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:
'They lighted on the banks of Tweed,
And blew their fires so het,
And fired the Merse and Teviotdale
All in an evening late.
As they flared up o'er Lammermuir
They burned baith up and down,
Until they came to a darksome house,
Some call it Lauder town.'
Many a foray from the same direction followed the same gait, their
coming heralded by the bale-fires that flashed the signal from Hume
Castle to Edgarhope (wrongly identified by Professor Veitch with
Edgerston on Jed Water), and from Edgarhope to Soultra Edge. But
memorable above all other Border raids recorded in song or story, is
that encounter in which 'the Douglas and the Percy met,' and which has
inspired perhaps the very finest of the historical ballads of each
country. Moot points there are of locality, date, and circumstances; but
it is generally accepted that the rhyme known for many centuries in
Scotland as _The Battle of Otterburn_, and the English _Chevy Chase_ are
versions, from opposite sides, of one event--a skirmish fought in the
autumn of 1388 on Rede Water, between a band of Scots, under James, Earl
of Douglas, returning home laden with spoil, and a body of English, led
by Hotspur, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, in which Douglas was
slain and young Harry Percy taken prisoner. It were as hard to decide
between the merits of these famous old lays as to award the prize for
prowess between the respective champions. But it may be noted, as a fine
Borderer's trait, that each of the two ballads does full justice to the
chivalry and fighting mettle of the enemy. It is to be observed also
that they are different poems, and not merely versions of the same; and
that _The Battle of Otterburn_ and the other racy and vigorous ballads
of its class dealt with in this chapter, are of themselves sufficient to
refute the arrogant dictum of Mr. Carew Hazlitt, that Scotland has no
original ballad-poetry to speak of, and that what she calls her own are
'chiefly English ballads, sprinkled with Northern provincialisms.'
But while they are, as Scott says, different in essentials, the English
and Scottish ballads have exchanged phrases and even verses, as the
English and Scottish warriors exchanged strokes, and these of the best:
'When Percy wi' the Douglas met,
I wat they were full fain;
They swakked their swords till sair they swet,
And the blood ran doon like rain,'
may lack some of the picturesqueness of the corresponding passage of
_Chevy Chase_. But nothing, at least in Scottish eyes, can surpass the
simple majesty and pathos of the last words of Douglas--words that sound
all the sadder since Walter Scott repeated them, when he also had almost
fought his last battle and was wounded unto death:
'"My nephew good," the Douglas said,
"What recks the death o' ane?
Last night I dreamed a dreary dream,
And I ken the day 's thy ain.
"My wound is deep, I fain would sleep;
Take thou the vanward o' the three,
And hide me by the bracken bush
That grows upon the lily lee.
"O bury me by the bracken bush,
Beneath the blooming brier;
Let never living mortal ken
A kindly Scot lies here."'
The Historical Ballad of Border chivalry touches its highest and
strongest note in these words; they will stand, like Tantallon, proof
against the tooth of Time as long as Scotland has a heart to feel and
ears to hear.