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diff --git a/4088-0.txt b/4088-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..576cb04 --- /dev/null +++ b/4088-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5088 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy, +by Andrew Lang + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most +other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions +whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of +the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at +www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have +to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. + + + + +Title: Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy + + +Author: Andrew Lang + + + +Release Date: August 16, 2014 [eBook #4088] +[This file was first posted on 19 November 2001] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE BORDER +MINSTRELSY*** + + +Transcribed from the 1910 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David +Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org + + + + + + SIR WALTER SCOTT + AND THE + BORDER MINSTRELSY + + + BY + ANDREW LANG + + * * * * * + + LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. + 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON + NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA + 1910 + + + + +PREFACE + + +PERSONS not much interested in, or cognisant of, “antiquarian old +womanries,” as Sir Walter called them, may ask “what all the pother is +about,” in this little tractate. On my side it is “about” the veracity +of Sir Walter Scott. He has been suspected of helping to compose, and of +issuing as a genuine antique, a ballad, _Auld Maitland_. He also wrote +about the ballad, as a thing obtained from recitation, to two friends and +fellow-antiquaries. If to Scott’s knowledge it was a modern imitation, +Sir Walter deliberately lied. + +He did not: he did obtain the whole ballad from Hogg, who got it from +recitation—as I believe, and try to prove, and as Scott certainly +believed. The facts in the case exist in published works, and in +manuscript letters of Ritson to Scott, and Hogg to Scott, and in the +original MS. of the song, with a note by Hogg to Laidlaw. If we are +interested in the truth about the matter, we ought at least to read the +very accessible material before bringing charges against the Sheriff and +the Shepherd of Ettrick. + +Whether _Auld Maitland_ be a good or a bad ballad is not part of the +question. It was a favourite of mine in childhood, and I agree with +Scott in thinking that it has strong dramatic situations. If it is a bad +ballad, such as many people could compose, then it is not by Sir Walter. + +The _Ballad of Otterburne_ is said to have been constructed from Herd’s +version, tempered by Percy’s version, with additions from a modern +imagination. We have merely to read Professor Child’s edition of +_Otterburne_, with Hogg’s letter covering his MS. copy of _Otterburne_ +from recitation, to see that this is a wholly erroneous view of the +matter. We have all the materials for forming a judgment accessible to +us in print, and have no excuse for preferring our own conjectures. + +“No one now believes,” it may be said, “in the aged persons who lived at +the head of Ettrick,” and recited _Otterburne_ to Hogg. Colonel Elliot +disbelieves, but he shows no signs of having read Hogg’s curious letter, +in two parts, about these “old parties”; a letter written on the day when +Hogg, he says, twice “pumped their memories.” + +I print this letter, and, if any one chooses to think that it is a crafty +fabrication, I can only say that its craft would have beguiled myself as +it beguiled Scott. + +It is a common, cheap, and ignorant scepticism that disbelieves in the +existence, in Scott’s day, or in ours, of persons who know and can recite +variants of our traditional ballads. The strange song of _The Bitter +Withy_, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered from recitation but +lately, in several English counties. The ignoble lay of _Johnny +Johnston_ has also been recovered: it is widely diffused. I myself +obtained a genuine version of _Where Goudie rins_, through the kindness +of Lady Mary Glyn; and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote procured the +low English version of _Young Beichan_, or _Lord Bateman_, from an old +woman in a rural workhouse. In Shropshire my friend Miss Burne, the +president of the Folk-Lore Society, received from Mr. Hubert Smith, in +1883, a very remarkable variant, undoubtedly antique, of _The Wife of +Usher’s Well_. {0a} In 1896 Miss Backus found, in the hills of Polk +County, North Carolina, another variant, intermediate between the +Shropshire and the ordinary version. {0b} + +There are many other examples of this persistence of ballads in the +popular memory, even in our day, and only persons ignorant of the facts +can suppose that, a century ago, there were no reciters at the head of +Ettrick, and elsewhere in Scotland. Not even now has the halfpenny +newspaper wholly destroyed the memories of traditional poetry and of +traditional tales even in the English-speaking parts of our islands, +while in the Highlands a rich harvest awaits the reapers. + +I could not have produced the facts, about _Auld Maitland_ especially, +and in some other cases, without the kind and ungrudging aid, freely +given to a stranger, of Mr. William Macmath, whose knowledge of +ballad-lore, and especially of the ballad manuscripts at Abbotsford, is +unrivalled. As to _Auld Maitland_, Mr. T. F. Henderson, in his edition +of the _Minstrelsy_ (Blackwood, 1892), also made due use of Hogg’s MS., +and his edition is most valuable to every student of Scott’s method of +editing, being based on the Abbotsford MSS. Mr. Henderson suspects, more +than I do, the veracity of the Shepherd. + +I am under obligations to Colonel Elliot’s book, as it has drawn my +attention anew to _Auld Maitland_, a topic which I had studied “somewhat +lazily,” like Quintus Smyrnæus. I supposed that there was an +inconsistency in two of Scott’s accounts as to how he obtained the +ballad. As Colonel Elliot points out, there was no inconsistency. Scott +had two copies. One was Hogg’s MS.: the other was derived from the +recitation of Hogg’s mother. + +This trifle is addressed to lovers of Scott, of the Border, and of +ballads, _et non aultres_. + +It is curious to see how facts make havoc of the conjectures of the +Higher Criticism in the case of _Auld Maitland_. If Hogg was the forger +of that ballad, I asked, how did he know the traditions about Maitland +and his three sons, which we only know from poems of about 1576 in the +manuscripts of Sir Richard Maitland? These poems in 1802 were, as far as +I am aware, still unpublished. + +Colonel Elliot urged that Leyden would know the poems, and must have +known Hogg. From Leyden, then, Hogg would get the information. In the +text I have urged that Leyden did not know Hogg. I am able now to prove +that Hogg and Leyden never met till after Laidlaw gave the manuscript of +_Auld Maitland_ to Hogg. + +The fact is given in the original manuscript of Laidlaw’s _Recollections +of Sir Walter Scott_ (among the Laing MSS. in the library of the +University of Edinburgh). Carruthers, in publishing Laidlaw’s +reminiscences, omitted the following passage. After Scott had read _Auld +Maitland_ aloud to Leyden and Laird Laidlaw, the three rode together to +dine at Whitehope. + +“Near the Craigbents,” says Laidlaw, “Mr. Scott and Leyden drew together +in a close and seemingly private conversation. I, of course, fell back. +After a minute or two, Leyden reined in his horse (a black horse that Mr. +Scott’s servant used to ride) and let me come up. ‘This Hogg,’ said he, +‘writes verses, I understand.’ I assured him that he wrote very +beautiful verses, and with great facility. ‘But I trust,’ he replied, +‘that there is no fear of his passing off any of his own upon Scott for +old ballads.’ I again assured him that he would never think of such a +thing; and neither would he at that period of his life. + +“‘Let him beware of forgery,’ cried Leyden with great force and energy, +and in, I suppose, what Mr. Scott used afterwards to call the _saw tones +of his voice_.” + +This proves that Leyden had no personal knowledge of “this Hogg,” and did +not supply the shepherd with the traditions about Auld Maitland. + +Mr. W. J. Kennedy, of Hawick, pointed out to me this passage in Laidlaw’s +_Recollections_, edited from the MS. by Mr. James Sinton, as reprinted +from the _Transactions_ of the Hawick Archæological Society, 1905. + + + + +CONTENTS + + PAGE +SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 1 +AULD MAITLAND 18 +THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 53 +SCOTT’S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED IT 67 +THE MYSTERY OF THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 87 +KINMONT WILLIE 126 +CONCLUSIONS 148 + + + + +SCOTT AND THE BALLADS + + +IT was through his collecting and editing of _The Border Minstrelsy_ that +Sir Walter Scott glided from law into literature. The history of the +conception and completion of his task, “a labour of love truly, if ever +such there was,” says Lockhart, is well known, but the tale must be +briefly told if we are to understand the following essays in defence of +Scott’s literary morality. + +Late in 1799 Scott wrote to James Ballantyne, then a printer in Kelso, “I +have been for years collecting Border ballads,” and he thought that he +could put together “such a selection as might make a neat little volume, +to sell for four or five shillings.” In December 1799 Scott received the +office of Sheriff of Selkirkshire, or, as he preferred to say, of Ettrick +Forest. In the Forest, as was natural, he found much of his materials. +The people at the head of Ettrick were still, says Hogg, {1a} like many +of the Highlanders even now, in that they cheered the long winter nights +with the telling of old tales; and some aged people still remembered, no +doubt in a defective and corrupted state, many old ballads. Some of +these, especially the ballads of Border raids and rescues, may never even +have been written down by the original authors. The Borderers, says +Lesley, Bishop of Ross, writing in 1578, “take much pleasure in their old +music and chanted songs, which they themselves compose, whether about the +deeds of their ancestors, or about ingenious raiding tricks and +stratagems.” {2a} + +The historical ballads about the deeds of their ancestors would be far +more romantic than scientifically accurate. The verses, as they passed +from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, would be in a +constant state of flux and change. When a man forgot a verse, he would +make something to take its place. A more or less appropriate stanza from +another ballad would slip in; or the reciter would tell in prose the +matter of which he forgot the versified form. + +Again, in the towns, street ballads on remarkable events, as early at +least as the age of Henry VIII., were written or printed. Knox speaks of +ballads on Queen Mary’s four Maries. Of these ballads only one is left, +and it is a libel. The hanging of a French apothecary of the Queen, and +a French waiting-maid, for child murder, has been transferred to one of +the Maries, or rather to an apocryphal Mary Hamilton, with Darnley for +her lover. Of this ballad twenty-eight variants—and extremely various +they are—were collected by Professor Child in his _English and Scottish +Popular Ballads_ (ten parts, 1882–1898). In one mangled form or another +such ballads would drift at last even to Ettrick Forest. + +A ballad may be found in a form which the first author could scarcely +recognise, dozens of hands, in various generations, having been at work +on it. At any period, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth +centuries, the cheap press might print a sheet of the ballads, edited and +interpolated by the very lowest of printer’s hacks; that copy would +circulate, be lost, and become in turn a traditional source, though full +of modernisms. Or an educated person might make a written copy, filling +up gaps himself in late seventeenth or in eighteenth century ballad +style, and this might pass into the memory of the children and servants +of the house, and so to the herds and to the farm lasses. I suspect that +this process may have occurred in the cases of _Auld Maitland_ and of +_The Outlaw Murray_—“these two bores” Mr. Child is said to have styled +them. + +When Allan Ramsay, about 1720, took up and printed a ballad, he altered +it if he pleased. More faithful to his texts (wherever he got them), was +David Herd, in his collection of 1776, but his version did not reach, as +we shall see, old reciters in Ettrick. If Scott found any traditional +ballads in Ettrick, as his collectors certainly did, they had passed +through the processes described. They needed re-editing of some sort if +they were to be intelligible, and readable with pleasure. + +In 1800, apparently, while Scott made only brief flying visits from the +little inn of Clovenfords, on Tweed, to his sheriffdom, he found a +coadjutor. Richard Heber, the wealthy and luxurious antiquary and +collector, looked into Constable’s first little bookselling shop, and saw +a strange, poor young student prowling among the books. This was John +Leyden, son of a shepherd in Roxburghshire, a lad living in extreme +poverty. + +Leyden, in 1800, was making himself a savant. Heber spoke with him, +found that he was rich in ballad-lore, and carried him to Scott. He was +presently introduced into the best society in Edinburgh (which would not +happen in our time), and a casual note of Scott’s proves that he did not +leave Leyden in poverty. Early in 1802, Leyden got the promise of an +East Indian appointment, read medicine furiously, and sailed for the East +in the beginning of 1803. It does not appear that Leyden went +ballad-hunting in Ettrick before he rode thither with Scott in the spring +of 1802. He was busy with books, with editorial work, and in aiding +Scott in Edinburgh. It was he who insisted that a small volume at five +shillings was far too narrow for the materials collected. + +Scott also corresponded with the aged Percy, Bishop of Dromore, editor of +the _Reliques_, and with Joseph Ritson, the precise collector, Percy’s +bitter foe. Unfortunately the correspondence on ballads with Ritson, who +died in 1803, is but scanty; nor has most of the correspondence with +another student, George Ellis, been published. Even in Mr. Douglas’s +edition of Scott’s _Familiar Letters_, the portion of an important letter +of Hogg’s which deals with ballad-lore is omitted. I shall give the +letter in full. + +In 1800–01, “_The Minstrelsy_ formed the editor’s chief occupation,” says +Lockhart; but later, up to April 1801, the Forest and Liddesdale had +yielded little material. In fact, I do not know that Scott ever procured +much in Liddesdale, where he had no Hogg or Laidlaw always on the spot, +and in touch with the old people. It was in spring, 1802, that Scott +first met his lifelong friend, William Laidlaw, farmer in Blackhouse, on +Douglasburn, in Yarrow. Laidlaw, as is later proved completely, +introduced Scott to Hogg, then a very unsophisticated shepherd. +“Laidlaw,” says Lockhart, “took care that Scott should see, without +delay, James Hogg.” {4a} These two men, Hogg and Laidlaw, knowing the +country people well, were Scott’s chief sources of recited balladry; and +probably they sometimes improved, in making their copies, the materials +won from the failing memories of the old. Thus Laidlaw, while tenant in +Traquair Knowe, obtained from recitation, _The Dæmon Lover_. Scott does +not tell us whether or not he knew the fact that Laidlaw wrote in stanza +6 (half of it traditional), stanza 12 (also a ballad formula), stanzas 17 +and 18 (necessary to complete the sense; the last two lines of 18 are +purely and romantically modern). + +We shall later quote Hogg’s account of his own dealings with his raw +materials from recitation. + +In January 1802 Scott published the two first volumes of _The +Minstrelsy_. Lockhart describes the enthusiasm of dukes, fine ladies, +and antiquarians. In the end of April 1803 the third volume appeared, +including ballads obtained through Hogg and Laidlaw in spring 1802. +Scott, by his store of historic anecdote in his introductions and notes, +by his way of vivifying the past, and by his method of editing, revived, +but did not create, the interest in the romance of ballad poetry. + +It had always existed. We all know Sidney’s words on “The Douglas and +the Percy”; Addison’s on folk-poetry; Mr. Pepys’ ballad collection; the +ballads in Tom Durfey’s and other miscellanies; Allan Ramsay’s +_Evergreen_; Bishop Percy’s _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_; Herd’s ballad +volumes of 1776; Evans’ collections; Burns’ remakings of old songs; +Ritson’s publications, and so forth. But the genius of Burns, while it +transfigured many old songs, was not often exercised on old narrative +ballads, and when Scott produced _The Minstrelsy_, the taste for ballads +was confined to amateurs of early literature, and to country folk. + +Sir Walter’s method of editing, of presenting his traditional materials, +was literary, and, usually, not scientific. A modern collector would +publish things—legends, ballads, or folk-tales—exactly as he found them +in old broadsides, or in MS. copies, or received them from oral +recitation. He would give the names and residences and circumstances of +the reciters or narrators (Herd, in 1776, gave no such information). He +would fill up no gaps with his own inventions, would add no stanzas of +his own, and the circulation of his work would arrive at some two or +three hundred copies given away! + +As Lockhart says, “Scott’s diligent zeal had put him in possession of a +variety of copies in various stages of preservation, and to the task of +selecting a standard text among such a diversity of materials he brought +a knowledge of old manners and phraseology, and a manly simplicity of +taste, such as had never before been united in the person of a poetical +antiquary.” + +Lockhart speaks of “The editor’s conscientious fidelity . . . which +prevented the introduction of anything new, and his pure taste in the +balancing of discordant recitations.” He had already written that “Scott +had, I firmly believe, interpolated hardly a line or even an epithet of +his own.” {8a} + +It is clear that Lockhart had not compared the texts in _The Minstrelsy_ +with the mass of manuscript materials which are still at Abbotsford. +These, copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been published in the +monumental collection of _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, in ten +parts, by the late Professor Child of Harvard, the greatest of scholars +in ballad-lore. From his book we often know exactly what kinds of copies +of ballads Scott possessed, and what alterations he made in his copies. +The _Ballad of Otterburne_ is especially instructive, as we shall see +later. But of the most famous of Border historical ballads, _Kinmont +Willie_, and its companion, _Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead_, Scott has +left no original manuscript texts. Now into each of these ballads Scott +has written (if internal evidence be worth anything) verses of his own; +stanzas unmistakably marked by his own spirit, energy, sense of romance, +and, occasionally, by a somewhat inflated rhetoric. On this point doubt +is not easy. When he met the names of his chief, Buccleuch, and of his +favourite ancestor, Wat of Warden, Scott did, in two cases, for those +heroes what, by his own confession, he did for anecdotes that came in his +way—he decked them out “with a cocked hat and a sword.” + +Sir Walter knew perfectly well that he was not “playing the game” in a +truly scientific spirit. He explains his ideas in his “Essay on Popular +Poetry” as late as 1830. He mentions Joseph Ritson’s “extreme attachment +to the severity of truth,” and his attacks on Bishop Percy’s purely +literary treatment of the materials of his _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_ +(1765). + +As Scott says, “by Percy words were altered, phrases improved, and whole +verses were inserted or omitted at pleasure.” Percy “accommodated” the +ballads “with such emendations as might recommend them to the modern +taste.” Ritson cried “forgery,” but Percy, says Scott, had to win a +hearing from his age, and confessed (in general terms) to his additions +and decorations. + +Scott then speaks reprovingly of Pinkerton’s wholesale fabrication of +_entire ballads_ (1783), a crime acknowledged later by the culprit +(1786). Scott applauds Ritson’s accuracy, but regrets his preference of +the worst to the better readings, as if their inferiority was a security +for their being genuine. Scott preferred the best, the most poetical +readings. + +In 1830, Scott also wrote an essay on “Imitations of the Ancient +Ballads,” and spoke very leniently of imitations passed off as authentic. +“There is no small degree of cant in the violent invectives with which +impostors of this nature have been assailed.” As to _Hardyknute_, the +favourite poem of his infancy, “the first that I ever learned and the +last that I shall forget,” he says, “the public is surely more enriched +by the contribution than injured by the deception.” Besides, he says, +the deception almost never deceives. + +His method in _The Minstrelsy_, he writes, was “to imitate the plan and +style of Bishop Percy, observing only more strict fidelity concerning my +originals.” That is to say, he avowedly made up texts out of a variety +of copies, when he had more copies than one. This is frequently +acknowledged by Scott; what he does not acknowledge is his own occasional +interpolation of stanzas. A good example is _The Gay Gosshawk_. He had +a MS. of his own “of some antiquity,” a MS. of Mrs. Brown, a famous +reciter and collector of the eighteenth century; and the Abbotsford MSS. +show isolated stanzas from Hogg, and a copy from Will Laidlaw. Mr. T. F. +Henderson’s notes {10a} display the methods of selection, combination, +emendation, and possible interpolation. + +By these methods Scott composed “a standard text,” now the classical +text, of the ballads which he published. Ballad lovers, who are not +specialists, go to _The Minstrelsy_ for their favourite fare, and for +historical elucidation and anecdote. + +Scott often mentions his sources of all kinds, such as MSS. of Herd and +Mrs. Brown; “an old person”; “an old woman at Kirkhill, West Lothian”; +“an ostler at Carlisle”; Allan Ramsay’s _Tea-Table Miscellany_; Surtees +of Mainsforth (these ballads are by Surtees himself: Scott never +suspected him); Caw’s _Hawick Museum_ (1774); Ritson’s copies, others +from Leyden; the Glenriddell MSS. (collected by the friend of Burns); on +several occasions copies from recitations procured by James Hogg or Will +Laidlaw, and possibly or probably each of these men emended the copy he +obtained; while Scott combined and emended all in his published text. + +Sometimes Scott gives no source at all, and in these cases research finds +variants in old broadsides, or elsewhere. + +In thirteen cases he gives no source, or “from tradition,” which is the +same thing; though “tradition in Ettrick Forest” may sometimes imply, +once certainly does, the intermediary Hogg, or Will Laidlaw. + +We now understand Scott’s methods as editor. They are not scientific; +they are literary. We also acknowledge (on internal evidence) his +interpolation of his own stanzas in _Kinmont Willie_ and _Jamie Telfer_, +where he exalts his chief and ancestor. We cannot do otherwise (as +scholars) than regret and condemn Scott’s interpolations, never +confessed. As lovers of poetry we acknowledge that, without Scott’s +interpolation, we could have no more of _Kinmont Willie_ than verses, +“much mangled by reciters,” as Scott says, of a ballad perhaps no more +poetical than _Jock o’ the Side_. Scott says that “some conjectural +emendations have been absolutely necessary to render it intelligible.” +As it is now very intelligible, to say “conjectural emendations” is a way +of saying “interpolations.” + +But while thus confessing Scott’s sins, I cannot believe that he, like +Pinkerton, palmed off on the world any ballad or ballads of his own sole +manufacture, or any ballad which he knew to be forged. + +The truth is that Scott was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if he +liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with _Barthram’s Dirge_ +and _Anthony Featherstonhaugh_, but with a long prose excerpt from a +non-existent manuscript about a phantom knight. Scott made the plot of +_Marmion_ hinge on this myth, in the encounter of Marmion with Wilfred as +the phantasmal cavalier. He tells us that in _The Flowers of the Forest_ +“the manner of the ancient minstrels is so happily imitated, that it +required the most positive evidence to convince the editor that the song +was of modern date.” Really the author was Miss Jane Elliot (1747–1805), +daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto. Herd published a made-up copy +in 1776. The tune, Scott says, is old, and he has heard an imperfect +verse of the original ballad— + + “I ride single on my saddle, + For the flowers o’ the forest are a’ wede awa’” + +The _constant_ use of double rhymes within the line— + + “At e’en, in the gloaming, nae younkers are roaming,” + +an artifice rare in genuine ballads, might alone have proved to Scott +that the poem of Miss Elliot is not popular and ancient. + +I have cleared my conscience by confessing Scott’s literary sins. His +interpolations, elsewhere mere stopgaps, are mainly to be found in +_Kinmont Willie_ and _Jamie Telfer_. His duty was to say, in his preface +to each ballad, “The editor has interpolated stanza” so and so; if he +made up the last verses of _Kinmont Willie_ from the conclusion of a +version of _Archie o’ Ca’field_, he should have said so; as he does +acknowledge two stopgap interpolations by Hogg in _Auld Maitland_. But +as to the conclusion of _Kinmont Willie_, he did, we shall see, make +confession. + +Professor Kittredge, who edited Child’s last part (X.), says in his +excellent abridged edition of Child (1905), “It was no doubt the feeling +that the popular ballad is a fluid and unstable thing that has prompted +so many editors—among them Sir Walter Scott, whom it is impossible to +assail, however much the scholarly conscience may disapprove—to deal +freely with the versions that came into their hands.” + +Twenty-five years after the appearance of _The Border Minstrelsy_, in +1827, appeared Motherwell’s _Minstrelsy_, _Ancient and Modern_. +Motherwell was in favour of scientific methods of editing. Given two +copies of a ballad, he says, “perhaps they may not have a single stanza +which is mutual property, except certain commonplaces which seem an +integral portion of the original mechanism of all our ancient ballads +. . . ” By selecting the most beautiful and striking passages from each +copy, and making those cohere, an editor, he says, may produce a more +perfect and ornate version than any that exists in tradition. Of the +originals “the individuality entirely disappears.” + +Motherwell disapproved of this method, which, as a rule, is Scott’s, and, +scientifically, the method is not defensible. Thus, having three ballads +of rescues, in similar circumstances, with a river to ford, Scott +confessedly places that incident where he thinks it most “poetically +appropriate”; and in all probability, by a single touch, he gives poetry +in place of rough humour. Of all this Motherwell disapproved. (See +_Kinmont Willie_, _infra._) + +Aytoun, in _The Ballads of Scotland_, thought Motherwell hypercritical; +and also, in his practice inconsistent with his preaching. Aytoun +observed, “with much regret and not a little indignation” (1859), “that +later editors insinuated a doubt as to the fidelity of Sir Walter’s +rendering. My firm belief, resting on documentary evidence, is that +Scott was most scrupulous in adhering to the very letter of his +transcripts, whenever copies of ballads, previously taken down, were +submitted to him.” As an example, Aytoun, using a now lost MS. copy of +about 1689–1702, of _The Outlaw Murray_, says “Sir Walter has given it +throughout just as he received it.” Yet Scott’s copy, mainly from a lost +Cockburn MS., contains a humorous passage on Buccleuch which Child half +suspects to be by Sir Walter himself. {15a} It is impossible for me to +know whether Child’s hesitating conjecture is right or wrong. Certainly +we shall see, when Scott had but one MS. copy, as of _Auld Maitland_, his +editing left little or nothing to be desired. + +But now Scott is assailed, both where he deserves, and where, in my +opinion, he does not deserve censure. + +Scott did no more than his confessed following of Percy’s method implies, +to his original text of the _Ballad of Otterburne_. This I shall prove +from his original text, published by Child from the Abbotsford MSS., and +by a letter from the collector of the ballad, the Ettrick Shepherd. + +The facts, in this instance, apparently are utterly unknown to +Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Fitzwilliam Elliot, in his _Further Essays on +Border Ballads_ (1910), pp. 1–45. + +Again, I am absolutely certain, and can demonstrate, that Scott did not +(as Colonel Elliot believes) detect Hogg in forging _Auld Maitland_, join +with him in this fraud, and palm the ballad off on the public. Nothing +of the kind occurred. Scott did not lie in this matter, both to the +world and to his intimate friends, in private letters. + +Once more, without better evidence than we possess, I do not believe +that, in _Jamie Telfer_, Scott transferred the glory from the Elliots to +the Scotts, and the shame from Buccleuch to Elliot of Stobs. The +discussion leads us into very curious matter. But here, with our present +materials, neither absolute proof nor disproof is possible. + +Finally, as to _Kinmont Willie_, I merely give such reasons as I can find +for thinking that Scott _had_ “mangled” fragments of an old ballad before +him, and did not merely paraphrase the narrative of Walter Scott of +Satchells, in his doggerel _True History of the Name of Scott_ (1688). + +The positions of Colonel Elliot are in each case the reverse of mine. In +the instance of _Auld Maitland_ (where Scott’s conduct would be +unpardonable if Colonel Elliot’s view were correct), I have absolute +proof that he is entirely mistaken. For _Otterburne_ I am equally +fortunate; that is, I can show that Scott’s part went no further than +“the making of a standard text” on his avowed principles. For _Jamie +Telfer_, having no original manuscript, I admit _decorative_ +interpolations, and for the rest, argue on internal evidence, no other +being accessible. For _Kinmont Willie_, I confess that the poem, as it +stands, is Scott’s, but give reasons for thinking that he had ballad +fragments in his mind, if not on paper. + +It will be understood that Colonel Elliot does not, I conceive, say that +his charges are _proved_, but he thinks that the evidence points to these +conclusions. He “hopes that I will give reasons for my disbelief” in his +theories; and “hopes, though he cannot expect that they will completely +dispose of” his views about _Jamie Telfer_. {17a} + +I give my reasons, though I entertain but slight hope of convincing my +courteous opponent. That is always a task rather desperate. But the +task leads me, in defence of a great memory, into a countryside, and into +old times on the Border, which are so alluring that, like Socrates, I +must follow where the _logos_ guides me. To one conclusion it guides me, +which startles myself, but I must follow the _logos_, even against the +verdict of Professor Child, _notre maître à tous_. In some instances, I +repeat, positive proof of the correctness of my views is impossible; all +that I can do is to show that Colonel Elliot’s contrary opinions also +fall far short of demonstration, or are demonstrably erroneous. + + + + +AULD MAITLAND + + +THE ballad of _Auld Maitland_ holds in _The Border Minstrelsy_ a place +like that of the _Doloneia_, or Tenth Book, in the _Iliad_. Every +professor of the Higher Criticism throws his stone at the _Doloneia_ in +passing, and every ballad-editor does as much to _Auld Maitland_. +Professor Child excluded it from his monumental collection of “English +and Scottish Popular Ballads,” fragments, and variants, for which Mr. +Child and his friends and helpers ransacked every attainable collection +of ballads in manuscript, and ballads in print, as they listened to the +last murmurings of ballad tradition from the lips of old or young. + +Mr. Child, says his friend and pupil, Professor Kittredge, “possessed a +kind of instinct” for distinguishing what is genuine and traditional, or +modern, or manipulated, or, if I may say so, “faked” in a ballad. + +“This instinct, trained by thirty years of study, had become wonderfully +swift in its operations, and almost infallible. A forged or retouched +piece could not escape him for a moment: he detected the slightest jar in +the ballad ring.” {18a} + +But all old traditional ballads are masses of “retouches,” made through +centuries, by reciters, copyists, editors, and so forth. Unluckily, +Child never gave in detail his reasons for rejecting that treasure of Sir +Walter’s, _Auld Maitland_. Child excluded the poem _sans phrase_. If he +did this, like Falstaff “on instinct,” one can only say that antiquarian +instincts are never infallible. We must apply our reason to the problem, +“What is _Auld Maitland_?” + +Colonel Elliot has taken this course. By far the most blighting of the +many charges made by Colonel Elliot against Sir Walter Scott are +concerned with the ballad of _Auld Maitland_. {19a} After stating that, +in his opinion, “several stanzas” of the ballad are by Sir Walter +himself, Colonel Elliot sums up his own ideas thus: + +“My view is that Hogg, in the first instance, tried to palm off the +ballad on Scott, and failed; and then Scott palmed it off on the public, +and succeeded . . . let us, as gentlemen and honest judges, admit that +the responsibility of the deception rests rather on the laird (Scott) +than on the herd” (Hogg.) {19b} + +If Colonel Elliot’s “views” were correct (and it is absolutely +erroneous), the guilt of “the laird” would be great. Scott conspires +with a shepherd, a stranger, to palm off a forgery on the public. Scott +issues the forgery, and, what is worse, in a private letter to a learned +friend, he utters what I must borrow words for: he utters “cold and +calculated falsehoods” about the manner in which, and the person from +whom, he obtained what he calls “my first copy” of the song. If Hogg and +Scott forged the poem, then when Scott told his tale of its acquisition +by himself from Laidlaw, Scott lied. + +Colonel Elliot is ignorant of the facts in the case. He gropes his way +under the misleading light of a false date, and of fragments torn from +the context of a letter which, in its complete form, has never till now +been published. Where positive and published information exists, it has +not always come within the range of the critic’s researches; had it done +so, he would have taken the information into account, but he does not. +Of the existence of Scott’s “first copy” of the ballad in manuscript our +critic seems never to have heard; certainly he has not studied the MS. +Had he done so he would not assign (on grounds like those of Homeric +critics) this verse to Hogg and that to Scott. He would know that Scott +did not interpolate a single stanza; that spelling, punctuation, and some +slight verbal corrections, with an admirable emendation, were the sum of +his industry: that he did not even excise two stanzas of, at earliest, +eighteenth century work. + +I must now clear up misconceptions which have imposed themselves on all +critics of the ballad, on myself, for example, no less than on Colonel +Elliot: and must tell the whole story of how the existence of the ballad +first became known to Scott’s collector and friend, William Laidlaw, how +he procured the copy which he presented to Sir Walter, and how Sir Walter +obtained, from recitation, his “second copy,” that which he printed in +_The Minstrelsy_ in 1803. + +In 1801 Scott, who was collecting ballads, gave a list of songs which he +wanted to Mr. Andrew Mercer, of Selkirk. Mercer knew young Will Laidlaw, +farmer in Blackhouse on Yarrow, where Hogg had been a shepherd for ten +years. Laidlaw applied for two ballads, one of them _The Outlaw Murray_, +to Hogg, then shepherding at Ettrick House, at the head of Ettrick, above +Thirlestane. Hogg replied on 20th July 1801. He could get but a few +verses of _The Outlaw_ from his maternal uncle, Will Laidlaw of Phawhope. +He said that, from traditions known to him, he could make good songs, +“but without Mr. Scott’s permission this would be an imposition, neither +could I undertake it without an order from him in his own handwriting +. . . ” {21a} Laidlaw went on trying to collect songs for Scott. We now +take his own account of _Auld Maitland_ from a manuscript left by him. +{21b} + +“I heard from one of the servant girls, who had all the turn and +qualifications for a collector, of a ballad called _Auld Maitland_, that +a grandfather (maternal) of Hogg could repeat, and she herself had +several of the first stanzas, which I took a note of, and have still the +copy. This greatly aroused my anxiety to procure the whole, for this was +a ballad not even hinted at by Mercer in his list of desiderata received +from Mr. Scott. I forthwith wrote to Hogg himself, requesting him to +endeavour to procure the whole ballad. In a week or two I received his +reply, containing _Auld Maitland_ exactly as he had received it from the +recitation of his uncle Will of Phawhope, corroborated by his mother, who +both said they learned it from their father, a still older Will of +Phawhope, and an old man called Andrew Muir, who had been servant to the +famous Mr. Boston, minister of Ettrick.” Concerning Laidlaw’s evidence, +Colonel Elliot says not a word. + +This copy of _Auld Maitland_, with the superscription outside— + + MR. WILLIAM LAIDLAW, + BLACKHOUSE, + +all in Hogg’s hand, is now at Abbotsford. We next have, through +Carruthers using Laidlaw’s manuscript, an account of the arrival of Scott +and Leyden at Blackhouse, of Laidlaw’s presentation of Hogg’s manuscript, +which Scott read aloud, and of their surprise and delight. Scott was +excited, so that his _burr_ became very perceptible. {23a} + +The time of year when Scott and Leyden visited Yarrow was not the +_autumn_ vacation of 1802, as Lockhart erroneously writes, {23b} but the +_spring_ vacation of 1802. The spring vacation, Mr. Macmath informs me, +ran from 11th March to 12th May in 1802. In May, apparently, Scott +having obtained the _Auld Maitland_ MS. in the vernal vacation of the +Court of Session, gave his account of his discovery to his friend Ellis +(Lockhart does not date the letter, but wrongly puts it after the return +to Edinburgh in November 1802). + +Scott wrote thus:—“We” (John Leyden and himself) “have just concluded an +excursion of two or three weeks through my jurisdiction of Selkirkshire, +where, in defiance of mountains, rivers, and bogs, damp and dry, we have +penetrated the very recesses of Ettrick Forest . . . I have . . . +returned _loaded_ with the treasures of oral tradition. The principal +result of our inquiries has been a complete and perfect copy of “Maitland +with his Auld Berd Graie,” referred to by [Gawain] Douglas in his _Palice +of Honour_ (1503), along with John the Reef and other popular characters, +and celebrated in the poems from the Maitland MS.” (_circ._ 1575). You +may guess the surprise of Leyden and myself when this was presented to +us, copied down from the recitation of an old shepherd, by a country +farmer . . . Many of the old words are retained, which neither the +reciter nor the copyer understood. Such are the military engines, +sowies, _springwalls_ (springalds), and many others . . . ” {24a} + +That Scott got the ballad in spring 1802 is easily proved. On 10th April +1802, Joseph Ritson, the crabbed, ill-tempered, but meticulously accurate +scholar, who thought that ballad-forging should be made a capital +offence, wrote thus to Scott:— + +“I have the pleasure of enclosing my copy of a very ancient poem, which +appears to me to be the original of _The Wee Wee Man_, and which I learn +from Mr. Ellis you are desirous to see.” In Scott’s letter to Ellis, +just quoted, he says: “I have lately had from him” (Ritson) “_a copie_ of +‘Ye litel wee man,’ of which I think I can make some use. In return, I +have sent him a sight of _Auld Maitland_, the original MS . . . I wish +him to see it _in puris naturalibus_.” “The precaution here taken was +very natural,” says Lockhart, considering Ritson’s temper and hatred of +literary forgeries. Scott, when he wrote to Ellis, had received Ritson’s +_The Wee Wee Man_ “lately”: it was sent to him by Ritson on 10th April +1802. Scott had already, when he wrote to Ellis, got “the original MS. +of _Auld Maitland_” (now in Abbotsford Library). By 10th June 1802 +Ritson wrote saying, “You may depend on my taking the utmost care of _Old +Maitland_, and returning it in health and safety. I would not use the +liberty of transcribing it into my manuscript copy of Mrs. Brown’s +ballads, but if you will signify your permission, I shall be highly +gratified.” {25} “Your ancient and curious ballad,” he styles the piece. + +Thus Scott had _Auld Maitland_ in May 1802; he sent the original MS. to +Ritson; Ritson received it graciously; he had, on 10th April 1802, sent +Scott another MS., _The Wee Wee Man_: and when Scott wrote to Ellis about +his surprise at getting “a complete and perfect copy of Maitland,” he had +but lately received _The Wee Wee Man_, sent by Ritson on 10th April 1802. +He had made a spring, not an autumn, raid into the Forest. + +We now know the external history of the ballad. Laidlaw, hearing his +servant repeat some stanzas, asks Hogg for the full copy, which Hogg +sends with a pedigree from which he never wavered. Auld Andrew Muir +taught the song to Hogg’s mother and uncle. Hogg took it from his +uncle’s recitation, and sent it, directed outside, + + TO MR. WILLIAM LAIDLAW, + BLACKHOUSE, + +and Laidlaw gave it to Scott, in March 12–May 12, 1802. But Scott, +publishing the ballad in _The Minstrelsy_ (1803), says it is given “as +written down from the recitation of the mother of Mr. James Hogg, who +sings, or rather chants, it with great animation” (manifestly he had +heard the recitation which he describes). + +It seems that Scott, before he wrote to Ellis in May 1802, had misgivings +about the ballad. Says Carruthers, he “made another visit to Blackhouse +for the purpose of getting Laidlaw as a guide to Ettrick,” being “curious +to see the poetical shepherd.” + +Laidlaw’s MS., used by Carruthers, describes the wild ride by the marshes +at the head of the Loch of the Lowes, through the bogs on the knees of +the hills, down a footpath to Ramseycleuch in Ettrick. They sent to +Ettrick House for Hogg; Scott was surprised and pleased with James’s +appearance. They had a delightful evening: “the qualities of Hogg came +out at every instant, and his unaffected simplicity and fearless +frankness both surprised and pleased the Sheriff.” {26a} Next morning +they visited Hogg and his mother at her cottage, and Hogg tells how the +old lady recited _Auld Maitland_. Hogg gave the story in prose, with +great vivacity and humour, in his _Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott_ +(1834). + +In an earlier poetical address to Scott, congratulating him on his +elevation to the baronetcy (1818), the Shepherd says— + + When Maitland’s song first met your ear, + How the furled visage up did clear. + Beaming delight! though now a shade + Of doubt would darken into dread, + That some unskilled presumptuous arm + Had marred tradition’s mighty charm. + Scarce grew thy lurking dread the less, + Till she, the ancient Minstreless, + With fervid voice and kindling eye, + And withered arms waving on high, + Sung forth these words in eldritch shriek, + While tears stood on thy nut-brown cheek: + “Na, we are nane o’ the lads o’ France, + Nor e’er pretend to be; + We be three lads of fair Scotland, + Auld Maitland’s sons a’ three.” + +(Stanza xliii. as printed. In Hogg’s MS. copy, given to Laidlaw there +are two verbal differences, in lines 1 and 4.) + +Then says Hogg— + + Thy fist made all the table ring, + By —, sir, but that is the thing! + +Hogg could not thus describe the scene in addressing Scott himself, in +1818, if his story were not true. It thus follows that his mother knew +the sixty-five stanzas of the ballad by heart. Does any one believe +that, as a woman of seventy-two, she learned the poem to back Hogg’s +hoax? That he wrote the poem, and caused her to learn it by rote, so as +to corroborate his imposture? + +This is absurd. + +But now comes the source of Colonel Elliot’s theory of a conspiracy +between Scott and Hogg, to forge a ballad and issue the forgery. Colonel +Elliot knows scraps of a letter to Hogg of 30th June 1802. He has read +parts, not bearing on the question, in Mr. Douglas’s _Familiar Letters of +Sir Walter Scott_ (vol. i. pp. 12–15), and another scrap, in which Hogg +says that “I am surprised to hear that _Auld Maitland_ is suspected by +some to be a modern forgery.” This part of Hogg’s letter of 30th June +1802 was published by Scott himself in the third volume of _The +Minstrelsy_ (April 1803). + +Not having the context of the letter, Colonel Elliot seems to argue, +“Scott says he got his first copy in autumn 1802” (Lockhart’s mistake), +“yet here are Hogg and Scott corresponding about the ballad long before +autumn, in June 1802. This is very suspicious.” I give what appears to +be Colonel Elliot’s line of reflection in my own words. He decides that, +as early as June 1802, “Hogg”(in the Colonel’s ‘view’), “in the first +instance, tried to palm off the ballad on Scott, and failed; and that +then Scott palmed it off on the public, and succeeded.” + +This is all a mare’s nest. Scott, in March-May 1802, had the whole of +the ballad except one stanza, which Hogg sent to him on 30th June. + +I now print, for the first time, the whole of Hogg’s letter of 30th June, +with its shrewd criticism on ballads, hitherto omitted, and I italicise +the passage about _Auld Maitland_:— + + ETTRICK HOUSE, _June_ 30. + + DEAR SIR,—I have been perusing your minstrelsy very diligently for a + while past, and it being the first book I ever perused which was + written by a person I had seen and conversed with, the consequence + hath been to me a most sensible pleasure; for in fact it is the + remarks and modern pieces that I have delighted most in, being as it + were personally acquainted with many of the modern pieces formerly. + My mother is actually a living miscellany of old songs. I never + believed that she had half so many until I came to a trial. There + are some (_sic_) in your collection of which she hath not a part, and + I should by this time had a great number written for your amusement, + thinking them all of great antiquity and lost to posterity, had I not + luckily lighted upon a collection of songs in two volumes, published + by I know not who, in which I recognised about half-a-score of my + mother’s best songs, almost word for word. No doubt I was piqued, + but it saved me much trouble, paper, and ink; for I am carefully + avoiding anything which I have seen or heard of being in print, + although I have no doubt that I shall err, being acquainted with + almost no collections of that sort, but I am not afraid that you too + will mistake. I am still at a loss with respect to some: such as the + Battle of Flodden beginning, “From Spey to the Border,” a long + poetical piece on the battle of Bannockburn, I fear modern: The + Battle of the Boyne, Young Bateman’s Ghost, all of which, and others + which I cannot mind, I could mostly recover for a few miles’ travel + were I certain they could be of any use concerning the above; and I + might have mentioned May Cohn and a duel between two friends, Graham + and Bewick, undoubtedly very old. You must give me information in + your answer. I have already scraped together a considerable + quantity—suspend your curiosity, Mr. Scott, you will see them when I + see you, of which I am as impatient as you can be to see the songs + for your life. But as I suppose you have no personal acquaintance in + this parish, it would be presumption in me to expect that you will + visit my cottage, but I will attend you in any part of the Forest if + you will send me word. I am far from supposing that a person of your + discernment,—d—n it, I’ll blot out that, ’tis so like flattery. I + say I don’t think you would despise a shepherd’s “humble cot an’ + hamely fare,” as Burns hath it, yet though I would be extremely proud + of a visit, yet hang me if I would know what to do wi’ ye. I am + surprised to find that the songs in your collection differ so widely + from my mother’s. Is Mr. Herd’s MS. genuine? I suspect it. Jamie + Telfer differs in many particulars. Johnny Armstrong of Gilnockie is + another song altogether. I have seen a verse of my mother’s way + called Johny Armstrong’s last good-night cited in the _Spectator_, + and another in _Boswell’s Journal_. It begins, “Is there ne’er a man + in fair Scotland?” Do you know if this is in print, Mr. Scott? In + the Tale of Tomlin the whole of the interlude about the horse and the + hawk is a distinct song altogether. {30a} Clerk Saunders is nearly + the same with my mother’s, until that stanza [xvi.] which ends, “was + in the tower last night wi’ me,” then with another verse or two which + are not in yours, ends Clerk Saunders. All the rest of the song in + your edition is another song altogether, which my mother hath mostly + likewise, and I am persuaded from the change in the stile that she is + right, for it is scarce consistent with the forepart of the ballad. + I have made several additions and variations out, to the printed + songs, for your inspection, but only when they could be inserted + without disjointing the songs as they are at present; to have written + all the variations would scarcely be possible, and I thought would + embarrass you exceedingly. _I have recovered another half verse of + Old Maitlan_, _and have rhymed it thus_— + + _Remember Fiery of the Scot_ + _Hath cowr’d aneath thy hand_; + For ilka drap o’ Maitlen’s blood + I’ll gie _thee_ rigs o’ land.— + + _The two last lines only are original_; _you will easily perceive + that they occur in the very place where we suspected a want_. _I am + surprised to hear that this song is suspected by some to be a modern + forgery_; _this will be best proved by most of the old people + hereabouts having a great part of it by heart_; many, indeed, are not + aware of the manners of this place, it is but lately emerged from + barbarity, and till this present age the poor illiterate people in + these glens knew of no other entertainment in the long winter nights + than in repeating and listening to these feats of their ancestors, + which I believe to be handed down inviolate from father to son, for + many generations, although no doubt, had a copy been taken of them at + the end of every fifty years, there must have been some difference, + which the repeaters would have insensibly fallen into merely by the + change of terms in that period. I believe that it is thus that many + very ancient songs have been modernised, which yet to a connoisseur + will bear visible marks of antiquity. The Maitlen, for instance, + exclusive of its mode of description, is all composed of words, which + would mostly every one spell and pronounce in the very same dialect + that was spoken some centuries ago. + + Pardon, my dear Sir, the freedom I have taken in addressing you—it is + my nature; and I could not resist the impulse of writing to you any + longer. Let me hear from you as soon as this comes to your hand, and + tell me when you will be in Ettrick Forest, and suffer me to + subscribe myself, Sir, your most humble and affectionate servant, + + JAMES HOGG. + +In Scott’s printed text of the ballad, two interpolations, of two lines +each, are acknowledged in notes. They occur in stanzas vii., xlvi., and +are attributed to Hogg. In fact, Hogg sent one of them (vii.) to Laidlaw +in his manuscript. The other he sent to Scott on 30th June 1802. + +Colonel Elliot, in the spirit of the Higher Criticism (_chimæra bombinans +in vacuo_), writes, {31a} “Few will doubt that the footnotes” (on these +interpolations) “were inserted with the purpose of leading the public to +think that Hogg made no other interpolations; but I am afraid I must go +further than this and say that, since they were inserted on the editor’s +responsibility, the intention must have been to make it appear as if no +other interpolations by any other hand had been inserted.” + +But no other interpolations by another hand _were_ inserted! Some verbal +emendations were made by Scott, but he never put in a stanza or two lines +of his own. + +Colonel Elliot provides us with six pages of the Higher Criticism. He +knows how to distinguish between verses by Hogg, and verses by Scott! +{32a} But, save when Scott puts one line, a ballad formula, where Hogg +has another line, Scott makes no interpolations, and the ballad formula +he probably took, with other things of no more importance, from Mrs. +Hogg’s recitation. Oh, Higher Criticism! + +I now print the ballad as Hogg sent it to Laidlaw, between August 1801 +and March 1802, in all probability. + +[Back of Hogg’s MS.: Mr. William Laidlaw, Blackhouse.] + + + +OLD MAITLAND +A VERY ANTIENT SONG + + + THERE lived a king in southern land + King Edward hecht his name + Unwordily he wore the crown + Till fifty years was gane. + + He had a sister’s son o’s ain + Was large o’ blood and bane + And afterwards when he came up, + Young Edward hecht his name. + + One day he came before the king, + And kneeld low on his knee + A boon a boon my good uncle, + I crave to ask of thee + + “At our lang wars i’ fair Scotland + I lang hae lang’d to be + If fifteen hunder wale wight men + You’ll grant to ride wi’ me.” + + “Thou sal hae thae thou sal hae mae + I say it sickerly; + And I mysel an auld grey man + Arrayd your host sal see.”— + + King Edward rade King Edward ran— + I wish him dool and pain! + Till he had fifteen hundred men + Assembled on the Tyne. + And twice as many at North Berwick + Was a’ for battle bound + + They lighted on the banks of Tweed + And blew their coals sae het + And fired the Merce and Tevidale + All in an evening late + + As they far’d up o’er Lammermor + They burn’d baith tower and town + Until they came to a derksome house, + Some call it Leaders Town + + Whae hauds this house young Edward crys, + Or whae gae’st ower to me + A grey haired knight set up his head + And cracked right crousely + + Of Scotlands King I haud my house + He pays me meat and fee + And I will keep my goud auld house + While my house will keep me + + They laid their sowies to the wall + Wi’ mony heavy peal + But he threw ower to them again + Baith piech and tar barille + + With springs: wall stanes, and good of ern, + Among them fast he threw + Till mony of the Englishmen + About the wall he slew. + + Full fifteen days that braid host lay + Sieging old Maitlen keen + Then they hae left him safe and hale + Within his strength o’ stane + + Then fifteen barks, all gaily good, + Met themen on a day, + Which they did lade with as much spoil + As they could bear away. + + “England’s our ain by heritage; + And whae can us gainstand, + When we hae conquerd fair Scotland + Wi’ bow, buckler, and brande”— + + Then they are on to th’ land o’ france, + Where auld King Edward lay, + Burning each town and castle strong + That ance cam in his way. + + Untill he cam unto that town + Which some call Billop-Grace + There were old Maitlen’s sons a’ three + Learning at School alas + + The eldest to the others said, + O see ye what I see + If a’ be true yon standard says, + We’re fatherless a’ three + + For Scotland’s conquerd up and down + Landsmen we’ll never be: + Now will you go my brethren two, + And try some jeopardy + + Then they hae saddled two black horse, + Two black horse and a grey + And they are on to Edwardes host + Before the dawn of day + + When they arriv’d before the host + They hover’d on the ley + Will you lend me our King’s standard + To carry a little way + + Where was thou bred where was thou born + Wherein in what country— + In the north of England I was born + What needed him to lie. + + A knight me got a lady bare + I’m a squire of high renown + I well may bear’t to any king, + That ever yet wore crown. + + He ne’er came of an Englishman + Had sic an ee or bree + But thou art likest auld Maitlen + That ever I did see + + But sic a gloom inon ae browhead + Grant’s ne’er see again + For many of our men he slew + And many put to pain + + When Maitlan heard his father’s name, + An angry man was he + Then lifting up a gilt dager + Hung low down by his kee + + He stab’d the knight the standard bore, + He stabb’d him cruelly; + Then caught the standard by the neuk, + And fast away rade he. + + Now is’t na time brothers he cry’d + Now, is’t na time to flee + Ay by my soothe they baith reply’d, + We’ll bear you company + + The youngest turn’d him in a path + And drew a burnish’d brand + And fifteen o’ the foremost slew + Till back the lave did stand + + He spurr’d the grey unto the path + Till baith her sides they bled + Grey! thou maun carry me away + Or my life lies in wed + + The captain lookit owr the wa’ + Before the break o day + There he beheld the three Scots lads + Pursued alongst the way + + Pull up portculzies down draw briggs + My nephews are at hame + And they shall lodge wi’ me to-night, + In spite of all England + + Whene’er they came within the gate + They thrust their horse them frae + And took three lang spears in their hands, + Saying, here sal come nae mae + + And they shott out and they shott in, + Till it was fairly day + When many of the Englishmen + About the draw brigg lay. + + Then they hae yoked carts and wains + To ca’ their dead away + And shot auld dykes aboon the lave + In gutters where they lay + + The king in his pavilion door + Was heard aloud to say + Last night three o’ the lads o’ France + My standard stole away + + Wi’ a fause tale disguis’d they came + And wi’ a fauser train + And to regain my gaye standard + These men were a’ down slaine + + It ill befits the youngest said + A crowned king to lie + But or that I taste meat and drink, + Reproved shall he be. + + He went before King Edward straight + And kneel’d low on his knee + I wad hae leave my liege he said, + To speak a word wi’ thee + + The king he turn’d him round about + And wistna what to say + Quo’ he, Man, thou’s hae leave to speak + Though thou should speak a day. + + You said that three young lads o’ France, + Your standard stole away + Wi’ a fause tale and fauser train, + And mony men did slay + + But we are nane the lads o’ France + Nor e’er pretend to be + We are three lads o’ fair Scotland, + Auld Maitlen’s sons a’ three + + Nor is there men in a your host, + Dare fight us three to three + Now by my sooth young Edward cry’d, + Weel fitted sall ye be! + + Piercy sall with the eldest fight + And Ethert Lunn wi’ thee + William of Lancastar the third + And bring your fourth to me + + He clanked Piercy owr the head + A deep wound and a sair + Till the best blood o’ his body + Came rinnen owr his hair. + + Now I’ve slain one slay ye the two; + And that’s good company + And if the two should slay ye baith, + Ye’se get na help frae me + + But Ethert Lunn a baited bear + Had many battles seen + He set the youngest wonder sair, + Till the eldest he grew keen + + I am nae king nor nae sic thing + My word it sanna stand + For Ethert shall a buffet bide, + Come he aneath my brand. + + He clanked Ethert owr the head, + A deep wound and a sair + Till a’ the blood of his body + Came rinnen owr his hair + + Now I’ve slayne two slay ye the one; + Isna that gude company + And tho’ the one should slay ye both + Ye’se get nae help o’ me. + + The twasome they hae slayn the one + They maul’d them cruelly + Then hang them owr the drawbridge, + That a’ the host might see + + They rade their horse they ran their horse, + Then hover’d on the ley + We be three lads o’ fair Scotland, + We fain wad fighting see + + This boasting when young Edward heard, + To’s uncle thus said he, + I’ll take yon lad I’ll bind yon lad, + And bring him bound to thee + + But God forbid King Edward said + That ever thou should try + Three worthy leaders we hae lost, + And you the fourth shall be. + + If thou wert hung owr yon drawbrigg + Blythe wad I never be + But wi’ the pole-axe in his hand, + Outower the bridge sprang he + + The first stroke that young Edward gae + He struck wi might and main + He clove the Maitlen’s helmet stout, + And near had pierced his brain. + + When Matlen saw his ain blood fa, + An angry man was he + He let his weapon frae him fa’ + And at his neck did flee + + And thrice about he did him swing, + Till on the ground he light + Where he has halden young Edward + Tho’ he was great in might + + Now let him up, King Edward cry’d, + And let him come to me + And for the deed that ye hae done + Ye shal hae earldoms three + + It’s ne’er be said in France nor Ire + In Scotland when I’m hame + That Edward once was under me, + And yet wan up again + + He stabb’d him thro and thro the hear + He maul’d him cruelly + Then hung him ower the drawbridge + Beside the other three + + Now take from me that feather bed + Make me a bed o’ strae + I wish I neer had seen this day + To mak my heart fu’ wae + + If I were once at London Tower, + Where I was wont to be + I never mair should gang frae hame, + Till borne on a bier-tree + +At the end of his copy Hogg writes (probably of stanza vii.)—“You may +insert the two following lines anywhere you think it needs them, or +substitute two better— + + And marching south with curst Dunbar + A ready welcome found.” + + + +II +_WHAT IS AULD MAITLAND_? + + +Is _Auld Maitland_ a sheer forgery by Hogg, or is it in any sense, and if +so, in what sense, antique and traditional? That Hogg made the whole of +it is to me incredible. He had told Laidlaw on 20th July 1801, that he +would make no ballads on traditions without Scott’s permission, written +in Scott’s hand. Moreover, how could he have any traditions about “Auld +Maitland, his noble Sonnis three,” personages of the thirteenth and +fourteenth centuries? Scott had read about them in poems of about 1580, +but these poems then lay in crabbed manuscripts. Again, Hogg wrote in +words (“springs, wall-stanes”) of whose meaning he had no idea; he took +it as he heard it in recitation. Finally, the style is not that of Hogg +when he attempts the ballad. Scott observed that “this ballad, +notwithstanding its present appearance, has a claim to very high +antiquity.” The language, except for a few technical terms, is modern, +but what else could it be if handed down orally? The language of +undoubted ballads is often more modern than that which was spoken in my +boyhood in Ettrick Forest. As Sir Walter Scott remarked, a poem of +1570–1580, which he quotes from the Maitland MSS., “would run as +smoothly, and appear as modern, as any verse in the ballad (with a few +exceptions) if divested of its antique spelling.” + +We now turn to the historical characters in the ballad. + +Sir Richard Maitland of Lauder, or Thirlestane, says Scott, was already +in his lands, and making donations to the Church in 1249. If, in 1296, +forty-seven years later, he held his castle against Edward I., as in the +ballad, he must have been a man of, say, seventy-five. By about 1574 his +descendant, Sir Richard Maitland, was consoled for his family misfortunes +(his famous son, Lethington, having died after the long siege of +Edinburgh Castle, which he and Kirkcaldy of Grange held for Queen Mary), +by a poet who reminded him that his ancestor, in the thirteenth century, +lost all his sons—“peerless pearls”—save one, “Burdallane.” The Sir +Richard of 1575 has also one son left (John, the minister of James VI.). +{41a} + +From this evidence, in 1802 in MS. unpublished, and from other Maitland +MSS., we learn that, in the sixteenth century, the Auld Maitland of the +ballad was an eminent character in the legends of that period, and in the +ballads of the people. {41b} His + + Nobill sonnis three, + Ar sung in monie far countrie, + _Albeit in rural rhyme_. + +Pinkerton published, in 1786, none of the pieces to which Scott refers in +his extracts from the Maitland MSS. How, then, did Hogg, if Hogg forged +the ballad, know of Maitland and his “three noble sons”? Except Colonel +Elliot, to whose explanation we return, I am not aware that any critic +has tried to answer this question. + +It seems to me that if the _Ballad of Otterburne_, extant in 1550 in +England, survived in Scottish memory till Herd’s fragment appeared in +1776, a tradition of Maitland, who was popular in the ballads of 1575, +and known to Gawain Douglas seventy years earlier, may also have +persisted. There is no impossibility. + +Looking next at Scott’s _Auld Maitland_ the story is that King Edward I. +reigned for fifty years. He had a nephew Edward (an apocryphal person: +such figures are common in ballads), who wished to take part in the +invasion of Scotland. The English are repulsed by old Maitland from his +“darksome house” on the Leader. The English, however, (stanza xv.) +conquer Scotland, and join Edward I. in France. They besiege that town, + + Which some call Billop-Grace (xviii.). + +Here Maitland’s three sons are learning at school, as Scots often were +educated in France. They see that Edward’s standard quarters the arms of +France, and infer that he has conquered their country. They “will try +some jeopardy.” Persuading the English that they are themselves +Englishmen, they ask leave to carry the royal flag. The eldest is told +that he is singularly like Auld Maitland. In anger he stabs the +standard-bearer, seizes the flag, and, with his brothers, spurs to +Billop-Grace, where the French captain receives them. There is fighting +at the gate. The King says that three disguised lads of France have +stolen his flag. The Maitlands apparently heard of this; the youngest +goes to Edward, and explains that they are Maitland’s sons, and Scots; +they challenge any three Englishmen; a thing in the manner of the period. +The three Scots are victorious. Young Edward then challenges one of the +dauntless three, who slays him. Edward wishes himself home at London +Tower. + +Such is the story. It is out of the regular line of ballad narrative, +but it does not follow that, in the sixteenth century, some such tale was +not told “in rural rhyme” about Maitland’s “three noble sons.” That it +is not historically true is nothing, of course, and that it is not in the +Scots of the thirteenth century is nothing. + +Colonel Elliot asks, What in the ballad raised suspicion of forgery (in +1802–03)? The historical inaccuracies are common to all historical +ballads. (In an English ballad known to me of 1578, Henry Darnley is +“hanged on a tree”!) + +Next, “there are occasional lines, and even stanzas, which jar in style +to such a degree that they must have been written by two separate hands.” + +But this, also, is a common feature. In “Professor Child and the +Ballad,” Mr. W. M. Hart gives a list of Professor Child’s notes on the +multiplicity of hands, which he, and every critic, detect in some ballads +with a genuinely antique substratum. {44a} + +Colonel Elliot quotes, as in his opinion the best, stanzas viii., ix., +x., xi., while he thinks xv., xviii. the worst. I give these stanzas— + + VIII. + + They lighted on the banks o’ Tweed, + And blew their coals sae het, + And fired the Merse and Teviotdale, + All in an evening late. + + IX. + + As they fared up o’er Lammermoor, + They burned baith up and doun, + Until they came to a darksome house, + Some call it Leader Town. + + X. + + “Wha hauds this house?” young Edward cried, + “Or wha gi’est ower to me?” + A grey-hair’d knight set up his head, + And crackit right crousely: + + XI. + + “Of Scotland’s king I haud my house, + He pays me meat and fee; + And I will keep my guid auld house, + While my house will keep me.” + + +I cannot, I admit, find any fault with these stanzas: cannot see any +reason why they should not be traditional. + +Then Colonel Elliot cites, as the worst— + + + XV. + + Then fifteen barks, all gaily good, + Met them upon a day, + Which they did lade with as much spoil + As they could take away. + + XVIII. + + Until we came unto that town + Which some call Billop-Grace; + There were Auld Maitland’s sons, a’ three, + Learning at school, alas! + +Now, if I venture to differ from Colonel Elliot here, I may plead that I +am practised in the art of ballad-faking, and can produce high +testimonials of skill! To me stanzas xv., xviii. seem to differ much +from viii.–xi., but not in such a way as Hogg would have differed, had he +made them. Hogg’s error would have lain, as Scott’s did, in being, as +Scott said of Mrs. Hemans, _too poetical_. + +Neither Hogg nor Scott, I think, was crafty enough to imitate the prosaic +drawl of the printed broadside ballad, or the feeble interpolations with +which the “gangrel scrape-gut,” or _bänkelsänger_, supplied gaps in his +memory. The modern complete ballad-faker _would_ introduce such abject +verses, but Scott and Hogg desired to decorate, not to debase, ballads +with which they intermeddled, and we track them by their modern romantic +touch when they interpolate. I take it, for this reason, that Hogg did +not write stanzas xv., xviii. It was hardly in nature for Hogg, if he +knew Ville de Grace in Normandy (a thing not very probable), to invent +“Billop-Grace” as a popular corruption of the name—and a popular +corruption it is, I think. Probably the original maker of this stanza +wrote, in line 4, “alace,” an old spelling—not “alas”—to rhyme with +“grace.” + +Colonel Elliot then assigns xv., xviii. as most likely of all to be by +Hogg. On that I have given my opinion, with my reasons. + +These verses, with xviii., lead us to France, and whereas Scott here +suspects that some verses have been lost (see his note to stanza xviii.), +Colonel Elliot suspects that the stanzas relating to France have been +interpolated. But the French scenes occupy the whole poem from xvi. to +lxv., the end. + +What, if Hogg were the forger, were his sources? He _may_ have known +Douglas’s _Palice of Honour_, which, of course, existed in print, with +its mention of Maitland’s grey beard. But how did he know Maitland’s +“three noble sons,” in 1801–1802, lying unsunned in the Maitland MSS.? + +This is a point which critics of _Auld Maitland_ studiously ignore, yet +it is the essential point. How did the Shepherd know about the three +young Maitlands, whose existence, in legend, is only revealed to us +through a manuscript unpublished in 1802? Colonel Elliot does not evade +the point. “We may be sure,” he says, that Leyden, before 1802, knew +Hogg, and Hogg might have obtained from him sufficient information to +enable him to compose the ballad. {47a} But it was from Laidlaw, not +from Leyden, that Scott, after receiving his first copy at Blackhouse, in +spring 1802, obtained Hogg’s address. {47b} There is no hint that before +spring 1802 Leyden ever saw Hogg. Had he known him, and his ballad-lore, +he would have brought him and Scott together. In 1801–02, Leyden was +very busy in Edinburgh helping Scott to edit _Sir Tristram_, copying +_Arthour_, seeking for an East India appointment, and going into society. +Scott’s letters prove all this. {47c} + +That Hogg, in 1802, was very capable of writing a ballad, I admit; also +that, through Blind Harry’s _Wallace_, he may have known all about +“sowies,” and “portculize,” and _springwalls_, or _springald’s_, or +_springalls_, mediæval _balistas_ for throwing heavy stones and darts. +But Hogg did not know or guess what a _springwall_ was. In his stanza +xiii. (in the MS. given to Laidlaw), Hogg wrote— + + With springs; wall stanes, and good o’ern + Among them fast he threw. + +Scott saw the real meaning of this nonsense, and read— + + With springalds, stones, and gads o’ airn. + +In his preface he says that many words in the ballad, “which the reciters +have retained without understanding them, still preserve traces of their +antiquity.” For instance, _springalls_, corruptedly pronounced +_springwalls_. Hogg, hearing the pronunciation, and not understanding, +wrote, “with springs: wall stanes.” A leader would not throw “wall +stanes” till he had exhausted his ammunition. Hogg heard “with +springwalls stones, he threw,” and wrote it, “with springs: wall stones +he threw.” + +Hogg could not know of Auld Maitland “and his three noble sons” except +through an informant familiar with the Maitland MSS. in Edinburgh +University Library. On the theory of a conspiracy to forge, Scott taught +him, but that theory is crushed. + +Hogg says, in _Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott_, that when his +mother met Scott she told him that her brother and she learned the ballad +from auld Andrew Muir, and he from “auld Babby Mettlin,” housekeeper of +the first (“Anderson”) laird of Tushielaw. This first Anderson, laird of +Tushielaw, reigned from 1688 to 1721 (?) or 1724. {48a} Hogg’s mother +was born in 1730, and was only one remove—filled up by Andrew Muir—from +Babby, who was “ither than a gude yin,” and knew many songs. Does any +one think Hogg crafty enough to have invented Babby Maitland as the +source of a song about the Maitlands, and to have introduced her into his +narrative in 1834? I conjecture that this Maitland woman knew a Maitland +song, modernised in time, and perhaps copied out and emended by one of +the Maitland family, possibly one of the descendants of Lethington. We +know that, under James I., about 1620, Lethington’s impoverished son, +James, had several children; and that Lauderdale was still supporting +them (or _their_ children) during the Restoration. Only a century +before, ballads on the Maitlands had certainly been popular, and there is +nothing impossible in the suggestion that one such ballad survived in the +Lauderdale or Lethington family, and came through Babby Maitland to +Andrew Muir, then to Hogg’s mother, to Hogg, and to Scott. + +If a manuscript copy ever existed, and was Babby’s ultimate source, it +would be of the late seventeenth century. That is the ascertained date +of the oldest known MS. of _The Outlaw Murray_, as is proved from an +allusion in a note appended to a copy, referring to a Judge of Session, +Lord Philiphaugh, as then alive. The copy was of 1689–1702. {49a} + +Granting a MS. of _Auld Maitland_ existing in any branch of the Maitland +family in 1680–1700, Babby Mettlin’s knowledge of the ballad, and its few +modernisms, are explained. + +As Lockhart truly says, Hogg “was the most extraordinary man that ever +wore the maud of a shepherd.” He had none of Burns’ education. In 1802 +he was young, and ignorant of cities, and always was innocent of research +in the crabbed MSS. of the sixteenth century. Yet he gets at legendary +persons known to us only through these MSS. He makes a ballad named +_Auld Maitland_ about them. Through him a farm-lass at Blackhouse +acquires some stanzas which Laidlaw copies. In a fortnight Hogg sends +Laidlaw the whole ballad, with the pedigree—his uncle, his mother, their +father, and old Andrew Muir, servant to the famous Rev. Mr. Boston of +Ettrick. The copy takes in Scott and Leyden. Later, Ritson makes no +objection. Mrs. Hogg recites it to Scott, and, according to Hogg, gives +a casual “auld Babby Maitland” as the original source. + +Is the whole fraud conceivable? Hogg, we must believe, puts in two +stanzas (xv., xviii.), of the lowliest order of printed stall-copy or +“gangrel scrape-gut” style, and the same with intent to deceive. He +introduces “Billop-Grace” as a deceptive popular corruption of _Ville de +Grace_. This is far beyond any craft that I have found in the most +artful modern “fakers.” One stanza (xlix.)— + + But Ethert Lunn, a baited bear, + Had many battles seen— + +seems to me very recent, whoever made it. Scott, in lxii., gives a +variant of “some reciters,” for “That Edward once lay under me,” they +read “That Englishman lay under me.” This, if a false story, was an +example of an art more delicate than Scott elsewhere exhibits. + +One does not know what Professor Child would have said to my arguments. +He never gave a criticism in detail of the ballad and of the +circumstances in which Scott acquired it. A man most reasonable, most +open to conviction, he would, I think, have confessed his perplexity. + +Scott did not interpolate a single stanza, even where, as Hogg wrote, he +suspected a lacuna in the text. He neither cut out nor improved the +cryingly modern stanzas. He kept them, as he kept several stanzas in +_Tamlane_, which, so he told Laidlaw, were obviously recent, but were in +a copy which he procured through Lady Dalkeith. {51a} + +By neither adding to nor subtracting from his MS. copy of _Auld +Maitland_, Scott proved, I think, his respect for a poem which, in its +primal form, he believed to be very ancient. We know, at all events, +that ballads on the Maitland heroes were current about 1580. So, late in +the sixteenth century, were the ballads quoted by Hume of Godscroft, on +the murder of the Knight of Liddesdale (1354), the murder of the young +Earl of Douglas in Edinburgh Castle (1440), and the battle of Otterburn. +Of these three, only _Otterburne_ was recovered by Herd, published in +1776. The other two are lost; and there is no _prima facie_ reason why a +Maitland ballad, of the sort current in 1580, should not, in favourable +circumstances, have survived till 1802. + +As regards the Shepherd’s ideas of honesty in ballad-collecting at this +early period, I have quoted his letter to Laidlaw of 20th July 1802. + +Again, in the case of his text from recitation of the _Ballad of +Otterburne_ (published by Scott in _The Minstrelsy_ of 1806), he gave the +Sheriff a full account of his mode of handling his materials, and Scott +could get more minute details by questioning him. + +To this text of _Otterburne_, freely attacked by Colonel Elliot, in +apparent ignorance, as before, of the published facts of the case, and of +the manuscript, we next turn our attention. In the meantime, Scott no +more conspired to forge _Auld Maitland_ than he conspired to forge the +Pentateuch. That Hogg did not forge _Auld Maitland_ I think I have made +as nearly certain as anything in this region can be. I think that the +results are a lesson to professors of the Higher Criticism of Homer. + + + + +THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE + + +SCOTT’S version of the _Ballad of Otterburne_, as given first in _The +Minstrelsy_ of 1806, comes under Colonel Elliot’s most severe censure. +He concludes in favour of “the view that it consists partly of stanzas +from Percy’s _Reliques_, which have undergone emendations calculated to +disguise the source from which they came, partly of stanzas of modern +fabrication, and partly of a very few stanzas and lines from Herd’s +version” (1776). {53a} + +As a matter of fact we know, though Colonel Elliot does not, the whole +process of construction of the _Otterburne_ in _The Minstrelsy_ of 1806. +Professor Child published all the texts with a letter. {53b} It is a +pity that Colonel Elliot overlooks facts in favour of conjecture. +Concerning historical facts he is not more thorough in research. The +story, in Percy’s _Reliques_, of the slaying of Douglas by Percy, “is, so +far as I know, supported neither by history nor by tradition.” {53c} If +unfamiliar with the English chroniclers (in Latin) of the end of the +fourteenth century, Colonel Elliot could find them cited by Professor +Child. Knyghton, Walsingham, and the continuator of Higden (Malverne), +all assert that Percy killed Douglas with his own hand. {54a} The +English ballad of _Otterburne_ (in MS. of about 1550) gives this version +of Douglas’s death. It is erroneous. Froissart, a contemporary, had +accounts of the battle from combatants, both English and Scottish. +Douglas, fighting in the front of the van, on a moonlight night, was +slain by three lance-wounds received in the mellay. The English knew not +whom they had slain. + +The interesting point is that, while the Scottish ballads give either the +English version of Percy’s death (in _Minstrelsy_, 1806) or another +account mentioned by Hume of Godscroft (_circ._ 1610), that he was slain +by one of his own men, the Scottish versions are _all_ deeply affected in +an important point by Froissart’s contemporary narrative, which has not +affected the English versions. {54b} The point is that the death of +Douglas was by his order concealed from both parties. + +When both the English version in Percy’s _Reliques_ (from a MS. of about +1550), and Scott’s version of 1806, mention a “challenge to battle” +between Percy and Douglas, Colonel Elliot calls this incident “probably +purely fanciful and imaginary,” and suspects Scott’s version of being +made up and altered from the English text. But the challenge which +resulted in the battle of Otterburn is not fanciful and imaginary! + +It is mentioned by Froissart. Douglas, he says, took Percy’s pennon in +an encounter under Newcastle. Percy vowed that Douglas would never carry +the pennon out of Northumberland; Douglas challenged him to come and take +it from his tent door that night; but Percy was constrained not to accept +the challenge. The Scots then marched homewards, but Douglas insisted on +besieging Otterburn Castle; here he passed some days on purpose to give +Percy a chance of a fight; Percy’s force surprised the Scots; they were +warned, as in the ballads, suddenly, by a man who galloped up; the fight +began; and so on. + +Now Herd’s version says nothing of Douglas at Newcastle; the whole scene +is at Otterburn. On the other hand, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s MS. +text _did_ bring Douglas to Newcastle. Of this Colonel Elliot says +nothing. The English version says _nothing of Percy’s loss of his pennon +to Douglas_ (nor does Sharpe’s), and gives the challenge and tryst. +Scott’s version says nothing of Percy’s pennon, but Douglas takes Percy’s +_sword_ and vows to carry it home. Percy’s challenge, in the English +version, is accompanied by a gross absurdity. He bids Douglas wait at +Otterburn, where, _pour tout potage_ to an army absurdly stated at 40,000 +men, Percy suggests venison and pheasants! In the Scottish version Percy +offers tryst at Otterburn. Douglas answers that, though Otterburn has no +supplies—nothing but deer and wild birds—he will there tarry for Percy. +This is chivalrous, and, in Scott’s version, Douglas understands war. In +the English version Percy does not. (To these facts I return, giving +more details.) Colonel Elliot supposes some one (Scott, I daresay) to +have taken Percy’s,—the English version,—altered it to taste, concealed +the alterations, as in this part of the challenge, by inverting the +speeches and writing new stanzas of the fight at Otterburn, used a very +little of Herd (which is true), and inserted modern stanzas. + +Now, first, as regards pilfering from the English version, that version, +and Herd’s undisputed version, have undeniably a common source. Neither, +as it stands, is “original”; of an _original_ contemporary Otterburn +ballad we have no trace. By 1550, when such ballads were certainly +current both in England and Scotland, they were late, confused by +tradition, and, of what we possess, say Herd’s, and the English MS. of +1550, all were interblended. + +The Scots ballad version, known to Hume of Godscroft (1610), may have +been taken from the English, and altered, as Child thought, or the +English, as Motherwell maintained, may have been borrowed from the Scots, +and altered. One or the other process undeniably occurred; the second +poet, who made the changes, introduced the events most favourable to his +country, and left out the less favourable. By Scott’s time, or Herd’s, +the versions were much degraded through decay of memory, bad penny +broadsides (lost), and uneducated reciters. Herd’s version has forgotten +the historic affair of the capture of Percy’s pennon (and of the whole +movement on Newcastle, preserved in Sharpe’s and Scott’s); Scott’s +remembers the encounter at Newcastle, forgets the pennon, and substitutes +the capture by Douglas of Percy’s sword. The Englishman deliberately +omits the capture of the pennon. The Scots version (here altered by Sir +Walter) makes Percy wound Douglas at Otterburn— + + Till backward he did flee. + +Now Colonel Elliot has no right, I conceive, to argue that this Scots +version, with the Newcastle incident, the captured sword, the challenge, +the “backward flight” of Douglas, were introduced by a modern (Scott?) +who was deliberately “faking” the English version. There is no reason +why tradition should _not_ have retained historical incidents in the +Scottish form; it is a mere assumption that a modern borrowed and +travestied these incidents from Percy’s _Reliques_. We possess Hogg’s +_unedited_ original of Scott’s version of 1806 (an original MS. never +hinted at by Colonel Elliot), and it retains clear traces of being +contaminated with a version of _The Huntiss of Chevet_, popular in 1459, +as we read in _The Complaynte of Scotland_ of that date. There is also +an old English version of _The Hunting of the Cheviot_ (1550 or later, +Bodleian Library). The _unedited_ text of Scott’s _Otterburne_ then +contained traces of _The Huntiss of Chevet_; the two were mixed in +popular memory. In short, Scott’s text, manipulated slightly by him in a +way which I shall describe, was _a thing surviving in popular memory_: +how confusedly will be explained. + +The differences between the English version of 1550 and the Scots +(collected for Scott by Hogg), are of old standing. I am not sure that +there was not, before 1550, a Scottish ballad, which the English +ballad-monger of that date annexed and altered. The English version of +1550 is not “popular”; it is the work of a humble literary man. + +The English is a very long ballad, in seventy quatrains; it greatly +exaggerates the number of the Scots engaged (40,000), and it is the work +of a professional author who uses the stereotyped prosaic stopgaps of the +cheap hack— + + I tell you withouten dread, + +is his favourite phrase, and he cites historical authority— + + The cronykle wyll not layne (lie). + +Scottish ballads do not appeal to chroniclers! A patriotic and imbecile +effort is made by the Englishman to represent Percy as captured, indeed, +but released without ransom— + + There was then a Scottysh prisoner tayne, + Sir Hew Mongomery was his name; + For sooth as I yow saye, + He borrowed the Persey home agayne. + +This is obscure, and in any case false. Percy _was_ taken, and towards +his ransom Richard II. paid £3000. {59a} + +It may be well to quote the openings of each ballad, English and Scots. + + ENGLISH (1550) + + I. + + It fell about the Lammas tyde, + When husbands win their hay, + The doughty Douglas bound him to ride, + In England to take a prey. + + II. + + The Earl of Fife, withouten strife, + He bound him over Solway; + The great would ever together ride + That race they may rue for aye. + + III. + + Over Hoppertop hill they came in, + And so down by Rodcliff crag, + Upon Green Linton they lighted down, + Stirring many a stag. + + IV. + + And boldly brent Northumberland, + And harried many a town, + They did our Englishmen great wrong, + To battle that were not boune. + + V. + + Then spake a berne upon the bent . . . + + SCOTTISH, HERD (1776) + + I. + + It fell and about the Lammas time, + When hushandmen do win their hay; + Earl Douglas is to the English woods, + And a’ with him to fetch a prey. + + II. + + He has chosen the Lindsays light, + With them the gallant Gordons gay; + And the Earl of Fyfe, withouten strife, + And Hugh Montgomery upon a grey. + +(_The last line is obviously a reciter’s stopgap_.) + + III. + + They have taken Northumberland, + And sae hae they _the north shire_, + And the Otterdale they hae burned hale, + And set it a’ into fire. + + IV. + + Out then spak a bonny boy; + +Manifestly these copies, so far, are not independent. But now Herd’s +copy begins to vary much from the English. + +In both ballads a boy or “berne” speaks up. In the English he recommends +to the Scots an attack on Newcastle; in the Scots he announces the +approach of an English host. Douglas promises to reward the boy if his +tale be true, to hang him if it be false. _The scene is Otterburn_. The +boy stabs Douglas, in a stanza which is a common ballad formula of +frequent occurrence— + + The boy’s taen out his little pen knife, + That hanget low down by his gare, + And he gaed Earl Douglas a deadly wound, + Alack! a deep wound and a sare. + +Douglas then says to Sir Hugh Montgomery— + + Take _thou_ the vanguard of the three, + And bury me at yon bracken bush, + That stands upon yon lilly lea. (Herd, 4–8.) + +Hume of Godscroft (about 1610), author of the _History of the Douglases_, +was fond of quoting ballads. He gives a form of the first verse in +_Otterburn_ which is common to Herd and the English copy. He says that, +according to some, Douglas was treacherously slain by one of his own men +whom he had offended. “But this narration is not so probable,” and the +fact is fairly meaningless in Herd’s fragment (the boy has no motive for +stabbing Douglas, for if his report is true, he will be rewarded). The +deed is probably based on the tradition which Godscroft thought “less +probable,”—the treacherous murder of the Earl. + +In the English ballad, Douglas marches on Newcastle, where Percy, without +fighting, makes a tryst to meet and combat him at Otterburn, on his way +home from Newcastle to Scotland. Thither Douglas goes, and is warned by +a Scottish knight of Percy’s approach: as in Herd, he is sceptical, but +is convinced by facts. (This warning of Douglas by a scout who gallops +up is narrated by Froissart, from witnesses engaged in the battle.) +After various incidents, Percy and Douglas encounter each other, and +Douglas is slain. After a desperate fight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, a +prisoner of the English, + + Borrowed the Percy home again. + +This is absurd. The Scots fought on, took Percy, and won the day. +Walsingham, the contemporary English chronicler (in Latin), says that +Percy slew Douglas, so do Knyghton and the continuator of Higden. + +Meanwhile we observe that the English ballad says nothing of Douglas’s +chivalrous fortitude, and soldier-like desire to have his death +concealed. Here every Scottish version follows Froissart. In Herd’s +fragment, Montgomery now attacks Percy, and bids him “yield thee to yon +bracken bush,” where the dead Douglas’s body lies concealed. Percy does +yield—to Sir Hugh Montgomery. The fragment has but fourteen stanzas. + +In 1802, Scott, correcting by another MS., published Herd’s copy. In +1806 he gave another version, for “fortunately two copies have since been +obtained from the recitation of old persons residing at the head of +Ettrick Forest.” {62a} + +Colonel Elliot devotes a long digression to the trivial value of +recitations, so styled, {62b} and gives his suggestions about the copy +being made up from the _Reliques_. When Scott’s copy of 1806 agrees with +the English version, Colonel Elliot surmises that a modern person, +familiar with the English, has written the coincident verses in _with +differences_. Percy and Douglas, for example, change speeches, each +saying what, in the English, the other said in substance, not in the +actual words. When Scott’s version touches on an incident known in +history, but not given in the English version, the encounter between +Douglas and Percy at Newcastle (Scott, vii., viii.), Colonel Elliot +suspects the interpolator (and well he may, for the verses are mawkish +and modern, not earlier than the eighteenth century imitations or +_remaniements_ which occur in many ballads traditional in essence). + +So Colonel Elliot says, “We are not told, either in _The Minstrelsy_ or +in any of Scott’s works or writings, who the reciters were, and who the +transcribers were.” {63a} We very seldom are told by Scott who the +reciters were and who the transcribers, but our critic’s information is +here mournfully limited—by his own lack of study. Colonel Elliot goes on +to criticise a very curious feature in Scott’s version of 1806, and finds +certain lines “beautiful” but “without a note of antiquity,” that he can +detect, while the sentiment “is hardly of the kind met with in old +ballads.” + +To understand the position we must remember that, _in the English_, Percy +and Douglas fight each other thus (1.)— + + The Percy and the Douglas met, + That either of other was fain, + They swapped together while that they sweat, + With swords of fine Collayne. (Cologne steel.) + +Douglas bids Percy yield, but Percy slays Douglas (as in Walsingham’s and +other contemporary chronicles, stanzas li.–lvi.). The Scottish losses +are then enumerated (only eighteen Scots were left alive!), and stanza +lix. runs— + + This fray began at Otterburn + Between the night and the day. + There the Douglas lost his life, + And the Percy was led away. + +Herd ends— + + This deed was done at Otterburn, + About the breaking of the day, + Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush, + And Percy led captive away. + +Manifestly, either the maker of Herd’s version knew the English, and +altered at pleasure, or the Englishman knew a Scots version, and altered +at pleasure. The perversion is of ancient standing, undeniably. But +when Scott’s original text exhibits the same phenomena of perversion, in +a part of the ballad missing in Herd’s brief lay, Colonel Elliot supposes +that _now_ the exchanges are by a modern ballad-forger, shall we say Sir +Walter? By Sir Walter they certainly are _not_! One tiny hint of Scots +originality is dubious. In the English, and in all Scots versions, men +“win their hay” at Lammastide. In Scotland the hay harvest is often much +later. But if the English ballad be _Northumbrian_, little can be made +out of that proof of Scottish origin. If the English version be a +southern version (for the minstrel is a professional), then Lammastide +for hay-making is borrowed from the Scots. + +The Scots version (Herd’s) insists on Douglas’s burial “by the bracken +bush,” to which Montgomery bids Percy surrender. This is obviously done +to hide his body and keep his death secret from both parties, _as in +Froissart he bids his friends do_. The verse of the English (l.) on the +fight between Douglas and Percy, is borrowed by, or is borrowed from, the +Scottish stanza (ix.) in Herd, where Sir Hugh Montgomery fights Percy. + + Then Percy and Montgomery met, + And weel a wot they warna fain; + They swaped swords, and they twa swat, + And ay the blood ran down between. + + The Persses and the Mongomry met, + +as quoted, is already familiar in _The Complaynte of Scotland_ (about +1549), and this line is not in the English ballad. So far it seems as if +the English balladist borrowed the scene from a Scots version, and +perverted it into a description of a fight, between Percy, who wins, and +Douglas—in place of the Scots version, the victory over Percy of Sir Hugh +Montgomery. + +This transference of incidents in the English and Scottish ballads is a +phenomenon which we are to meet again in the ballad of _Jamie Telfer of +the Fair Dodhead_. One “maker” or the other has, in old times, pirated +and perverted the ballad of another “maker.” + + + + +SCOTT’S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED IT + + +AS early as December 1802–January 1803, Scott was “so anxious to have a +complete Scottish _Otterburn_ that I will omit the ballad entirely in the +first volume (of 1803), hoping to recover it in time for insertion in the +third.” {67a} + +The letter is undated, but is determined by Scott’s expressed interest +“about the Tushielaw lines, which, from what you mention, must be worth +recovering.” In a letter (Abbotsford MSS.) from Hogg to Scott (marked in +copy, “January 7, 1803”) Hogg encloses “the Tushielaw lines,” which were +popular in Ettrick, but were verses of the eighteenth century. They were +orally repeated, but literary in origin. + +Scott, who wanted “a complete Scottish Otterburn” in winter 1802, did not +sit down and make one. He waited till he got a text from Hogg, in 1805, +and published an edited version in 1806. + +_Scott’s published_ stanza i. is Herd’s stanza i., with slight verbal +changes taken from the Hogg MS. text of 1805. (?) Hogg’s MS. and Scott, +in stanza ii., give Herd’s lines on the Lindsays and Gordons, adding the +Grahams, and, in place of Herd’s + + The Earl of Fife, + And Sir Hugh Montgomery upon a grey, + +they end thus— + + But the Jardines wald not wi’ him ride, + And they rue it to this day. + +This is from Hogg’s copy; it is a natural Border variant. No Earl of +Fife is named, but a reproach to a Border clan is conveyed. + +For Herd’s iii. (they take Northumberland, and burn “the North shire,” +and the Otter dale), Hogg’s reciters gave— + + And he has burned the dales o’ Tyne, + And part o’ _Almonshire_, + And three good towers in Roxburgh fells, + He left them all on fire. + +Hogg, in his letter accompanying his copy, says that “Almonshire” may +stand for the “Bamborowshire” of the English vi., but that he leaves in +“Almonshire,” as both reciters insist on it. Scott printed +“Bambroughshire,” as in the English version (vi.). + +Now here is proof that Hogg had a copy, from reciters—a copy which he +could not understand. “Almonshire” is “Alneshire,” or “Alnwickshire,” +where is the Percy’s Alnwick Castle. In Froissart the Scots burn and +waste the region of Alneshire, all round Alnwick, but the Earl of +Northumberland holds out in the castle, unattacked, and sends his sons, +Henry and Ralph Percy, to Newcastle to gather forces, and take the +retreating Scots between two fires, Newcastle and Alnwick. But the Scots +were not such poor strategists as to return by the way they had come. In +a skirmish or joust at Newcastle, says Froissart, Douglas captured +Percy’s lance and pennon, with his blazon of arms, and vowed that he +would set it up over his castle of Dalkeith. Percy replied that he would +never carry it out of England. To give Percy a chivalrous chance of +recovering his pennon and making good his word, Douglas insists on +waiting at Otterburn to besiege the castle there; and he is taken by +surprise (as in the ballads) when a mounted man brings news of Percy’s +approach. No tryst is made by Percy and Douglas _at Otterburn_ in +Froissart; Douglas merely tarried there by the courtesy of Scotland. + +In Hogg’s version we have a reason why Douglas should tarry at Otterburn; +in the English ballad we have none very definite. No captured pennon of +Percy’s is mentioned, no encounter of the heroes “at the barriers” of +Newcastle. Percy, from the castle wall, merely threatens Douglas +vaguely; Douglas says, “Where will you meet me?” and Percy appoints +Otterburn as we said. He makes the absurd remark that, by way of +supplies (for 40,000 men), Douglas will find abundance of pheasants and +red deer. {69a} + +We see that the English balladist is an unwarlike literary hack. The +author of the Ettrick version knew better the nature of war, as we shall +see, and his Douglas objects to Otterburn as a place destitute of +supplies; nothing is there but wild beasts and birds. If the original +poem is the sensible poem, the Scott version is the original which the +English hath perverted. + +In Hogg, Douglas jousts with Percy at Newcastle, and gives him a fall. +Then come two verses (viii.–ix.). The second is especially modern and +mawkish— + + But O how pale his lady look’d, + Frae off the castle wa’, + When down before the Scottish spear + She saw brave Percy fa’! + How pale and wan his lady look’d, + Frae off the castle hieght, + When she beheld her Percy yield + To doughty Douglas’ might. + +Colonel Elliot asks, “Can any one believe that these stanzas are really +ancient and have come down orally through many generations?” {70a} + +Certainly not! But Colonel Elliot does not allow for the fact, insisted +on by Professor Child, that traditional ballads, from the sixteenth to +the eighteenth centuries, were often printed on broad-sheets as edited by +the cheapest broadside-vendors’ hacks; that the hacks interpolated and +messed their originals; and that, after the broadside was worn out, lost, +or burned, oral memory kept it alive in tradition. For examples of this +process we have only to look at _William’s Ghost_ in Herd’s copy of 1776. +This is a traditional ballad; it is included in Scott’s _Clerk Saunders_, +but, as Hogg told him, is a quite distinct song. In Herd’s copy it ends +thus— + + “Oh, stay, my only true love, stay,” + The constant Marg’ret cry’d; + Wan grew her cheeks, she closed her eyes, + Stretched her soft limbs, and dy’d. + +Let _this_ get into tradition, and be taken down from recitation, and the +ballad will be denounced as modern. But it is essentially ancient. + +These two modern stanzas, in Hogg’s copy, are rather too bad for Hogg’s +making; and I do not know whether they are his (he practically says they +are not, we shall see), or whether they are remembered by reciters from a +stall-copy of the period of Lady Wardlaw’s _Hardyknute_. + +After that, Hogg’s copy becomes more natural. Douglas says to the +discomfited Percy (x.)— + + Had we twa been upon the green, + And never an eye to see, + I should hae had ye flesh and fell, + But your sword shall gae wi’ me. + +That rings true! Moreover, had either Hogg or Scott tampered here (Scott +excised), either would have made Douglas carry off—not Percy’s _sword_, +but the historic captured _pennon_ of Percy. Scott really could not have +resisted the temptation had he been interpolating _à son dévis_. + + But your _pennon_ shall gae wi’ me! + +It was easy to write in that! + +Percy had challenged Douglas thus— + + But gae ye up to Otterburn, + And there wait days three (xi.), + +as in the English (xiii.). In the English, Percy, we saw, promises game +enough there; in Hogg, Douglas demurs (xii., xiii., xiv.). There are no +supplies at Otterburn, he says— + + To feed my men and me. + + The deer rins wild frae dale to dale, + The birds fly wild frae tree to tree, + And there is neither bread nor kale, + To fend my men and me. + +These seem to me sound true ballad lines, like— + + My hounds may a’ rin masterless + My hawks may fly frae tree to tree, + +in Child’s variant of _Young Beichan_. The speakers, we see, are +“inverted.” Percy, in the English, promises Douglas’s men +pheasants—absurd provision for the army of 40,000 men of the English +ballad. In the Ettrick text Douglas says that there are no supplies, +merely _feræ naturæ_, but he will wait at Otterburn to give Percy his +chance. + +Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern +pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions +them, and the “prettier verses,” with a note of exclamation (!). {73a} +But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd’s +old copy, and nobody says that Scott or Hogg or any modern faker made the +inversions in Herd’s text. The differences and inversions in the English +and in Herd are very ancient; by 1550 “the Percy and the Montgomery met,” +in the line quoted in _The Complaynte of Scotland_. At about the same +period (1550) it was the Percy and the Douglas who met, in the English +version. Manifestly there pre-existed, by 1550, an old ballad, which +either a Scot then perverted from the English text, or an Englishman from +the Scots. Thus the inversions in the Ettrick and English version need +not be due (they are not due) to a _modern_ “faker.” + +In the Hogg MS. (xxiii.), Percy wounds Douglas “till backwards he did +flee.” Hogg was too good a Scot to interpolate the flight of Douglas; +and Scott was so good a Scot that—what do you suppose he did?—he excised +“till backwards he did flee” from Hogg’s text, and inserted “that he fell +to the ground” _from the English text_! + +In the Hogg MS. (xviii., xix.), in Scott xvii., xviii., Douglas, at +Otterburn, is roused from sleep by his page with news of Percy’s +approach. Douglas says that the page lies (compare Herd, where Douglas +doubts the page)— + + For Percy hadna’ men yestreen + To dight my men and me. + +There is nothing in this to surprise any one who knows the innumerable +variants in traditional ballads. But now comes in a very curious +variation (Hogg MS. xx., Scott, xix.). Douglas says (Hogg MS. xx.)— + + But I have seen a dreary dream + Beyond the Isle o’ Skye, + I saw a dead man won the fight, + And I think that man was I. + +Here is something not in Herd, and as remote from the manner of the +English poet, with his + + The Chronicle will not lie, + +as Heine is remote from, say,—Milman. The verse is magical, it has +haunted my memory since I was ten years old. Godscroft, who does not +approve of the story of Douglas’s murder by one of his men, writes that +the dying leader said:— + +“First do yee keep my death both from our own folke and from the enemy” +(Froissart, “Let neither friend nor foe know of my estate”); “then that +ye suffer not my standard to be lost or cast downe” (Froissart, “Up with +my standard and call _Douglas_!”;) “and last, that ye avenge my death” +(also in Froissart). “Bury me at Melrose Abbey with my father. If I +could hope for these things I should die with the greater contentment; +for long since I _heard a prophesie that a dead man should winne a +field_, _and I hope in God it shall be I_.” {75a} + + I saw a dead man won the fight, + And I think that man was I! + +Godscroft, up to the mention of Melrose and the prophecy, took his tale +direct from Froissart, or, if he took it from George Buchanan’s Latin +History, Buchanan’s source was Froissart, but Froissart’s was evidence +from Scots who were in the battle. + +But who changed the prophecy to a dream of Douglas, and who versified +Godscroft’s “a dead man shall winne a field, and I hope in God it shall +be I”? Did Godscroft take that from the ballad current in his time and +quoted by him? Or did a _remanieur_ of Godscroft turn _his_ words into + + I saw a dead man win the fight, + And I think that man was I? + +Scott did not make these two noble lines out of Godscroft, he found them +in Hogg’s copy from recitation, only altering “I saw” into “I dreamed,” +and the ungrammatic “won” into “win”; and “_the_ fight” into “_a_ fight.” + +The whole dream stanza occurs in a part of the ballad where Hogg +confesses to no alteration or interpolation, and I doubt if the Shepherd +of Ettrick had read a rare old book like Godscroft. If he had not, this +stanza is purely traditional; if he had, he showed great genius in his +use of Godscroft. + +In Hogg’s Ettrick copy, Douglas, after telling his dream, rushes into +battle, is wounded by Percy, and “backward flees.” Scott (xx.), +following a historical version (Wyntoun’s _Cronykil_), makes + + Douglas forget the helmit good + That should have kept his brain. + +Being wounded, in Hogg’s version, and “backward fleeing,” Douglas sends +his page to bring Montgomery (Hogg), and from stanza xxiv. to xxxiv., in +Hogg, all is made up by himself, he says,—from facts given “in plain +prose” by his reciters, with here and there a line or two given in verse. +Scott omitted some verses here, amended others slightly, by help of +Herd’s version, _left out a broken last stanza_ (xl.) and put in Herd’s +concluding lines (stanza lxviii. in the English text). + + This deed was done at the Otterburn. (Herd.) + + The fraye began at Otterburn. (English.) + +Now what was the broken Ettrick stanza that Scott omitted in his +published _Otterburne_ (1806)? It referred to Sir Hugh Montgomery, who, +in Herd, captured Percy after a fight; in the English version is a +prisoner apparently exchanged for Percy. In the Ettrick MS. the omitted +verse is + + He left not an Englishman on the field + . . . + That he hadna either killed or taen + Ere his heart’s blood was cauld. + +Scott ended with Herd’s last stanza; in the English version the last but +two. + +Now the death, at Otterburn, of Sir Hugh, is recorded in an English +ballad styled _The Hunting of the Cheviot_. By 1540–50 it was among the +popular songs north of Tweed. _The Complaynte of Scotland_ (1549) +mentions among “The Songis of Natural Music of the Antiquitie” +(_volkslieder_), _The Hunttis of Chevet_. Our copy of the English +version is in the Bodleian (MS. Ashmole, 48). It ends: “Expliceth, quod +Rychard Sheale,” a minstrel who recited ballads and tales at Tamworth +(_circ._ 1559). The text was part of his stock-in-trade. + +The Cheviot ballad, in a Scots form popular in 1549, is later in many +ways than the English _Battle of Otterburne_. It begins with a brag of +Percy, a vow that, despite Douglas, he will hunt in the Cheviot hills. +While Percy is hunting with a strong force, Douglas arrives with another. +Douglas offers to decide the quarrel by single combat with Percy, who +accepts. Richard Witherington refuses to look on quietly, and a general +engagement ensues. + + At last the Duglas and the Perse met, + Lyk to Captayns of myght and of mayne, + They swapte together tylle they both swat + With swordes that wear of fyn myllan. + +We are back in stanza I. of the English _Otterburne_, in stanza xxxv. +(substituting Hugh Montgomery for Douglas) of the Hogg MS. In _The +Hunting_, Douglas is slain by an English arrow (xxxvi.–xxxviii.). + +Sir Hugh Montgomery now charges and slays Percy (who, of course, was +merely taken prisoner). An archer of Northumberland sends an arrow +through good Sir Hugh Montgomery (xliii.–xlvi.). Stanza lxvi. has + + At Otterburn begane this spurne, + Upon a Monnynday; + There was the doughte Douglas slean, + The Perse never went away. + +This is a form of Herd’s stanza xiv. of the English _Otterburn_ +(lxviii.), made soon after the battle. We see that the _original_ ballad +has protean variants; in time all is mixed in tradition. + +Now the curious and interesting point is that Hogg, when he collected the +ballad from two reciters, himself noticed that the _Cheviot_ ballad had +merged, in some way, into the _Otterburn_ ballad, and pointed this out to +Scott. I now publish Hogg’s letter to Scott, in which, as usual, he does +not give the year-date: I think it was 1805. + + ETTRICK HOUSE, _Sept._ 10, [?1805]. + + DEAR SIR,—Though I have used all diligence in my power to recover the + old song about which you seemed anxious, I am afraid it will arrive + too late to be of any use. I cannot at this time have Grame and + Bewick; the only person who hath it being absent at a harvest; and as + for the scraps of Otterburn which you have got, _they seem to have + been some confused jumble made by some person who had learned both + the songs you have_, {79a} _and in time had been straitened to make + one out of them both_. But you shall have it as I had it, saving + that, as usual, I have sometimes helped the metre without altering + one original word. + +Hogg here gives his version from recitation as far as stanza xxiv. + +Here Hogg stops and writes:— + + The ballad, which I have collected from two different people, a crazy + old man and a woman deranged in her mind, seems hitherto considerably + entire; but now, when it becomes most interesting, they have both + failed me, and I have been obliged to take much of it in plain prose. + However, as none of them seemed to know anything of the history save + what they had learned from the song, I took it the more kindly. Any + few verses which follow are to me unintelligible. + + He told Sir Hugh that he was dying, and ordered him to conceal his + body, and neither let his own men nor Piercy’s know; which he did, + and the battle went on headed by Sir Hugh Montgomery, and at length— + +Here follow stanzas up to xxxviii. + +Hogg then goes on thus:— + + Piercy seems to have been fighting devilishly in the dark. Indeed my + narrators added no more, but told me that Sir Hugh died on the field, + but that + + He left not an Englishman on the field, + . . . + That he hadna either killed or ta’en + Ere his heart’s blood was cauld. + + Almonshire (Stanza iii.) may probably be a corruption of + Bamburghshire, but as both my narrators called it so I thought proper + to preserve it. The towers in Roxburgh fells (Stanza iii.) may not + be so improper as we were thinking, there may have been some + [English] strength on the very borders.—I remain, Dear Sir, your most + faithful and affectionate servant, JAMES HOGG. + +Hogg adds a postscript: + + Not being able to get the letter away to the post, I have taken the + opportunity of again pumping my old friend’s memory, and have + recovered some more lines and half lines of Otterburn, of which I am + becoming somewhat enamoured. These I have been obliged to arrange + somewhat myself, as you will see below, but so mixed are they with + original lines and sentences that I think, if you pleased, they might + pass without any acknowledgment. Sure no man will like an old song + the worse of being somewhat harmonious. After stanza xxiv. you may + read stanzas xxv. to xxxiv. Then after xxxviii. read xxxix. + +Now we know all that can be known about the copy of the ballad which, in +1805, Scott received from Hogg. Up to stanza xxiv. it is as given by the +two old reciters. The crazy man may be the daft man who recited to Hogg +Burns’s _Tam o’ Shanter_, and inspired him with the ambition to be a +poet. The deranged woman, like mad Madge Wildfire, was rich in ballad +scraps. From stanza xxv. to xxxiv., Hogg confessedly “harmonises” what +he got in plain prose intermixed with verse. Stanza xxxix. is apparently +Hogg’s. The last broken stanza, as Hogg said, is a reminiscence of the +_Hunting of the Cheviot_, in a Scots form, long lost. + +Hogg was not a scientific collector: had he been, he would have taken +down “the plain prose” and the broken lines and stanzas verbally. But +Hogg has done his best. + +We have next to ask, How did Scott treat the material thus placed before +him? He dropped five stanzas sent by Hogg, mainly from the part made up +from “plain prose”; he placed in a stanza and a line or two from Herd’s +text; he remade a stanza and adopted a line from the English of 1550, and +inserted an incident from Wyntoun’s _Cronykil_ (about 1430). He did +these things in the effort to construct what Lockhart calls “a standard +text.” + +1. In stanza i., for Hogg’s “Douglas _went_,” Scott put “bound him to +ride.” + +2. (_H._) “With the Lindsays.” + + (_S._) “With _them_ the Lindesays.” + +3. (_H._) “Almonshire.” + + (_S._) “Bamboroughshire.” + + (_H._) “Roxburgh.” + + (_S._) “Reidswire.” + +6. (_H._) “The border again.” + + (_S._) “The border fells.” + +7. (_H._) “_Most_ furiously.” + + (_S._) “_Right_ furiouslie.” + +9. (_H._) A modernised stanza. + + (_S._) Scott deletes it. + +15. (_H._) Scott rewrites the stanza thus, + + (_H._) + + But I will stay at Otterburn, + Where you shall welcome be; + And if ye come not at three days end, + A coward I’ll call thee. + + (_S._) + + “Thither will I come,” proud Percy said, + “By the might of Our Ladye.” + “There will I bide thee,” said the Douglas, + “My troth I’ll plight to thee.” + +19. (_H._) “I have _seen_ a dreary dream.” + +20. (_S._) “I have _dreamed_ a dreary dream.” + +21. (_H._) + + Where he met with the stout Percy + And a’ his goodly train. + +21. (_S._) + + But he forgot the helmet good + That should have kept his brain. + + (From Wyntoun.) + +22. (_H._) Line 2. “Right keen.” + + (_S._) Line 2. “Fu’ fain.” + +Line 4. + + The blood ran down like rain. + +Line 4. + + The blood ran them between. + +23. (_H._) + + But Piercy wi’ his good broadsword + Was made o’ the metal free, + Has wounded Douglas on the brow + Till backward did he flee. + +24. (_S._) + + But Piercy wi’ his broadsword good + That could so sharply wound, + Has wounded Douglas on the brow, + Till he fell to the ground. + +25. (_H._) Here Hogg has mixed prose and verse, and does his best. +Scott deletes Hogg’s 25. + +27. (_H._) Douglas repeats the story of his dream. Scott deletes the +stanza. + +28. In Hogg’s second line, + + Nae mair I’ll fighting see. + +Scott gives, from Herd, + + Take thou the vanguard of the three. + +29. Hogg’s verse is + + But tell na ane of my brave men + That I lie bleeding wan, + But let the name of Douglas still + Be shouted in the van. + +This is precisely what Douglas does say, in Froissart, but Scott deletes +the stanza. Probably Hogg got the fact from his reciters, “in plain +prose,” with a phrase or two in verse. + +31. (_H._) Line 4. + + On yonder lily lee. + +27. (_S._) + + That his merrie men might not see. + +33. (_H._) Scott deletes the stanza. + +35. (_H._) + + When stout Sir Hugh wi’ Piercy met. + +30. (_S._) + + The Percy and Montgomery met. {83a} + +36. (_H._) + + “O yield thee, Piercy,” said Sir Hugh, + “O yield, or ye shall die!” + “Fain would I yield,” proud Percy said, + “But ne’er to loon like thee.” + +31. (_S._) + + “Now yield thee, yield thee, Percy,” he said, + “Or else I vow I’ll lay thee low,” + “To whom must I yield,” quoth Earl Percy, + “Now that I see it must be so?” + +Scott took this from Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s MS. copy. {84a} + +38. (_H._) + +38. (_S._) Scott makes a slight verbal alteration. + +39. (_H._) Line 1. + +34. (_S._) Line 1. + +Scott substitutes Herd’s + + As soon as he knew it was Montgomery. + +40. (_H._) Hogg’s broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, derived from +a lost form of the _Huntiss of Chevets_, named in _The Complaynte of +Scotland_. + +35. (_S._) Scott omits giving the formula common to the English of 1550 +and to Herd. This was the whole of Scott’s editorial alteration. Any +one may discover the facts from Professor Kittredge’s useful abbreviation +of Child’s collection into a single volume (Nutt. London, 1905). +Colonel Elliot quotes Professor Kittredge’s book three or four times, but +in place of looking at the facts he abounds in the Higher Criticism. +Colonel Elliot says that Scott does not tell us of a single line having +been borrowed from Percy’s version. {84b} Scott has only “a single line” +to tell of, the fourth line in his stanza xxii., “Till he fell to the +ground.” + +For the rest, the old English version and Herd’s have many +inter-borrowings of stanzas, but we do not know whether a Scot borrowed +from an Englishman, or _vice versa_. Thus, in another and longer +traditional version—Hogg’s—more correspondence must be expected than in +Herd’s fourteen stanzas. It is, of course, open to scepticism to allege +that Hogg merely made his text, invented the two crazy old reciters, and +the whole story about them, and his second “pumping of their memories,” +invented “Almonshire,” which he could not understand, and invented his +last broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, to give the idea that _The +Huntiss of Chevets_ was mingled in the recollections of the reciters with +_The Battle of Otterburn_. He also gave the sword in place of the pennon +of Percy as the trophy of Douglas, “and the same with intent to deceive,” +just as he pretended, in _Auld Maitland_, not to know what “springwalls” +were, and wrote “springs: wall-stanes.” If this probable theory be +correct, then Scott was the dupe of Truthful James. At all events, +though for three years Scott was moving heaven and earth and Ettrick +Forest to find a copy of a Scottish ballad of Otterburn, he did not sit +down and make one, as, in Colonel Elliot’s system, he easily could and +probably would have done. + +Before studying his next ill deed, we must repeat that the Otterburn +ballads prove that in early times one nation certainly pirated a ballad +of a rival nation, and very ingeniously altered it and inverted the parts +of the heroes. + +We have next to examine a case in a later generation, in which a maker +who was interested in one clan, pirated, perverted, and introverted the +_rôles_ of the heroes in a ballad by a maker interested in another clan. +Either an Elliotophile perverted a ballad by a Scottophile, or a +Scottophile perverted a ballad by an Elliotophile. + +This might be done at the time when the ballad was made (say 1620–60). +But Colonel Elliot believes that the perversion was inflicted on an +Elliotophile ballad by a Scottophile impostor about 1800–1802. The name +of this desperate and unscrupulous character was Walter Scott, Sheriff of +Ettrick Forest, commonly called Selkirkshire. + +In this instance I have no manuscript evidence. The name of “Jamie of +the Fair Dodhead,” the ballad, appears in a list of twenty-two ballads in +Sir Walter’s hand, written in a commonplace book about 1800–1801. Eleven +are marked X. “Jamie” is one of that eleven. _Kinmont Willie_ is among +the eleven not marked X. We may conjecture that he had obtained the +first eleven, and was hunting for the second eleven,—some of which he +never got, or never published. + + + + +THE MYSTERY OF THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER + + +I +A RIDING SONG + + +_The Ballad of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead_ has many charms for +lovers of the Border. The swift and simple stanzas carry us through a +great tract of country, which remains not unlike what it was in the days +when Scotts, Armstrongs, and Elliots rode the hills in jack and knapscap, +with sword and lance. The song leads us first, with a foraging party of +English riders, from Bewcastle, an English hold, east of the Border +stream of the Liddel; then through the Armstrong tribe, on the north +bank; then through more Armstrongs north across Tarras water (“Tarras for +the good bull trout”); then north up Ewes water, that springs from the +feet of the changeless green hills and the _pastorum loca vasta_, where +now only the shepherd or the angler wakens the cry of the curlews, but +where then the Armstrongs were in force. We ride on, as it were, and +look down into the dale of the stripling Teviot, _electro clarior_ (then +held by the Scotts); we descend and ford “Borthwick’s roaring strand,” as +Leyden sings, though the burn is usually a purling brook even where it +joins Teviot, three miles above Hawick. + +Next we pass across the green waves of moorlands that rise to the heights +over Ettrick (held by the Scotts), whence the foragers of the song gallop +down to “The Fair Dodhead,” now a heap of grass-covered stones, but in +their day a peel tower, occupied, _according to the ballad_, by one James +Telfer. The English rob the peel tower, they drive away ten cows, and +urge them southwards over Borthwick water, then across Teviot at Coultart +Cleugh (say seven miles above Hawick), then up the Frostily burn, and so +down Ewes water as before; but the Scottish pursuers meet them before +they cross the Liddel again into English bounds. The English are +defeated, their captain is shot through the head (which in no way affects +his power of making speeches); he is taken, twenty or thirty of his men +are killed or wounded, his own cattle are seized, and his victim Telfer, +returns rejoicing to Dodhead in distant Ettrick. + +_C’est magnifique_, _mais ce n’est pas la guerre_! These events never +occurred, as we shall see later, yet the poet has the old reiving spirit, +the full sense of the fierce manly times, and possesses a traditional +knowledge of the historical personages of the day, and knows the +country,—more or less. + +The poem has raised as many difficulties as Nestor’s long story about +raided cattle in the eleventh book of the _Iliad_. Historical Greece +knew but dimly the places which were familiar to Nestor, the towns that +time had ruined, the hill where Athene “turned the people again.” We, +too, have to seek in documents of the end of the sixteenth century, or in +an old map of 1654 (drawn about 1600), to find Dodhead, Catslack, or +Catloch, or Catlock hill, and Preakinhaugh, places essential to our +inquiry. + +I see the student who has ventured so far into my tract wax wan! He does +not,—she does not,—wish to hear about dusty documents and ancient maps. +For him or for her the ballad is enough, and a very good ballad it is. I +would shake the faith of no man in the accuracy of the ballad tale, if it +were not necessary for me to defend the character of Sir Walter Scott, +which, on occasion of this and other ballads, is impugned by Colonel the +Hon. FitzWilliam Elliot. He “hopes, though he cannot expect,” that I +will give my reasons for not sharing his belief that Sir Walter did a +certain thing which I could not easily palliate. {89} + + + +II +THE BALLAD IMPOSSIBLE + + +My attempts to relieve Colonel Elliot from his painful convictions about +Sir Walter’s unsportsmanlike behaviour must begin with proof that the +ballad, as it stands, cannot conceivably be other than “a pack o’ lees.” +Here Colonel Elliot, to a great extent and on an essential point, agrees +with me. In sketching rapidly the story of the ballad,—the raid from +England into Ettrick, the return of the raiders, the pursuit,—I omitted +the _clou_, the pivot, the central point of dramatic interest. It is +this: in one version of the ballad,—call it A for the present,—the +unfortunate Telfer runs to ask aid from the laird of Buccleuch, at +Branksome Hall, some three and a half or four miles above Hawick, on the +Teviot. From the Dodhead it was a stiff run of eight miles, through +new-fallen snow. The farmer of Dodhead, in the centre of the Scott +country, naturally went for help to the nearest of his neighbours, the +greatest chief in the mid-Border. In version A (which I shall call “the +Elliot version”), “auld Buccleuch” (who was a man of about thirty in +fact) was deaf to Telfer’s prayer. + + Gae seek your succour frae Martin Elliot, + For succour ye’s get nane frae me, + Gae seek your succour where ye paid blackmail, + For, man, ye ne’er paid money to me. + +This is impossibly absurd! As Colonel Elliot writes, “I pointed out in +my book” (_The Trustworthiness of Border Ballads_) “that the allegation +that Buccleuch had refused to strike a blow at a party of English +raiders, who had insolently ridden some twenty-five miles into Scottish +ground and into the very middle of his own territory, was too absurd to +be believed . . . ” {91a} + +Certainly; and the story is the more ridiculous as Buccleuch (who has +taken Telfer’s protection-money, or “blackmail”) pretends to believe that +Telfer—living in Ettrick, about nine miles from Selkirk—pays +protection-money to Martin Elliot, residing at Preakinhaugh, high up the +water of Liddel. Martin was too small a potentate, and far too remote to +be chosen as protector by a man living near the farm of Singlee on +Ettrick, and near the bold Buccleuch. + +All this is nonsense. Colonel Elliot sees that, and suggests that all +this is not by the original poet, but has been “inserted at some later +period.” {91b} But, if so, _what was the original ballad before the +insertion_? As it stands, all hinges on this impossible refusal of +Buccleuch to help his neighbour and retainer, James Telfer. If Colonel +Elliot excises Buccleuch’s refusal of aid as a later interpolation, and +if he allows Telfer to reach Branksome and receive the aid which +Buccleuch would rejoice to give, then the Elliot version of the ballad +cannot take a further step. It becomes a Scott ballad, Buccleuch sends +out his Scotts to pursue the English raiders, and the Elliots, if they +come in at all, must only be subordinates. But as the Elliot version +stands, it is Buccleuch’s refusal to do his duty that compels poor Jamie +to run to his brother-in-law, “auld Jock Grieve” in Coultartcleugh, four +miles higher on Teviot than Branksome. Jock gives him a mount, and he +rides to “Martin’s Hab” at “Catlockhill,” a place unknown to research +thereabout. Thence they both ride to Martin Elliot at Preakinhaugh, high +up in Liddesdale, and the Elliots under Martin rescue Jamie’s kye. + +Now the original ballad, if it did not contain Buccleuch’s refusal of aid +to Telfer (which refusal is a thing “too absurd to be believed”) must +merely have told about the rescue of Jamie’s kye by the Scotts, Wat of +Harden, and the rest. If Buccleuch did not refuse help he gave it, and +there was no ride by Telfer to Martin Elliot. Therefore, without a +passage “too absurd to be believed” (Buccleuch’s refusal), _there could +be no Elliots in the story_. The alternative is, that Telfer in Ettrick +_did_ pay blackmail to a man so remote as Elliot of Preakinhaugh, though +Buccleuch was his chief and his neighbour. This is absurd. Yet Colonel +Elliot firmly maintains that the version, in which the Elliots have all +the glory and Buccleuch all the shame, is the original version, and is +true on essential points. + +That is only possible if we cut out the verses about Buccleuch and make +an Ettrick man not appeal to him, but go direct to a Liddesdale man for +succour. He must run from Dodhead to Coultartcleugh, get a horse from +Jock Grieve (Buccleuch’s man and tenant), and then ride into Liddesdale +to Martin. But an Ettrick man, in a country of Scotts, would inevitably +go to his chief and neighbour, Buccleuch: it is inconceivable that he +should choose the remote Martin Elliot as his protector, and go to _him_. + +Thus, as a corollary from Colonel Elliot’s own disbelief in the Buccleuch +incident, the Elliot version of the ballad must be absolutely false and +foolish. + +If Colonel Elliot leaves in the verses on Buccleuch’s refusal, he leaves +in what he calls “too absurd to be believed.” If he cuts out these +verses as an interpolation, then Buccleuch lent aid to Telfer, and there +was no occasion to approach Martin Elliot. Or, by a third course, the +Elliot ballad originally made an Ettrick man, a neighbour of the great +Buccleuch, never dream of appealing to _him_ for help, but run to +Coultartcleugh, four miles above Buccleuch’s house, and thence make his +way over to distant Liddesdale to Martin Elliot! Yet Colonel Elliot says +that in what I call “the Elliot version,” “the story defies criticism.” +{93a} Now, however you take it,—I give you three choices,—the story is +absolutely impossible. + +This Elliot version was unknown to lovers of the ballads, till the late +Professor Child of Harvard, the greatest master of British ballad-lore +that ever lived, in his beautiful _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, +printed it from a manuscript belonging to Mr. Macmath, which had +previously been the property of a friend of Scott, Charles Kirkpatrick +Sharpe. This version is entitled “Jamie Telfer _in_ the Fair Dodhead,” +not “_of_”: Jamie was a tenant (there was no Jamie Telfer tenant of +Dodhead in 1570–1609, but concerning that I have more to say). Jamie was +no laird. + +Before Professor Child’s publication of the Elliot version, we had only +that given by Scott in _The Border Minstrelsy_ of 1802. Now Scott’s +version is at least as absurdly incredible as the Elliot version. In +Scott’s version the unhappy Jamie runs, not to Branksome and Buccleuch, +to meet a refusal; but to “the Stobs’s Ha’”(on Slitterick above Hawick) +and to “auld Gibby Elliot,” the laird. Elliot bids him go to Branksome +and the laird of Buccleuch, + + For, man, ye never paid money to me! + +Naturally Telfer did not pay to Elliot: he paid to Buccleuch, if to any +one. More, till after the Union of 1603, and the end of Border raids, +Gilbert Elliot, a cousin and friend of Buccleuch, _was not the owner of +Stobs_. The Hon. George Elliot pointed out this fact in his _Border +Elliots and the Family of Minto_: Colonel Elliot rightly insists on this +point. + +The Scott version is therefore as hopelessly false as the Elliot version. +The Elliot version, with the Buccleuch incident, is “too absurd to be +believed,” and could not have been written (except in banter of +Buccleuch), while men remembered the customs of the sixteenth century. +The Scott version, again, could not be composed before the tradition +arose that Gilbert Elliot _was_ laird of Stobs before the Union of the +Crowns in 1603. Now that tradition was in full force on the Border +before 1688. We know that (see chapter on _Kinmont Willie_, _infra_), +for, in 1688, a man born in 1613, Captain Walter Scott of Satchells, in +his _Metrical History of the Honourable Families of the Names of Scott +and Elliot_, represents Gilbert Elliot of Stobs as riding with Buccleuch +in the rescue of Kinmont Willie, in 1596. {95a} Now Satchells’s own +father rode in that fray, he says, {95b} and he gives a minute genealogy +of the Elliots of Stobs. {95c} + +Thus the belief that Gilbert Elliot was laird of Stobs by 1596 was +current in the traditions of a man born seventeen years after 1596. _The +Scott version rests on that tradition_, and is not earlier than the rise +of that erroneous belief. + +Neither the Scott nor Elliot version is other than historically false. +But the Scott version, if we cut out the reference to auld Gibby Elliot, +offers a conceivable, though not an actual, course of events. The Elliot +version, if we excise the Buccleuch incident, does not. Cutting out the +Buccleuch incident, Telfer goes all the way from Ettrick to Liddesdale, +seeking help in that remote country, and never thinks of asking aid from +Buccleuch, his neighbour and chief. This is idiotic. In the Scott +version, if we cut out the refusal of Gilbert Elliot of Stobs, Telfer +goes straight to his brother-in-law, auld Jock Grieve, within four miles +of Buccleuch at Branksome; thence to another friend, William’s Wat, at +Catslockhill (now Branksome-braes), and so to Buccleuch at Branksome. +This is absurd enough. Telfer would have gone straight to Branksome and +Buccleuch, unless he were a poor shy small farmer, _who wanted sponsors_, +known to Buccleuch. Jock Grieve and William’s Wat, both of them +retainers and near neighbours of Buccleuch, were such sponsors. Granting +this, the Scott version runs smoothly, Telfer goes to his sponsors, and +with his sponsors to Buccleuch, and Buccleuch’s men rescue his kye. + + + +III +COLONEL ELLIOT’S CHARGE AGAINST SIR WALTER SCOTT + + +Colonel Elliot believes generally in the historical character of the +ballad as given in the Elliot version, but “is inclined to think that” +the original poet “never wrote the stanza” (the stanza with Buccleuch’s +refusal) “at all, and that it has been inserted at some later period.” +{97a} In that case Colonel Elliot is “inclined to think” that an Ettrick +farmer, robbed by the English, never dreamed of going to his neighbour +and potent chief, but went all the way to Martin Elliot, high up in +Liddesdale, to seek redress! Surely few can share the Colonel’s +inclination. Why should a farmer in Ettrick “choose to lord” a remote +Elliot, when he had the Cock of the Border, the heroic Buccleuch, within +eight miles of his home? + +Holding these opinions, Colonel Elliot, with deep regret— + + I wat the tear blinded his ee— + +accuses Sir Walter Scott of having taken the Elliot version—till then the +only version—and of having altered stanzas vii.–xi. (in which Jamie goes +to Branksome, and is refused succour) into his own stanzas vii.–xi., in +which Jamie goes to Stobs and is refused succour. This evil thing Scott +did, thinks Colonel Elliot. Scott had no copy, he thinks, of the ballad +except an Elliot copy, which he deliberately perverted. + +We must look into the facts of the case. I know no older published copy +of the ballad than that of Scott, in _Border Minstrelsy_, vol. i. p. 91 +_et seqq._ (1802). Professor Child quotes a letter from the Ettrick +shepherd to Scott of “June 30, 1802” thus: “I am surprised to find that +the songs in your collection differ so widely from my mother’s; _Jamie +Telfer_ differs in many particulars.” {98a} (This is an incomplete +quotation. I give the MS. version later.) + +Scott himself, before Hogg wrote thus, had said, in the prefatory note to +his _Jamie Telfer_: “There is another ballad, under the same title as the +following, in which nearly the same incidents are narrated, with little +difference, except that the honour of rescuing the cattle is attributed +to the Liddesdale Elliots, headed by a chief there called Martin Elliot +of the Preakin Tower, whose son, Simm, is said to have fallen in the +action. It is very possible that both the Teviotdale Scotts and the +Elliots were engaged in the affair, and that each claimed the honour of +the victory.” + +Old Mrs. Hogg’s version, “differing in many particulars” from Scott’s, +must have been the Elliot version, published by Professor Child, as “A*,” +“Jamie Telfer _in_” (not “_of_”) “the Fair Dodhead,” “from a MS. written +about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and now in the possession +of Mr. William Macmath”; it had previously belonged to Charles +Kirkpatrick Sharpe. {98b} + +There is one great point of difference between the two forms. In Sir +Walter’s variant, verse 26 summons the Scotts of Teviotdale, including +Wat of Harden. In his 28 the Scotts ride with the slogan “Rise for +Branksome readily.” Scott’s verses 34, 36, and the two first lines of +38, are, if there be such a thing as internal evidence, from his own pen. +Such lines as + + The Dinlay snaw was ne’er mair white + Nor the lyart locks o’ Harden’s hair + +are cryingly modern and “Scottesque.” + +That Sir Walter knew the other version, as in Mr. Macmath’s MS. of the +early nineteenth century, is certain; he describes that version in his +preface. That he effected the whole transposition of Scotts for Elliots +is Colonel Elliot’s opinion. {99a} + +If Scott did, I am not the man to defend his conduct; I regret and +condemn it; and shall try to prove that he found the matter in his copy. +I shall first prove, beyond possibility of doubt, that the ballad is, +from end to end, utterly unhistorical, though based on certain real +incidents of 1596–97. I shall next show that the Elliot version is +probably later than the Scott version. Finally, I shall make it certain +(or so it seems to me) that Scott worked on an old copy which was _not_ +the copy that belonged to Kirkpatrick Sharpe, but contained points of +difference, _not_ those inserted by Sir Walter Scott about “Dinlay snaw,” +and so forth. + + + +IV +WHO WAS THE FARMER IN THE DODHEAD IN 1580–1609? + + +Colonel Elliot has made no attempt to prove that one Telfer was tenant of +the Dodhead in 1580–1603, which must, we shall see, include the years in +which the alleged incidents occur. On this question—was there a Telfer +in the Dodhead in 1580–1603?—I consulted my friend, Mr. T. Craig Brown, +author of an excellent _History of Selkirkshire_. In that work (vol. i. +p. 356) the author writes: “Dodhead or Scotsbank; Dodhead was one of the +four stedes of Redefurd in 1455. In 1609 Robert Scot of Satchells +(ancestor of the poet-captain) obtained a Crown charter of the lands of +Dodbank.” For the statement that Dodhead was one of the three stedes in +1455, Mr. Craig Brown quotes “The Retoured Extent of 1628,” “an +unimpeachable authority.” For the Crown charter of 1609, we have only to +look up “Dodbank” in the Register of the Great Seal of 1609. The charter +is of November 24, 1609, and gratifies “Robert Scott of Satscheillis” +(father of the Captain Walter Scott who composed the _Metrical History_ +of the Scotts in 1688) with the lands, which have been occupied by him +and his forefathers “from a time past human memory.” Thus, writes Mr. +Craig Brown to me, “Scott of Satchells was undoubtedly Scott of _Dodhead_ +also in 1609.” + +In “The Retoured Extent of 1628,” “_Dodhead_ or Dodbank” appears as +Harden’s property. Thus in 1628 the place was “Dodhead or Dodbank,” a +farm that had been tenanted by Scotts “from beyond human memory.” But +Mr. Craig Brown proves from record that one Simpson farmed it in 1510. + +So where does Jamie Telfer come in? + +The farmers were Scotts, it was to their chief, Buccleuch, that they went +when they needed aid. {101a} + +Thus vanishes the hero of the ballad, _Jamie Telfer in the Fair Dodhead_, +and thus the ballad is pure fiction from end to end. + + + +V +MORE IMPOSSIBILITIES IN THE BALLAD + + +This is only one of the impossibilities in the ballad. That the Captain +of Bewcastle, an English hold, stated in a letter of the period to be +distant three miles from the frontier, the Liddel water, should seek “to +drive a prey” from the Ettrick, far through the bounds of his neighbours +and foes, Grahams, Armstrongs, Scotts, and Elliots, is a ridiculously +absurd circumstance. + +Colonel Elliot attempts to meet this difficulty by his theory of the +route taken by the Captain, which he illustrates by a map. {102a} The +ballad gives no details except that the Captain found his first guide +“high up in Hardhaughswire,” which Colonel Elliot cannot identify. The +second guide was “laigh down in Borthwick water.” If this means on the +lower course of the Borthwick, the Captain was perilously near Branksome +Hall and Harden, and his ride was foolhardy. But “laigh down,” I think, +means merely “on lower ground than Hardhaughswire.” + +The Captain, as soon as he crossed the Ritterford after leaving +Bewcastle, was in hostile and very watchful Armstrong country. This +initial difficulty Colonel Elliot meets by marking on his map, as +Armstrong country, the north bank of the Liddel down to Kershope burn; +and the Captain crosses Liddel below that burn at Ritterford. Thence he +goes north by west, across Tarras water, up Ewes water, up Mickledale +burn, by Merrylaw and Ramscleugh and so on to Howpasley, which is not on +the lower but the upper Borthwick. + +Looking at Colonel Elliot’s chart of the Captain’s route, all seems easy +enough for the Captain. He does not try to ride into Teviotdale, for +which he is making, up the Liddel water, and thence by the Hermitage +tributary on his left. Colonel Elliot studs that region with names of +Armstrong and Elliot strongholds. He makes the Captain, crossing Liddel +by the Ritterford, bear to his left, through a space empty of hostile +habitations, in his map. This seems prudent, but the region thus left +blank was full of the fiercest and most warlike of the Armstrong name. +That road was closed to the Captain! + +Colonel Elliot has failed to observe this fact, which I go on to prove, +from a memoir addressed in 1583 to Burleigh, by Thomas Musgrave, the +active son of the aged Captain of Bewcastle, Sir Simon Musgrave. Thomas +describes the topography of the Middle Marches. He says that the +Armstrongs hold both banks of Liddel as far south as “Kershope foot” (the +junction of the Kershope with the Liddel), and hold the north side of the +Liddel as far as its junction with the Esk. {103a} Thus on crossing +Liddel by the Ritterford, the Captain had at once to pass through the +hostile Armstrongs. Thereby also were Grahams with whom the Musgraves of +Bewcastle were in deadly feud. Farther down Esk, west of Esk, dwelt +Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong, “at a place called Morton.” If he did pass +so far through Armstrongs, the Captain met them again, farther north, on +Tarras side, where Runyen Armstrong lived at Thornythaite. Near him was +Armstrong of Hollhouse, Musgrave’s great enemy. North of Tarras the +Captain rode through Ewesdale; there he had to deal with three hundred +Armstrong men of the spear. {104a} When he reached Ramscleuch (which he +never could have done), the Colonel’s map makes the Captain ride past +Ramscleuch, then farmed by the Grieves, retainers of Buccleuch, who would +warn Branksome. When the Captain reached Howpasley on Borthwick water, +he would be observed by the men of Scott of Howpasley, the Grieves, who +could send a rider some six miles to warn Branksome. + +We get the same information as to the perils of the Captain’s path from +the places marked on Blaeu’s map of 1600–54. There are Hollhouse and +Thornythaite, Armstrong towers, and the active John Armstrong of Langholm +can come at a summons. + +It seems to be a great error to suppose that the route chosen for the +Captain by Colonel Elliot could lead him into anything better than a +death-trap. I must insist that it would have been madness for a Captain +of Bewcastle to ride far through Armstrong country, deep into Buccleuch’s +country, and return on another line through Scott, and near Elliot, and +through Armstrong country—and all for no purpose but to steal ten cows in +remote Selkirkshire! + +Here I may save the reader trouble, by omitting a great mass of detail as +to the deplorable condition of Bewcastle itself in 1580–96. Sir Simon, +the Captain, declares himself old and weary. The hold is “utterly +decayed,” the riders are only thirty-seven men fairly equipped. Soldiers +are asked for, sometimes fifty are sent from the garrison of Berwick, +then they are withdrawn. Bewcastle is forayed almost daily; “March +Bills” minutely describe the cattle, horses, and personal property taken +from the Captain and the people by the Armstrongs and Elliots. + +Once, in 1582, Thomas Musgrave slew Arthur Graham, a near neighbour, and +took one hundred and sixty kye, but this only caused such a feud that the +Musgraves could not stir safely from home. From 1586 onwards, Thomas +Musgrave, officially or unofficially, was acting Captain of Bewcastle. +He had no strength to justify him in raiding to remote Ettrick, through +enemies who penned him in at Bewcastle. + +I look on Musgrave as the Captain whose existence is known to the +ballad-maker, and I find the origin of the tale of his defeat and capture +in the ballad, in a distorted memory of his actual capture. + +On 3rd July 1596, Thomas (having got Scrope’s permission, without which +he dared not cross the Border on affairs of war) attempted a retaliatory +raid on Armstrongs within seven miles of the Border, the Armstrongs of +Hollace, or Hollhouse. “He found only empty houses;” he “sought a prey” +in vain; he let his men straggle, and returning homeward, with some +fifteen companions, he was ambushed by the Armstrongs near Bewcastle, was +refused shelter by a Graham, was taken prisoner, and was sent to +Buccleuch at Branksome. On 15th July he came home under a bond of £200 +for ransom. {106a} As every one did, in his circumstances, the Captain +made out his Bill for Damages. It was indented on 28th April 1597. We +learn that John (Armstrong) of Langholm, Will of Kinmont (not Liddesdale +men), and others, who took him, are in the Captain’s debt for “24 horses +and mares, himself prisoner, and ransomed to £200, and 16 other +prisoners, and slaughter.” The charges are admitted by the accused; the +Captain is to get £400. {106b} + +In my opinion this capture of the Captain of Bewcastle and others, +poetically handled, is, with other incidents, the basis of the ballad. +Colonel Elliot says that the incident “is no proof that a Captain of +Bewcastle was not also taken or killed at some other place or at some +other time.” But _what_ Captain, and when? Sir Simon, in 1586, had been +Captain, he says, for thirty years. Thenceforth till near the Union of +the Crowns, Thomas was Captain, or acting Captain. + +So considerable an event as the taking of a Captain of Bewcastle, who, in +the ballad, was shot through the head and elsewhere, could not escape +record in dispatches, and the periodical “March Bills,” or statements of +wrongs to be redressed. Colonel Elliot’s reply takes the shape of the +argument that the ballad may speak of some other Captain, at some other +time; and that, in one way or another, the sufferings and losses of +_that_ Captain may have escaped mention in the English dispatches from +the Border. These dispatches are full of minute details, down to the +theft of a single mare. I am content to let historians familiar with the +dispatches decide as to whether the Captain’s mad ride into Ettrick, with +his dangerous wounds, loss of property, and loss of seventeen men killed +and wounded (as in the ballad), could escape mention. + +The capture of Thomas Musgrave, I think, and two other +incidents,—confused in course of tradition, and handled by the poet with +poetic freedom,—are the materials of _Jamie Telfer_. One of the other +incidents is of April 1597. {107a} Here Buccleuch in person, on the +Sabbath, burned twenty houses in Tynedale, and “slew fourteen men who had +been in Scotland and brought away their booty.” Here we have Buccleuch +“on the hot trod,” pursuing English reivers, recovering the spoils +probably, and slaying as many of the raiders as the Captain lost, in the +ballad. Again, not a _son_ of Elliot of Preakinhaugh (as I had +erroneously said), but a _nephew_ named Martin, was slain in a Tynedale +raid into Liddesdale. {108a} Soldiers aided the English raiders. A +confused memory of this death of Elliot’s nephew in 1597 may be the +source of the story of the death of his son, Simmy, in the ballad. + +Our traditional ballads all arise out of some germs of history, all +handle the facts romantically, and all appear to have been composed, in +their extant shapes, at a considerable time after the events. I may cite +_Mary Hamilton_; _The Laird of Logie_ is another case in point; there are +many others. + +Colonel Elliot does not agree with me. So be it. + +Colonel Elliot writes that,—in place of my saying that _Jamie Telfer_ “is +a mere mythical perversion of carefully recorded facts,”—“it would surely +be more correct to say that it is a fairly true, though jumbled, account +of actual incidents, separated from each other by only short periods of +time . . . ” {108b} If he means, or thinks that I mean, that the actual +facts were the capture of Musgrave near Bewcastle in 1596 by the +Armstrongs, with Buccleuch’s hot-trod, and Martin Elliot’s slaying in +1597, I entirely agree with him that the facts are “jumbled.” But as to +the opinion that the ballad is “fairly true” about the raid to Ettrick +(the Captain could not ride a mile beyond the Border without the Warden’s +permission), about the non-existent Jamie Telfer, about the shooting, +taking, and plundering of the Captain, about his loss of seventeen men +wounded and slain (he lost about as many prisoners),—I have given reasons +for my disbelief. + + + +VI +IS THE SCOTT VERSION, WITH ELLIOTS AND SCOTTS TRANSPOSED, THE LATER +VERSION? + + +We now come to the important question, Is the Scott version of the ballad +(apart from Sir Walter’s decorative stanzas) necessarily _later_ than the +Elliot version in Sharpe’s copy? The chief argument for the lateness of +the Scott version, the presence of a Gilbert Elliot of Stobs at a date +when this gentleman had not yet acquired Stobs, I have already treated. +If the ballad is no earlier than the date when Elliot was believed (as by +Satchells) to have obtained Stobs before 1596, the argument falls to the +ground. + +Starting from that point, and granting that a minstrel fond of the Scotts +wants to banter the Elliots, he may make Telfer ask aid at Stobs. After +that, which version is better in its topography? Bidden by Stobs to seek +Buccleuch, Telfer runs to Teviot, to Coultartcleugh, some four miles +above Branksome. Branksome was nearer, but Telfer was shy, let us say, +and did not know Buccleuch; while at Coultartcleugh, Jock Grieve was his +brother-in-law. Jock gives him a mount, and takes him to “Catslockhill.” + +Now, no Catslockhill is known anywhere, to me or to Colonel Elliot. Mr. +Henderson, in a note to the ballad, {110a} speaks of “Catslack in +Branxholm,” and cites the _Register of the Privy Seal_ for 4th June 1554, +and the _Register of the Privy Council_ for 14th October 1592. The +records are full of _that_ Catslack, but it is not in Branksome. Blaeu’s +map (1600–54) gives it, with its appurtenances, on the north side of St. +Mary’s Loch. There is a Catslack on the north side of Yarrow, near +Ladhope, on the southern side. Neither Catslack is the Catslockhill of +the Scott ballad. But on evidence, “and it is good evidence,” says +Colonel Elliot, {110b} I prove that, in 1802, a place called “Catlochill” +existed between Coultartcleugh and Branksome. The place (Mrs. Grieve, +Branksome Park, informs me) is now called Branksome-braes. On his copy +of _The Minstrelsy_ of 1802, Mr. Grieve, then tenant of Branksome Park, +made a marginal note. Catlochill was still known to him; it was in a +commanding site, and had been strengthened by the art of man. His note I +have seen and read. + +Thus, on good evidence, there was a Catlochill, or Catlockhill, between +Coultartcleugh and Branksome. The Scott version is right in its +topography. + +This fact was unknown to Colonel Elliot. Not knowing a Catslackhill or +Catslockhill in Teviot, he made Scott’s Telfer go to an apocryphal +Catlockhill in Liddesdale. Professor Veitch had said that the +Catslockhill of the ballad “_is to be sought_” in some locality between +Coultartcleugh and Branxholm. Colonel Elliot calls this “a really +preposterously cool suggestion.” {111a} Why “really preposterously +cool”? Being sought, the place is found where it had always been. Jamie +Telfer found it, and in it his friend “William’s Wat,” who took him to +the laird of Buccleuch at Branksome. + +In the Elliot version, when refused aid by Buccleuch, Jamie ran to +Coultartcleugh,—as in Scott’s,—on his way to Martin Elliot at +Preakinhaugh on the Liddel. Jamie next “takes the fray” to “the +Catlockhill,” and is there remounted by “Martin’s Hab,” an Elliot (not by +William’s Wat), and _they_ “take the fray” to Martin Elliot at +Preakinhaugh in Liddesdale. This is very well, but where _is_ this +“Catlockhill” in Liddesdale? Is it even a real place? + +Colonel Elliot has found no such place; nor can I find it in the +_Registrum Magni Sigilli_, nor in Blaeu’s map of 1600–54. + +Colonel Elliot’s argument has been that the Elliot version, the version +of the Sharpe MS., is the earlier, for, among other reasons, its +topography is correct. {112a} It makes Telfer run from Dodhead to +Branksome for aid, because that was the comparatively near residence of +the powerful Buccleuch. Told by Buccleuch to seek aid from Martin Elliot +in Liddesdale, Telfer does so. He runs up Teviot four miles to his +brother-in-law, Jock Grieve, who mounts him. He then rides off at a +right angle, from Teviot to Catlockhill, says the Elliot ballad, where he +is rehorsed by Martin’s Hab. The pair then take the fray to Martin +Elliot at Preakinhaugh on Liddel water, and Martin summons and leads the +pursuers of the Captain. + +This, to Colonel Elliot’s mind, is all plain sailing, all is feasible and +natural. And so it _is_ feasible and natural, if Colonel Elliot can find +a Catlockhill anywhere between Coultartcleugh and Preakinhaugh. On that +line, in Mr. Veitch’s words, Catlockhill “is to be sought.” But just as +Mr. Veitch could find no Catslockhill between Coultartcleugh and +Branksome, so Colonel Elliot can find no Catlockhill between +Coultartcleugh and Preakinhaugh. He tells us {112b} indeed of +“Catlockhill on Hermitage water.” But there is no such place known! +Colonel Elliot’s method is to take a place which, he says, is given as +“Catlie” Hill, “between Dinlay burn and Hermitage water, on Blaeu’s map +of 1654.” We may murmur that Catlie Hill is one thing and Catlock +another, but Colonel Elliot points out that “lock” means “the meeting of +waters,” and that Catlie Hill is near the meeting of Dinlay burn and the +Hermitage water. But then why does Blaeu call it, not Catlockhill, nor +Catlie hill, nor “Catlie” even, but “_Gatlie_,” for so it is distinctly +printed on my copy of the map? Really we cannot take a place called +“Gatlie Hill” and pronounce that we have found “Catlockhill”! Would +Colonel Elliot have permitted Mr. Veitch—if Mr. Veitch had found “Gatlie +Hill” near Branksome, in Blaeu—to aver that he had found Catslockhill +near Branksome? + +Thus, till Colonel Elliot produces on good evidence a Catlockhill between +Coultartcleugh and Preakinhaugh, the topography of the Elliot ballad, of +the Sharpe copy of the ballad, is nowhere, for neither Catliehill nor +Gatliehill is Catlockhill. That does not look as if the Elliot were +older than the Scott version. (There was a Sim _Armstrong_ of the +_Cathill_, slain by a Ridley of Hartswell in 1597. {113a}) + +We now take the Scott version where Telfer has arrived at Branksome. +Scott’s stanza xxv. is Sharpe’s xxiv. In Scott, Buccleuch; in Sharpe, +Martin Elliot bids his men “warn the waterside” (Sharpe), “warn the water +braid and wide” (Scott). Scott’s stanza xxvi. is probably his own, or +may be, for he bids them warn Wat o’ Harden, Borthwick water, and the +Teviot Scotts, and Gilmanscleuch—which is remote. Then, in xxvii., +Buccleuch says— + + Ride by the gate of Priesthaughswire, + And warn the Currors o’ the Lee, + As ye come down the Hermitage slack + Warn doughty Wiliie o’ Gorrinberry. + +All this is plain sailing, by the pass of Priesthaughswire the Scotts +will ride from Teviot into Hermitage water, and, near the Slack, they +will pass Gorrinberry, will call Will, and gallop down Hermitage water to +the Liddel, where they will nick the returning Captain at the Ritterford. + +The Sharpe version makes Martin order the warning of the waterside +(xxiv.), and then Martin says (xxv.)— + + When ye come in at the Hermitage Slack, + Warn doughty Will o’ Gorranherry. + +Colonel Elliot {114a} supposes Martin (if I follow his meaning) to send +Simmy with his command, _back over all the course that Telfer and +Martin’s Hab have already ridden_: back past Shaws, near Braidley (a +house of Martin’s), past “Catlockhill,” to Gorranberry, to “warn the +waterside.” But surely Telfer, who passed Gorranberry gates, and with +Hab passed the other places, had “taken the fray,” and warned the water +quite sufficiently already. If this be granted, the Sharpe version is +taking from the Scott version the stanza, so natural there, about the +Hermitage Slack and Gorranberry. But Colonel Elliot infers, from stanzas +xxvi., xxx., xxxi., that Simmy has warned the water as far as Gorranberry +(_again_), has come in touch with the Captain, “between the Frostily and +the Ritterford,” and that this is “consistent only with his having moved +up the Hermitage water.” + +Meanwhile Martin, he thinks, rode with his men down Liddel water. But +here we get into a maze of topographical conjecture, including the +hypothesis that perhaps the Liddel came down in flood, and caused the +English to make for Kershope ford instead of Ritterford, and here they +were met by Martin’s men on the Hermitage line of advance. I cannot find +this elegant combined movement in the ballad; all this seems to me +hypothesis upon hypothesis, even granting that Martin sent Simmy back up +Hermitage that he might thence cut sooner across the enemy’s path. +Colonel Elliot himself writes: “It is certain that after the news of the +raid reached Catlockhill” (_and_ Gorranberry, Telfer passed it), “it must +have spread rapidly through Hermitage water, and it is most unlikely for +the men of this district to have delayed taking action until they +received instructions from their chief.” {115} + +That is exactly what I say; but Martin says, “When ye come in at the +Hermitage Slack, warn doughty Will o’ Gorranberry.” Why go to warn him, +when, as Colonel Elliot says, the news is running through Hermitage +water, and the men are most probably acting on it,—as they certainly +would do? + +Martin’s orders, in Sharpe xxv., are taken, I think, from Buccleuch’s, in +Scott’s xxvii. + +The point is that Martin had no need to warn men so far away as +Gorranberry,—they were roused already. Yet he orders them to be warned, +and about a combined movement of Martin and Simmy on different lines the +ballad says not a word. All this is inference merely, inference not from +historical facts, but from what may be guessed to have been in the mind +of the poet. + +Thus the Elliot or Sharpe version has topography that will not hold +water, while the Scott topography does hold water; and the Elliot song +seems to borrow the lines on the Hermitage Slack and Gorranberry from a +form of the Scott version. This being the case, the original version on +which Scott worked is earlier than the Elliot version. In the Scott +version the rescuers must come down the Hermitage Slack: in the Elliot +they have no reason for riding _back_ to that place. + + + +VII +SCOTT HAD A COPY OF THE BALLAD WHICH WAS NOT THE SHARPE COPY + + +Did Scott know no other version than that of the Sharpe MS.? In Scott’s +version, stanza xlix., the last, is absent from the Elliot version, which +concludes triumphantly, thus— + + Now on they came to the fair Dodhead, + They were a welcome sight to see, + And instead of his ain ten milk-kye + Jamie Telfer’s gotten thirty and three. + +Scott too gives this, but ends with a verse not in Sharpe— + + And he has paid the rescue shot + Baith wi’ goud and white money, + And at the burial o’ Willie Scott + I wat was mony a weeping ee. + +Did Scott add this? Proof is impossible; but the verse is so prosaic, +and so injurious to the triumphant preceding verse, that I think Scott +found it in his copy: in which case he had another copy than Sharpe’s. + +Scott (stanza xviii.) reads “Catslockhill” where the Sharpe MS. reads +“Catlockhill.” In Scott’s time it was a mound, but the name was then +known to Mr. Grieve, the tenant of Branksome Park. To-day I cannot find +the mound; is it likely that Scott, before making the change, sought +diligently for the mound and its name? If so, he found “_Catlochill_,” +for so Mr. Grieve writes it, not Catslockhill. + +Meanwhile Colonel Elliot, we know, has no Catlockhill where he wants it; +he has only Gatliehill, unless his Blaeu varies from my copy, and +Gatliehill is not Catlockhill. + +Scott gives (xlviii.) the speech of the Captain after he is shot through +the head and in another dangerous part of his frame— + + “Hae back thy kye!” the Captain said, + “Dear kye, I trow, to some they be, + For gin I suld live a hundred years, + There will ne’er fair lady smile on me.” + +This is not in Sharpe’s MS., and I attribute this redundant stanza to +Scott’s copy. The Captain, remember, has a shot “through his head,” and +another which must have caused excruciating torture. In these +circumstances would a poet like Scott put in his mouth a speech which +merely reiterates the previous verse? No! But the verse was in Scott’s +copy. + +Colonel Elliot has himself noted a more important point than these: he +quotes Scott’s stanza xii., which is absent from the Sharpe MS.— + + My hounds may a’ rin masterless, + My hawks may fly frae tree to tree, + My lord may grip my vassal lands, + For there again maun I never be! + +“They are, doubtless, beautiful lines, but their very beauty jars like a +false note. One feels they were written by another hand, by an artist of +a higher stamp than a Border ‘ballad-maker.’ And not only is it their +beauty that jars, but so also does their inapplicability to Jamie Telfer +and to the circumstances in which he found himself—so much so, indeed, +that it may well occur to one that the stanza belongs to some other +ballad, and has accidentally been pitchforked into this one. It would +not have been out of place in the ballad of _The Battle of Otterbourne_, +and, indeed, it bears some resemblance to a stanza in that ballad.” Here +the Colonel says that the lines “one feels were written by another hand, +by an artist of a higher stamp than a Border ballad-maker.” But “it may +also occur to one that the stanza belongs to some other ballad, and has +_accidentally_” (my italics) “been pitchforked into this”: a very sound +inference. + +Now if Scott had only the Sharpe version, he was the last man to +“pitchfork” into it, “accidentally,” a stanza from “some other ballad,” +that stanza being as Colonel Elliot says “inapplicable” to Telfer and his +circumstances. Poor Jamie, a small tenant-farmer, with ten cows, and, as +far as we learn, not one horse, had no hawks and hounds; no “vassal +lands,” and no reason to say that at the Dodhead he “maun never be +again.” He could return from his long run! Scott certainly did not +compose these lines; and he could not have pitchforked them into _Jamie +Telfer_, either by accident or design. + +Professor Child remarked on all this: “Stanza xii. is not only found +elsewhere (compare _Young Beichan_, E vi.), but could not be more +inappropriately brought in than here; Scott, however, is not responsible +for that.” {120a} + + The hawk that flies from tree to tree + +is a formula; it comes in the Kinloch MS. copy of the ballad of _Jamie +Douglas_, date about 1690. + +I know no proof that Scott was acquainted with variant E of _Young +Beichan_. {120b} If he had been, he could not have introduced into +_Jamie Telfer_ lines so utterly out of keeping with Telfer’s +circumstances, as Colonel Elliot himself says that stanza xii. is. It +may be argued, “if Scott _did_ find stanza xii. in his copy, it was in +his power to cut it out; he treated his copies as he pleased.” This is +true, but my position is that, of the two, Scott is more likely to have +let the stanza abide where he found it (as he did with his MS. of +_Tamlane_, retaining its absurdities) in his copy, than to “pitchfork it +in,” from an obscure variant of _Young Beichan_, which we cannot prove +that he had ever heard or read. But as we can never tell that Scott did +_not_ know any rhyme, we ask, why did he “pitchfork in” the stanza, where +it was quite out of place? Child absolves him from this absurdity. + +Thus Scott had before him another than the Sharpe copy; had a copy +containing stanza xii. That copy presented the perversion—the +transposition of Scott’s and Elliot’s—and into that copy Scott wrote the +stanzas which bear his modern romantic mark. Colonel Elliot, we saw, is +uncertain whether to attribute stanza xii. to “another hand, an artist of +higher stamp than a Border ballad-maker,” or to regard it as belonging +“to some other ballad,” and as having been “accidentally pitchforked into +this one.” The stanza is, in fact, an old floating ballad stanza, +attracted into the _cantefable of Susie Pye_, and the ballad of _Young +Beichan_ (E), and partly into _Jamie Douglas_. Thus Scott did not _make_ +the stanza, and we cannot suppose that, if he knew the stanza in any +form, he either “accidentally pitchforked” or wilfully inserted into +_Jamie Telfer_ anything so absurdly inappropriate. The inference is that +Scott worked on another copy, not the Sharpe copy. + +If Scott had not a copy other than Sharpe’s, why should he alter Sharpe’s +(vii.) + + The moon was up and the sun was down, + +into + + The sun wasna up but the moon was down? + +What did he gain by that? _Why did he make Jamie_ “_of_” _not_ “_in_” +_the Dodhead_, _if he found_ “_in_” _in his copy_? “In” means “tenant +in,” “of” means “laird of,” as nobody knew better than Scott. Jamie is +evidently no laird, but “of” was in Scott’s copy. + +If the question were about two Greek texts, the learned would admit that +these points in A (Scott) are not derived from B (Sharpe). Scott’s +additions have an obvious motive, they add picturesqueness to his clan. +But the differences which I have noticed do nothing of that kind. When +they affect the poetry they spoil the poetry, when they do not affect the +poetry they are quite motiveless, whence I conclude that Scott followed +his copy in these cases, and that his copy was not the Sharpe MS. + +If I have satisfied the reader on that point I need not touch on Colonel +Elliot’s long and intricate argument to prove, or suggest, that Scott had +before him no copy of the ballad except one supposed by the Colonel to +have been taken by James Hogg from his mother’s recitation, while that +copy, again, is supposed to be the Sharpe MS.—all sheer conjecture. +{122a} Not that I fear to encounter Colonel Elliot on this ground, but +argufying on it is dull, and apt to be inconclusive. + +In the letter of Hogg to Scott (June 30, 1803) as given by Mr. Douglas in +_Familiar Letters_, Hogg says, “I am surprised to find that the songs in +your collection differ so widely from my mother’s . . . _Jamie Telfer_ +differs in many particulars.” {123a} The marks of omission were all +filled up in Hogg’s MS. letter thus: “Is Mr. Herd’s MS. genuine? I +suspect it.” Then it runs on, “_Jamie Telfer_ differs in many +particulars.” + +I owe this information to the kindness of Mr. Macmath. What does Hogg +mean? Does “Is Mr. Herd’s MS. genuine?” mean all Herd’s MS. copies used +by Scott? Or does it refer to _Jamie Telfer_ in especial? + +Mr. Macmath, who possesses C. K. Sharpe’s MS. copy of the Elliot version, +believes that it is Herd’s hand as affected by age. Mr. Macmath and I +independently reached the conclusion that by “Mr. Herd’s MS.” Hogg meant +all Herd’s MSS., which Scott quoted in _The Minstrelsy_ of 1803. Their +readings varied from Mrs. Hogg’s; therefore Hogg misdoubted them. He +adds that _Jamie Telfer_ differs from his mother’s version, without +meaning that, for _Jamie_, Scott used a Herd MS. + + + +CONCLUSION + + +I have now proved, I hope, that the ballad of _Jamie Telfer_ is entirely +mythical except for a few suggestions derived from historical events of +1596–97. I have shown, and Colonel Elliot agrees, that refusal of aid by +Buccleuch (or by Elliot of Stobs) is impossible, and that the ballad, if +it existed without this incident, must have been a Scott, and could not +be an Elliot ballad. No farmer in Ettrick would pay protection-money to +an Elliot on Liddel, while he had a Scott at Branksome. I have also +disproved the existence of a _Jamie Telfer_ as farmer at “Dodhead or +Dodbank” in the late sixteenth century. + +As to the character of Sir Walter Scott, I have proved, I hope, that he +worked on a copy of the ballad which was not the Elliot version, or the +Sharpe copy; so that this copy may have represented the Scotts as taking +the leading part; while for the reasons given, it is apparently earlier +than the Elliot version—cannot, at least, be proved to be later—and is +topographically the more correct of the two. I have given antique +examples of the same sort of perversions in _Otterburn_. If I am right, +Colonel Elliot’s charge against Scott lacks its base—that Scott knew none +but the Sharpe copy, whence it is inferred that he not only decorated the +song (as is undeniable), but perverted it in a way far from +sportsmanlike. + +I may have shaken Colonel Elliot’s belief in the historicity of the +ballad. His suspicions of Scott I cannot hope to remove, and they are +very natural suspicions, due to Scott’s method of editing ballads and +habit of “giving them a cocked hat and a sword,” as he did to stories +which he heard; and repeated, much improved. + +Absolute proof that Scott did, or did not, pervert the ballad, and turn a +false Elliot into a false Scott version, cannot be obtained unless new +documents bearing on the matter are discovered. + +But, I repeat, as may be read in the chapter on _The Ballad of +Otterburne_, such inversions and perversions of ballads occurred freely +in the sixteenth century, and, in the seventeenth, the process may have +been applied to _Jamie Telfer_. {125a} + + + + +KINMONT WILLIE + + +IF there be, in _The Border Minstrelsy_, a ballad which is still popular, +or, at least, is still not forgotten, it is _Kinmont Willie_. This hero +was an Armstrong, and one of the most active of that unbridled clan. He +was taken prisoner, contrary to Border law, on a day of “Warden’s Truce,” +by Salkeld of Corby on the Eden, deputy of Lord Scrope, the English +Warden; and, despite the written remonstrances of Buccleuch, he was shut +up in Carlisle Castle. Diplomacy failing, Buccleuch resorted to force, +and, by a sudden and daring march, he surprised Carlisle Castle, rescued +Willie, and returned to Branksome. The date of the rescue is 13th April +1596. The dispatches of the period are full of this event, and of the +subsequent negotiations, with which we are not concerned. + +The ballad is worthy of the cool yet romantic gallantry of the +achievement. Kinmont Willie was a ruffian, but he had been unlawfully +seized. This was one of many studied insults passed by Elizabeth’s +officials on Scotland at that time, when the English Government, leagued +with the furious pulpiteers of the Kirk, and with Francis Stewart, the +wild Earl of Bothwell, was persecuting and personally affronting James +VI. + +In Buccleuch, the Warden of the March, England insulted the man who was +least likely to pocket a wrong. Without causing the loss of an English +life, Buccleuch repaid the affront, recovered the prisoner, broke the +strong Castle of Carlisle, made Scrope ridiculous and Elizabeth frantic. + +In addition to _Kinmont Willie_ there survive two other ballads on +rescues of prisoners in similar circumstances. One is _Jock o’ the +Side_, of which there is an English version in the Percy MSS., _John a +Side_. Scott’s version, in _The Border Minstrelsy_, is from Caw’s +_Museum_, published at Hawick in 1784. Scott leaves out Caw’s last +stanza about a punch-bowl. There are other variations. Four Armstrongs +break into Newcastle Tower. Jock, heavily ironed, is carried downstairs +on the back of one of them; they ride a river in spait, where the English +dare not follow. + +_Archie o’ Cafield_, another rescue, Scott printed in 1802 from a MS. of +Mr. Riddell of Glenriddell, a great collector, the friend of Burns. He +omitted six stanzas, and “made many editorial improvements, besides +Scotticising the spelling.” In the edition published after his death +(1833) he “has been enabled to add several stanzas from recitation.” +Leyden appears to have collected the copy whence the additional stanzas +came; the MS., at Abbotsford, is in his hand. In this ballad the Halls, +noted freebooters, rescue Archie o’ Cafield from prison in Dumfries. As +in _Jock o’ the Side_ and _Kinmont Willie_, they speak to their friend, +asking how he sleeps; they carry him downstairs, irons and all, and, as +in the two other ballads, they are pursued, cross a flooded river, banter +the English, and then, in a version in the Percy MSS., “communicated to +Percy by Miss Fisher, 1780,” the English lieutenant says— + + I think some witch has bore thee, Dicky, + Or some devil in hell been thy daddy. + I would not swam that wan water, double-horsed, + For a’ the gold in Christenty. + +Manifestly here was a form of Lord Scrope’s reply to Buccleuch, in the +last stanza of _Kinmont Willie_— + + He is either himself a devil frae hell, + Or else his mother a witch may be, + I wadna hae ridden that wan water + For a’ the gowd in Christentie. + +Scott writes, in a preface to _Archie o’ Cafield_ and _Jock o’ the Side_, +that there are, with _Kinmont Willie_, three ballads of rescues, “the +incidents in which nearly resemble each other; though the poetical +description is so different, that the editor did not feel himself at +liberty to reject any one of them, as borrowed from the others. As, +however, there are several verses, which, in recitation, are common to +all these three songs, the editor, to prevent unnecessary and +disagreeable repetition, has used the freedom of appropriating them to +that in which they have the best poetical effect.” {129a} + +Consequently the verse quoted from the Percy MS. of _Archie o’ Cafield_ +may be improved and placed in the lips of Lord Scrope, in _Kinmont +Willie_. But there is no evidence that Scott ever saw or even heard of +this Percy MS., and probably he got the verse from recitation. + +Now the affair of the rescue of Kinmont Willie was much more important +and resonant than the two other rescues, and was certain to give rise to +a ballad, which would contain much the same formulæ as the other two. +The ballad-maker, like Homer, always uses a formula if he can find one. +But _Kinmont Willie_ is so much superior to the two others, so epic in +its speed and concentration of incidents, that the question rises, had +Scott even fragments of an original ballad of the Kinmont, “much mangled +by reciters,” as he admits, or did he compose the whole? No MS. copies +exist at Abbotsford. There is only one hint. In a list of twenty-two +ballads, pasted into a commonplace book, eleven are marked X (as if he +had obtained them), and eleven others are unmarked, as if they were still +to seek. Unmarked is _Kinmount Willie_. + +Did he find it, or did he make it all? + +In 1888, in a note to _Kinmont Willie_, I wrote: “There is a prose +account very like the ballad in Scott of Satchells’ _History of the Name +of Scott_” (1688). Satchells’ long-winded story is partly in unrhymed +and unmetrical lines, partly in rhymes of various metres. The man, born +in 1613, was old, had passed his life as a soldier; certainly could not +write, possibly could not read. + +Colonel Elliot “believes that Sir Walter wrote the whole from beginning +to end, and that it is, in fact, a clever and extremely beautiful +paraphrase of Satchells’ rhymes.” {130a} + +This thorough scepticism is not a novelty, as Colonel Elliot quotes me I +had written years ago, “In _Kinmont Willie_, Scott has been suspected of +making the whole ballad.” I did not, as the Colonel says, “mention the +names of the sceptics or the grounds of their suspicions.” “The +sceptics,” or one of them, was myself: I had “suspected” on much the same +grounds as Colonel Elliot’s own, and I shall give my reasons for adopting +a more conservative opinion. One reason is merely subjective. As a man, +by long familiarity with ancient works of art, Greek gems, for example, +acquires a sense of their authenticity, or the reverse, so he does in the +case of ballads—or thinks he does—but of course this result of experience +is no ground of argument: experts are often gulled. The ballad varies in +many points from Satchells’, which Colonel Elliot explains thus: “I think +that the cause for the narrative at times diverging from that recorded by +the rhymes (of Satchells), is due, partly to artistic considerations, +partly to the author having wished to bring it more or less into +conformity with history.” {131a} + +Colonel Elliot quotes Scott’s preface to the ballad: “In many things +Satchells agrees with the ballads current in his time” (1643–88), “from +which in all probability he derived most of his information as to past +events, and from which he occasionally pirates whole verses, as we +noticed in the annotations upon the _Raid of the Reidswire_. In the +present instance he mentions the prisoner’s large spurs (alluding to +fetters), and some other little incidents noticed in the ballad, which +therefore was probably well known in his day.” + +As Satchells was born in 1613, while the rescue of _Kinmont Willie_ by +Buccleuch, out of Carlisle Castle, was in 1596, and as Satchells’ father +was in that adventure (or so Satchells says) he probably knew much about +the affair from fresh tradition. Colonel Elliot notices this, and says: +“The probability of Satchells having obtained information from a +hypothetical ballad is really quite an inadmissible argument.” + +This comes near to begging the question. As contemporary incidents much +less striking and famous than the rescue of _Kinmont Willie_ were +certainly recorded in ballads, the opinion that there was a ballad of +_Kinmont Willie_ is a legitimate hypothesis, which must be tested on its +merits. For example, we shall ask, Does Satchells’ version yield any +traces of ballad sources? + +My own opinion has been anticipated by Mr. Frank Miller in his _The Poets +of Dumfriesshire_ (p. 33, 1910), and in ballad-lore Mr. Miller is well +equipped. He says: “The balance of probability seems to be in favour of +the originality of _Kinmont Willie_,” rather than of Satchells (he means, +not of our _Kinmont Willie_ as Scott gives it, but of a ballad concerning +the Kinmont). “Captain Walter Scott’s” (of Satchells) “_True History_ +was certainly gathered out of the ballads current in his day, as well as +out of formal histories, and his account of the assault on the Castle +reads like a narrative largely due to suggestions from some popular lay.” + +Does Satchells’ version, then, show traces of a memory of such a lay? +Undoubtedly it does. + +Satchells’ prolix narrative occasionally drops or rises into ballad +lines, as in the opening about Kinmont Willie— + + It fell about the Martinmas + When kine was in the prime + +that Willie “brought a prey out of Northumberland.” The old ballad, +disregarding dates, may well have opened with this common formula. Lord +Scrope vowed vengence:— + + Took Kinmont the self-same night. + + If he had had but ten men more, + That had been as stout as he, + Lord Scroup had not the Kinmont ta’en + With all his company. + +Scott’s ballad (stanza i.) says that “fause Sakelde” and Scrope took +Willie (as in fact Salkeld of Corby _did_), and + + Had Willie had but twenty men, + But twenty men as stout as he, + Fause Sakelde had never the Kinmont ta’en, + Wi’ eight score in his cumpanie. + +Manifestly either Satchells is here “pirating” a verse of a ballad (as +Scott holds) or Scott, if he had _no_ ballad fragments before him, is +“pirating” a verse from Satchells, as Colonel Elliot must suppose. + +In my opinion, Satchells had a memory of a Kinmont ballad beginning like +_Jamie Telfer_, “It fell about the Martinmas tyde,” or, like _Otterburn_, +“It fell about the Lammas tide,” and he opened with this formula, broke +away from it, and came back to the ballad in the stanza, “If he had had +but ten men more,” which differs but slightly from stanza ii. of Scott’s +ballad. That this is so, and that, later, Satchells is again reminiscent +of a ballad, is no improbable opinion. + +In the ballad (iii.–viii.) we learn how Willie is brought a prisoner +across Liddel to Carlisle; we have his altercation with Lord Scrope, and +the arrival of the news at Branksome, where Buccleuch is at table. +Satchells also gives the altercation. In both versions Willie promises +to “take his leave” of Scrope before he quits the Castle. + +In Scott’s ballad (Scrope speaks) (stanza vi.). + + Before ye cross my castle yate, + I trow ye shall take fareweel o’ me. + +Willie replies— + + I never yet lodged in a hostelrie, + But I paid my lawing before I gaed. + +In Satchells, Lord Scrope says— + + “Before thou goest away thou must + Even take thy leave of me?” + “By the cross of my sword,” says Willie then, + “I’ll take my leave of thee.” + +Now, had Scott been pirating Satchells, I think he would have kept “By +the cross of my sword,” which is picturesque and probable, Willie being +no good Presbyterian. In _Otterburne_, Scott, _altering Hogg’s copy_, +makes Douglas swear “By the might of Our Ladye.” + +It is a question of opinion; but I do think that if Scott were merely +paraphrasing and pirating Satchells, he could not have helped putting +into his version the Catholic, “‘By the cross of my sword,’ then Willy +said,” as given by Satchells. To do this was safe, as Scott had said +that Satchells does pirate ballads. On the other hand, Satchells, +composing in black 1688, when Catholicism had been stamped out on the +_Scottish Border_, was not apt to invent “By the cross of my sword.” It +_looks_ like Scott’s work, for he, of course, knew how Catholicism +lingered among the spears of Bothwell, himself a Catholic, in 1596. But +it is _not_ Scott’s work, it is in Satchells. In both Satchells and the +ballad, news comes to Buccleuch. Here Satchells again balladises— + + “It is that way?” Buckcleugh did say; + “Lord Scrope must understand + That he has not only done me wrong + But my Sovereign, James of Scotland. + + “My Sovereign Lord, King of Scotland, + Thinks not his cousin Queen, + Will offer to invade his land + Without leave asked and gi’en.” + +I do not see how Satchells could either invent or glean from tradition +the gist of Buccleuch’s diplomatic remonstrances, first with Salkeld, for +Scrope was absent at the time of Willie’s capture, then with Scrope. +Buccleuch, in fact, wrote that the taking of Willie was “to the touch of +the King,” a stain on his honour, says a contemporary manuscript. {135a} + +In a _contemporary_ ballad, a kind of rhymed news-sheet, the facts would +be known and reported. But at this point (at Buccleuch’s reception of +the news of Kinmont), Scott is perhaps overmastered by his opportunity, +and, I think, himself composes stanzas ix., x., xi., xii. + + O is my basnet a widow’s curch? + Or my lance a wand o’ the willow tree? + +and so on. Child and Mr. Henderson are of the same opinion; but it is +only sense of style that guides us in such a matter, nor can I give other +grounds for supposing that the original ballad appears again in stanza +xiii. + + O were there war between the lands, + As well I wot that there is none, + I would slight Carlisle castle high, + Tho’ it were built o’ marble stone! + +Thence, I think, the original ballad (doubtless made “harmonious,” as +Hogg put it) ran into stanza xxxi., where Scott probably introduced the +Elliot tune (if it be ancient)— + + O wha dare meddle wi’ me? + +Satchells next, through a hundred and forty lines, describes Buccleuch’s +correspondence with Scrope, his counsels with his clansmen, and gives all +their names and estates, with remarks on their relationships. He thinks +himself a historian and a genealogist. The stuff is partly in prose +lines, partly in rhymed couplets of various lengths. There are two or +three more or less ballad-like stanzas at the beginning, but they are too +bad for any author but Satchells. + +Scott’s ballad “cuts” all that, omits even what Satchells gives—mentions +of Harden, and goes on (xv.)— + + He has called him forty marchmen bauld, + I trow they were of his own name. + Except Sir Gilbert Elliot called + The Laird of Stubs, I mean the same. + +Now I would stake a large sum that Sir Walter never wrote that +“stall-copy” stanza! Colonel Elliot replies that I have said the +ballad-faker should avoid being too poetical. The ballad-faker _should_ +shun being too poetical, as he would shun kippered sturgeon; but Scott +did not know this, nor did Hogg. We can always track them by their too +decorative, too literary interpolations. On this I lay much stress. + +The ballad next gives (xvi.–xxv.) the spirited stanzas on the ride to the +Border— + + There were five and five before them a’, + Wi’ hunting horns and bugles bright; + And five and five came wi’ Buccleuch, + Like Warden’s men arrayed for fight. + + And five and five like a mason gang, + That carried the ladders lang and hie; + And five and five like broken men, + And so they reached the Woodhouselee. + +—a house in Scotland, within “a lang mile” of Netherby, in England, the +seat of the Grahams, who were partial, for private reasons, to the +Scottish cause. They were at deadly feud with Thomas Musgrave, Captain +of Bewcastle, and Willie had married a Graham. + +Now in my opinion, up to stanza xxvi., all the evasive answers given to +Salkeld by each gang, till Dicky o’ Dryhope (a real person) replies with +a spear-thrust— + + “For never a word o’ lear had he,” + +are not an invention of Scott’s (who knew that Salkeld was not met and +slain), but a fantasy of the original ballad. Here I have only +familiarity with the romantic perversion of facts that marks all ballads +on historical themes to guide me. + +Salkeld is met— + + “As we crossed the Batable land, + When to the English side we held.” + +The ballad does not specify the crossing of Esk, nor say that Salkeld was +on the English side; nor is there any blunder in the reply of the “mason +gang”— + + “We gang to harry a corbie’s nest, + That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.” + +Whether on English or Scottish soil the masons say not, and their +pretence is derisive, bitterly ironical. + +Colonel Elliot makes much of the absence of mention of the Esk, and says +“it is _after_ they are in England that the false reports are spread.” +{139a} But the ballad does not say so—read it! All passes with +judicious vagueness. + + “As we crossed the Batable land, + When to the English side we held.” + +Satchells knows that the ladders were made at Woodhouselee; it took till +nightfall to finish them. The ballad, swift and poetical, takes the +ladders for granted—as a matter of fact, chronicled in the dispatches, +the Grahams of Netherby harboured Buccleuch: Netherby was his base. + +“I could nought have done that matter without great friendship of the +Grames of Eske,” wrote Buccleuch, in a letter which Scrope intercepted. +{139b} + +In Satchells, Buccleuch leaves half his men at the “Stonish bank” +(Staneshaw bank) “_for fear they had made noise or din_.” An old soldier +should have known better, and the ballad (his probable half-remembered +source here) _does_ know better— + + “And there the laird garr’d leave our _steeds_, + For fear that they should stamp and nie,” + +and alarm the castle garrison. Each man of the post on the ford would +hold two horses, and also keep the ford open for the retreat of the +advanced party. The ballad gives the probable version; Satchells, when +offering as a reason for leaving half the force, lest they should make +“noise or din,” is maundering. Colonel Elliot does not seem to perceive +this obvious fact, though he does perceive Buccleuch’s motive for +dividing his force, “presumably with the object of protecting his line of +retreat,” and also to keep the horses out of earshot, as the ballad says. +{140a} + +In Satchells the river is “in no great rage.” In the ballad it is “great +and meikle o’ spait.” And it really was so. The MS. already cited, +which Scott had not seen when he published the song, says that Buccleuch +arrived at the “Stoniebank beneath Carleile brig, the water being at the +tyme, through raines that had fallen, weill thick.” + +In Scott’s _original_ this river, he says, was the Esk, in Satchells it +is the Eden, and Scott says he made this necessary correction in the +ballad. In Satchells the storming party + + Broke a sheet of leid on the castle top. + +In the ballad they + + Cut a hole through a sheet o’ lead. + +Both stories are erroneous; the ladders were too short; the rescuers +broke into a postern door. Scrope told this to his Government on the day +after the deed, 14th April. {140b} + +In xxxi. the ballad makes Buccleuch sound trumpets when the castle-roof +was scaled; in fact it was not scaled. The ladders were too short, and +the Scots broke in a postern door. The Warden’s trumpet blew “O wha dare +meddle wi’ me,” and here, as has been said, I think Scott is the author. +Here Colonel Elliot enters into learning about “Wha dare meddle wi’ me?” +a “Liddesdale tune,” and in the poem an adaptation, by Scott, of +Satchells’ “the trumpets sounded ‘Come if ye dare.’” + +Satchells makes the trumpets sound when the rescuers bring Kinmont Willie +to the castle-top on the ladder (which they did not), and again when the +rescuers reach the ground by the ladder. They made no use at all of the +ladders, which were too short, and Willie, says the ballad, lay “in the +_lower_ prison.” They came in and went out by a door; but the trumpets +are not apocryphal. They, and the shortness of the ladders, are +mentioned in a MS. quoted by Scott, and in Birrell’s contemporary +_Diary_, i. p. 57. In the MS. Buccleuch causes the trumpets to be +sounded from below, by a detachment “in the plain field,” securing the +retreat. His motive is to encourage his party, “and to terrify both +castle and town by imagination of a greater force.” Buccleuch again +“sounds up his trumpet before taking the river,” in the MS. Colonel +Elliot may claim stanza xxxi. for Scott, and also the tune “Wha dare +meddle wi’ me?” he may even claim here a suggestion from Satchells’ “Come +if ye dare.” Colonel Elliot says that no tune of this title ever +existed, a thing not easy to prove. {142a} + +In the conclusion, with differences, there are resemblances in the ballad +and Satchells. Colonel Elliot goes into them very minutely. For +example, he says that Kinmont is “made to ride off; not on horseback, but +on Red Rowan’s back!” + +The ballad says not a word to that effect. Kinmont’s speech about Red +Rowan as “a rough beast” to ride, is made immediately after the stanza, + + “Then shoulder high, with shout and cry, + We bore him down the ladder lang; + At every stride Red Rowan made, + I wot the Kinmont’s airns played clang.” {142b} + +After this verse Kinmont makes his speech (xl.–xli.). But if he _did_ +ride on Red Rowan’s back to Staneshaw bank, it was the best thing that a +heavily ironed man could do. In the ballad (xxvii.) no horses of the +party were waiting at the castle, _all_ horses were left behind at +Staneshaw bank (Satchells brings horses, or at least a horse for Willie, +to the castle). On what could Willie “ride off,” except on Red Rowan? +{142c} + +Stanzas xxxv., xxxvi. and xliv. are related, we have seen, to passages in +_Jock o’ the Side_ and _Archie o’ Cafield_, but ballads, like Homer, +employ the same formulæ to describe the same circumstances: a note of +archaism, as in Gaelic poetic passages in _Märchen_. + +I do not pretend always to know how far Scott kept and emended old +stanzas mangled by reciters: there are places in which I am quite at a +loss to tell whether he is “making” or copying. + +I incline to hold that Satchells was occasionally reminiscent of a ballad +for the reasons and traces given, and I think that Scott when his and +Satchells’ versions coincide, did not borrow direct from Satchells, but +that both men had a ballad source. + +That ballad was later than the popular belief, held by Satchells, that +Gilbert Elliot was at the time (1596) laird of Stobs, which he did not +acquire till after the Union (1603), and that he (the only man not a +Scot, says Satchells, wrongly) rode with Buccleuch. Elliot is not +accused of doing so in Scrope’s dispatches, but he may have come as far +as Staneshaw bank, where half the company were left behind, says +Satchells, with the horses, which were also left, says the ballad. In +that case Elliot would not be observed in or near the Castle. Yet it may +have been known in Scotland that he was of the party. + +He was, as Satchells says, a cousin, he was also a friend of Buccleuch’s, +and he may conceivably have taken a part in this glorious adventure, +though he could not, _at the moment_, be called laird of Stobs. Were I +an Elliot, this opinion would be welcome to me! Really, Salkeld was in a +good position to know whether Elliot rode with Buccleuch or not. + +The whole question is not one on which I can speak dogmatically. A +person who suspects Scott intensely may believe that there were no ballad +fragments of Kinmont in his possession. The person who, like myself, +thinks Satchells, with his “It fell about the Martinmas,” knew a ballad +vaguely, believes that Satchells _had_ some ballad sources bemuddled in +his old memory. + +A person who cannot conceive that Scott wrote + + Except Sir Gilbert Elliot, called + The laird of Stobs, I mean the same, + +will hold that Scott knew some ballad fragments, _disjecta membra_. But +I quite agree with Colonel Elliot, that the ballad, _as it stands_ (with +the exception, to my mind, of some thirty stanzas, themselves emended), +“belongs to the early nineteenth century, not to the early seventeenth.” +The time for supposing the poem, _as it stands_, to be “saturated with +the folk-spirit” all through is past; the poem is far too much +contaminated by the genius of Scott itself; like Burns’ transfiguration +of “the folk-spirit” at its best. + +Near the beginning of this paper I said, in answer to a question of +Colonel Elliot’s, that I myself was the person who had suspected Scott of +composing the whole of _Kinmont Willie_, and I have given my reasons for +not remaining constant to my suspicions. But in a work which Colonel +Elliot quotes, the abridged edition of Child’s great book by Mrs. +Child-Sargent and Professor Kittredge (1905), the learned professor +writes, “_Kinmont Willie_ is under vehement suspicion of being the work +of Sir Walter Scott.” Mr. Kittredge’s entire passage on the matter is +worth quoting. He first says—“The traditional ballad appears to be +inimitable by any person of literary cultivation,” “the efforts of poets +and poetasters” end in “invariable failure.” + +I do not think that they need end in failure except for one reason. The +poet or poetaster cannot, now, except by flat lying and laborious forgery +of old papers, produce any documentary evidence to prove the +_authenticity_ of his attempt at imitation. Without documentary evidence +of antiquity, no critic can approach the imitation except in a spirit of +determined scepticism. He knows, certainly, that the ballad is modern, +and, knowing that, he easily finds proofs of modernism even where they do +not really exist. I am convinced that to imitate a ballad that would, +except for the lack of documentary evidence, beguile the expert, is +perfectly feasible. I even venture to offer examples of my own +manufacture at the close of this volume. I can find nothing suspicious +in them, except the deliberate insertion of formulæ which occur in +genuine ballads. Such _wiederholungen_ are not reasons for rejection, in +my opinion; but they are _suspect_ with people who do not understand that +they are a natural and necessary feature of archaic poetry, and this fact +Mr. Kittredge does understand. + +Mr. Kittredge speaks of Sir Walter’s unique success with _Kinmont +Willie_; but is Sir Walter successful? Some of his stanzas I, for one, +can hardly accept, even as emended traditional verses. + +Mr. Kittredge writes—“Sir Walter’s success, however, in a special kind of +balladry for which he was better adapted by nature and habit of mind than +for any other, would only emphasise the universal failure. And it must +not be forgotten that _Kinmont Willie_, if it be Scott’s work, is not +made out of whole cloth; it is a working over of one of the best +traditional ballads known (_Jock o’ the Side_), with the intention of +fitting it to an historical exploit of Buccleuch. Further, the subject +itself was of such a nature that it might well have been celebrated in a +ballad,—indeed, one is tempted to say, it must have been so celebrated.” + +Not a doubt of _that_! + +“And, finally, Sir Walter Scott felt towards ‘the Kinmont’ and ‘the bold +Buccleuch’ precisely as the moss-trooping author of such a ballad would +have felt. For once, then, the miraculous happened. . . . ” {146a} Or +did not happen, for the exception is “solitary though doubtful,” and +“under vehement suspicion.” But Mr. Kittredge must remember that no +known Scottish ballad “is made out of whole cloth.” All have, in various +degrees, the successive modifications wrought by centuries of oral +tradition, itself, in some cases, modifying a much modified printed +“stall-copy” or “broadside.” + +Take _Jock o’ the Side_. The oldest version is in the Percy MS. {147a} +As Mr. Henderson says, “it contains many evident corruptions,” + + “Jock on his lively bay, Wat’s on his white horse behind.” + +There is an example of what the original author could not have written! + +We do not know how good _Jock_ was when he left his poet’s hands; and +Scott has not touched him up. We cannot estimate the original excellence +of any traditional poem by the state in which we find it, + + Corrupt by every beggar-man, + And soiled by all ignoble use. + + + + +CONCLUSIONS + + +WE have now examined critically the four essentially _Border_ ballads +which Sir Walter is suspected of having “edited” in an unrighteous +manner. Now he helps to forge, and issues _Auld Maitland_. Now he, or +somebody, makes up _Otterburne_, “partly of stanzas from Percy’s +_Reliques_, which have undergone emendations calculated to disguise the +source from which they came, partly of stanzas of modern fabrication, and +partly of a few stanzas and lines from Herd’s version.” {148a} Thirdly, +Scott, it is suggested, knew only what I call “the Elliot version” of +_Jamie Telfer_, perverted that by transposing the _rôles_ of Buccleuch +and Stobs, and added picturesque stanzas in glorification of his +ancestor, Wat of Harden. Fourthly, he is suspected of “writing the whole +ballad” of _Kinmont Willie_, “from beginning to end.” + +Of these four charges the first, and most disastrous, we have absolutely +disproved. Scott did not write one verse of the _Auld Maitland_; he +edited it with unusual scrupulosity, for he had but one copy, and an +almost identical recitation. He could not “eke and alter” by adding +verses from other texts, as he did in _Otterburne_. + +Secondly, Scott did not make up _Otterburne_ in the way suggested by his +critic. He took Hogg’s MS., and I have shown minutely what that MS. was, +and he edited it in accordance with his professed principles. He made “a +standard text.” It is only to be regretted that Hogg did not take down +_verbatim_ the words of his two reciters and narrators, and that Scott +did not publish Hogg’s version, with his letter, in his notes; but that +was not his method, nor the method of his contemporaries. + +Thirdly, as to _Jamie Telfer_, long ago I wrote, opposite + + “The lyart locks of Harden’s hair,” + +_aut Jacobus aut Diabolus_, meaning that either James Hogg or the devil +composed that stanza. I was wrong. Hogg had nothing to do with it; on +internal evidence Scott was the maker. But that he transposed the Scott +and Elliot _rôles_ is incapable of proof; and I have shown that such +perversions were made in very early times, where national, not clan +prejudices were concerned. I have also shown that Scott’s version +contains matter not in the Elliot version, matter injurious to the poem, +as in one stanza, certainly not composed by himself, the stanza being an +inappropriate stray formula from other ballads. But, in the absence of +manuscript materials I can only produce presumptions, not proofs. + +Lastly, _Kinmont Willie_, and Scott’s share in it, is matter of +presumption, not of proof. He had been in quest of the ballad, as we +know from his list of _desiderata_; he says that what he got was +“mangled” by reciters, and that, in what he got, one river was mentioned +where topography requires another. He also admits that, in the three +ballads of rescues, he placed passages where they had most poetical +appropriateness. My arguments to show that Satchells had memory of a +Kinmont ballad will doubtless appeal with more or less success, or with +none, to different students. That an indefinite quantity of the ballad, +and improvements on the rest, are Scott’s, I cannot doubt, from evidence +of style. + +“Sir Walter Scott it is impossible to assail, however much the scholarly +conscience may disapprove,” says Mr. Kittredge. {150a} Not much is to be +taken by assailing him! “Business first, pleasure afterwards,” as, +according to Sam Weller, Richard III. said, when he killed Henry VI. +before smothering the princes in the Tower. I proceed to pleasure in the +way of presenting imitations of “the traditional ballad” which “appears +to be inimitable by any person of literary cultivation,” according to Mr. +Kittredge. + + + +IMITATIONS OF BALLADS + + +The three following ballads are exhibited in connection with Mr. +Kittredge’s opinion that neither poet nor poetaster can imitate, to-day, +the traditional ballad. Of course, not one of my three could now take in +an expert, for he would ask for documentary evidence of their antiquity. +But I doubt if Mr. Kittredge can find any points in my three imitations +which infallibly betray their modernity. + +The first, _Simmy o’ Whythaugh_, is based on facts in the Border +despatches. Historically the attempt to escape from York Castle failed; +after the prisoners had got out they were recaptured. + +The second ballad, _The Young Ruthven_, gives the traditional view of the +slaying of the Ruthvens in their own house in Perth, on 5th August 1600. + +The third, _The Dead Man’s Dance_, combines the horror of the ballads of +_Lizzy Wan_ and _The Bonny Hind_, with that of the Romaic ballad, in +English, _The Suffolk Miracle_ (Child, No. 272). + + +I—SIMMY O’ WHYTHAUGH + + + O, will ye hear o’ the Bishop o’ York, + O, will ye hear o’ the Armstrongs true, + How they hae broken the Bishop’s castle, + And carried himsel’ to the bauld Buccleuch? + + They were but four o’ the Lariston kin, + They were but four o’ the Armstrong name, + Wi’ stout Sim Armstrong to lead the band, + The Laird o’ Whythaugh, I mean the same. + + They had done nae man an injury, + They had na robbed, they had na slain, + In pledge were they laid for the Border peace, + In the Bishop’s castle to dree their pain. + + The Bishop he was a crafty carle, + He has ta’en their red and their white monie, + But the muddy water was a’ their drink, + And dry was the bread their meat maun be. + + “Wi’ a ged o’ airn,” did Simmy say, + “And ilka man wi’ a horse to ride, + We aucht wad break the Bishop’s castle, + And carry himsel’ to the Liddel side. + + “The banks o’ Whythaugh I sall na see, + I never sall look upon wife and bairn; + I wad pawn my saul for my gude mear, Jean, + I wad pawn my saul for a ged o’ airn.” + + There was ane that brocht them their water and bread; + His gude sire, he was a kindly Scot, + Says “Your errand I’ll rin to the Laird o’ Cessford, + If ye’ll swear to pay me the rescue shot.” + + Then Simmy has gi’en him his seal and ring, + To the Laird o’ Cessford has ridden he— + I trow when Sir Robert had heard his word + The tear it stood in Sir Robert’s e’e. + + “And sall they starve him, Simmy o’ Whythaugh, + And sall his bed be the rotten strae? + I trow I’ll spare neither life nor gear, + Or ever I live to see that day! + + “Gar bring up my horses,” Sir Robert he said, + “I bid ye bring them by three and three, + And ane by ane at St. George’s close, + At York gate gather your companie.” + + Oh, some rade like corn-cadger men, + And some like merchants o’ linen and hose; + They slept by day and they rade by nicht, + Till they a’ convened at St. George’s close. + + Ilka mounted man led a bridded mear, + I trow they had won on the English way; + Ilka belted man had a brace o’ swords, + To help their friends to fend the fray. + + Then Simmy he heard a hoolet cry + In the chamber strang wi’ never a licht; + “That’s a hoolet, I ken,” did Simmy say, + “And I trow that Teviotdale’s here the nicht!” + + They hae grippit a bench was clamped wi’ steel, + Wi’ micht and main hae they wrought, they four, + They hae burst it free, and rammed wi’ the bench, + Till they brake a hole in the chamber door. + + “Lift strae frae the beds,” did Simmy say; + To the gallery window Simmy sped, + He has set his strength to a window bar, + And bursten it out o’ the binding lead. + + He has bursten the bolts o’ the Elliot men, + Out ower the window the strae cast he, + For they bid to loup frae the window high, + And licht on the strae their fa’ would be. + + To the Bishop’s chamber Simmy ran; + “Oh, sleep ye saft, my Lord!” says he; + “Fu’ weary am I o’ your bread and water, + Ye’se hae wine and meat when ye dine wi’ me.” + + He has lifted the loon across his shoulder; + “We maun leave the hoose by the readiest way!” + He has cast him doon frae the window high, + And a’ to hansel the new fa’n strae! + + Then twa by twa the Elliots louped, + The Armstrongs louped by twa and twa. + “I trow, if we licht on the auld fat Bishop, + That nane the harder will be the fa’!” + + They rade by nicht and they slept by day; + I wot they rade by an unkenned track; + “The Bishop was licht as a flea,” said Sim, + “Or ever we cam’ to the Liddel rack.” + + Then “Welcome, my Lord,” did Simmy say, + “We’ll win to Whythaugh afore we dine, + We hae drunk o’ your cauld and ate o’ your dry, + But ye’ll taste o’ our Liddesdale beef and wine.” + + +II—THE YOUNG RUTHVEN + + + The King has gi’en the Queen a gift, + For her May-day’s propine, + He’s gi’en her a band o’ the diamond-stane, + Set in the siller fine. + + The Queen she walked in Falkland yaird, + Beside the hollans green, + And there she saw the bonniest man + That ever her eyes had seen. + + His coat was the Ruthven white and red, + Sae sound asleep was he + The Queen she cried on May Beatrix, + That bonny lad to see. + + “Oh! wha sleeps here, May Beatnix, + Without the leave o’ me?” + “Oh! wha suld it be but my young brother + Frae Padua ower the sea! + + “My father was the Earl Gowrie, + An Earl o’ high degree, + But they hae slain him by fause treason, + And gar’d my brothers flee. + + “At Padua hae they learned their leir + In the fields o’ Italie; + And they hae crossed the saut sea-faem. + And a’ for love o’ me!” + + * * * * + + The Queen has cuist her siller band + About his craig o’ snaw; + But still he slept and naething kenned, + Aneth the hollans shaw. + + The King was walking thro’ the yaird, + He saw the siller shine; + “And wha,” quo’ he, “is this galliard + That wears yon gift o’ mine?” + + The King has gane till the Queen’s ain bower, + An angry man that day; + But bye there cam’ May Beatrix + And stole the band away. + + And she’s run in by the little black yett, + Straight till the Queen ran she: + “Oh! tak ye back your siller band, + On it gar my brother dee!” + + The Queen has linked her siller band + About her middle sma’; + And then she heard her ain gudeman + Come sounding through the ha’. + + “Oh! whare,” he cried, “is the siller band + I gied ye late yestreen? + The knops was a’ o’ the diamond-stane, + Set in the siller sheen.” + + “Ye hae camped birling at the wine, + A’ nicht till the day did daw; + Or ye wad ken your siller band + About my middle sma’!” + + The King he stude, the King he glowered, + Sae hard as a man micht stare: + “Deil hae me! Like is a richt ill mark,— + Or I saw it itherwhere! + + “I saw it round young Ruthven’s neck + As he lay sleeping still; + And, faith, but the wine was wondrous guid, + Or my wife is wondrous ill!” + + There was na gane a week, a week, + A week but barely three; + The King has hounded John Ramsay out, + To gar young Ruthven dee! + + They took him in his brother’s house, + Nae sword was in his hand, + And they hae slain him, young Ruthven, + The bonniest in the land! + + And they hae slain his fair brother, + And laid him on the green, + And a’ for a band o’ the siller fine + And a blink o’ the eye o’ the Queen! + + Oh! had they set him man to man, + Or even ae man to three, + There was na a knight o’ the Ramsay bluid + Had gar’d Earl Gowrie dee! + + +III—THE DEAD MAN’S DANCE + + + “The dance is in the castle ha’, + And wha will dance wi’ me?” + “There’s never a man o’ living men, + Will dance the nicht wi’ thee!” + + Then Margaret’s gane within her bower, + Put ashes on her hair, + And ashes on her bonny breast + And on hen shoulders bare. + + There cam’ a knock to her bower-door, + And blythe she let him in; + It was her brother frae the wars, + She lo’ed abune her kin. + + “Oh, Willie, is the battle won? + Or are you fled?” said she, + “This nicht the field was won and lost, + A’ in a far countrie. + + “This nicht the field was lost and won, + A’ in a far countrie, + And here am I within your bower, + For nane will dance with thee.” + + “Put gold upon your head, Margaret, + Put gold upon your hair, + And gold upon your girdle-band, + And on your breast so fair!” + + “Nay, nae gold for my breast, Willie, + Nay, nae gold for my hair, + It’s ashes o’ oak and dust o’ earth, + That you and I maun wear! + + “I canna dance, I mauna dance, + I daurna dance with thee. + To dance atween the quick and the deid, + Is nae good companie.” + + * * * + + The fire it took upon her cheek, + It took upon her chin, + Nae Mass was sung, nor bells was rung, + For they twa died in deidly sin. + + + + +FOOTNOTES + + +{0a} Child, part vi. p. 513. + +{0b} Child, part x. p. 294. + +{1a} Hogg to Scott, 30th June 1802, given later in full. + +{2a} See _De Origine_, _Moribus_, _et Rebus Gestis Scotorum_, p. 60 +(1578). + +{4a} Lockhart, vol. ii. p. 60 (1839). + +{8a} Lockhart, vol. ii. pp. 130–135 (1839). + +{10a} _Minstrelsy_, iii. 186–198. + +{15a} Child, part ix., 187. + +{17a} _Further Essays_, p. 184. + +{18a} Child, vol. i. p. xxx. + +{19a} _Minstrelsy_, 2nd edition, vol iii. (1803). + +{19b} _Further Essays_, pp. 247, 248. + +{21a} Carruthers, “Abbotsford Notanda,” in R. Chambers’s _Life of +Scott_, pp. 115–117 (1891). + +{21b} _Ibid._, _p._ 118. + +{23a} Carruthers, “Abbotsford Notanda,” in R. Chambers’s _Life of +Scott_, pp. 115–117 (1891). + +{23b} Lockhart, vol. ii. p. 99. + +{24a} Lockhart, _Life of Sir Walter Scott_, _Bart._, vol. ii. pp. 99, +100 (1829). + +{25} Ritson of 10th April 1802, in his _Letters of Joseph Ritson_, +_Esq._, vol. ii. p. 218. Letter of 10th June 1802, _Ibid._, p. 207. +Ritson returned the original manuscript of _Auld Maitland_ on 28th +February 1803, _Ibid._, p. 230. + +{26a} Carruthers, pp. 128, 131. + +{30a} _Sweet William’s Ghost_. + +{31a} _Further Essays_, pp. 225, 226. + +{32a} _Further Essays_, pp. 227–234. + +{41a} _Minstrelsy_, vol. iii. pp. 307–310 (1833). + +{41b} _Ibid._, vol. iii. p. 314. + +{44a} _Publications of the Modern Language Association of America_, xxi. +4, pp. 804–806. + +{47a} _Further Essays_, p. 237. + +{47b} Carruthers, p. 128. + +{47c} Lockhart, vol. ii. pp. 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79. + +{48a} Craig Brown, _History of Selkirkshire_. + +{49a} Child, part ix. p. 185. + +{51a} Scott to Laidlaw, 21st January 1803; Carruthers, pp. 121, 122. + +{53a} _Further Essays_, p. 45. + +{53b} Child, part viii. pp. 499–502. + +{53c} _Further Essays_, p. 10, where only two references to sources are +given. + +{54a} Child, part vi. p. 292. + +{54b} _Ibid._, part ix. p. 243. Herd, 1776; also C. K. Sharpe’s MS. + +{59a} Bain, _Calendar_, vol. iv. pp. 87–93. + +{62a} This is scarcely accurate. Hogg, in fact, made up one copy, in +two parts, from the recitation of two old persons, as we shall see. + +{62b} _Further Essays_, pp. 12–27. + +{63a} _Further Essays_, p. 37. + +{67a} Scott to Laidlaw, Carruthers, p. 129. + +{69a} English version, xi.–xv. + +{70a} _Further Essays_, p. 58. + +{73a} _Further Essays_, p. 31. + +{75a} Godscroft, ed. 1644, p. 100; Child, part vi. p. 295. + +{79a} _The Hunting of the Cheviot_, and Herd’s _Otterburn_. + +{83a} Herd, and _Complaynte of Scotland_, 1549. + +{84a} Child, part ix. p. 244, stanza xiii. + +{84b} _Further Essays_, p. 27. + +{89} _Further Essays on Border Ballads_, p. 184. Andrew Elliot, 1910. +To be quoted as _F. E. B. B._ The other work on the subject is Colonel +Elliot’s _The Trustworthiness of the Border Ballads_. Blackwoods, 1906. + +{91a} _F. E. B. B._, _p._ 199. + +{91b} _F. E. B. B._, _p._ 200. + +{93a} _Trustworthiness of the Border Ballads_, p. vi. + +{95a} Satchells, pp. 13, 14. Edition of 1892. + +{95b} _Ibid._, p. 14. + +{95c} _Ibid._, part ii. pp. 35, 36. + +{97a} _F. E. B. B._, p. 200. + +{98a} Child, _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, part viii. p. 518. +He refers to “Letters I. No. 44” in MS. + +{98b} See Sargent and Kittredge’s reduced edition of Child, p. 467, +1905. They publish this Elliot version only. The version has modern +spelling. On this version and its minor variations from Scott’s, I say +more later; Colonel Elliot gives no critical examination of the +variations which seem to me essential. + +{99a} _F. E. B. B._, p. 184. + +{101a} Robert Scott (the poet Satchells’s father) “had Southinrigg for +his service” to Buccleuch, says Sir William Fraser, in his _Memoirs of +the House of Buccleuch_. (See Satchells, 1892, pp. vii., viii.) But the +“fathers” of Satchells “having dilapidate and engaged their Estate by +Cautionary,” poor Satchells was brought up as a cowherd, till he went to +the wars, and never learned to write, or even, it seems, to read; as he +says in the Dedication of his book to Lord Yester. + +{102a} _The Trustworthiness of the Border Ballads_, opp. p. 36. + +{103a} _Border Papers_, vol. i. pp. 120–127. + +{104a} _Border Papers_, vol. i. p. 106. + +{106a} Scrope, in _Border Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 148–152. + +{106b} _Border Papers_, vol. ii. p. 307, No. 606. + +{107a} _Border Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 299–303 + +{108a} _Border Papers_, vol. ii. p. 356. + +{108b} _F. E. B. B._, p. 161. + +{110a} See his _Border Minstrelsy_, vol. ii. p. 15. + +{110b} _F. E. B. B._, p. 156. + +{111a} _T. B. B._, p. 14. + +{112a} _T. B. B._, p. 12. + +{112b} _T. B. B._, p. 12. + +{113a} _Memoirs of Robert Carey_, p. 98, 1808. + +{114a} _T. B. B._, pp. 19, 20. + +{115} _T. B. B._, p. 20. + +{120a} Child, part vii. p. 5. + +{120b} Variant E is a patched-up thing from five or six MS. sources and +a printed “stall copy.” Jamieson published it in 1817. Motherwell had +heard a _cantefable_, or version in alternate prose and verse, which +contained the stanza. It is not identical with stanza xxxii. in Scott’s +_Jamie Telfer_, but runs thus— + + My hounds they all go masterless, + My hawks they fly from tree to tree, + My younger brother will heir my lands, + Fair England again I’ll never see. + +Child, part ii. p. 454 _et seqq._ The speaker is young Beichan, a +prisoner in the dungeon of a professor of the Moslem faith. + +{122a} _F. E. B. B._, pp. 179–185. + +{123a} Child, part viii. p. 518. + +{125a} Aytoun, in _The Ballads of Scotland_ (vol. i. p. 211), says that +his copy of _Jamie Telfer_ “is almost _verbatim_ the same as that given +in the _Border Minstrelsy_.” He does not tell us where he got his copy; +or why the Captain’s bride’s speech (Sharpe, stanza xxxvi.) differs from +the version in Scott and Sharpe. He gives the stanza which comes last in +Scott’s copy, and is too bad and enfeebling to be attributed to Scott’s +pen. He omits the stanza which has strayed in from other ballads, + + “My hounds may a’ rin masterless.” + +But as Aytoun confessedly rejected such inappropriate stanzas, he may +have found it in his copy and excised it. + +{129a} _Minstrelsy_, vol. iii. p. 76, 1803. + +{130a} _Further Essays_, p. 112. + +{131a} _Further Essays_, p. 112. + +{135a} In _Minstrelsy_, vol. ii. p. 35 (1833). + +{139a} _Further Essays_, p. 124. + +{139b} _Border Papers_, vol. ii. p. 367. + +{140a} _Further Essays_, pp. 123, 124. + +{140b} _Border Papers_, vol. ii. p. 121. + +{142a} _Further Essays_, p. 125. + +{142b} Birrell’s _Diary_ vouches for the irons. + +{142c} _Further Essays_, p. 128. + +{146a} Sargent and Kittredge, pp. xxix., xxx. + +{147a} Hales and Furnivall, ii. pp. 205–207. + +{148a} _Further Essays_, p. 45. + +{150a} _Ballads_, p. xxix. + + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE BORDER +MINSTRELSY*** + + +******* This file should be named 4088-0.txt or 4088-0.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/4/0/8/4088 + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will +be renamed. + +Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright +law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, +so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United +States without permission and without paying copyright +royalties. 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