They were driving before them a knot of some forty or fifty cattle, and three of them led horses carrying heavy burdens.

Oswald's quick eye noticed that four of the horsemen were not carrying their spears.
"They are three short of their number," he said to himself, "and those four must all be sorely wounded.

Well, it might have been worse." Oswald had been brought up to regard forays and attacks as ordinary incidents of life.

Watch and ward were always kept in the little fortalice, especially when the nights were dark and misty, for there was never any saying when a party of Scottish borderers might make an attack; for the truces, so often concluded between the border wardens, had but slight effect on the prickers, as the small chieftains on both sides were called, who maintained a constant state of warfare against each other.
The Scotch forays were more frequent than those from the English side of the border; not because the people were more warlike, but because they were poorer, and depended more entirely upon plunder for their subsistence.

There was but little difference of race between the peoples on the opposite side of the border.