Upon the 10th of January 1138 the advance guard of the Scottish army, under the command of William Fitz-Duncan the king’s nephew, crossed the Borders, and attempted to surprise Werk Castle before daylight; but, failing in their object, they wasted the surrounding country until the arrival of the main body under David and his son Henry, when a regular siege was commenced with all the engineering appliances of the age. The castle was the property of Walter Espec, and so gallantly was it defended by his nephew, Jordan de Bussy, that, before long, the king, converting the siege into a blockade, marched with the remainder of his army to effect a junction with William Fitz-Duncan, whom he had already dispatched to lay waste the remainder of Northumberland; and once more the northern counties endured a repetition of the scenes of horror enacted, nearly seventy years before, in the early days of the Conqueror. David, who had been long preparing for war, had gathered his army from every quarter of his dominions; and around the royal standard, the ancient Dragon of Wessex, might be seen the representatives of nearly every race contributing to form the varied ancestry of the modern Scottish people. The Norman knight and the Low Country “Reiter,” the sturdy Angle and the fiery Scot, marched side by side with the men of Northumberland and Cumberland, of Lothian and of Teviotdale; whilst the mixed population of the distant islands, Norwegians from the Orkneys, and the wild Picts of Galloway, flocked in crowds to the banner of their king, to revel in the plunder of the south.[240] The Galwegians, an unruly host of tributary allies rather than of subjects, claimed to march in the van, and a piteous account of their ravages, and enormities, has been left on record by the contemporary chroniclers of Hexham. It was only by a great exertion of authority, that William Fitz-Duncan was enabled to save that priory from the destruction with which it was menaced by a body of exasperated clansmen, whose chieftain had fallen in an affray with some retainers of the monastery; and to prevent the possibility of such a sacrilege, David quartered a body of Scots within its walls, whilst he granted to the community his own share of the plunder, in reparation for the injuries they had sustained from his undisciplined and semi-barbarous followers.