In august 1388 a force of northern Englishmen was overwhelmed at the battle of Otterburn, in Redesdale, Northumberland. Writing shortly after the event, a monk at Westminster Abbey sought to explain this defeat. He attributed it partly to the ‘impetuous spirit and excessive audacity’ of Sir Henry Percy, and partly to the failure of the bishop of Durham to turn up with his forces. But in addition, he wrote, the English were defeated:

Writing some eighty years earlier, the northern chronicler Walter of Guisborough had described similar confusion, when a Scottish raiding party defeated another northern English force near Wark-on-Tweed in Northumberland, at Easter 1296, in a skirmish which marked the outbreak of the Scottish wars. He relates that the Scots had arranged a password, so as to be able to distinguish friend from foe. However, many of the English simply repeated the passwords themselves and so escaped by pretending to be Scots. As these examples demonstrate, the men on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish borders spoke the same northern dialect of English. They also shared the same culture, and indeed, for most of the thirteenth century, the border had been of very little political or cultural significance, and cross-border links had flourished and multiplied.