2, 1754, announced, marriages were performed “with the utmost privacy,
decency, and regularity, the expense not more than one guinea, the
five shilling stamp included. There are five private ways by land to
this chapel, and two by water.” The Reverend John Williamson, “His
Majesty’s Chaplain of the Savoy,” asserted that as such he could grant
licences; and despite the Act he went on coupling. In 1755 he married
the enormous number of one thousand one hundred and ninety; half the
brides being visibly in an interesting condition. The authorities,
having warned him time and again to no purpose, at last commenced
proceedings. But he evaded arrest by skipping over roofs and vanishing
through back doors, in a manner inexplicable to us to-day; and went
on issuing licences, while his curate, Mr. Grierson, did the actual
work at the altar. Grierson, however, was seized and transported for
fourteen years: then his chief surrendered (1756), stood his trial, and
received a like sentence; the irregular marriages both had performed
being declared of no effect.
What now were the amorous to do? Well, there were divers makeshifts.
Thus, at Southampton (_temp._ 1750), a boat was held ever ready to
sail for Guernsey with any couple able and willing to pay five pounds.
Ireland did not impress itself on the lovers’ imagination: it may be
that the thought of that gruesome middle passage “froze the genial
current of their souls.” But there was a North as well as a South
Britain; and--what was more to the purpose--the Scots marriage law
was all that heart could wish. Marriage (it held) is a contract into
which two parties not too young and not too “sib” might enter at any
time, all that was necessary being that each party clearly and in
good faith expressed consent. Neither writing nor witnesses, however
important for proof, were essential to a valid union. Not that the
Scots law, civil or ecclesiastical, favoured this happy despatch; but
the very punishment it imposed only tied the knot tighter. Couples of
set purpose confessed their vows, got a small fine inflicted, and
there was legal evidence of their union! Ecclesiastical discipline was
strict enough to prevent regularly instituted Scots ministers from
assisting at such affairs. But any man would do (for, after all, he was
but a witness), and the first across the Border as well as or better
than another. Now, by a well-known principle of international law,
the _lex loci contractus_ governs such contracts: the marriage being
valid in Scotland where it took place, was also recognised as valid in
England where its celebration would have been a criminal offence! This
was curiously illustrated early in the century by the case of Joseph
Atkinson. The Border, I must explain, had all along been given to
irregular marriages, and different localities in Scotland were used as
best suited the parties. Lamberton Toll Bar, N.B., lay four miles north
of Berwick-on-Tweed; and here our Atkinson did a thriving business in
the coupling line. One fine day he had gone to Berwick when a couple
sought his service at the toll-house. A quaint fiction presumes that
everybody knows the law; but here it turned out that nobody did, for
the bride and groom instead of uniting themselves before the first
comer rushed off to Berwick, and were there wedded by Lamberton. And
not only was the affair a nullity; but the unfortunate coupler was
sentenced to seven years’ transportation for offending against the
English marriage laws.
Most of them, however, that went North on marriage bent, took the
Carlisle road. A few miles beyond that city the little river Sark
divides the two countries. Just over the bridge is the toll-house:
a footpath to the right takes you to Springfield. Till about 1826
the North road lay through this village; then, however, the way was
changed, and ran by Gretna Green, which is nine and a half miles
from Carlisle. These two places, together with the toll-house, are
all in Gretna parish; but of course the best known is Gretna Green:
“the resort” (wrote Pennant) “of all amorous couples whose union
the prudence of parents or guardians prohibits.” The place acquired
a world-wide fame: that English plays and novels should abound in
references to it, as they had done to the Fleet, was only natural;
but one of George Sand’s heroes elopes thither with a banker’s
daughter, and even Victor Hugo hymns it in melodious verse, albeit his
pronunciation is a little peculiar:
La mousse des près exhale
Avril, qui chante drin, drin,
Et met une succursale
De Cythère à Gretna Green.
And how to explain the fact that people hurried from the remotest
parts of Scotland as well as from England, though any square yard of
soil “frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat’s” had served their purpose just
as well? The parishioners, indeed, sought not the service of their
self-appointed priest; but is there not an ancient saying as to the
prophet’s lack of honour among his own people?
Now, if you travelled North in proper style, in a chaise and four, with
post-boys and so forth, you went to the “King’s Head” at Springfield,
or, after the change of road, more probably to Gretna Hall; but your
exact halting-place was determined at Carlisle. The postillions there,
being in league with one or other of the Gretna innkeepers, took you
willy-nilly to one or the other hostelry. Were you poor and tramped
it, you were glad to get the knot tied at the toll-house. Most of the
business fell into a few hands. Indeed, the landlords of the various
inns instead of performing the rite themselves usually sent for a
so-called priest. A certificate after this sort was given to the wedded
couple:--“Kingdom of Scotland, County of Dumfries, Parish of Gretna:
these are to certify to all whom it may concern that (here followed the
names) by me, both being present and having declared to me that they
are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the law
of Scotland.” This the parties and their witnesses subscribed.
I shall not attempt to trace the obscure succession of Gretna Green
priests. Joseph Paisley, who died in 1811, aged eighty-four, was, it
seems, the original blacksmith; but he was no son of Tubal Cain,
though he had been fisher, smuggler, tobacconist. He united man with
woman even as the smith welds iron with iron--thus the learned explain
his title. After Paisley, and connected with him by marriage, there
was Robert Elliott, and several people of the name of Laing. In some
rather amusing memoirs Elliott assures us that between 1811 and 1839 he
performed three thousand eight hundred and seventy-two marriages; also
that his best year was 1825, when he did one hundred and ninety-eight,
and his worst 1839, when he did but forty-two. At the toll-bar there
was a different line, whose most picturesque figure was Gordon, the old
soldier. Gordon officiated in full regimentals, a large cocked hat on
his head and a sword by his side. Here, too, Beattie reigned for some
years before 1843. His occupation went to his head, for latterly he
had a craze for marrying, so that he would creep up behind any chance
couple and begin to mumble the magic words that made them one. The law
has ever terrors for the unlettered, and the rustic bachelor fled at
Beattie’s approach, as if he had been the pest. The “priests” sometimes
used a mangled form of the Church of England service: which irreverence
was probably intended as a delicate compliment to the nationality of
most of their clients. The fees were uncertain. When the trembling
parties stood hand in hand in inn or toll-bar, whilst the hoofs of
pursuing post-horses thundered ever nearer, ever louder, or it might be
that irate father or guardian battered at the door, it was no time to
bargain. The “priest” saw his chance; and now and again he pouched as
much as a hundred pounds.
Each house had its record of famous marriages. There was the story
of how Lord Westmoreland sought the hand of the heiress of Child,
the banker, and was repulsed with “Your blood, my Lord, is good, but
money is better.” My Lord and the young lady were speedily galloping
towards the border, while Mr. Child “breathed hot and instant on their
trace.” He had caught them too, but his leader was shot down or his
carriage disabled by some trick (the legends vary), and he was too late
after all. He made the best of it, of course, and in due time Lady
Sophia Fane, daughter of the marriage, inherited grandpa’s fortune
and his bank at Temple Bar. Odder still was the marriage, in 1826,
of Edward Gibbon Wakefield to Ellen Turner. It was brought about by
an extraordinary fraud, and a week after the far from happy couple
were run to earth at Calais by the bride’s relatives. They “quoted
William and Mary upon me till I was tired of their Majesties’ names,”
was Wakefield’s mournful excuse for submitting to a separation. He
was afterwards tried for abduction, found guilty, and sentenced to
three years’ imprisonment; while a special Act of Parliament (7 and 8
Geo. IV. c. 66) declared the marriage null and void. Wakefield ended
strangely as a political economist. Is not his “theory of colonisation”
writ large in all the text books? A pair of Lord High Chancellors
must conclude our list. In November 1772, John Scott, afterwards Lord
Eldon, was married at Blackshiels, in East Lothian, to Bessie Surtees,
the bridegroom being but twenty-one. Though the Rev. Mr. Buchanan,
minister of an Episcopal congregation at Haddington, officiated, it was
a runaway match and an irregular marriage. Lord Erskine, about October
1818, was wedded at the “King’s Head,” Springfield, to Miss Mary Buck
(said to have been his housekeeper). He was about seventy, and, one
fears, in his dotage. A number of extravagant legends still linger as
to the ceremony. He was dressed in woman’s clothes, and played strange
pranks. He and his intended spouse had with them in the coach a brace
of merry-begots (as our fathers called them), over whom he threw his
cloak during the ceremony in order to make them his heirs. It is still
a vulgar belief in the North that if the parents of children born out
of wedlock are married, the offspring, to be legitimised, must be held
under their mother’s girdle through the nuptial rites. Now, by the
law of Scotland, such a marriage produces the effect noted; but the
presence or absence of the children is void of legal consequence. As
far as is known, Erskine had one son called Hampden, born December 5,
1821, and no other by Mary Buck. It is worth noting that Robert Burns,
on his road to Carlisle in 1787, fell in by the way “with a girl and
her married sister”; and “the girl, after some overtures of gallantry
on my side, sees me a little cut with the bottle, and offers to take me
in for a Gretna Green affair.” Burns was already wed, Scots fashion, to
Jean Armour. And the thing did not come off, so that bigamy is not to
be reckoned among the poet’s sins.
They were rather sordid affairs in the end, those Gretna Green
marriages. So, at least, the Reverend James Roddick, minister of
the parish, writing of the place in 1834 in the _New Statistical
Account_, would have us believe. There were three or four hundred
marriages annually: “the parties are chiefly from the sister kingdom
and from the lowest rank of the population.” A number came from
Carlisle at fair-time, got married, spent a few days together, and
then divorced themselves. Competition had brought down the priest’s
fee to half-a-crown, and every tippling-house had its own official.
Nay, the very roadman on the highway that joined the kingdoms pressed
his services on all and sundry! And then the railway came to Gretna,
and you had the spectacle of “priests” touting on the platform. Alas
for those shores of old Romance! In 1856, Lord Brougham’s Act (19 &
20 Vict. cap. 96), made well-nigh as summary an end of Gretna as Lord
Hardwicke’s had of the Fleet unions. It provided that at least one
of the parties to an irregular Scots marriage must be domiciled in
Scotland, or have resided there during the twenty-one days immediately
preceding the espousals; else were they altogether void. What an enemy
your modern law-giver is to the picturesque! And what an entertaining
place this world must once have been!
The Border Law
The Border Country--Its Lays and Legends--The Wardens and Other
Officers--Johnie Armstrong--Merrie Carlisle--Blackmail--The Border
Chieftain and His Home--A Raid--“Hot-trod”--“To-names”--A Bill
of Complaint--The Day of Truce--Business and Pleasure--“Double
and Salffye”--Border Faith--Deadly Feud--The Story of Kinmont
Willie--The Debateable Land--The Union of the Crowns and the End of
Border Law.
_Leges marchiarum_, to wit, the Laws of the Marches; so statesmen and
lawyers named the codes which said, though oft in vain, how English and
Scots Borderers should comport themselves, and how each kingdom should
guard against the other’s deadly unceasing enmity. I propose to outline
these laws, and the officials by whom and courts wherein they were
enforced.
But first a word as to country and people. From Berwick to the
Solway--the extreme points of the dividing line between North and
South Britain--is but seventy miles in a crow’s flight. But trace its
windings, and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half of
this space the division is arbitrary. It happed where the opposing
forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here,
was pushed back a little farther north there; and commissioners and
treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three
centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the
kingdoms met. If it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots’ character, and
prevented the growth of commerce and tilth and comfort in Scotland
proper, what must have been its effect on the Scots Borderer, ever in
the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt
the struggle far more than England, yet the English were worse troubled
than the Scots Borders: being the richer, they were the more liable
to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other
Englishmen; they were kept in hand by a strong central authority; they
had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now,
the Scots clansmen developed unchecked; so it is mainly from them that
we take our ideas of Border life.
The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded
hills, and streams innumerable, and secluded valleys, where the ruins
of old peels or feudal castles intimate a troubled past. That past,
however, has left a precious legacy to letters, for the Border ballads
are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can,
the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and fears, and beliefs of
other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness, yet
we oft feel:
He had himself laid hand on sword
He who this rime did write!
The most of them have no certain time or place. Even the traditional
stories help but little to make things clear. Yet they tell us more,
and tell it better, than the dull records of the annalists. We know who
these men really were--a strong, resolute race, passionate and proud,
rough and cruel, living by open robbery, yet capable of deathless
devotion, faithful to their word, hating all cowards and traitors to
the death; not without a certain respect and admiration for their likes
across the line, fond of jest and song, equal on occasion to a certain
rude eloquence; and, before all, the most turbulent and troublesome.
The Scots Borderers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen;
and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the
Highlands to the north and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder
at the burden _it_ had to endure. For a race, whatever its good
qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as
well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliots,
were girded at as “always riding”; and they were not particular as to
whom they rode against. Nay, both governments suspected the Borderers
of an inexplicable tenderness for their neighbours. When they took part
in a larger expedition, they would attack each other with a suspicious
lack of heart. At best they were apt to look at war from their own
point of view, and fight for mere prisoners or plunder.
To meet such conditions the Border Laws were evolved. They were
administered in chief by special officers called Wardens. Either Border
was portioned out into three Marches: the East, the Middle, and the
West (the Lordship of Liddesdale was included in the Scots Middle
March, but sometimes it had a special Keeper of almost equal dignity
with a Warden.) Each of the three Scots Wardens had a hundred pounds of
yearly fee; he could appoint deputies, captains of strongholds, clerks,
sergeants, and dempsters; he could call out the full force of his
district to invade or beat back invasion; he represented the Sovereign,
and was responsible for crimes. He must keep the Border clans in order
by securing as hostages several of their most conspicuous sons, and
either these were quartered on nobles on the other side of the Firth,
or they were held in safer keeping in the king’s castles. He also held
Justice Courts for the trial of Scots subjects accused of offences
against the laws of their own country. He was commonly a great noble
of the district, his office in early times being often hereditary;
and, as such noble, he had power of life and death, so that the need
for holding special courts was little felt. A pointed Scots anecdote
pictures an angry Highlander “banning” the Lords of Session as “kinless
loons,” because, though some were relatives, they had decided a case
against him. These Wardens were _not_ “kinless loons,” and they often
used their office to favour a friend or depress a foe. On small pretext
they put their enemies “to the horn,” as the process of outlawry (by
trumpet blast) was called. True, the indifference with which those
enemies “went to the horn” would scandalise the legal pedants.
Sometimes a superior officer, called “Lieutenant,” was sent to the
Borders; the Wardens were under him; he more fully represented the
royal power. Now and again the Sovereign himself made a progress,
administering a rough and ready justice, and so “dantoning the
thieves of the Borders, and making the rush bush keep the cow.” So
it was said of James V.’s famous raid in 1529. The chief incident
was the capture of Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, the ruins of whose
picturesque tower at the Hollows still overlook the Esk. Gilnockie
came to meet his King with a great band of horsemen richly apparelled.
He was captain of Langholm Castle, and the ballad tells how he and
his companions exercised themselves in knightly sports on Langholm
Lee, whilst “The ladies lukit frae their loft windows. ‘God bring our
men well hame agen!’” the ladies said; and their apprehensions were
more than justified, for Johnie’s reception was not so cordial as he
expected. “What wants yon knave that a King should have?” asked James
in angry amaze, as he ordered the band to instant execution. Gilnockie
and company were presently strung up on some convenient yew-trees at
Carlenrig, though, in accordance with romantic precedent, one is said
to have escaped to tell the tale. Many of Johnie’s name, among them Ill
Will Armstrong, tersely described as “another stark thieff,” went to
their doom; but the act, however applauded at Edinburgh, was bitterly
condemned on the Borders. Gilnockie only plundered the English, it
was urged, and the King had caught him by a trick unworthy a Stuart.
The country folk loved to tell how the dule-trees faded away, and
they loved to point out the graves of the Armstrongs in the lonely
churchyard. But the stirring ballad preserves the name better than
all else. It unblushingly commends Gilnockie’s love of honesty, his
generosity, his patriotism, and directly accuses his Sovereign of
treachery, in which accusation there is perhaps some truth. Anyhow,
his execution was the violent act of a weak man, and had no permanent
effect.
The Wardens had twofold duties: first, that of defence against the
enemy; second, that of negotiation in times of peace with their
mighty opposites. Thus the Border laws were part police and part
international, and were administered in different courts. Offences of
the first class were speaking or conferring with Englishmen without
permission of the King or the Warden, and the warning Englishmen of the
Scots’ alertness in the matter of forays. In brief, aiding, abetting,
or in any way holding intercourse with the “auld enemy” was march
treason (to adopt a convenient English term).
In England the Wardens were finally chosen for their political and
military skill, not because of their territorial position. Now, the
Warden of the East Marches was commonly Governor and Castellan of
Berwick. The castle of Harbottell was allotted to the Warden of the
Middle Marches; whilst for the West, Carlisle, where again Governor
and Warden were often one, was the appointed place. Sometimes a Lord
warden-general was appointed, sometimes a Lieutenant, but the Wardens
were commonly independent. At the Warden courts Englishmen were
punished for march treason, a branch of which was furnishing the Scots
with articles of merchandise or war. And here I note that Carlisle
throve on this illegal traffic. At Carlisle Fair the Carlisle burgher
never asked the nationality of man or beast. The first got his money or
its equivalent; the second was instantly passed through the hands of
butcher and skinner. Though the countryside were wasted, the burghers
lay safe within their strong walls, and waxed fat on the spoils of
borderman and dalesman alike. Small wonder the city was “Merrie
Carlisle.” The law struck with as little force against blackmail, or
protection money, which it was an offence to pay to any person, Scots
or English. From this source, Gilnockie and others, coining the terror
of their name, drew great revenue. Another provision was against
marriage with a Scotswoman without the Warden’s consent, for in this
way traitors, or “half-marrows,” arose within the gate. Complete forms
are preserved of the procedure at those Warden courts. There were a
grand jury and an ordinary jury, and the Warden acted very much as a
judge of to-day. One or two technical terms I shall presently explain.
Here I but note that the criminal guilty of march treason was beheaded
“according to the customs of the marches.”