Sir Walter Scott and the border minstrelsy

SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE
BORDER MINSTRELSY

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Vh

SIR WALTER SCOTT^'

AND THE

BORDER MINSTRELSY

BY

ANDREW LANG

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON i

NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA /->,
1910

PR

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, Attld 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

vi SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

ballad is not part of the question. It was a
favourite of mine in childhood, and I agree with
Scott in thinkinor that it has strono- dramatic situa-
tions. 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 Ottei'burne to Hoee. Colonel Elliot
disbelieves, but he shows no siorns of having read
Hogg's curious letter, in two parts, about these
"old parties ■' ; a letter written on the day when
^ogg, 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 strano-e

PREFACE vii

song of The Bitter Withy, unknown to Professor
Child, was recovered from recitation but lately, in
several English counties. The ignoble lay cA 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
Yonng 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 Ushers Well} In 1S96 Miss
Backus found, in the hills of Polk County, North
Carolina, another variant, intermediate between the
Shropshire and the ordinary version."

There are many other examples of this persist-
ence 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, with-

^ Child, part vi. p. 513. ' Child, part x. p. 294.

viii SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

out the kind and ungrudging aid, freely given to a
stranger, of Mr. William Macmath, whose know-
ledge 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 Smyrneeus. 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 Hoee's mother.

This trifle is addressed to lovers of Scott, of the
Border, and of ballads, el non aultres.

It is curious to see how facts make havoc of the
conjectures of the Higher Criticism in the case of
Atdd Maitland. If HoofSf was the former 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 manu-
scripts of Sir Richard Maitland ? These poems in
1802 were, as far as I am aware, still unpublished.

PREFACE ix

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 oi Attld Mail land lo 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.

X SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

Scott used afterwards to call the saw tones of his
voice."

This proves that Leyden had no personal know-
ledge of "this Hogg," and did not supply the
shepherd with the traditions about Auld Maitland.

Mr. \V. 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 Archaeo-
logical Society, 1905). |

CONTENTS

PAGE

Scott and the Ballads ..... i

AULD Maitland ....... i8

The Ballad of Otterburne . . . . -53

Scott's Traditional Copy and how he edited it . 67
The Mystery of the Ballad of Jamie Telfer . . 87

KiNMONT Willie ...... 126

Conclusions . . . . . . .148

XI

SCOTT AND THE BORDER
MINSTRELSY

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,^

^ Hogg to Scott, 30th June 1802, given later in full.

2 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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." ^

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
eeneration, 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 remark-
able 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

^ See De Online, Moribus^ et Rebus Gestis Scotonnn, p. 60 (1578).

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 3

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, 1 882-1 898).
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 inter-
polated by the very lowest of printer's hacks ;
that copy would circulate, be lost, and become in
turn a traditional source, though full of modern-
isms. Or an educated person might make a
written copy, filling up gaps himself in late seven-
teenth 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 Azild 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

4 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 co-
adjutor. 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

J

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 5

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 Religzces, 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
Hooror'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 life-
long friend, William Laidlaw, farmer in Black-
house, 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."^ These
two men, Hogg and Laidlaw, knowing the
country people well, were Scott's chief sources of

^ Lockhart, vol. ii. p. 60 (1839).

6 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Dcemoii 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 Re-
liqties of Ancient Poetry ; Herd's ballad volumes
of 1776; Evans' collections; Burns' remakings of

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 7

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, y

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 orive 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, w^ould 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 knowledoe 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

8 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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."^

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 con-
fession, he did for anecdotes that came in his way —

* Lockhart, vol. ii. pp. 130-135 (1839).

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 9

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 " Imita-
tions of the Ancient Ballads," and spoke very
leniently of imitations passed off as authentic.
"There is no small degree of cant in the violent

10 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

invectives with which impostors of this nature have
been assailed." As to Hardykmite, 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 ^
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 Minsirelsy for their
favourite fare, and for historical elucidation and
anecdote.

^ Minsirelsy, iii. 186-198.

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS ii

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 Ram-
say's Tea- Table Miscellany ; Surtees of Mains-
forth (these ballads are by Surtees himself: Scott
never suspected him) ; Caw's Hawick Mttseum
(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 "tradi-
tion 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 inter-
polation of his own stanzas in Kinniont 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 acknow-

12 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

ledge 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 d the
Side. Scott says that "some conjectural emenda-
tions 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
A^ithony Feather stonhaugh, 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 con-
vince the editor that the sonij was of modern
date." Really the author was Miss Jane Elliot
(1747- I S05), daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot
of Minto. Herd published a made-up copy in
1776. The tune, Scott says, is old, and he

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 13

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 con-
clusion of a version oi Archie 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 dis-

14 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

approve — 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 in-
tegral 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 indi-
viduality 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

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 15

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 1 689-1 702, of The Outlaw MiLvray,
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.^ 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 Azild 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 followinof
of Percy's method implies, to his original text of
the Ballad of Olterburne. 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.

^ Child, part ix., 187.

i6 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

Again, I am absolutely certain, and can
demonstrate, that Scott did not (as Colonel Elliot
believes) detect Hogg in forging Atild 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
^^(3^ " mangled " fragments of an old ballad before
him, and did not merely paraphrase the narrative
of Walter Scott of Satchells, in his doeeerel True
History of the Name of Scott (1688).

The positions of Colonel Elliot are in each
case the reverse of mine. In the instance o{ Aiild
Maitland (where Scott's conduct would be un-
pardonable 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

SCOTT AND THE BALLADS 17

for the rest, argue on internal evidence, no other
beino- accessible. For Kiinnont 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 2how\. Jamie Telfer}

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, noU^e maiti^e a tozis. In some
instances, I repeat, positive proof of the correct-
ness 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 demon-
strably erroneous.

^ Further Essays, p. 184.

AULD MAITLAND

The ballad of Auld Maitland holds in The
Border Minstrelsy a place like that of the
Doloneia, or Tenth Book, in the Iliad. Every
professor of the Higher Criticism throws his stone
at the Doloneia in passing, and every ballad-
editor does as much to Auld Maitland. Professor
Child excluded it from his monumental collec-
tion 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 distin-
guishing 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."^

^ Child, vol. i. p. XXX.

i8

AULD MAITLAND 19

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
Aiild 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}
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 in-
stance, 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 decep-
tion rests rather on the laird (Scott) than on the
herd" (Hogg.) 2

If Colonel Elliot's "view" were correct (and it
is absolutely erroneous), the guilt of "the laird"
would be great. Scott conspires with a shep-
herd, a stranger, to palm off a forgery on the

^ Minstrelsy, 2nd edition, vol iii. (1803).
^ Further Essays, pp. 247, 248)

20 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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

AULD MAITLAND 21

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 1 80 1 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
Mttrray, 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 Ozitlaw 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 hand-
writing . . ." ^ Laidlaw went on trying to collect
songs for Scott. We now take his own account
of Auld Maitland from a manuscript left by him.^

" I heard from one of the servant girls, who had

^ Carruthers, "Abbotsford Notanda," in R. Chambers's Life of
Scoti, pp. 115-117 (1891). 2 Ji^id,^ p. 118.

22 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

all the turn and qualifications for a collector, of a
ballad called Auld Maitland, that a grandfather
(maternal) of Hogg could repeat, and shfe 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, cor-
roborated 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 evi-
dence. Colonel Elliot says not a word.

This copy of Auld Maitland, with the super-
scription 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.

J

AULD MAITLAND 23

Scott was excited, so that his burr became very
perceptible/

The time of year when Scott and Leyden
visited Yarrow was not the mitum^i vacation of
1802, as Lockhart erroneously writes,^ but the
spring v2iQ.2X\on of 1802. The spring vacation, Mr.
Macmath informs me, ran from nth March to
1 2th May in 1802. In May, apparently, Scott
having obtained the Auld Maitland MS. in the
vernal vacation of the Court of Session, oave 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 Selkirk-
shire, where, in defiance of mountains, rivers, and
bogs, damp and dry, we have penetrated the very
recesses of Ettrick Forest. ... I have ... re-
turned 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 cele-
brated 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

^ Carruthers, "Abbotsford Notanda," in R. Chambers's Life of
Scott, pp. 1 1 5-1 17 (i 891). 2 Lockhart, vol. ii. p. 99.

24 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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,
spriiigwalls (springalds), and many others. . . ."-^

That Scott got the ballad in spring 1802 is
easily proved. On loth April 1802, Joseph Ritson,
the crabbed, ill-tempered, but meticulously accurate
scholar, who thouQfht that ballad-foro"inor 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) "« copie of 'Ye litel wee man,'
of which I think I can make some use. In return,
I have sent him a sight of Atdd Maitland, the
original MS. ... I wish him to see it in puris
naturalibusr " 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 loth April 1802. Scott had already,
when he wrote to Ellis, got "the original MS. of
Auld MaitlancT' (now in Abbotsford Library). By
loth June 1802 Ritson wrote saying, "You may

^ Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, Ba7-t., vol. ii. pp. 99, 100
(1S29).

AULD MAITLAND 25

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." ^ " 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 loth 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 Matty
sent by Ritson on loth 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,

^ Ritson of loth April 1802, in his Letters of Joseph Ritson^ Esq.,
vol. ii. p. 218. Letter of loth June 1802, Ibid., p. 207. Ritson returned
the original manuscript of Auld Mait!a?td on 28th February 1803,
Ibid., p. 230.

26 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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."^ Next
morning they visited Hogg and his mother at
her cottage, and Hogg tells how the old lady
recited Auld Mail land. 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, con-

^ Carruthers, pp. 128, 131.

AULD MAITLAND 27

oratulatino: him on his elevation to the baronetcy
(18 18), 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 xhii. as printed. In Hogg's MS. copy, given to Laidlaw
there are two verbal differences, in lines i and 4.)

Then says Hogg —

Thy fist made all the table ring.
By , sir, but that is the thing !

Hoee 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,

28 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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), '^^'^^ another scrap,
in which Hogg says that " I am surprised to hear
that Atild 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 Tke 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 ofT 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 Atild Maitland : —

AULD MAITLAND 29

Ettrick Kovse, 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 (st'c) 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 Colin 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

30 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 par-
ticulars. 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
a.nother in Boswet/'s /ourna/. 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. 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 hkewise, 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 Piercy of the Scot
Hath cowf^d aneath thy hand;
For ilka drap o' Maitlen's blood
I'll gie thee rigs o' land.

The two last lines 07ily are original; you will easily perceive
that they occur in the very place where we suspected a zvant. I
am surprised to hear that this song is suspected by some to be a
mode}-n 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

1 Sweet Williajnh Ghost.

AULD MAITLAND 31

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 inter-
polations, 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 Criti-
cism (c/m7i{Bra bombinans in vacuo), writes,^ " Few
will doubt that the footnotes " (on these interpola-
tions) "were inserted with the purpose of leading
the public to think that Hogg made no other inter-
polations ; 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 inter-
polations by any other hand had been inserted."

^ Further Essays, pp. 225, 226.

32 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 !^
But, save when Scott puts one line, a ballad formula,
where Hogg has another line, Scott makes no inter-
polations, 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
Unvvordily 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

^ Further Essays, pp. 227-234,

AULD MAITLAND 33

"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

AH 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 hands 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 baud 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.

34 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Haitian'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

I

AULD MAITLAND 35

Where was thou bred where was thou born

Wherein in what country —
In the north of England I was born

What needed him to He.

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 Haitian 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

36 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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

AULD MAITLAND 37

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 sail ye be !

Piercy sail with the eldest fight

And Ethert Lunn wi' thee
WiUiam 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.

38 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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

AULD MAITLAND 39

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 substi-
tute two better —

And marching south with curst Dunbar
A ready welcome found."

40 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

II

WHAT IS AULD MAlTLANDl

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 1 80 1, that he would make no ballads on tradi-
tions 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 cen-
turies ? Scott had read about them in poems of about
1580, but these poems then lay in crabbed manu-
scripts. 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, notwith-
standing 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 1 570-1 580,
which he quotes from the Maitland MSS., "would
run as smoothly, and appear as modern, as any

AULD MAITLAND 41

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, Leth-
ington, having died after the long siege of Edin-
burgh 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, " Burd-
allane." The Sir Richard of 1575 has also one
son left (John, the minister of James vi.).^

From this evidence, in 1802 in MS. unpublished,
and from other Maidand 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.^ His

Nobill sonnis three,
Ar sung in monie far countrie,
Albeit in rtwal rhyme.

Pinkerton published, in 1786, none of the pieces

^ Minstrelsy, vol. iii. pp. 307-310 (1833).
^ Ibid,, vol. iii. p. 314.

42 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Otterburiie,
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." Persuad-
ing the English that they are themselves English-

AULD MAITLAND 43

men, they ask leave to carry the royal flag. The
eldest is told that he is singularly like Auld Mait-
land. 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
Maitlands 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."

44 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY |

But this, also, is a common feature. In " Pro-
fessor 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.^

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 hands 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 baud 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.

^ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
xxi. 4, pp. 804-806.

AULD MAITLAND 45

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 b'dnkelsdnger,
supplied gaps in his memory. The modern com-
plete 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 Hosrsf did not write stanzas xv., xviii. It was
hardly in nature for Hogg, if he knew Ville de

46 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Ixv,, 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

AULD MAITLAND 47

compose the ballad/ But It was from Laidlaw,
not from Leyden, that Scott, after receiving his
first copy at Blackhouse, in spring 1802, obtained
HoCTor's address,^ 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 Art hour, seeking
for an East India appointment, and going into
society. Scott's letters prove all this.^

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
springalds, 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

^ Further Essays, p. 237. - Carruthers, p, 128.

^ Lockhart, vol. ii. pp. 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79.

48 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

ballad, "which the reciters have retained without
understanding them, still preserve traces of their
antiquity." For instance, springalls, corruptedly
pronounced sprmgwalls. Hogg, hearing the
pronunciation, and not understanding, wrote,
" with springs : wall stanes." A leader would not
throw "wall stanes" till he had exhausted his am-
munition. Hogg heard "with springwalls stones,
he threw," and wrote it, "with springs: wall
stones he threw."

Hoear 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.^
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 Maidand as
the source of a song about the Maidands, and to

1 Craig Brown, History of Selkirkshire.

AULD MAITLAND 49

have introduced her into his narrative in 1834? I
conjecture that this Maitland woman knew a Mait-
land 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 impos-
sible 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.^

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

^ Child, part ix. p. 185.
4

50 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 A uld Mail land
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 de-
ceptive 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 Ixii., gives a variant of "some reciters," for
"That Edward once lay under me," they read

AULD MAITLAND 51

"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 circum-
stances 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.^

By neither adding to nor subtracting from his
MS, copy oi 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 Liddes-
dale (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

^ Scott to Laidlaw, 21st January 1803 ; Carruthers, pp. 121, 122.

5 2 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 1801.

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 manu-
script, we next turn our attention. In the mean-
time, Scott no more conspired to forge Aztld
Maitland than he conspired to forge the Penta-
teuch. That HoCTo- did not forge Auld Maitland
I think I have made as nearly certain as any-
thing 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 Otterbztrne, as
given first in The Minstrelsy of 1806, comes under
Colonel Elliot's most severe censure. He con-
cludes in favour of " the view that it consists partly
of stanzas from Percy's Reliques, which have under-
gone 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).^

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. Pro-
fessor Child published all the texts with a letter.^ 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."^ If unfamiliar with
the English chroniclers (in Latin) of the end of the

^ Further Essays^ P- 45-

2 Child, part viii. pp. 499-502.

^ Further Essays, p. 10, where only two references to sources

are given.

53

54 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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/ 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. 16 10),
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 narra-
tive, 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 im-
aginary," and suspects Scott's version of being

^ Child, part vi. p. 292.

2 Ibid., part ix. p. 243. Herd, 1776 ; also C. K. Sharpe's MS.

THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 55

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 New-
castle. 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 pemion
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, pozir tout potage to an army
absurdly stated at 40,000 men, Percy suggests

56 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 57

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, pre-
served 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 7iot have retained historical in-
cidents in the Scottish form ; it is a mere assump-
tion that a modern borrowed and travestied these
incidents from Percy's Reliqttes. 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 Ckevet, popular

58 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 nnedited 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 sur-
viving in popular 7nemory : 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 stop-gaps of the cheap hack —

I tell you withouten dread,

is his favourite phrase, and he cites historical
authority —

The cronykle vvyll not layne (lie).

Scottish ballads do not appeal to chroniclers !
A patriotic and imbecile effort is made by the

THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 59

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 11.
paid ^3000/

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 . . .

^ Bain, Calendar, vol. iv. pp. 87-93.

6o SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

Scottish, Herd (1776)

I.

It fell and about the Lammas time,
When husbandmen 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 stop-gap^

in.

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 in-
dependent. But now Herd's copy begins to vary
much from the EngHsh.

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. Tke scene is Otterbuim.
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.

THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 6i

Douglas then says to Sir Hugh Montgomery —

Take thoic 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 16 10), 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 meaning-
less 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 en-
counter each other, and Douglas is slain. After a

62 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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
fragfment 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."^

Colonel Elliot devotes a long digression to
the trivial value of recitations, so styled,^ 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

1 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.

2 Further Essays^ pp. 12-27.

THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 63

that a modern person, familiar with the English,
has written the coincident verses in with differ-
ences. 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 sus-
pects the interpolator (and well he may, for the
verses are mawkish and modern, not earlier
than the eighteenth century imitations or remanie-
ments 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." ^ We very seldom are told by
Scott who the reciters were and who the tran-
scribers, but our critic's information is here mourn-
fully 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.) —

1 Further Essays, p. 37.

64 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

The Percy and the Douglas met,

That either of other wa? fain,
They swapped together wmle 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

THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE 65

often much later. But if the EngHsh ballad be
Northttmbrian, 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 Mont-
gomery 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 (1.) 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 {shout 1549), and this line is not in the
Eno^lish ballad. So far it seems as if the Eng-Hsh
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

66 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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." -^

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 re-
peated, but literary in origin.

Scott, who wanted "a complete Scottish Otter-
burn" in winter 1802, did not sit down and make
one. He waited till he ^ot a text from Hogfo- in
1805, and published an edited version in 1806.

Scott's /2/<5/z5-/^^^ stanza i. is Herd's stanza i., with
slight verbal chancres taken from the Hogfof MS. text
of 1805. (?) Hogg's MS. and Scott, in stanza ii..

^ Scott to Laidlaw, Carruthers, p. 129.
67

68 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 vvald 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).
Honor's reciters crave —

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 " Bam-
borowshire " 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

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 69

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 chival-
rous chance of recovering his pennon and making
good his word, Douglas insists on waiting at Otter-
burn 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 abund-
ance of pheasants and red deer.^

^ English version, xi.-xv.

70 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

We see that the English balladlst is an un-
warlike 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 New-
castle, 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 ? " ^

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

^ Further Essays^ P- S8.

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 71

out, lost, or burned, oral memory kept it alive in
tradition. For examples of this process we have
only to look at Williams Ghost in Herd's copy
of 1776. This is a traditional ballad; it is in-
cluded 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 Hmbs, 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.

72 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

Scott really could not have resisted the temptation
had he been interpolating a son ddvis.

But your pennoii 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 Enolish ballad. In the Ettrick text Douorlas
says that there are no supplies, merely fercB
naturcB, but he will wait at Otterburn to give
Percy his chance.

Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 73

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 (!).i
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 I

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

^ Further Essays, p. 31.

74 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 varia-
tion (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

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 75

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 mart
should winne a field, and I hope in God it shall

be ir^

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 reinanieur 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
•'/>5^ fight" into ''a fight."

The whole dream stanza occurs in a part of
the ballad where Hogg confesses to no alteration

^ Godscroft, ed. 1644, p. 100 ; Child, part vi. p. 295.

T6 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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.), follow-
ing 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 " back-
ward 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 Ixviii. 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 Otte^'burne (1^06)}
It referred to Sir Hugh Montgomery, who, in
Herd, captured Percy after a fight ; in the English

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY ^-j

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.

78 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 1. of the English
Otterburne, in stanza xxxv. (substituting Hugh
Montgomery for Douglas) of the Hogg MS.
In The Hitnting, 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 Ixvi. 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 (Ixviii.), made soon after the
battle. We see that the original ballad has
protean variants ; in time all is mixed in tradi-
tion.

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.

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 79

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 sovie confiised ju77ible made by
some perso?i who had learned both the songs you have} 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 some-
times helped the metre without altering one original word.

HoofQ- here pfives 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.

^ The Hunting of the Cheviot, and Herd's Otterburn.

8o SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Tarn 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 apparendy Hogg's. The last broken
stanza, as Hogg said, is a reminiscence of the Hunt-
ing 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 "

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY

Si

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."
I. In stanza i., for Hogg's "Douglas went,''
Scott put "bound him to ride."

"With the Lindsays."
" With them the Lindesays."
"Almonshire."
" Bamborouahshire."
" Roxburgh."
" Reidswire."
" The border again."
"The border fells."
''Most furiously."
''Right furiouslie."
A modernised stanza.
Scott deletes it.
Scott rewrites the stanza thus,

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.
6

2.

{H.)

(.s.)

3-

(H.)

(S.)

(H.)

(S.)

6.

(H.)

(S.)

7-

(H.)

(S.)

9-

iff.)

(S.)

IS-

(H.)

(H.)

82 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY
(S.)

"Thither will I come," proud Percy said,

"By the might of Om- Ladye."
" Thei'e will I bide thee," said the Douglas,

"My troth I'll plight to thee."

19. {^.) " I have seen sl 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. (5.)

But he forgot the helmet good
That should have kept his brain.

(From Wyntoun.)

22. (^.) Line 2. " Right keen."
\s.) Line 2. "Fu'fain."
Line 4.

The blood ran down like rain.

Line 4.

The blood ran them between.

But Piercy wi' his good broadsword
Was made o' the metal free,

24. (5.)

Has wounded Douglas on the brow
Till backward did he flee.

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.

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 83

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.^

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,"

'^ Herd, and Complaynte of Scotland^ I549-

84 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

"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.^

38. (H.)

T,2>. (S.) Scott makes a slight verbal alteration.

39. (H.) Line i.

34. (S.) Line i.

Scott substitutes Herd's

As soon as he knew it was Montgomery.

40. (//.) Hogg's broken stanza on the death
of Montgomery, derived from a lost form of the
Huntiss of Ckevets, named in The Complaynte of
Scotland.

35. (kS*.) 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.^ Scott has only
"a sinsfle line " to tell of, the fourth line in his
stanza xxii., " Till he fell to the oround."

&

^ Child, part ix. p. 244, stanza xiii.
^ Further Essays, p. 27.

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY 85

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 corres-
pondence 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 under-
stand, and invented his last broken stanza on the
death of Montgomery, to give the idea that The
Himtiss of Chevets was mingled in the recollections
of the reciters with The Battle of Otterbuvji. 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

86 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Scotto-
phile 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 1 800-1 802. 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 1 800-1 801. Eleven are marked X.
" Jamie " is one of that eleven. Kmmont 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 grreen hills and the
pastorzmi 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

87

88 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 moor-
lands 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, acco7^ding to the ballad, by one
James Telfer. The English rob the peel tower,
they drive away ten cows, and urge them south-
wards 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.

Cest fnagnifiqtie, mats ce nest pas la guerre I
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

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 89

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 sharinQT his belief that Sir Walter did a certain
thing which I could not easily palliate.^

1 Fu7-ther 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.
Black woods, 1906.

90 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

II

THE BALLAD IMPOSSIBLE

My attempts to relieve Colonel Elliot from his
painful convictions about Sir Walter's unsports-
manlike 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 cloit, 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 ver-
sion "), " 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.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 91

This is impossibly absurd ! As Colonel Elliot
writes, "I pointed out in my book" {The Trust-
worthiness 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. . . ."^

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."^
But, if so, what was the original ballad before the
insertion ? As it stands, all hinges on this impos-
sible 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
1 F. E. B. B., p. 199. 2 p^ £•. ^. s., p. 200.

92 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Liddes-
dale, 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 Preakinhauoh, thouofh 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.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 93

That is only possible if we cut out the verses
about Buccleuch and make an Ettrick man not appeal
to him, but sfo 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 Buc-
cleuch'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
hi7n 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." ^ Now,
however you take it, — I give you three choices, —
the story is absolutely impossible.

^ Trustworthiness of the Border Ballads, p. vi.

94 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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
1 5 70- 1 609, 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 Slit-
terick 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, ^"^^ 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

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 95

and the Family of Minlo : 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 remem-
bered 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
Kin77iont Willie, infra), for, in 1688, a man born
in 1 613, 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.^ Now Sat-
chells's own father rode in that fray, he says,^ and he
gives a minute genealogy of the Elliots of Stobs.^

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

^ Satchells, pp. 13, 14. Edition of 1892.

^ Ibid., p. 14. ^ Ibid., part ii. pp. 35, 36.

96 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 neigh-
bour and chief. This is idiotic. I n 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 Brank-
some ; 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.

Ill

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,

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 97

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." ^ 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 havino- 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

1 F. E. B. B., p. 200.

98 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

et seqq. (1802). Professor Child quotes a letter
from the Ettrick shepherd to Scott of "June 30,
1S02" thus: "I am surprised to find that the
songs in your collection differ so widely from my
mother's \ Jamie 7>//6'?' differs in many particulars."^
(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 Telfe^^ :
"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 rescuino- 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 "^/") " the Fair Dodhead,"
"from a MS. written about the beQ-innino- of the
nineteenth century, and now in the possession of
Mr. William Macmath"; it had previously belonged
to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.^

^ Child, English a?id Scottish Popular Ballads, part viii. p. 51 8.
He refers to " Letters I. No. 44" in MS.

2 See Sargent and Kittredge's reduced edition of Child, p. 467,
1905. They pubhsh this Elliot version only. The version has

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 99

There is one great point of difference between
the two forms. In Sir Walter's variant, verse 26
summons the Scotts of Teviotdale, includino- 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 snavv 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. ^

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 7iot the copy that belonged

modern speUing. 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.
1 F.E. B.B.,^. 184.

loo SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

to Kirkpatrick Sharpe, but contained points of
difference, 7iot those inserted by Sir Walter Scott
about " Dinlay snaw," and so forth.

IV

WHO WAS THE FARMER IN THE DODHEAD IN

I580-1609 ?

Colonel Elliot has made no attempt to prove
that one Telfer was tenant of the Dodhead in
1 580-1 603, 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, v/e 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

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER loi

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 15 10.

So where does Jamie Telfer come in ?

The farmers were Scotts, it was to their chief,
Buccleuch, that they went when they needed aid.^

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

^ 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.

102 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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.^ 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 Hard-
haughswire."

The Captain, as soon as he crossed the Ritter-
ford 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 Ritter-
ford. 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.

^ The Trustworthiness of the Border Ballads, opp. p. 36.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 103

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
Armstronor and Elliot strono-holds. He makes the
Captain, crossing Liddel by the Ritterford, bear to
his left, through a space empty of hostile habita-
tions, in his map. This seems prudent, but the
reofion 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 topo-
graphy 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.^ 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 Mus-
graves 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

^ Border Papers, vol. i. pp. 120-127.

104 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

pass so far through Armstrongs, the Captain met
them agahi, farther north, on Tarras side, where
Runyen Armstrong Hved at Thornythaite. Near
him was Armstrono- of Hollhouse, Musorrave's
great enemy. North of Tarras the Captain rode
through Ewesdale ; there he had to deal with three
hundred Armstrong men of the spear/ 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 Borth-
wick 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 mad-
ness 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

^ Border Papers, vol. i. p. io6.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 105

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

io6 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

Border on affairs of war) attempted a retalia-
tory 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 return-
ing homeward, with some fifteen companions, he
was ambushed by the Armstrongs near Bewcastle,
was refused shelter by a Graham, was taken
prisoner, and was sent to Buccleuch at Branksome.
On 15th July he came home under a bond of ^200
for ransom.^ As every one did, in his circum-
stances, 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 ;C200,
and 16 other prisoners, and slaughter." The
charges are admitted by the accused ; the Captain
is to get ;^400.^

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.

^ Scrope, in Bo?'der Papers, vol. ii. pp. 148-152.
2 Border Papers, vol. ii. p. 307, No. 606.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 107

Thenceforth till near the Union of the Crowns,
Thomas was Captain, or acting Captain.

So considerable an event as the takings 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 oi Jamie Telfer. One
of the other incidents is of April 1597/ 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

^ Border Papers^ vol. ii. pp. 299-303

io8 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 S07i
of Elliot of Preakinhaugh (as I had erroneously
said), but a nephew named Martin, was slain in a
Tynedale raid into Liddesdale/ 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 ao-ree 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, separ-
ated from each other by only short periods of
time, . . ."^ 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

1 Border Papers, vol. ii. p. 356. - F. E. B. B., p. 161.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 109

1597, I entirely agree with him that the facts are
"jumbled." But as to the opinion that the ballad
is "fairly true" about the raid to Ettrick (the
Captain could not ride a mile beyond the Border
without the Warden's permission), about the non-
existent Jamie Telfer, about the shooting, taking,
and plundering of the Captain, about his loss of
seventeen men wounded and slain (he lost about as
many prisoners), — I have given reasons for my
disbelief.

VI

IS THE SCOTT VERSION, WITH ELLIOTS AND SCOTTS
TRANSPOSED, THE LATER VERSION ?

We now come to the important question, Is the
Scott version of the ballad (apart from Sir Walter's
decorative stanzas) necessarily later than the Elliot
version in Sharpe's copy ? The chief argument
for the lateness of the Scott version, the presence
of a Gilbert Elliot of Stobs at a date when this
gentleman had not yet acquired Stobs, I have
already treated. If the ballad is no earlier than
the date when Elliot was believed (as by Satchells)
to have obtained Stobs before 1596, the argument
falls to the ground.

Starting from that point, and granting that a
minstrel fond of the Scotts wants to banter the
Elliots, he may make Telfer ask aid at Stobs.
After that, which version is better in its topo-

1 10 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

graphy? 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,^ 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,^ I prove that,
in 1802, a place called " Catlochill " existed be-
tween Coultartcleugh and Branksome. The place
(Mrs. Grieve, Branksome Park, informs me) i^
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.

^ See his Border Minstrelsy, vol. ii. p. 15. - F. E. B. B., p. 156.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER in

Thus, on good evidence, there was a Catlochill,
or Catlockhill, between Coultartcleugh and Brank-
some. The Scott version is right in its topography.

This fact was unknown to Colonel Elhot. 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."^ 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 Preakin-
haugh 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 Registi'uni Magni Sigilii, nor
in Blaeu's map of 1600-54.

1 T. B. B., p. 14.

1 1 2 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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.^ It makes Telfer run from Dodhead to
Branksome for aid, because that was the com-
paratively 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 ^ 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,

1 T. B. B., p. 12. 2 t; ^, ^,^ p, 12.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 113

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
" Gat lie,' 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 per-
mitted 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.^)

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

^ Memoirs of Robert Carey ^ p. 98, 1808,
8

114 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

water, and the Tevlot 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 Willie o' Gorrinberry.

All this is plain sailing, by the pass of Priesthaughs-
wire the Scotts will ride from Teviot into Hermitaee
water, and, near the Slack, they will pass Gorrin-
berry, 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' Gorranberry.

Colonel Elliot^ supposes Martin (if I follow
his meaning) to send Simmy with his command,
back over all the course that Telfer and Martins
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.

J T. D. B., pp. 19, 20.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 115

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 Ritter-
ford," 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 Kers-
hope 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 instruc-
tions 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

1 T. B. B., p. 20.

ii6 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 topo-
graphy 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

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 117

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.

ii8 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Hke
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 im-
portant 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 BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 119

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 Otterbotcrne, 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, "accident-
ally," 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 inappropri-

120 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

ately brought in than here ; Scott, however, is not
responsible for that." ^

The hawk that flies from tree to tree

is a formula ; it comes in the Kinloch MS. copy
of the ballad oi Jamie Douglas, date about 1690.

I know no proof that Scott was acquainted
with variant E of Young Beickan} 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 Tamiane, retaining its absurdities) in his
copy, than to "pitchfork it in," from an obscure
variant of Yoitng Beichan, which we cannot prove
that he had ever heard or read. But as we can

^ Child, part vii. p. 5.

^ Variant E is a patched-up thing from five or six MS. sources
and a printed "stall copy." Jamieson published it in 1S17.
Motherwell had heard a ca7itefable, or version in alternate prose and
verse, which contained the stanza. It is not identical with stanza
xxxii. in Scott's /a7;/z> 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 ct seqq. The speaker is young Beichan, a
prisoner in the dungeon of a professor of the Moslem faith.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 121

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 trans-
position 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 reofard it as belonCTing- "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 ca7itefable of S^tsie Pye, and the ballad of
Yozmg Beichan (E), and partly mX.o 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?

122 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

What did he gain by that ? Why did he make
Jamie ''of,'' not " in " Ihe 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 lonp- 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.^ 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 Fa^niliar Letters,
1 F. E. B. B., pp. 179-185.

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 123

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." ^ 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 con-
clusion 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 ih.3it J a7nie 7>^r 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

^ Child, part viii. p. 518.

124 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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

THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER 125

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 Otterbutne, such inversions and
perversions of ballads occurred freely in the six-
teenth century, and, in the seventeenth, the process
may have been applied to Jamie Telfer}

1 Aytoun, in The Ballads of Scotland {vo\. i. p. 211), says that his
copy oi 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 attri-
buted 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.

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 subse-
quent negotiations, with which we are not con-
cerned.

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

126

KINMONT WILLIE 127

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, re-
covered 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 d 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 d 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 improve-
ments, 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

128 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

the additional stanzas came ; the MS., at Abbots-
ford, is in his hand. In this ballad the Halls,
noted freebooters, rescue Archie o' Cafield from
prison in Dumfries. As in Jock d the Side and
Kin7nont 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., "com-
municated 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 d Cafield
3.n6. Jock d the Side, that there are, with Kininont
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

KINMONT WILLIE 129

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."^

Consequently the verse quoted from the Percy
MS. of Archie Cafield may be improved and
placed in the lips of Lord Scrope, in Kimnont
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. Un-
marked is Kimnount Willie.

Did he find it, or did he make it all ?

^ Minstrelsy, vol. iii. p. 76, 1803.
9

I30 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 16 13, 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."^

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 adopt-
ing 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',

^ Further Essays, p. 112.

KINMONT WILLIE 131

which Colonel Elliot explains thus : " I think that
the cause for the narrative at times diverorino- 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 con-
formity with history,"^

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 Reids-
wire. 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 proba-
bility 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

^ Further Essays, p. 112.

132 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

famous than the rescue of Kinmont Willie
were certainly recorded in ballads, the opinion
that there was a ballad of Kin7nont 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- oZ^ 19 lo), 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 Northumber-
land." The old ballad, disregarding dates, may well

KINMONT WILLIE 133

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.

134 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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, alter-
ing Hoggs 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.

KINMONT WILLIE 135

To do this was safe, as Scott had said that
Satchells does pirate ballads. On the other hand,
Satchells, composing in black 1688, when Catholi-
cism 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 lino-ered 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 arain 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.^

In a contemporary ballad, a kind of rhymed
news-sheet, the facts would be known and reported.

^ In Minstrelsy, vol, ii. p. 35 (1833).

136 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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.

were there war between the lands,
As well I wot that there is none,

1 would slight Carlisle castle high,
Tho' it were built o' marble stone !

Thence, I think, the original ballad (doubt-
less 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

KINMONT WILLIE 137

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 Stobs, 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,

138 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 Eatable 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 afUr they are

KINMONT WILLIE 139

in England that the false reports are spread."^
But the ballad does not say so — read it ! All
passes with judicious vagueness.

"As we crossed the Eatable 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.^

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,"

1 Further Essays, p. 124. * Border Papers, vol. ii. p. 367-

140 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

is maundering. Colonel Elliot does not seem to
perceive this obvious fact, though he does per-
ceive 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.^

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.^

In xxxi. the ballad makes Buccleuch sound
trumpets when the casde-roof was scaled ; in fact

^ Further Essays, pp. 123, 124.
^ Border Papers, vol. ii. p. 121.

KINMONT WILLIE 141

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 contempo-
rary 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

142 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

that no tune of this title ever existed, a thing not
easy to prove/

In the conclusion, with differences, there are
resemblances in the ballad and Satchells. Colonel
Elliot goes into them very minutely. For ex-
ample, 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 aims played clang." ^

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 ? ^

Stanzas xxxv., xxxvi. and xliv. are related, we
have seen, to passages in Jock o the Side and
Archie d Cafield, but ballads, like Homer, employ
the same formulae to describe the same circum-

^ Further Essays, p. 125.

* Birrell's Diary vouches for the irons.

^ Further Essays, p. 128.

KINMONT WILLIE 143

stances : a note of archaism, as in Gaelic poetic
passages in Metre hen.

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

144 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 excep-
tion, to my mind, of some thirty stanzas, themselves
emended), "belongs to the early nineteenth century,
not to the early seventeenth." The time for sup-
posing 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

KINMONT WILLIE 145

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 con-
vinced 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 formulee

which occur in genuine ballads. Such wieder-
10

146 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

holungen 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. Kittredo-e does understand,

Mr. Kittredge speaks of Sir Walter's unique
success with Kiitmont 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 sub-
ject 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 hap-
pened. . . ."^ Or did not happen, for the excep-
tion is "solitary though doubtful," and "under

^ Sargent and Kittredge, pp. xxix., xxx.

KINMONT WILLIE 147

vehement suspicion." But Mr. Kittredge must
remember that no known Scottish ballad " is made
out of whole cloth." All have, in various decrees,
the successive modifications wrought by centuries
of oral tradition, itself, in some cases, modifying a
much modified printed " stall-copy " or " broad-
side."

Take/oc^ d the Side. The oldest version is
in the Percy MS.^ 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 ex-
cellence of any traditional poem by the state in
which we find it,

Corrupt by every beggar-man,
And soiled by all ignoble use.

^ Hales and Furnivall, ii. pp. 205-207.

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 M ait land. Now
he, or somebody, makes up Otter burne, "partly of
stanzas from Percy's Reliques, which have under-
gone 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."^ Thirdly, Scott, it is sug-
gested, 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^
"fjom 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

^ Further Essays, p. 45.

148

CONCLUSIONS 149

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 pro-
fessed 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,"

azit 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 manu-

150 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

script 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 dis-
approve," says Mr. Kittredge.^ 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 smother-
ing the princes in the Tower. I proceed to pleasure
in the way of presenting imitations of " the tradi-
tional ballad" which "appears to be inimitable by
any person of literary cultivation," according to
Mr. Kittredoe.

^ Ballads^ p. xxix.

CONCLUSIONS 151

Imitations of Ballads

The three following ballads are exhibited in con-
nection with Mr. Kittredge's opinion that neither
poet nor poetaster can imitate, to-day, the tradi-
tional 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 ' d 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 Rzithven, gives
the traditional view of the slaying of the Ruthvens
in their own house in Perth, on 5th August 1600.

The third. The Dead Mans Dance, combines
the horror of the ballads of Lizzy Wan and The
Bonny Hind, with that of the Romaic ballad, in
English, The Sjiffolk Miracle (Child, No. 272).

I

SIMMY O' WHYTHAUGH

O, will ye hear o' the Bishop V 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,

152 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 sail na see,

I never sail 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 sail 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.

CONCLUSIONS 153

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 then' 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 1 "

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."

I 54 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 hoUans 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 Beatrix,

Without the leave o' me ? "
" Oh ! wha suld it be but my young brother

Frae Padua ower the sea !

" My father was the Earl Cowrie,

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.

CONCLUSIONS 155

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,

Or 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 biding 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 !

156 SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY

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 !

Ill

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 her 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."

CONCLUSIONS 157

"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.

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