appeal for help was made in ticklish affairs.

There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of
Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of
Tynedale in hot water for so many years. Leehall appears to have been
physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes
seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the
superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his
enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing
gallop across deep ground or heathery hill. In any case, as a general
rule, Lowes was more often the hunted than the hunter. Yet, to the
followers of Lowes--there must always be two sides to a story--it was
he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between
the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes' horse was killed by a sword-thrust
directed at the rider's thigh, the old ballad says:

"Oh, had Leehall but been a man
As he was never ne-an,
He wad have stabbed the rider
And letten the horse alean."

But perhaps the animosity here shown to Leehall comes more from one who
was a lover of horses--as who in Northumberland is not?--than from a
partisan of Lowes. However, the feud ran on, year in, year out, as is
the custom of such things, and no doubt it might have been bequeathed
from father to son, like a property under entail, had it not been for
the intervention of Frank Stokoe. Lowes and Leehall, it seems, had met
by chance near Sewing Shields, with the usual result. Only, upon this
occasion, the former was possibly not on the back of an animal the
superior in speed and stamina of the horse on which Leehall was mounted.