Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy

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

This fact was unknown to Colonel Elliot. Not knowing a Catslackhill or Catslockhill in Teviot, he made Scott’s Telfer go to an apocryphal Catlockhill in Liddesdale. Professor Veitch had said that the Catslockhill of the ballad “is to be sought” in some locality between Coultartcleugh and Branxholm. Colonel Elliot calls this “a really preposterously cool suggestion.” 72 Why “really preposterously cool”? Being sought, the place is found where it had always been. Jamie Telfer found it, and in it his friend “William’s Wat,” who took him to the laird of Buccleuch at Branksome.

In the Elliot version, when refused aid by Buccleuch, Jamie ran to Coultartcleugh, – as in Scott’s, – on his way to Martin Elliot at Preakinhaugh on the Liddel. Jamie next “takes the fray” to “the Catlockhill,” and is there remounted by “Martin’s Hab,” an Elliot (not by William’s Wat), and they “take the fray” to Martin Elliot at Preakinhaugh in Liddesdale. This is very well, but where is this “Catlockhill” in Liddesdale? Is it even a real place?

Colonel Elliot has found no such place; nor can I find it in the Registrum Magni Sigilli, nor in Blaeu’s map of 1600–54.

Colonel Elliot’s argument has been that the Elliot version, the version of the Sharpe MS., is the earlier, for, among other reasons, its topography is correct. 73 It makes Telfer run from Dodhead to Branksome for aid, because that was the comparatively near residence of the powerful Buccleuch. Told by Buccleuch to seek aid from Martin Elliot in Liddesdale, Telfer does so. He runs up Teviot four miles to his brother-in-law, Jock Grieve, who mounts him. He then rides off at a right angle, from Teviot to Catlockhill, says the Elliot ballad, where he is rehorsed by Martin’s Hab. The pair then take the fray to Martin Elliot at Preakinhaugh on Liddel water, and Martin summons and leads the pursuers of the Captain.

This, to Colonel Elliot’s mind, is all plain sailing, all is feasible and natural. And so it is feasible and natural, if Colonel Elliot can find a Catlockhill anywhere between Coultartcleugh and Preakinhaugh. On that line, in Mr. Veitch’s words, Catlockhill “is to be sought.” But just as Mr. Veitch could find no Catslockhill between Coultartcleugh and Branksome, so Colonel Elliot can find no Catlockhill between Coultartcleugh and Preakinhaugh. He tells us 74 indeed of “Catlockhill on Hermitage water.” But there is no such place known! Colonel Elliot’s method is to take a place which, he says, is given as “Catlie” Hill, “between Dinlay burn and Hermitage water, on Blaeu’s map of 1654.” We may murmur that Catlie Hill is one thing and Catlock another, but Colonel Elliot points out that “lock” means “the meeting of waters,” and that Catlie Hill is near the meeting of Dinlay burn and the Hermitage water. But then why does Blaeu call it, not Catlockhill, nor Catlie hill, nor “Catlie” even, but “Gatlie,” for so it is distinctly printed on my copy of the map? Really we cannot take a place called “Gatlie Hill” and pronounce that we have found “Catlockhill”! Would Colonel Elliot have permitted Mr. Veitch – if Mr. Veitch had found “Gatlie Hill” near Branksome, in Blaeu – to aver that he had found Catslockhill near Branksome?

Thus, till Colonel Elliot produces on good evidence a Catlockhill between Coultartcleugh and Preakinhaugh, the topography of the Elliot ballad, of the Sharpe copy of the ballad, is nowhere, for neither Catliehill nor Gatliehill is Catlockhill. That does not look as if the Elliot were older than the Scott version. (There was a Sim Armstrong of the Cathill, slain by a Ridley of Hartswell in 1597. 75)

We now take the Scott version where Telfer has arrived at Branksome. Scott’s stanza xxv. is Sharpe’s xxiv. In Scott, Buccleuch; in Sharpe, Martin Elliot bids his men “warn the waterside” (Sharpe), “warn the water braid and wide” (Scott). Scott’s stanza xxvi. is probably his own, or may be, for he bids them warn Wat o’ Harden, Borthwick water, and the Teviot Scotts, and Gilmanscleuch – which is remote. Then, in xxvii., Buccleuch says —

Ride by the gate of Priesthaughswire,And warn the Currors o’ the Lee,As ye come down the Hermitage slackWarn doughty Wiliie o’ Gorrinberry.

All this is plain sailing, by the pass of Priesthaughswire the Scotts will ride from Teviot into Hermitage water, and, near the Slack, they will pass Gorrinberry, will call Will, and gallop down Hermitage water to the Liddel, where they will nick the returning Captain at the Ritterford.

The Sharpe version makes Martin order the warning of the waterside (xxiv.), and then Martin says (xxv.) —

When ye come in at the Hermitage Slack,Warn doughty Will o’ Gorranherry.

Colonel Elliot 76 supposes Martin (if I follow his meaning) to send Simmy with his command, back over all the course that Telfer and Martin’s Hab have already ridden: back past Shaws, near Braidley (a house of Martin’s), past “Catlockhill,” to Gorranberry, to “warn the waterside.” But surely Telfer, who passed Gorranberry gates, and with Hab passed the other places, had “taken the fray,” and warned the water quite sufficiently already. If this be granted, the Sharpe version is taking from the Scott version the stanza, so natural there, about the Hermitage Slack and Gorranberry. But Colonel Elliot infers, from stanzas xxvi., xxx., xxxi., that Simmy has warned the water as far as Gorranberry (again), has come in touch with the Captain, “between the Frostily and the Ritterford,” and that this is “consistent only with his having moved up the Hermitage water.”

Meanwhile Martin, he thinks, rode with his men down Liddel water. But here we get into a maze of topographical conjecture, including the hypothesis that perhaps the Liddel came down in flood, and caused the English to make for Kershope ford instead of Ritterford, and here they were met by Martin’s men on the Hermitage line of advance. I cannot find this elegant combined movement in the ballad; all this seems to me hypothesis upon hypothesis, even granting that Martin sent Simmy back up Hermitage that he might thence cut sooner across the enemy’s path. Colonel Elliot himself writes: “It is certain that after the news of the raid reached Catlockhill” (and Gorranberry, Telfer passed it), “it must have spread rapidly through Hermitage water, and it is most unlikely for the men of this district to have delayed taking action until they received instructions from their chief.” 77

That is exactly what I say; but Martin says, “When ye come in at the Hermitage Slack, warn doughty Will o’ Gorranberry.” Why go to warn him, when, as Colonel Elliot says, the news is running through Hermitage water, and the men are most probably acting on it, – as they certainly would do?

Martin’s orders, in Sharpe xxv., are taken, I think, from Buccleuch’s, in Scott’s xxvii.

The point is that Martin had no need to warn men so far away as Gorranberry, – they were roused already. Yet he orders them to be warned, and about a combined movement of Martin and Simmy on different lines the ballad says not a word. All this is inference merely, inference not from historical facts, but from what may be guessed to have been in the mind of the poet.

Thus the Elliot or Sharpe version has topography that will not hold water, while the Scott topography does hold water; and the Elliot song seems to borrow the lines on the Hermitage Slack and Gorranberry from a form of the Scott version. This being the case, the original version on which Scott worked is earlier than the Elliot version. In the Scott version the rescuers must come down the Hermitage Slack: in the Elliot they have no reason for riding back to that place.

VII

SCOTT HAD A COPY OF THE BALLAD WHICH WAS NOT THE SHARPE COPY

Did Scott know no other version than that of the Sharpe MS.? In Scott’s version, stanza xlix., the last, is absent from the Elliot version, which concludes triumphantly, thus —

Now on they came to the fair Dodhead,They were a welcome sight to see,And instead of his ain ten milk-kyeJamie Telfer’s gotten thirty and three.

Scott too gives this, but ends with a verse not in Sharpe —

And he has paid the rescue shotBaith wi’ goud and white money,And at the burial o’ Willie ScottI wat was mony a weeping ee.

Did Scott add this? Proof is impossible; but the verse is so prosaic, and so injurious to the triumphant preceding verse, that I think Scott found it in his copy: in which case he had another copy than Sharpe’s.

Scott (stanza xviii.) reads “Catslockhill” where the Sharpe MS. reads “Catlockhill.” In Scott’s time it was a mound, but the name was then known to Mr. Grieve, the tenant of Branksome Park. To-day I cannot find the mound; is it likely that Scott, before making the change, sought diligently for the mound and its name? If so, he found “Catlochill,” for so Mr. Grieve writes it, not Catslockhill.

Meanwhile Colonel Elliot, we know, has no Catlockhill where he wants it; he has only Gatliehill, unless his Blaeu varies from my copy, and Gatliehill is not Catlockhill.

Scott gives (xlviii.) the speech of the Captain after he is shot through the head and in another dangerous part of his frame —

“Hae back thy kye!” the Captain said,“Dear kye, I trow, to some they be,For gin I suld live a hundred years,There will ne’er fair lady smile on me.”

This is not in Sharpe’s MS., and I attribute this redundant stanza to Scott’s copy. The Captain, remember, has a shot “through his head,” and another which must have caused excruciating torture. In these circumstances would a poet like Scott put in his mouth a speech which merely reiterates the previous verse? No! But the verse was in Scott’s copy.

Colonel Elliot has himself noted a more important point than these: he quotes Scott’s stanza xii., which is absent from the Sharpe MS. —

My hounds may a’ rin masterless,My hawks may fly frae tree to tree,My lord may grip my vassal lands,For there again maun I never be!

“They are, doubtless, beautiful lines, but their very beauty jars like a false note. One feels they were written by another hand, by an artist of a higher stamp than a Border ‘ballad-maker.’ And not only is it their beauty that jars, but so also does their inapplicability to Jamie Telfer and to the circumstances in which he found himself – so much so, indeed, that it may well occur to one that the stanza belongs to some other ballad, and has accidentally been pitchforked into this one. It would not have been out of place in the ballad of The Battle of Otterbourne, and, indeed, it bears some resemblance to a stanza in that ballad.” Here the Colonel says that the lines “one feels were written by another hand, by an artist of a higher stamp than a Border ballad-maker.” But “it may also occur to one that the stanza belongs to some other ballad, and has accidentally” (my italics) “been pitchforked into this”: a very sound inference.

Now if Scott had only the Sharpe version, he was the last man to “pitchfork” into it, “accidentally,” a stanza from “some other ballad,” that stanza being as Colonel Elliot says “inapplicable” to Telfer and his circumstances. Poor Jamie, a small tenant-farmer, with ten cows, and, as far as we learn, not one horse, had no hawks and hounds; no “vassal lands,” and no reason to say that at the Dodhead he “maun never be again.” He could return from his long run! Scott certainly did not compose these lines; and he could not have pitchforked them into Jamie Telfer, either by accident or design.

Professor Child remarked on all this: “Stanza xii. is not only found elsewhere (compare Young Beichan, E vi.), but could not be more inappropriately brought in than here; Scott, however, is not responsible for that.” 78

The hawk that flies from tree to tree

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

I know no proof that Scott was acquainted with variant E of Young Beichan. 79 If he had been, he could not have introduced into Jamie Telfer lines so utterly out of keeping with Telfer’s circumstances, as Colonel Elliot himself says that stanza xii. is. It may be argued, “if Scott did find stanza xii. in his copy, it was in his power to cut it out; he treated his copies as he pleased.” This is true, but my position is that, of the two, Scott is more likely to have let the stanza abide where he found it (as he did with his MS. of Tamlane, retaining its absurdities) in his copy, than to “pitchfork it in,” from an obscure variant of Young Beichan, which we cannot prove that he had ever heard or read. But as we can never tell that Scott did not know any rhyme, we ask, why did he “pitchfork in” the stanza, where it was quite out of place? Child absolves him from this absurdity.

Thus Scott had before him another than the Sharpe copy; had a copy containing stanza xii. That copy presented the perversion – the transposition of Scott’s and Elliot’s – and into that copy Scott wrote the stanzas which bear his modern romantic mark. Colonel Elliot, we saw, is uncertain whether to attribute stanza xii. to “another hand, an artist of higher stamp than a Border ballad-maker,” or to regard it as belonging “to some other ballad,” and as having been “accidentally pitchforked into this one.” The stanza is, in fact, an old floating ballad stanza, attracted into the cantefable of Susie Pye, and the ballad of Young Beichan (E), and partly into Jamie Douglas. Thus Scott did not make the stanza, and we cannot suppose that, if he knew the stanza in any form, he either “accidentally pitchforked” or wilfully inserted into Jamie Telfer anything so absurdly inappropriate. The inference is that Scott worked on another copy, not the Sharpe copy.

If Scott had not a copy other than Sharpe’s, why should he alter Sharpe’s (vii.)

The moon was up and the sun was down,

into

The sun wasna up but the moon was down?

What did he gain by that? Why did he make Jamie “of” not “in” the Dodhead, if he found “in” in his copy? “In” means “tenant in,” “of” means “laird of,” as nobody knew better than Scott. Jamie is evidently no laird, but “of” was in Scott’s copy.

If the question were about two Greek texts, the learned would admit that these points in A (Scott) are not derived from B (Sharpe). Scott’s additions have an obvious motive, they add picturesqueness to his clan. But the differences which I have noticed do nothing of that kind. When they affect the poetry they spoil the poetry, when they do not affect the poetry they are quite motiveless, whence I conclude that Scott followed his copy in these cases, and that his copy was not the Sharpe MS.

If I have satisfied the reader on that point I need not touch on Colonel Elliot’s long and intricate argument to prove, or suggest, that Scott had before him no copy of the ballad except one supposed by the Colonel to have been taken by James Hogg from his mother’s recitation, while that copy, again, is supposed to be the Sharpe MS. – all sheer conjecture. 80 Not that I fear to encounter Colonel Elliot on this ground, but argufying on it is dull, and apt to be inconclusive.

In the letter of Hogg to Scott (June 30, 1803) as given by Mr. Douglas in Familiar Letters, Hogg says, “I am surprised to find that the songs in your collection differ so widely from my mother’s.. Jamie Telfer differs in many particulars.” 81 The marks of omission were all filled up in Hogg’s MS. letter thus: “Is Mr. Herd’s MS. genuine? I suspect it.” Then it runs on, “Jamie Telfer differs in many particulars.”

I owe this information to the kindness of Mr. Macmath. What does Hogg mean? Does “Is Mr. Herd’s MS. genuine?” mean all Herd’s MS. copies used by Scott? Or does it refer to Jamie Telfer in especial?

Mr. Macmath, who possesses C. K. Sharpe’s MS. copy of the Elliot version, believes that it is Herd’s hand as affected by age. Mr. Macmath and I independently reached the conclusion that by “Mr. Herd’s MS.” Hogg meant all Herd’s MSS., which Scott quoted in The Minstrelsy of 1803. Their readings varied from Mrs. Hogg’s; therefore Hogg misdoubted them. He adds that Jamie Telfer differs from his mother’s version, without meaning that, for Jamie, Scott used a Herd MS.

Conclusion

I have now proved, I hope, that the ballad of Jamie Telfer is entirely mythical except for a few suggestions derived from historical events of 1596–97. I have shown, and Colonel Elliot agrees, that refusal of aid by Buccleuch (or by Elliot of Stobs) is impossible, and that the ballad, if it existed without this incident, must have been a Scott, and could not be an Elliot ballad. No farmer in Ettrick would pay protection-money to an Elliot on Liddel, while he had a Scott at Branksome. I have also disproved the existence of a Jamie Telfer as farmer at “Dodhead or Dodbank” in the late sixteenth century.

As to the character of Sir Walter Scott, I have proved, I hope, that he worked on a copy of the ballad which was not the Elliot version, or the Sharpe copy; so that this copy may have represented the Scotts as taking the leading part; while for the reasons given, it is apparently earlier than the Elliot version – cannot, at least, be proved to be later – and is topographically the more correct of the two. I have given antique examples of the same sort of perversions in Otterburn. If I am right, Colonel Elliot’s charge against Scott lacks its base – that Scott knew none but the Sharpe copy, whence it is inferred that he not only decorated the song (as is undeniable), but perverted it in a way far from sportsmanlike.

I may have shaken Colonel Elliot’s belief in the historicity of the ballad. His suspicions of Scott I cannot hope to remove, and they are very natural suspicions, due to Scott’s method of editing ballads and habit of “giving them a cocked hat and a sword,” as he did to stories which he heard; and repeated, much improved.

Absolute proof that Scott did, or did not, pervert the ballad, and turn a false Elliot into a false Scott version, cannot be obtained unless new documents bearing on the matter are discovered.

But, I repeat, as may be read in the chapter on The Ballad of Otterburne, such inversions and perversions of ballads occurred freely in the sixteenth century, and, in the seventeenth, the process may have been applied to Jamie Telfer. 82

KINMONT WILLIE

If there be, in The Border Minstrelsy, a ballad which is still popular, or, at least, is still not forgotten, it is Kinmont Willie. This hero was an Armstrong, and one of the most active of that unbridled clan. He was taken prisoner, contrary to Border law, on a day of “Warden’s Truce,” by Salkeld of Corby on the Eden, deputy of Lord Scrope, the English Warden; and, despite the written remonstrances of Buccleuch, he was shut up in Carlisle Castle. Diplomacy failing, Buccleuch resorted to force, and, by a sudden and daring march, he surprised Carlisle Castle, rescued Willie, and returned to Branksome. The date of the rescue is 13th April 1596. The dispatches of the period are full of this event, and of the subsequent negotiations, with which we are not concerned.

The ballad is worthy of the cool yet romantic gallantry of the achievement. Kinmont Willie was a ruffian, but he had been unlawfully seized. This was one of many studied insults passed by Elizabeth’s officials on Scotland at that time, when the English Government, leagued with the furious pulpiteers of the Kirk, and with Francis Stewart, the wild Earl of Bothwell, was persecuting and personally affronting James VI.

In Buccleuch, the Warden of the March, England insulted the man who was least likely to pocket a wrong. Without causing the loss of an English life, Buccleuch repaid the affront, recovered the prisoner, broke the strong Castle of Carlisle, made Scrope ridiculous and Elizabeth frantic.

In addition to Kinmont Willie there survive two other ballads on rescues of prisoners in similar circumstances. One is Jock o’ the Side, of which there is an English version in the Percy MSS., John a Side. Scott’s version, in The Border Minstrelsy, is from Caw’s Museum, published at Hawick in 1784. Scott leaves out Caw’s last stanza about a punch-bowl. There are other variations. Four Armstrongs break into Newcastle Tower. Jock, heavily ironed, is carried downstairs on the back of one of them; they ride a river in spait, where the English dare not follow.

Archie o’ Cafield, another rescue, Scott printed in 1802 from a MS. of Mr. Riddell of Glenriddell, a great collector, the friend of Burns. He omitted six stanzas, and “made many editorial improvements, besides Scotticising the spelling.” In the edition published after his death (1833) he “has been enabled to add several stanzas from recitation.” Leyden appears to have collected the copy whence the additional stanzas came; the MS., at Abbotsford, is in his hand. In this ballad the Halls, noted freebooters, rescue Archie o’ Cafield from prison in Dumfries. As in Jock o’ the Side and Kinmont Willie, they speak to their friend, asking how he sleeps; they carry him downstairs, irons and all, and, as in the two other ballads, they are pursued, cross a flooded river, banter the English, and then, in a version in the Percy MSS., “communicated to Percy by Miss Fisher, 1780,” the English lieutenant says —

I think some witch has bore thee, Dicky,Or some devil in hell been thy daddy.I would not swam that wan water, double-horsed,For a’ the gold in Christenty.

Manifestly here was a form of Lord Scrope’s reply to Buccleuch, in the last stanza of Kinmont Willie—

He is either himself a devil frae hell,Or else his mother a witch may be,I wadna hae ridden that wan waterFor a’ the gowd in Christentie.

Scott writes, in a preface to Archie o’ Cafield and Jock o’ the Side, that there are, with Kinmont Willie, three ballads of rescues, “the incidents in which nearly resemble each other; though the poetical description is so different, that the editor did not feel himself at liberty to reject any one of them, as borrowed from the others. As, however, there are several verses, which, in recitation, are common to all these three songs, the editor, to prevent unnecessary and disagreeable repetition, has used the freedom of appropriating them to that in which they have the best poetical effect.” 83

Consequently the verse quoted from the Percy MS. of Archie o’ Cafield may be improved and placed in the lips of Lord Scrope, in Kinmont Willie. But there is no evidence that Scott ever saw or even heard of this Percy MS., and probably he got the verse from recitation.

Now the affair of the rescue of Kinmont Willie was much more important and resonant than the two other rescues, and was certain to give rise to a ballad, which would contain much the same formulæ as the other two. The ballad-maker, like Homer, always uses a formula if he can find one. But Kinmont Willie is so much superior to the two others, so epic in its speed and concentration of incidents, that the question rises, had Scott even fragments of an original ballad of the Kinmont, “much mangled by reciters,” as he admits, or did he compose the whole? No MS. copies exist at Abbotsford. There is only one hint. In a list of twenty-two ballads, pasted into a commonplace book, eleven are marked X (as if he had obtained them), and eleven others are unmarked, as if they were still to seek. Unmarked is Kinmount Willie.

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

In 1888, in a note to Kinmont Willie, I wrote: “There is a prose account very like the ballad in Scott of Satchells’ History of the Name of Scott” (1688). Satchells’ long-winded story is partly in unrhymed and unmetrical lines, partly in rhymes of various metres. The man, born in 1613, was old, had passed his life as a soldier; certainly could not write, possibly could not read.

Colonel Elliot “believes that Sir Walter wrote the whole from beginning to end, and that it is, in fact, a clever and extremely beautiful paraphrase of Satchells’ rhymes.” 84

This thorough scepticism is not a novelty, as Colonel Elliot quotes me I had written years ago, “In Kinmont Willie, Scott has been suspected of making the whole ballad.” I did not, as the Colonel says, “mention the names of the sceptics or the grounds of their suspicions.” “The sceptics,” or one of them, was myself: I had “suspected” on much the same grounds as Colonel Elliot’s own, and I shall give my reasons for adopting a more conservative opinion. One reason is merely subjective. As a man, by long familiarity with ancient works of art, Greek gems, for example, acquires a sense of their authenticity, or the reverse, so he does in the case of ballads – or thinks he does – but of course this result of experience is no ground of argument: experts are often gulled. The ballad varies in many points from Satchells’, which Colonel Elliot explains thus: “I think that the cause for the narrative at times diverging from that recorded by the rhymes (of Satchells), is due, partly to artistic considerations, partly to the author having wished to bring it more or less into conformity with history.” 85