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Title: Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: May, 2003  [Etext #4088]
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SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY




Contents:

   Preface
   Scott and the Ballads
   Auld Maitland
   The Ballad of Otterburne
   Scott's Traditional Copy and how he edited it
   The Mystery of the Ballad of Jamie Telfer
   Kinmont Willie
   Conclusions



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 Smyrnaeus.  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 Archaeological Society,
1905.



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 Daemon 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 maitre a 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. {19a}
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 (chimaera
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. {42b}  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 bankelsanger,
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, mediaeval 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.  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 pounds. {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 a son devis.


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 ferae
naturae, 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. {84a}  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
roles 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.'


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." {91a}  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 pounds 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 pounds, and 16 other prisoners, and
slaughter."  The charges are admitted by the accused; the Captain is to
get 400 pounds. {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 nonexistent 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."'

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. {120a}  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 formulae 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 formulae to describe the same circumstances:  a note of
archaism, as in Gaelic poetic passages in Marchen.

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 formulae 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 roles 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 roles 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 saIl 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).

{25a}  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.

{89a}  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.

{115a}  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 Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy