Barely threescore years and ten had elapsed since William the Norman had carried fire and sword through Northumbria. The charred and blackened ruins of grange and village were not yet entirely hidden by the dense growth of bramble and thorn; and the human bones, that had been gnawed by the wolves in their midnight banquets in the evil days that succeeded the Confessor's death, had not yet mouldered into their kindred earth. It was in the wild and stormy season of the opening spring of 1138 that King David commenced his operations. Shaken to its centre, Northumbria lay at the mercy of the invader: again the sword reaped its bloody harvest, again the torch performed its evil office, and the midnight skies were illumined by the glare of burning homesteads and villages. The highways and byeways were strewn with the dead: with the gashed clay of strong men, of women, and of little children. Age and womanhood lay together in dishonoured death; the white hairs and the flowing tresses trodden in the same bloody mire, and, most cruel spectacle! the little babes, pierced and shattered by spears, lay where they had been cast in fiendish sport by the pitiless barbarians. The blood of the priests reeked upon the altars of the most High God, and the sacred fanes were heaped with the sweltering corruption of slain worshippers. Miserable fugitives turned their faces towards the Humber, striving to escape the hot-footed Scot, who pressed so keen and fast upon their track. The remnant of the maddened people, desperate in their despair, only required a leader to organise and direct their strength. Thurstan, the aged Archbishop of York, although bowed down to the verge of the grave by the weight of many years and infirmities, came forward to organise the strength of his afflicted people. Stephen being unable to disengage himself from the toils of his revolted barons, the civil war having already broken out in the south, despatched Bernard de Baliol to the north, at the head of a body of men-at-arms. The real strength of the movement was, however, the combination of those eminent northern barons, William, Earl of Albemarle, Robert de Ferrars, William Percy, Roger de Mowbray, Ilbert de Lacy, and the veteran Walter l'Espec, who, responding with prompt energy to the supplications of Archbishop Thurstan, gathered their vassals together, and prepared to take the field, as soon as all arrangements were completed, and the widely scattered strength of the North was concentrated.