William Douglas had been captured earlier in 1333, at an action known as the Battle of Dornock, and so escaped the carnage that had wiped out or captured the leading men of the nation at Halidon Hill. Upon his release in 1334, he started raiding Galloway under the command of John Randolph, 3rd Earl of Moray, capturing Guy II, Count of Namur at the Battle of Boroughmuir. After Randolph's capture and without his support Douglas started building his own power base. Douglas returned to his lands in Lothian and as he had a pitiful amount of tenantry to draw upon, he organised a company of men that would follow him based on his martial prowess. "The armed bands led by Douglas, his contemporary Alexander Ramsay and others lived 'in poverty' and 'like shadows', fighting a guerrilla war against the English...Ramsay based his followers in a network of caves at Hawthorndean in Midlothian, while Douglas, operated from lairs in the [Ettrick] Forest or the Pentland Hills, was wounded twice and risked capture ambushing larger English forces. But these leaders engaging in small-scale warfare were the only active opponents of the English in the South." Later historians and chroniclers would praise Douglas and his guerrillas as "schools of Knighthood", earning him the epithet "Flower of Chivalry" just as they had praised his relative the Good Sir James for his guerrilla tactics in the First War of Independence.