his march to Nottingham had gone before him and all thought of resistance was abandoned. He reached Pontefract on January 2; its constable “came there to his mercy.”[1156] He went on to “his city of York,” and “wrought all his will with it.”[1157] On January 7 and 8 he was at Darlington.[1158] The horrors wrought by his troops seem to have equalled, if not surpassed, those which the Scots had been wont to perpetrate in their raids upon Northumbria in their days of savage heathenism before the conversion of Malcolm Canmore.[1159] A few barons “submitted themselves to the mercy of the merciless one”; the rest “fled before his face.”[1160] From Darlington he seems to have advanced on the 8th to Durham; thence he was about to turn southward again, when he learned that Alexander had set fire to Newcastle-on-Tyne. Swearing “by God’s teeth” that he would “run the little sandy fox-cub to his earth,”[1161] John dashed forward to Newcastle; the place was indeed burnt, but Alexander had withdrawn into his own territory,[1162] and on the 11th the English refugees gathered round him in the chapter-house at Melrose and renewed their oath to him on the relics of the saints. John was on their track, burning and ravaging what little there was left to ravage--little enough, for the fugitives had set fire to their own fields and villages that he might get no benefit from them.[1163] On the day of the homage at Melrose John reached Alnwick.[1164] On the 14th he assaulted Berwick; town and castle were taken next day,[1165] and the population butchered, after horrible tortures, by his mercenaries. From Berwick he made, in the following week, a series of raids across the Tweed, and swept the country as far as Dunbar and Haddington, both of which he burned. At last, seeing that the “fox-cub” was not worth a longer chase and that there was more important work to be done elsewhere, he ordered Berwick to be burnt, fired with his own hand--so the Scottish story runs--the house in which he had himself been lodging,[1166] and on January 23 or 24 began to move southward. After stopping two days at Newcastle[1167] and granting a new charter to its citizens,[1168] he made his way slowly back through Yorkshire. When at the end of February he reached Fotheringay,[1169] all the castles in the shire save two were in his power and garrisoned by followers of his own, who were charged to hold the country and continue