Over this scene of complex organization and activity dark shadows came in the fourteenth century. The Scots, who had been quiescent for some time, fell upon the Bishopric with great ferocity during the reigns of the first three Edwards, and the years were seldom free from the record of invasion or pillage. It had come to be regarded as a prime duty of the Bishop to repress all northern incursions, and, as a contemporary document puts it, to serve as a wall of brass against the Scots. He had his fortified castles, Norham in Norhamshire, Durham in its own county, and Northallerton in Yorkshire. These three lay on one of the chief routes by which the invaders entered England, and were kept in threatening times well defended and provisioned. In 1312 Bruce pushed his forces right through Northumberland, and advanced into the heart of the Bishopric, delivering a blow against Durham itself, which must have been severe. Two years later in Scotland the troops of England were beaten at Bannockburn, and the humiliation of Edward II. was only effaced some years later by Edward III. in the victories of Halidon Hill, and more particularly of Neville’s Cross in 1346. The latter battle was the great glory of the men of Durham until it was forgotten in the greater prestige of Flodden nearly 200 years later. The tomb of Ralph Neville, badly battered by Scots in later days, still stands in Durham Cathedral as a local memorial of Neville’s Cross, in which he led the Bishopric troops. The joy caused by these successes was soon dimmed when the terrors of the Black Death overwhelmed the district. Perhaps no part of England suffered much more severely. The pestilence rolled up towards the North in the year 1349, and at last made its dreaded appearance in the south-east of the county. From this point it spread with frightful rapidity, carrying off all orders and conditions of men, for none escaped. Sometimes a whole household perished, and here and there an entire village was obliterated. "No tenants came from West Thickley, because they are all dead," is the steward’s entry at one manorial court or halmote, as the local word is. In the winter that followed there was no sowing, and when the spring came men had not the heart to go to work on the fields, for the plague was renewed with increasing virulence, and everything was thrown out of gear. Villeins had run away from sheer terror; even madness was not unheard of; and whilst there was little to eat famine and misery stalked unchecked.[5] The Bishop’s lands and the Prior’s lands were going out of cultivation, for it was impossible to find labourers, or to bind them down in the old way. Grotesque attempts were made to keep up the former conditions of service, until by degrees stewards and bailiffs found out that they were face to face with the greatest economic difficulty which had ever appeared in the Bishopric. The Black Death practically brought to an end the rigid system of land