'The hills were high on ilka side,
And the bucht i' the lirk o' the hill,
And aye as she sang her voice it rang
Out ower the head o' yon hill.
There cam' a troop o' gentlemen,
Merrily riding by,
And ane o' them rade out o' the way
To the bucht to the bonnie may.'
Nowhere has the ballad inspiration and the ballad touch lingered longer than by Eden and Leader and Whitadder. Lady Grizel Baillie (who also wonned in Mellerstain) had them —
'There once was a may and she lo'ed nae men,
And she biggit her bonnie bower doun in yon glen' —
and it still lives in Lady John Scott, who has sung of The Bonnie Bounds of Cheviot as if the mantle of the Border minstrels had fallen upon her.
After all, the ballads of Yarrow and Ettrick, of the Merse and Teviotdale, owe their superior fame as much as anything to the happy chance that the Wizard of Abbotsford dwelt in the midst of them, and seizing upon them before they were forgotten, made them and the localities classical. Other districts have in this way been despoiled to some extent of their proper meed of honour. Fortune as well as merit has favoured the Border Minstrelsy in the race for survival and for precedence in the popular memory. But Galloway, a land pervaded with romance, claims at least one ballad that can rank with the best. Lord Gregory has aliases and duplicates without number. But the scene is always Loch Ryan and some castled island within sight of that arm of the sea, whither the love-lorn Annie fares in her boat 'wi' sails o' the light green silk and tows o' taffetie,' in quest of her missing lord:
'"O row the boat, my mariners,
And bring me to the land!
For yonder I see my love's castle
Close by the salt sea strand."'
Alas! cold is her welcome as she stands with her young son in her arms, and knocks and calls on her love, while 'the wind blaws through her yellow hair, and the rain draps o'er her chin.' A voice, that seems that of Lord Gregory, bids her go hence as 'a witch or a wil' warlock, or a mermaid o' the flood'; and with a woful heart she turns back to the sea and the storm. And when he wakes up from boding dreams to find his true love and his child have been turned from his door, it is too late. His cry to the waves is as vain as Annie's cry to that 'ill woman,' his mother, who has betrayed them:
'"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!
O Annie, winna ye bide?"
But aye the mair that he cried Annie,
The braider grew the tide.
"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!
Dear Annie, speak to me!"
But aye the louder he cried Annie,
The louder roared the sea.'
The shores and basin of the Forth have also their rowth of ballads; and some of them have, like The Lass of Lochryan, the sound of the waves and the salt smell of the sea mingled with their plaintive music. Gil Morice has been 'placed' by Carronside – Ossian's 'roaring Carra' – a meet setting for the story. Sir Patrick Spens cleaves to the shores of Fife; though some, eager for the honour of the North, have claimed that it is Aberdour in Buchan that is spoken of in the ballad. By the powerful spell of this old rhyme, the king still sits and drinks the blood-red wine in roofless Dunfermline tower; the ladies still haunt the windy headland – Kinghorn or Elie Ness – with 'their kaims intil their hands' waiting in vain the return of their 'good Scots lords'; the wraith of Sir Patrick himself in misty days strides the silver strand under the Hawes Wood, reading the braid letter. Near by is Donibristle; and it keeps the memory of the 'Bonnie Earl of Moray,' slain here, hints the balladist – though history is silent on the point – for pleasing too well the Queen's eye at Holyrood.
Edinburgh, too, draws a good part of its romance from the ballad bard. Mary Hamilton, of the Queen's Maries, rode through the Netherbow Port to the gallows-foot:
'"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she 'll hae but three;
There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beaton,
And Marie Carmichael, and me."'
The Marchioness of Douglas wandered disconsolate on Arthur's Seat and drank of St. Anton's well:
'"O waly, waly, love be bonnie
A little time while it is new,
But when it 's auld it waxes cauld
And fades awa' like morning dew.
But had I wist before I kissed
That love had been so ill to win,
I 'd locked my heart within a kist
And fastened it wi' a siller pin"';
and across the hill lies the 'Wells o' Wearie.' Nowhere else has the wail of forsaken love found such wistful expression – except in The Fause Lover:
'"But again, dear love, and again, dear love,
Will you never love me again?
Alas! for loving you so well,
And you not me again."'
From Edinburgh wandered Leezie Lindsay, kilting her coats of green satin to follow her Lord Ronald Macdonald the weary way to the Highland Border; and to its plainstanes came the faithful Lady of Gicht to ransom her Geordie:
'My Geordie, O my Geordie,
The love I bear my Geordie!
For the very ground I walk upon
Bears witness I lo'e Geordie.'
And these regions of the North have as much of the 'blood-red wine' of ballad romance coursing through them as Tweedside or Lothian, although it may be of harsher and coarser flavour. Space does not allow of doing justice to the Northern Ballads, some of them simple strains, made familiar by sweet airs, like Hunting Tower, or Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, or the Banks of the Lomond; others, and these chiefly from the wintry side of Cairn o' Mount, 'bleak and bare' as that wilderness of heather; still others, and from the same quarter, gallant, warm-hearted, light-stepping tunes as ever were sung —Glenlogie, for instance:
'There were four-and-twenty nobles
Rode through Banchory fair;
And bonnie Glenlogie
Was flower o' them there.'
For the most part they are variants, many of them badly mutilated in the rhymes, that are familiar, under other names, farther south. They gather about the family history and the family trees of the great houses – the Gordons for choice – planted by Dee and Don and Ythan, where Gadie runs at the 'back o' Benachie,' and in the Bog o' Gicht; and they tell of love adventures and mischances that have befallen the Lords of Huntly or Aboyne, the Lairds of Drum or Meldrum, and even the humble Trumpeter of Fyvie.
CHAPTER VI
THE HISTORICAL BALLAD
'It fell about the Lammas tide,
When the muirmen win their hay,
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride
Into England, to drive a prey.'
The Battle of Otterburn.
The kindly Scot will not quarrel with the comparative mythologist who tells him that the superstitions embalmed in his ballad minstrelsy are wanderers out of misty times and far countries – primitive ideas and beliefs that may have started with his remote ancestors from the heart of the East, to find harbour in the valleys of the Cheviots and the islands of the West, or that have drifted thither with the tide of later inroads. Nor will he greatly protest when the literary historian assures him that the plots and incidents in the popular old rhymes of the frenzies and parlous adventures of love have been borrowed or adapted from the metrical and prose romances of the Middle Ages. He can appreciate in his poetry, as in his pedigree, high and long descent; all the more since, as he flatters himself, whencesoever the seed may have come, it has found kindly soil, and drawn from thence a strength and colour such as few other lands and ballad literatures can match.
But to suggest that not even our Historical Songs of fight and of foray against our 'auld enemies' of England are genuine, unalloyed products of the national spirit; to hint that Kinmont Willie, The Outlaw Murray, or The Battle of Otterburn itself is an exotic – that were a somewhat dangerous exercise of the art of analytic criticism, in the presence of a Scottish audience. In truth, no poetry of any tongue or land is more powerfully dominated by the sense of locality – is more expressive of the manners of the time and mood of the race – than those rough Border lays of moonlight rides, on reiving or on rescue bound, and of death fronted boldly in the press of spears or 'behind the bracken bush.' These are not tales of the infancy of a people. Scotland had already attained to something of national unity of blood and of sentiment before they came to birth. For generations and centuries she had to keep her head and her bounds against an enemy as watchful and warlike as herself, and many times as strong. Blows were struck and returned, keen and sudden as lightning. The 'hammer of the Scots,' wielded by the English kings, had smitten, and under its blows the race had been welded together and wrought to a temper like steel, supple upon occasion to bend, but elastic and unbreakable, and with a sharp cutting edge.
Heroes conquered or fell; and sometimes a minstrel was by to sing the exploit. Patriotism and the joy of combat are leading notes in these Historic Ballads. The annals of Scotland are full of family and clan feuds – the quarrels of kites and crows. But, with a fine and true instinct, the best of these ballads avoid taking account of the bickerings in the household. It is when they sing of 'patriot battles won of old,' where Scot and Southron met, 'red-wat shod,' that the strain rises to its clearest, and 'stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet.' Nor is it always the events that are most noised in the history-book that are best remembered in the ballads. The old singers and their audiences delighted more in personal episode than in filling a big canvas; their genius was dramatic rather than epic. Hardyknut, with its commemoration of the battle of Largs and the Northmen, although accepted by the literati of the early Georgian era as a genuine 'antique,' has long been proved to be an imitative production of Lady Wardlaw's. The rhyme which the Scottish maidens sang about Bannockburn is lost. The Wallace group of ballads bears plain marks of spurious intermixture, or later composition. There are no traditional verses preserved in popular memory regarding the disasters of Neville's Cross or of Homildon Hill, where so much good Scots blood soaked an alien sod; or of that shameful day of Solway Moss, about which James the Fifth muttered strange words on his dying-bed. Even the pathetic strain, more lyrical, however, than narrative, in which lament is made for The Flowers o' the Forest, that were 'wede awa'' at Flodden, came two centuries later than the woful battle.
Perhaps it is natural that a warlike people should sing of their triumphs rather than of their defeats and humiliations. But if the old ballads have lost sight of some great landmarks in the country's chronicle, they have preserved names and incidents which the duller pen of history has forgotten or overlooked. The breath of poetry passes over the Valley of Bones of the national annals, and each knight stands up in his place, a breathing man and a living soul. They are none the less real and living for us because Dry-as-dust has mislaid the vouchers for their birth and their deeds, and cannot fit them into their place in his family trees and chronological tables.
It follows, from the strongly patriotic cast of the ballads of war and fray, that they should have sprung up most rankly on the battle-fields and around the peel-towers of the Borderland. It was on the line of the Tweed and of the Cheviots that the long quarrel was fought out; and thus the Merse, Ettrick Forest, and Teviotdale; the Debateable Land, Liddesdale, and Annan Water became the native countries of the songs of raid and battle. The 'Red Harlaw' – which has had its own homespun bard, although of a different note and fibre from the minstrels of the Border – may be said to have ended the struggle for the mastery between Highlands and Lowlands. From thence onward through the age of ballad-making, there were spreaghs and feuds enow upon and within the Highland Line. But, until the time when Jacobitism came to give change of theme and bent, along with change of scene, to the spirit of Scottish romance, none of these local bloodlettings sufficed to inspire a ballad of more than local fame; unless indeed the story drew part of its power to live and to please from other sources besides the mere zest for fighting. In distinction, as we shall see from the typical Border War Lay, in which woman, if her presence is felt at all, is kept in the background, as looker-on or rewarder of the fight, in such Northern tales of raid and spulzie as The Baron of Bracklay, Edom o' Gordon, The Bonnie House o' Airlie, or even The Burning o' Frendraught, she is brought into the heart of the scene and forms an abiding and controlling influence.
In a word, these are at least as much Romantic as Historical Ballads. We suspect that woman's guile and treachery are at work, as soon as we hear the taunting words of Bracklay's lady:
'O rise, my bauld Baron,
And turn back your kye,
For the lads o' Drumwharron
Are driving them bye.'
We are made sure of it, when the minstrel tells us:
'There was grief in the kitchen
But mirth in the ha';
But the Baron o' Bracklay
Is dead and awa'.'
And in the assault on the 'House o' the Rhodes,' it is not the wild work of the Gordons on which our thoughts are fixed; it is not even on the Forbeses, riding hard and fast to be in time for rescue:
'Put on, put on, my michty men,
As fast as ye can drie;
For he that 's hindmost o' my men
Will ne'er get good o' me.'
It is 'the bonnie face that lies on the grass,' and Lady Ogilvie, and not her lord or the 'gleyed Argyll,' is central figure of the tale of the raid of the Campbells against their hereditary foes in Angus.
As a rule, in those ballads of the Borders whose business is with foray and reprisal, we have none of this disturbing element. The sheer love of adventure, the chance of exchanging 'hard dunts' with the Englishmen, is inducement enough for us to follow the lead of the Douglas or Buccleuch across the Waste of Bewcastle or through the wilds of Kidland. The women folks are safe and well defended in the peel-towers, from whence, when the word has gone out to 'warn the water speedilie,' the bale-fires flash up the dales from water-foot to well-e'e, and set the hill-crests aflame with the news of the enemy's coming. They may have given the hint of a toom larder by serving a dish of spurs on the board. They will be the first to welcome home the warden's men or the moss-troopers if they return with full hands, or to rally them if they have brought nothing back but broken heads. But keeping or breaking the peace on the Borders is a man's part; and only men mingle in it. Both sides are too accustomed to surprises, and have too many strong fortalices and friends at hand, to give the foe the chance of 'lifting' whole families as well as their gear and cattle. The last thing one looks for, then, in the moss-trooping ballads is a strain of tender and pathetic sentiment. The tone is hearty and virile even to boisterousness. The minstrel, like the fighters, revels in hard knocks and rough jests. He has ridden with them probably, and has had the piper's share of the plunder and whatever else was going. He has heard 'the bows that bauldly ring and the arrows whiddering near him by,' as he passes through the 'derke Foreste.' He took the fell with the other folk in the following of the Scottish warden, and looking down the slope towards Reed Water, witnessed the beginning and end of the skirmish known as The Raid of the Reidswire.
'Be this our folk had taen the fell
And planted pallions there to bide;
We looked down the other side,
And saw them breasting ower the brae
Wi' Sir John Forster as their guide,
Full fifteen hundred men and mae.'
With strokes, graphic and humorous, he describes how the meeting of the two wardens, 'begun with merriment and mowes,' turned to the exchange of such 'reasons rude' between Tyndale and Jed Forest, as flights of arrows and 'dunts full dour.' Pride was at the bottom of the mischief; pride and the memory of old scores.
'To deal with proud men is but pain;
For either must ye fight or flee,
Or else no answer make again,
But play the beast and let them be.'
And so, when the English raised the question of surrendering a fugitive,
'Carmichael bade them speak out plainlie,
And cloak no cause for ill or good;
The other answering him as vainly,
Began to reckon kin and blood;
He raise, and raxed him where he stood,
And bade him match him wi' his marrows;
Then Tyndale heard these reason rude,
And they let off a flight of arrows.'
Again, in Kinmont Willie, the flower, with one exception to be named, of the ballads that celebrate the exploits of the 'ruggers and rivers,' the singer lets slip, as it were by accident, that he was of the bold and lawless company that broke Carlisle Castell in time of peace. The old lay tingles and glows with the restless untameable courage, the dramatic fire, the grim humour, and the spirit of good fellowship that were characteristic, along with some less admirable qualities, of the old Borderers. The rage, tempered with a dash of Scots caution, of the Bauld Buccleuch when he heard that his unruly countryman had been taken 'against the truce of border tide' by the 'fause Sakelde and the keen Lord Scroope'; his device for a rescue that while it would set the Kinmont free, would 'neither harm English lad nor lass,' or break the peace between the countries; the keen questionings and adroit replies that passed, like thrust and parry, between the divided bands of the warden's men and Sakelde himself, who met them successively as they crossed the Debateable Land, until it came to the turn of tongue-tied Dickie o' Dryhope, who, having never a word ready, 'thrust the lance through his fause bodie,' – all these are told in the most vigorous and graphic style of rough first-hand narrative. And then the story-teller takes up the parable in his own person, and describes how he and his comrades plunged through the flooded Eden, climbed the bank, and through 'wind and weet and fire and sleet' came beneath the castle wall: —
'We crept on knees and held our breath,
Till we placed the ladders against the wa';
And sae ready was Buccleuch himsel'
To mount the first before us a'.
He 's ta'en the watchman by the throat,
And flung him down upon the lead —
"Had there not been peace between our lands,
Upon the other side thou 'dst gaed!"'
In the 'inner prison' lay Willie o' Kinmont, like a wolf in a trap, sleeping soft and waking oft, with thoughts of the gallows, on which he was to swing in the morning, and of his wife and bairns and the 'gude fellows' in the Debateable Land he was never to see again. But in an instant, at the hail and sight of his friends, the fearless humour of the Border rider comes back to him; mounted, irons and all, on the shoulders of Red Rowan, 'the starkest man in Teviotdale,' he must first take farewell of his host, Lord Scroope, with a significant promise that he would 'pay him lodging maill when first they met on the border side.'
'Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,
We bore him down the ladder lang;
At every stride Red Rowan made
I wot the Kinmont's airns played clang.
"O mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie,
"I 've ridden a horse baith wild and wud;
But a rougher beast than Red Rowan
I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode."'
Then comes the wild rush for the Eden, where it flowed from bank to brim, with all Carlisle streaming behind in chase, and the bold plunge of the fugitives into the spate, leaving Lord Scroope staring after them, sore astonished, from the water's edge:
'"He 's either himsel' a devil frae hell,
Or else his mither a witch maun be;
I wadna' have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie."'
History attests the main incidents and characters of Kinmont Willie as true to the facts; and tradition has broidered the story with incidents which the ballad itself does not record. The daughter of the smith, on the road between Longtown and Langholm, used to relate, half a century afterwards, how Buccleuch impatiently thrust his spear through the window to arouse her father and rid Armstrong's legs from their 'cumbrous spurs,' and remembered seeing the rough riders grouped in the outer darkness and streaming with wet. The rescue was one of the latest of the episodes of Border warfare before the Union of the Crowns; and Armstrong of Kinmont himself, besides being a typical specimen of his clan,
'Able men,
Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame,'
was one of the last of what we may describe as the legitimate line of Border freebooters, before the freebooter became merged in the vulgar thief, as explained quaintly and sympathetically in Scott of Satchells' rhyme:
'It 's most clear a freebooter doth live in hazard's train;
A freebooter 's a cavalier who ventures life for gain;
But since King James the Sixth to England went,
There has been no cause for grief;
And he that hath transgressed since then,
Is no cavalier, but a thief.'
No doubt many other like exploits of capture and rescue were enacted and recounted on the Borders in the troublous times. Jock o' the Side and Archie o' Ca'field read almost like variants of Kinmont Willie. Their heroes, too, are 'notour lymours and thieves,' living on or near the margin of the Debateable Land; and he of the Side, in particular, lives in Sir Richard Maitland's bede-roll of the Liddesdale thieves, as only 'too well kend' by his peaceable neighbours,
'A greater thief did never hyde;
He never tyris
For to brek byris,
Owre muir and myris,
Owre gude and guide.'
Both are clapped into 'prison strang,' and liberated by a night raid and surprise. But the scene of rescue is shifted from Carlisle to Newcastle in the one case, and to Dumfries Tolbooth in the other. Hobbie Noble, the English outlaw, performs for the redoubtable Jock o' the Side the service rendered by Red Rowan; and 'mettled John Hall o' laigh Teviotdale' clatters down the Tolbooth stairs with Archie Armstrong of the Calfhill on his back, to mount him on his fleet black mare. And from the safe side of Tyne and of Nith, instead of Eden, they send their jeers and challenges back at the discomfited English pursuers. The old balladists may have mixed up places, names, and incidents in their memories, as they were rather wont to do, and laid skaith or credit at the wrong doors. But while their poetic and dramatic merit may vary, the spirit of the very baldest of these ancient songs is irresistible. The Border reiver may play a foul trick in the game; the Armstrongs, for instance, requited scurvily the services of Hobbie Noble, 'the man that lowsed Jock o' the Side;' but the roughest of these tykes, whether they rode behind the Captain of Bewcastle or the Laird of Buccleuch or Ferniehirst, or fought for their own hand, had their own code of honour, and the balladist zealously and jealously measures by it their acts and words. The worst of them had courage; they snap their fingers and laugh in the very teeth of death. Hobbie Noble, with the can of beer at his lips and the rope about his neck, could sing with an approving conscience —
'"Now, fare thee well, sweet Mangerton,
For ne'er again I will thee see;
I wad hae betrayed nae man alive
For a' the gowd in Christentie"' —
a farewell that reminds us of that of the Highland cateran, Macpherson, who 'so rantingly, so dantonly,' played a spring and danced to it beneath the gallows-tree at Banff, crying out the while against 'treacherie,' and broke his fiddle across his knee when none among the crowd would take it from his hand.
Like Sir Lancelot, in the famous eulogy of Sir Ector, these Borderers of old were not only strong men of their hands, but strong also of heart, and 'true friends to their friends,' who, since they held the first line of defence of the Kingdom, might be said to embrace, after their own family and clan, their countrymen at large. They might, on occasion, 'seek their broth in England and in Scotland both.' But they robbed and slew, when it was possible, with patriotic discrimination. In Johnie Armstrong and The Sang o' the Outlaw Murray the heroes take credit for their 'honesty' and for their services to their country. The former boasts that 'never a Scots wife could have said that e'er I skaithed her ae puir flee'; and the other that he had won Ettrick Forest from the Southron without help from king or noble. Yet the quarrel of both is with the Scottish sovereign, who has come South intent on the exemplary and kingly work of 'making the rash bush keep the cow'; and, stranger still, it is for the bold-spoken outlaws, and not for the legitimate guardian of Border peace, that the minstrel engages our sympathies.
If we may credit the surmises of Mr. P. Macgregor Chalmers, the Outlaw Murray is none other than the 'John Morvo,' the builder who has set an admirable mark of his own upon Melrose Abbey and other ecclesiastical fanes, and, as Sheriff of the Forest, built Newark Castle after he had, in jest or earnest, defied the authority of his patron, King James IV.; perhaps he was even the writer of the ballad. This is a pretty strong order on our faith; although it must be confessed that there is a singular mixture, in this fine old lay, of information on architecture, venerie, and local ownership of land; and the Outlaw is made to have all the best of the combat of wits and words, and of the bargain with which it ends. 'Name your lands,' cries the King, 'where'er they lie, and here I render them to thee'; and the Outlaw promptly responds:
'"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,
And Lewinshope still mine shall be,
Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnis baith,
My bow and arrow purchased me.
And I have native steads to me,
And some by name I do not knaw;
The Hangingshaw and Newark Lee,
And mony mair in the Forest shaw."'
Very different was the guerdon which Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie got from King James the Fifth, when, in an evil hour, he came with a gallant company from his stronghold in Eskdale to meet that monarch, who had ridden with a strong force into the heart of the moss-troopers' country, intent on taming the marchmen. Well might the ladies 'look from their loft windows,' and sigh, 'God bring our men weel hame again!' as Johnie, and the six-and-thirty Armstrongs and Elliots in his train, ran their horses through Langholm howm in their haste to welcome their 'lawful king.' This expedition of 1529 has left its mark on ballad poetry as well as history; through the hanging of Cockburn of Henderland it gave occasion for the Lament of the Border Widow. But no incident in it made deeper impression on the popular memory – none seems to have caused more sorrow and reprobation – than the stringing up of the Laird of Gilnockie and his followers on the trees at Carlenrig, at the head of Teviot. A 'Johnie Armstrong's Dance' was popular when the Complaynt of Scotland was written twenty years later; and Sir David Lyndsay, in one of his plays, makes his Pardoner hawk about, among his relics of saints, the cords of good hemp that hanged the unlucky laird of Gilnockie Hall, with the commendation that
'Wha'ever beis hangit in this cord
Neidis never to be drowned.'
At the bar of judgment of the balladists, the deed was counted murder:
'Scotland's heart was ne'er sae wae
To see sae mony brave men die';
and murder all the less pardonable, since the king who ordered it was himself an inspirer and, as some say, a writer of ballads. As is pointed out in the Border Minstrelsy, the ballad, in its account of the interview between the king and his troublesome subject, follows pretty closely the narrative of Pitscottie. 'What wants that knave that a king should have?' was the offended remark of James, when he saw the band approaching him in the bravery of their war-gear. And Johnie, when all his appeals and bribes proved to be vain, could also speak a frank word:
'"To seek het water beneath cauld ice,
Surely it is a great follie;
I have asked grace at a graceless face,
But there is nane for my men and me."'
Whatever their misdeeds, Gilnockie and his men had certainly hard measure and short shrift. The king's courtiers, it is alleged, incited him to make a summary end of the Armstrongs; and he had not the biting answer ready which his father is said to have given to the 'keen laird of Buccleuch,' when that Border chieftain urged him to 'braid on with fire and sword' against the Outlaw of Ettrick Forest:
'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,
Nor speak of reif or felonie;
For had every honest man his coo,
A right puir clan thy name would be.'
But when their own clan or dependants made appeal for help or vengeance, none were more prompt with the strong word and deed than the Scotts – witness, Kinmont Willie; witness also, Jamie Telfer o' the Fair Dodhead. When Jamie ran hot-foot to Branksome Hall with the news that the Captain of Bewcastle had ramshackled his house and driven his gear and stock, until
'There was naught left in the Fair Dodhead
But a greeting wife and bairnies three,'
did not Buccleuch start up like an old roused lion?
'"Gar warn the water, braid and wide,
Gar warn it soon and hastilie!
They that winna ride for Telfer's kye,
Let them never look on the face o' me!"'
And the chase goes on, from the Dodhead on the Ettrick until, at the fords of the Liddel, the enemy are brought to bay; and we have the fine picture of Auld Wat of Harden, the husband of the 'Flower of Yarrow,' and a forebear of the author of Waverley, as he 'grat for very rage' when Willie Scott, the son of his chief, lay slain by an English stroke:
'But he 's ta'en aff his good steel cap,
And thrice he 's waved it in the air.
The Dinley's snaw was ne'er mair white
Than the lyart locks of Harden's hair.'
Vain was the offer by the Bewcastle raiders to men in such mood to take back the cattle that had been lifted:
'When they cam' to the Fair Dodhead,
They were a welcome sight to see!
For instead of his ain ten milk-kye,
Jamie Telfer has gotten thirty-and-three.'
Auld Maitland treats of an inroad on the opposite side of the country, of more ancient date and more formidable character. Its hero appears to have been a progenitor of that line of Lethington in East Lothian, and of Thirlstane, in Lauderdale, who, planted firmly on both sides of Lammermuir, produced in after-times warriors, statesmen, and even poets of note. Gavin Douglas places Maitland, with the 'auld beird grey,' among the legendary inmates of his 'Palace of Honour'; and Scott identifies him as a Sir Richard de Mautlant who, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and probably during the Wars of Independence, held the ancestral lands by Leaderside, on the track of invading armies crossing the Tweed between Coldstream and Melrose, and holding in to Lothian by Soultra Hill. Accordingly, the ballad tells us that the English army, under King Edward, assembled on the Tyne: