Hitherto the barons of Yorkshire had looked upon the distant warfare with lukewarm indifference, each mistrusting his neighbour, and hardly knowing whether to oppose the Scots, as became the trusty partizans of King Stephen, or to support them as loyal subjects of the Empress Queen, whose standard was already raised by Robert of Gloucester, and her other friends, in the south and west. But when the war was now fast approaching their own neighbourhood, when their own lands were about to be plundered and their own vassals to be put to the sword, it was time to shake off their apathy, and out of the very excesses of the foe arose their strongest bond of union. Archbishop Thorstein preached a holy war; and through every parish, priests bore the relics of the saints, with all the imposing paraphernalia of the Roman Catholic religion, proclaiming it to be the duty of every Christian man to rise in defence of the church against barbarians, hateful alike to God and man. Ilbert de Lacy and Robert de Bruce, the youthful William Albemarle and the aged Walter de Ghent, summoned their followers to meet at Thirsk; and even Robert de Mowbray, then a mere child, appeared in armour at the head of his vassals to animate the courage of the numerous retainers of his house. To the same place of meeting hurried William Percy and William Fossard, Richard de Courcy and Robert d’ Estoteville; the knights of Nottinghamshire under William Peveril, and the chivalry of Derbyshire under Robert Ferrers: whilst Stephen, too much occupied to leave the south of England, dispatched a chosen body of knights, under Bernard de Balliol, to join the flower of the midland and northern chivalry in repelling the inroads of the Scottish foe. Walter Espec, a baron of vast possessions, whose age and experience, united to a gigantic stature and a ready eloquence, marked him out as a leader fit to inspire confidence and exact obedience, reminded the confederate nobles of the glories of their ancestry, and pointed out to their retainers that the enemy was little better than an unarmed mob.[242] Ralph, the titular bishop of the Orkneys, was commissioned, in the place of the aged and infirm Thorstein, to grant a general absolution to the army, which, strengthened by the consolations of the ministers of religion, and encouraged by the exhortations of military experience, viewed the impending contest in the light of a holy war, and prepared with alacrity for battle.