Frae off the castle wa’,
When down before the Scottish spear
She saw brave Percy fa’!
How pale and wan his lady look’d,
Frae off the castle hieght,
When she beheld her Percy yield
To doughty Douglas’ might.
Colonel Elliot asks, “Can any one believe that these stanzas are really
ancient and have come down orally through many generations?” {70a}
Certainly not! But Colonel Elliot does not allow for the fact, insisted
on by Professor Child, that traditional ballads, from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth centuries, were often printed on broad-sheets as edited by
the cheapest broadside-vendors’ hacks; that the hacks interpolated and
messed their originals; and that, after the broadside was worn out, lost,
or burned, oral memory kept it alive in tradition. For examples of this
process we have only to look at _William’s Ghost_ in Herd’s copy of 1776.
This is a traditional ballad; it is included in Scott’s _Clerk Saunders_,
but, as Hogg told him, is a quite distinct song. In Herd’s copy it ends
thus—
“Oh, stay, my only true love, stay,”
The constant Marg’ret cry’d;
Wan grew her cheeks, she closed her eyes,
Stretched her soft limbs, and dy’d.
Let _this_ get into tradition, and be taken down from recitation, and the
ballad will be denounced as modern. But it is essentially ancient.
These two modern stanzas, in Hogg’s copy, are rather too bad for Hogg’s
making; and I do not know whether they are his (he practically says they
are not, we shall see), or whether they are remembered by reciters from a
stall-copy of the period of Lady Wardlaw’s _Hardyknute_.
After that, Hogg’s copy becomes more natural. Douglas says to the
discomfited Percy (x.)—
Had we twa been upon the green,
And never an eye to see,
I should hae had ye flesh and fell,
But your sword shall gae wi’ me.
That rings true! Moreover, had either Hogg or Scott tampered here (Scott
excised), either would have made Douglas carry off—not Percy’s _sword_,
but the historic captured _pennon_ of Percy. Scott really could not have
resisted the temptation had he been interpolating _à son dévis_.
But your _pennon_ shall gae wi’ me!
It was easy to write in that!
Percy had challenged Douglas thus—
But gae ye up to Otterburn,
And there wait days three (xi.),
as in the English (xiii.). In the English, Percy, we saw, promises game
enough there; in Hogg, Douglas demurs (xii., xiii., xiv.). There are no
supplies at Otterburn, he says—
To feed my men and me.
The deer rins wild frae dale to dale,
The birds fly wild frae tree to tree,
And there is neither bread nor kale,
To fend my men and me.
These seem to me sound true ballad lines, like—
My hounds may a’ rin masterless
My hawks may fly frae tree to tree,
in Child’s variant of _Young Beichan_. The speakers, we see, are
“inverted.” Percy, in the English, promises Douglas’s men
pheasants—absurd provision for the army of 40,000 men of the English
ballad. In the Ettrick text Douglas says that there are no supplies,
merely _feræ naturæ_, but he will wait at Otterburn to give Percy his
chance.
Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern
pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions
them, and the “prettier verses,” with a note of exclamation (!). {73a}
But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd’s
old copy, and nobody says that Scott or Hogg or any modern faker made the
inversions in Herd’s text. The differences and inversions in the English
and in Herd are very ancient; by 1550 “the Percy and the Montgomery met,”
in the line quoted in _The Complaynte of Scotland_. At about the same
period (1550) it was the Percy and the Douglas who met, in the English
version. Manifestly there pre-existed, by 1550, an old ballad, which
either a Scot then perverted from the English text, or an Englishman from
the Scots. Thus the inversions in the Ettrick and English version need
not be due (they are not due) to a _modern_ “faker.”
In the Hogg MS. (xxiii.), Percy wounds Douglas “till backwards he did
flee.” Hogg was too good a Scot to interpolate the flight of Douglas;
and Scott was so good a Scot that—what do you suppose he did?—he excised
“till backwards he did flee” from Hogg’s text, and inserted “that he fell
to the ground” _from the English text_!
In the Hogg MS. (xviii., xix.), in Scott xvii., xviii., Douglas, at
Otterburn, is roused from sleep by his page with news of Percy’s
approach. Douglas says that the page lies (compare Herd, where Douglas
doubts the page)—
For Percy hadna’ men yestreen
To dight my men and me.
There is nothing in this to surprise any one who knows the innumerable
variants in traditional ballads. But now comes in a very curious
variation (Hogg MS. xx., Scott, xix.). Douglas says (Hogg MS. xx.)—
But I have seen a dreary dream
Beyond the Isle o’ Skye,
I saw a dead man won the fight,
And I think that man was I.
Here is something not in Herd, and as remote from the manner of the
English poet, with his
The Chronicle will not lie,
as Heine is remote from, say,—Milman. The verse is magical, it has
haunted my memory since I was ten years old. Godscroft, who does not
approve of the story of Douglas’s murder by one of his men, writes that
the dying leader said:—
“First do yee keep my death both from our own folke and from the enemy”
(Froissart, “Let neither friend nor foe know of my estate”); “then that
ye suffer not my standard to be lost or cast downe” (Froissart, “Up with
my standard and call _Douglas_!”;) “and last, that ye avenge my death”
(also in Froissart). “Bury me at Melrose Abbey with my father. If I
could hope for these things I should die with the greater contentment;
for long since I _heard a prophesie that a dead man should winne a
field_, _and I hope in God it shall be I_.” {75a}
I saw a dead man won the fight,
And I think that man was I!
Godscroft, up to the mention of Melrose and the prophecy, took his tale
direct from Froissart, or, if he took it from George Buchanan’s Latin
History, Buchanan’s source was Froissart, but Froissart’s was evidence
from Scots who were in the battle.
But who changed the prophecy to a dream of Douglas, and who versified
Godscroft’s “a dead man shall winne a field, and I hope in God it shall
be I”? Did Godscroft take that from the ballad current in his time and
quoted by him? Or did a _remanieur_ of Godscroft turn _his_ words into
I saw a dead man win the fight,
And I think that man was I?
Scott did not make these two noble lines out of Godscroft, he found them
in Hogg’s copy from recitation, only altering “I saw” into “I dreamed,”
and the ungrammatic “won” into “win”; and “_the_ fight” into “_a_ fight.”
The whole dream stanza occurs in a part of the ballad where Hogg
confesses to no alteration or interpolation, and I doubt if the Shepherd
of Ettrick had read a rare old book like Godscroft. If he had not, this
stanza is purely traditional; if he had, he showed great genius in his
use of Godscroft.
In Hogg’s Ettrick copy, Douglas, after telling his dream, rushes into
battle, is wounded by Percy, and “backward flees.” Scott (xx.),
following a historical version (Wyntoun’s _Cronykil_), makes
Douglas forget the helmit good
That should have kept his brain.
Being wounded, in Hogg’s version, and “backward fleeing,” Douglas sends
his page to bring Montgomery (Hogg), and from stanza xxiv. to xxxiv., in
Hogg, all is made up by himself, he says,—from facts given “in plain
prose” by his reciters, with here and there a line or two given in verse.
Scott omitted some verses here, amended others slightly, by help of
Herd’s version, _left out a broken last stanza_ (xl.) and put in Herd’s
concluding lines (stanza lxviii. in the English text).
This deed was done at the Otterburn. (Herd.)
The fraye began at Otterburn. (English.)
Now what was the broken Ettrick stanza that Scott omitted in his
published _Otterburne_ (1806)? It referred to Sir Hugh Montgomery, who,
in Herd, captured Percy after a fight; in the English version is a
prisoner apparently exchanged for Percy. In the Ettrick MS. the omitted
verse is
He left not an Englishman on the field
. . .
That he hadna either killed or taen
Ere his heart’s blood was cauld.
Scott ended with Herd’s last stanza; in the English version the last but
two.
Now the death, at Otterburn, of Sir Hugh, is recorded in an English
ballad styled _The Hunting of the Cheviot_. By 1540–50 it was among the
popular songs north of Tweed. _The Complaynte of Scotland_ (1549)
mentions among “The Songis of Natural Music of the Antiquitie”
(_volkslieder_), _The Hunttis of Chevet_. Our copy of the English
version is in the Bodleian (MS. Ashmole, 48). It ends: “Expliceth, quod
Rychard Sheale,” a minstrel who recited ballads and tales at Tamworth
(_circ._ 1559). The text was part of his stock-in-trade.
The Cheviot ballad, in a Scots form popular in 1549, is later in many
ways than the English _Battle of Otterburne_. It begins with a brag of
Percy, a vow that, despite Douglas, he will hunt in the Cheviot hills.
While Percy is hunting with a strong force, Douglas arrives with another.
Douglas offers to decide the quarrel by single combat with Percy, who
accepts. Richard Witherington refuses to look on quietly, and a general
engagement ensues.
At last the Duglas and the Perse met,
Lyk to Captayns of myght and of mayne,
They swapte together tylle they both swat
With swordes that wear of fyn myllan.
We are back in stanza I. of the English _Otterburne_, in stanza xxxv.
(substituting Hugh Montgomery for Douglas) of the Hogg MS. In _The
Hunting_, Douglas is slain by an English arrow (xxxvi.–xxxviii.).
Sir Hugh Montgomery now charges and slays Percy (who, of course, was
merely taken prisoner). An archer of Northumberland sends an arrow
through good Sir Hugh Montgomery (xliii.–xlvi.). Stanza lxvi. has
At Otterburn begane this spurne,
Upon a Monnynday;
There was the doughte Douglas slean,
The Perse never went away.
This is a form of Herd’s stanza xiv. of the English _Otterburn_
(lxviii.), made soon after the battle. We see that the _original_ ballad
has protean variants; in time all is mixed in tradition.
Now the curious and interesting point is that Hogg, when he collected the
ballad from two reciters, himself noticed that the _Cheviot_ ballad had
merged, in some way, into the _Otterburn_ ballad, and pointed this out to
Scott. I now publish Hogg’s letter to Scott, in which, as usual, he does
not give the year-date: I think it was 1805.
ETTRICK HOUSE, _Sept._ 10, [?1805].
DEAR SIR,—Though I have used all diligence in my power to recover the
old song about which you seemed anxious, I am afraid it will arrive
too late to be of any use. I cannot at this time have Grame and
Bewick; the only person who hath it being absent at a harvest; and as
for the scraps of Otterburn which you have got, _they seem to have
been some confused jumble made by some person who had learned both
the songs you have_, {79a} _and in time had been straitened to make
one out of them both_. But you shall have it as I had it, saving
that, as usual, I have sometimes helped the metre without altering
one original word.
Hogg here gives his version from recitation as far as stanza xxiv.
Here Hogg stops and writes:—
The ballad, which I have collected from two different people, a crazy
old man and a woman deranged in her mind, seems hitherto considerably
entire; but now, when it becomes most interesting, they have both
failed me, and I have been obliged to take much of it in plain prose.
However, as none of them seemed to know anything of the history save
what they had learned from the song, I took it the more kindly. Any
few verses which follow are to me unintelligible.
He told Sir Hugh that he was dying, and ordered him to conceal his
body, and neither let his own men nor Piercy’s know; which he did,
and the battle went on headed by Sir Hugh Montgomery, and at length—
Here follow stanzas up to xxxviii.
Hogg then goes on thus:—
Piercy seems to have been fighting devilishly in the dark. Indeed my
narrators added no more, but told me that Sir Hugh died on the field,
but that
He left not an Englishman on the field,
. . .
That he hadna either killed or ta’en
Ere his heart’s blood was cauld.
Almonshire (Stanza iii.) may probably be a corruption of
Bamburghshire, but as both my narrators called it so I thought proper
to preserve it. The towers in Roxburgh fells (Stanza iii.) may not
be so improper as we were thinking, there may have been some
[English] strength on the very borders.—I remain, Dear Sir, your most
faithful and affectionate servant, JAMES HOGG.
Hogg adds a postscript:
Not being able to get the letter away to the post, I have taken the
opportunity of again pumping my old friend’s memory, and have
recovered some more lines and half lines of Otterburn, of which I am
becoming somewhat enamoured. These I have been obliged to arrange
somewhat myself, as you will see below, but so mixed are they with
original lines and sentences that I think, if you pleased, they might
pass without any acknowledgment. Sure no man will like an old song
the worse of being somewhat harmonious. After stanza xxiv. you may
read stanzas xxv. to xxxiv. Then after xxxviii. read xxxix.
Now we know all that can be known about the copy of the ballad which, in
1805, Scott received from Hogg. Up to stanza xxiv. it is as given by the
two old reciters. The crazy man may be the daft man who recited to Hogg
Burns’s _Tam o’ Shanter_, and inspired him with the ambition to be a
poet. The deranged woman, like mad Madge Wildfire, was rich in ballad
scraps. From stanza xxv. to xxxiv., Hogg confessedly “harmonises” what
he got in plain prose intermixed with verse. Stanza xxxix. is apparently
Hogg’s. The last broken stanza, as Hogg said, is a reminiscence of the
_Hunting of the Cheviot_, in a Scots form, long lost.
Hogg was not a scientific collector: had he been, he would have taken
down “the plain prose” and the broken lines and stanzas verbally. But
Hogg has done his best.
We have next to ask, How did Scott treat the material thus placed before
him? He dropped five stanzas sent by Hogg, mainly from the part made up
from “plain prose”; he placed in a stanza and a line or two from Herd’s
text; he remade a stanza and adopted a line from the English of 1550, and
inserted an incident from Wyntoun’s _Cronykil_ (about 1430). He did
these things in the effort to construct what Lockhart calls “a standard
text.”
1. In stanza i., for Hogg’s “Douglas _went_,” Scott put “bound him to
ride.”
2. (_H._) “With the Lindsays.”
(_S._) “With _them_ the Lindesays.”
3. (_H._) “Almonshire.”
(_S._) “Bamboroughshire.”
(_H._) “Roxburgh.”
(_S._) “Reidswire.”
6. (_H._) “The border again.”
(_S._) “The border fells.”
7. (_H._) “_Most_ furiously.”
(_S._) “_Right_ furiouslie.”
9. (_H._) A modernised stanza.
(_S._) Scott deletes it.
15. (_H._) Scott rewrites the stanza thus,
(_H._)
But I will stay at Otterburn,
Where you shall welcome be;
And if ye come not at three days end,
A coward I’ll call thee.
(_S._)
“Thither will I come,” proud Percy said,
“By the might of Our Ladye.”
“There will I bide thee,” said the Douglas,
“My troth I’ll plight to thee.”
19. (_H._) “I have _seen_ a dreary dream.”
20. (_S._) “I have _dreamed_ a dreary dream.”
21. (_H._)
Where he met with the stout Percy
And a’ his goodly train.
21. (_S._)
But he forgot the helmet good
That should have kept his brain.
(From Wyntoun.)
22. (_H._) Line 2. “Right keen.”
(_S._) Line 2. “Fu’ fain.”
Line 4.
The blood ran down like rain.
Line 4.
The blood ran them between.
23. (_H._)
But Piercy wi’ his good broadsword
Was made o’ the metal free,
Has wounded Douglas on the brow
Till backward did he flee.
24. (_S._)
But Piercy wi’ his broadsword good
That could so sharply wound,
Has wounded Douglas on the brow,
Till he fell to the ground.
25. (_H._) Here Hogg has mixed prose and verse, and does his best.
Scott deletes Hogg’s 25.
27. (_H._) Douglas repeats the story of his dream. Scott deletes the
stanza.
28. In Hogg’s second line,
Nae mair I’ll fighting see.
Scott gives, from Herd,
Take thou the vanguard of the three.
29. Hogg’s verse is
But tell na ane of my brave men
That I lie bleeding wan,
But let the name of Douglas still
Be shouted in the van.
This is precisely what Douglas does say, in Froissart, but Scott deletes
the stanza. Probably Hogg got the fact from his reciters, “in plain
prose,” with a phrase or two in verse.
31. (_H._) Line 4.
On yonder lily lee.
27. (_S._)
That his merrie men might not see.
33. (_H._) Scott deletes the stanza.
35. (_H._)
When stout Sir Hugh wi’ Piercy met.
30. (_S._)
The Percy and Montgomery met. {83a}
36. (_H._)
“O yield thee, Piercy,” said Sir Hugh,
“O yield, or ye shall die!”
“Fain would I yield,” proud Percy said,
“But ne’er to loon like thee.”
31. (_S._)
“Now yield thee, yield thee, Percy,” he said,
“Or else I vow I’ll lay thee low,”
“To whom must I yield,” quoth Earl Percy,
“Now that I see it must be so?”
Scott took this from Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s MS. copy. {84a}
38. (_H._)
38. (_S._) Scott makes a slight verbal alteration.
39. (_H._) Line 1.
34. (_S._) Line 1.
Scott substitutes Herd’s
As soon as he knew it was Montgomery.
40. (_H._) Hogg’s broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, derived from
a lost form of the _Huntiss of Chevets_, named in _The Complaynte of
Scotland_.
35. (_S._) Scott omits giving the formula common to the English of 1550
and to Herd. This was the whole of Scott’s editorial alteration. Any
one may discover the facts from Professor Kittredge’s useful abbreviation
of Child’s collection into a single volume (Nutt. London, 1905).
Colonel Elliot quotes Professor Kittredge’s book three or four times, but
in place of looking at the facts he abounds in the Higher Criticism.
Colonel Elliot says that Scott does not tell us of a single line having
been borrowed from Percy’s version. {84b} Scott has only “a single line”
to tell of, the fourth line in his stanza xxii., “Till he fell to the
ground.”
For the rest, the old English version and Herd’s have many
inter-borrowings of stanzas, but we do not know whether a Scot borrowed
from an Englishman, or _vice versa_. Thus, in another and longer
traditional version—Hogg’s—more correspondence must be expected than in
Herd’s fourteen stanzas. It is, of course, open to scepticism to allege
that Hogg merely made his text, invented the two crazy old reciters, and
the whole story about them, and his second “pumping of their memories,”
invented “Almonshire,” which he could not understand, and invented his
last broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, to give the idea that _The
Huntiss of Chevets_ was mingled in the recollections of the reciters with
_The Battle of Otterburn_. He also gave the sword in place of the pennon
of Percy as the trophy of Douglas, “and the same with intent to deceive,”
just as he pretended, in _Auld Maitland_, not to know what “springwalls”
were, and wrote “springs: wall-stanes.” If this probable theory be
correct, then Scott was the dupe of Truthful James. At all events,
though for three years Scott was moving heaven and earth and Ettrick
Forest to find a copy of a Scottish ballad of Otterburn, he did not sit
down and make one, as, in Colonel Elliot’s system, he easily could and
probably would have done.
Before studying his next ill deed, we must repeat that the Otterburn
ballads prove that in early times one nation certainly pirated a ballad
of a rival nation, and very ingeniously altered it and inverted the parts
of the heroes.
We have next to examine a case in a later generation, in which a maker
who was interested in one clan, pirated, perverted, and introverted the
_rôles_ of the heroes in a ballad by a maker interested in another clan.
Either an Elliotophile perverted a ballad by a Scottophile, or a
Scottophile perverted a ballad by an Elliotophile.
This might be done at the time when the ballad was made (say 1620–60).
But Colonel Elliot believes that the perversion was inflicted on an
Elliotophile ballad by a Scottophile impostor about 1800–1802. The name
of this desperate and unscrupulous character was Walter Scott, Sheriff of
Ettrick Forest, commonly called Selkirkshire.
In this instance I have no manuscript evidence. The name of “Jamie of
the Fair Dodhead,” the ballad, appears in a list of twenty-two ballads in
Sir Walter’s hand, written in a commonplace book about 1800–1801. Eleven
are marked X. “Jamie” is one of that eleven. _Kinmont Willie_ is among
the eleven not marked X. We may conjecture that he had obtained the
first eleven, and was hunting for the second eleven,—some of which he
never got, or never published.
THE MYSTERY OF THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER
I
A RIDING SONG
_The Ballad of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead_ has many charms for
lovers of the Border. The swift and simple stanzas carry us through a
great tract of country, which remains not unlike what it was in the days
when Scotts, Armstrongs, and Elliots rode the hills in jack and knapscap,
with sword and lance. The song leads us first, with a foraging party of
English riders, from Bewcastle, an English hold, east of the Border
stream of the Liddel; then through the Armstrong tribe, on the north
bank; then through more Armstrongs north across Tarras water (“Tarras for
the good bull trout”); then north up Ewes water, that springs from the
feet of the changeless green hills and the _pastorum loca vasta_, where
now only the shepherd or the angler wakens the cry of the curlews, but
where then the Armstrongs were in force. We ride on, as it were, and
look down into the dale of the stripling Teviot, _electro clarior_ (then
held by the Scotts); we descend and ford “Borthwick’s roaring strand,” as
Leyden sings, though the burn is usually a purling brook even where it
joins Teviot, three miles above Hawick.
Next we pass across the green waves of moorlands that rise to the heights
over Ettrick (held by the Scotts), whence the foragers of the song gallop
down to “The Fair Dodhead,” now a heap of grass-covered stones, but in
their day a peel tower, occupied, _according to the ballad_, by one James
Telfer. The English rob the peel tower, they drive away ten cows, and
urge them southwards over Borthwick water, then across Teviot at Coultart
Cleugh (say seven miles above Hawick), then up the Frostily burn, and so
down Ewes water as before; but the Scottish pursuers meet them before
they cross the Liddel again into English bounds. The English are
defeated, their captain is shot through the head (which in no way affects
his power of making speeches); he is taken, twenty or thirty of his men
are killed or wounded, his own cattle are seized, and his victim Telfer,
returns rejoicing to Dodhead in distant Ettrick.
_C’est magnifique_, _mais ce n’est pas la guerre_! These events never
occurred, as we shall see later, yet the poet has the old reiving spirit,
the full sense of the fierce manly times, and possesses a traditional
knowledge of the historical personages of the day, and knows the
country,—more or less.
The poem has raised as many difficulties as Nestor’s long story about
raided cattle in the eleventh book of the _Iliad_. Historical Greece
knew but dimly the places which were familiar to Nestor, the towns that
time had ruined, the hill where Athene “turned the people again.” We,
too, have to seek in documents of the end of the sixteenth century, or in
an old map of 1654 (drawn about 1600), to find Dodhead, Catslack, or
Catloch, or Catlock hill, and Preakinhaugh, places essential to our
inquiry.
I see the student who has ventured so far into my tract wax wan! He does
not,—she does not,—wish to hear about dusty documents and ancient maps.
For him or for her the ballad is enough, and a very good ballad it is. I
would shake the faith of no man in the accuracy of the ballad tale, if it
were not necessary for me to defend the character of Sir Walter Scott,
which, on occasion of this and other ballads, is impugned by Colonel the
Hon. FitzWilliam Elliot. He “hopes, though he cannot expect,” that I
will give my reasons for not sharing his belief that Sir Walter did a
certain thing which I could not easily palliate. {89}
II
THE BALLAD IMPOSSIBLE