Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy

Colonel Elliot quotes Scott’s preface to the ballad: “In many things Satchells agrees with the ballads current in his time” (1643–88), “from which in all probability he derived most of his information as to past events, and from which he occasionally pirates whole verses, as we noticed in the annotations upon the Raid of the Reidswire. In the present instance he mentions the prisoner’s large spurs (alluding to fetters), and some other little incidents noticed in the ballad, which therefore was probably well known in his day.”

As Satchells was born in 1613, while the rescue of Kinmont Willie by Buccleuch, out of Carlisle Castle, was in 1596, and as Satchells’ father was in that adventure (or so Satchells says) he probably knew much about the affair from fresh tradition. Colonel Elliot notices this, and says: “The probability of Satchells having obtained information from a hypothetical ballad is really quite an inadmissible argument.”

This comes near to begging the question. As contemporary incidents much less striking and famous than the rescue of Kinmont Willie were certainly recorded in ballads, the opinion that there was a ballad of Kinmont Willie is a legitimate hypothesis, which must be tested on its merits. For example, we shall ask, Does Satchells’ version yield any traces of ballad sources?

My own opinion has been anticipated by Mr. Frank Miller in his The Poets of Dumfriesshire (p. 33, 1910), and in ballad-lore Mr. Miller is well equipped. He says: “The balance of probability seems to be in favour of the originality of Kinmont Willie,” rather than of Satchells (he means, not of our Kinmont Willie as Scott gives it, but of a ballad concerning the Kinmont). “Captain Walter Scott’s” (of Satchells) “True History was certainly gathered out of the ballads current in his day, as well as out of formal histories, and his account of the assault on the Castle reads like a narrative largely due to suggestions from some popular lay.”

Does Satchells’ version, then, show traces of a memory of such a lay? Undoubtedly it does.

Satchells’ prolix narrative occasionally drops or rises into ballad lines, as in the opening about Kinmont Willie —

It fell about the MartinmasWhen kine was in the prime

that Willie “brought a prey out of Northumberland.” The old ballad, disregarding dates, may well have opened with this common formula. Lord Scrope vowed vengence: —

Took Kinmont the self-same night.If he had had but ten men more,That had been as stout as he,Lord Scroup had not the Kinmont ta’enWith all his company.

Scott’s ballad (stanza i.) says that “fause Sakelde” and Scrope took Willie (as in fact Salkeld of Corby did), and

Had Willie had but twenty men,But twenty men as stout as he,Fause Sakelde had never the Kinmont ta’en,Wi’ eight score in his cumpanie.

Manifestly either Satchells is here “pirating” a verse of a ballad (as Scott holds) or Scott, if he had no ballad fragments before him, is “pirating” a verse from Satchells, as Colonel Elliot must suppose.

In my opinion, Satchells had a memory of a Kinmont ballad beginning like Jamie Telfer, “It fell about the Martinmas tyde,” or, like Otterburn, “It fell about the Lammas tide,” and he opened with this formula, broke away from it, and came back to the ballad in the stanza, “If he had had but ten men more,” which differs but slightly from stanza ii. of Scott’s ballad. That this is so, and that, later, Satchells is again reminiscent of a ballad, is no improbable opinion.

In the ballad (iii.–viii.) we learn how Willie is brought a prisoner across Liddel to Carlisle; we have his altercation with Lord Scrope, and the arrival of the news at Branksome, where Buccleuch is at table. Satchells also gives the altercation. In both versions Willie promises to “take his leave” of Scrope before he quits the Castle.

In Scott’s ballad (Scrope speaks) (stanza vi.).

Before ye cross my castle yate,I trow ye shall take fareweel o’ me.

Willie replies —

I never yet lodged in a hostelrie,But I paid my lawing before I gaed.

In Satchells, Lord Scrope says —

“Before thou goest away thou mustEven take thy leave of me?”“By the cross of my sword,” says Willie then,“I’ll take my leave of thee.”

Now, had Scott been pirating Satchells, I think he would have kept “By the cross of my sword,” which is picturesque and probable, Willie being no good Presbyterian. In Otterburne, Scott, altering Hogg’s copy, makes Douglas swear “By the might of Our Ladye.”

It is a question of opinion; but I do think that if Scott were merely paraphrasing and pirating Satchells, he could not have helped putting into his version the Catholic, “‘By the cross of my sword,’ then Willy said,” as given by Satchells. To do this was safe, as Scott had said that Satchells does pirate ballads. On the other hand, Satchells, composing in black 1688, when Catholicism had been stamped out on the Scottish Border, was not apt to invent “By the cross of my sword.” It looks like Scott’s work, for he, of course, knew how Catholicism lingered among the spears of Bothwell, himself a Catholic, in 1596. But it is not Scott’s work, it is in Satchells. In both Satchells and the ballad, news comes to Buccleuch. Here Satchells again balladises —

“It is that way?” Buckcleugh did say;“Lord Scrope must understandThat he has not only done me wrongBut my Sovereign, James of Scotland.“My Sovereign Lord, King of Scotland,Thinks not his cousin Queen,Will offer to invade his landWithout leave asked and gi’en.”

I do not see how Satchells could either invent or glean from tradition the gist of Buccleuch’s diplomatic remonstrances, first with Salkeld, for Scrope was absent at the time of Willie’s capture, then with Scrope. Buccleuch, in fact, wrote that the taking of Willie was “to the touch of the King,” a stain on his honour, says a contemporary manuscript. 86

In a contemporary ballad, a kind of rhymed news-sheet, the facts would be known and reported. But at this point (at Buccleuch’s reception of the news of Kinmont), Scott is perhaps overmastered by his opportunity, and, I think, himself composes stanzas ix., x., xi., xii.

O is my basnet a widow’s curch?Or my lance a wand o’ the willow tree?

and so on. Child and Mr. Henderson are of the same opinion; but it is only sense of style that guides us in such a matter, nor can I give other grounds for supposing that the original ballad appears again in stanza xiii.

O were there war between the lands,As well I wot that there is none,I would slight Carlisle castle high,Tho’ it were built o’ marble stone!

Thence, I think, the original ballad (doubtless made “harmonious,” as Hogg put it) ran into stanza xxxi., where Scott probably introduced the Elliot tune (if it be ancient) —

O wha dare meddle wi’ me?

Satchells next, through a hundred and forty lines, describes Buccleuch’s correspondence with Scrope, his counsels with his clansmen, and gives all their names and estates, with remarks on their relationships. He thinks himself a historian and a genealogist. The stuff is partly in prose lines, partly in rhymed couplets of various lengths. There are two or three more or less ballad-like stanzas at the beginning, but they are too bad for any author but Satchells.

Scott’s ballad “cuts” all that, omits even what Satchells gives – mentions of Harden, and goes on (xv.) —

He has called him forty marchmen bauld,I trow they were of his own name.Except Sir Gilbert Elliot calledThe Laird of Stubs, I mean the same.

Now I would stake a large sum that Sir Walter never wrote that “stall-copy” stanza! Colonel Elliot replies that I have said the ballad-faker should avoid being too poetical. The ballad-faker should shun being too poetical, as he would shun kippered sturgeon; but Scott did not know this, nor did Hogg. We can always track them by their too decorative, too literary interpolations. On this I lay much stress.

The ballad next gives (xvi.–xxv.) the spirited stanzas on the ride to the Border —

There were five and five before them a’,Wi’ hunting horns and bugles bright;And five and five came wi’ Buccleuch,Like Warden’s men arrayed for fight.And five and five like a mason gang,That carried the ladders lang and hie;And five and five like broken men,And so they reached the Woodhouselee.

– a house in Scotland, within “a lang mile” of Netherby, in England, the seat of the Grahams, who were partial, for private reasons, to the Scottish cause. They were at deadly feud with Thomas Musgrave, Captain of Bewcastle, and Willie had married a Graham.

Now in my opinion, up to stanza xxvi., all the evasive answers given to Salkeld by each gang, till Dicky o’ Dryhope (a real person) replies with a spear-thrust —

“For never a word o’ lear had he,”

are not an invention of Scott’s (who knew that Salkeld was not met and slain), but a fantasy of the original ballad. Here I have only familiarity with the romantic perversion of facts that marks all ballads on historical themes to guide me.

Salkeld is met —

“As we crossed the Batable land,When to the English side we held.”

The ballad does not specify the crossing of Esk, nor say that Salkeld was on the English side; nor is there any blunder in the reply of the “mason gang” —

“We gang to harry a corbie’s nest,That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.”

Whether on English or Scottish soil the masons say not, and their pretence is derisive, bitterly ironical.

Colonel Elliot makes much of the absence of mention of the Esk, and says “it is after they are in England that the false reports are spread.” 87 But the ballad does not say so – read it! All passes with judicious vagueness.

“As we crossed the Batable land,When to the English side we held.”

Satchells knows that the ladders were made at Woodhouselee; it took till nightfall to finish them. The ballad, swift and poetical, takes the ladders for granted – as a matter of fact, chronicled in the dispatches, the Grahams of Netherby harboured Buccleuch: Netherby was his base.

“I could nought have done that matter without great friendship of the Grames of Eske,” wrote Buccleuch, in a letter which Scrope intercepted. 88

In Satchells, Buccleuch leaves half his men at the “Stonish bank” (Staneshaw bank) “for fear they had made noise or din.” An old soldier should have known better, and the ballad (his probable half-remembered source here) does know better —

“And there the laird garr’d leave our steeds,   For fear that they should stamp and nie,”

and alarm the castle garrison. Each man of the post on the ford would hold two horses, and also keep the ford open for the retreat of the advanced party. The ballad gives the probable version; Satchells, when offering as a reason for leaving half the force, lest they should make “noise or din,” is maundering. Colonel Elliot does not seem to perceive this obvious fact, though he does perceive Buccleuch’s motive for dividing his force, “presumably with the object of protecting his line of retreat,” and also to keep the horses out of earshot, as the ballad says. 89

In Satchells the river is “in no great rage.” In the ballad it is “great and meikle o’ spait.” And it really was so. The MS. already cited, which Scott had not seen when he published the song, says that Buccleuch arrived at the “Stoniebank beneath Carleile brig, the water being at the tyme, through raines that had fallen, weill thick.”

In Scott’s original this river, he says, was the Esk, in Satchells it is the Eden, and Scott says he made this necessary correction in the ballad. In Satchells the storming party

Broke a sheet of leid on the castle top.

In the ballad they

Cut a hole through a sheet o’ lead.

Both stories are erroneous; the ladders were too short; the rescuers broke into a postern door. Scrope told this to his Government on the day after the deed, 14th April. 90

In xxxi. the ballad makes Buccleuch sound trumpets when the castle-roof was scaled; in fact it was not scaled. The ladders were too short, and the Scots broke in a postern door. The Warden’s trumpet blew “O wha dare meddle wi’ me,” and here, as has been said, I think Scott is the author. Here Colonel Elliot enters into learning about “Wha dare meddle wi’ me?” a “Liddesdale tune,” and in the poem an adaptation, by Scott, of Satchells’ “the trumpets sounded ‘Come if ye dare.’”

Satchells makes the trumpets sound when the rescuers bring Kinmont Willie to the castle-top on the ladder (which they did not), and again when the rescuers reach the ground by the ladder. They made no use at all of the ladders, which were too short, and Willie, says the ballad, lay “in the lower prison.” They came in and went out by a door; but the trumpets are not apocryphal. They, and the shortness of the ladders, are mentioned in a MS. quoted by Scott, and in Birrell’s contemporary Diary, i. p. 57. In the MS. Buccleuch causes the trumpets to be sounded from below, by a detachment “in the plain field,” securing the retreat. His motive is to encourage his party, “and to terrify both castle and town by imagination of a greater force.” Buccleuch again “sounds up his trumpet before taking the river,” in the MS. Colonel Elliot may claim stanza xxxi. for Scott, and also the tune “Wha dare meddle wi’ me?” he may even claim here a suggestion from Satchells’ “Come if ye dare.” Colonel Elliot says that no tune of this title ever existed, a thing not easy to prove. 91

In the conclusion, with differences, there are resemblances in the ballad and Satchells. Colonel Elliot goes into them very minutely. For example, he says that Kinmont is “made to ride off; not on horseback, but on Red Rowan’s back!”

The ballad says not a word to that effect. Kinmont’s speech about Red Rowan as “a rough beast” to ride, is made immediately after the stanza,

“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.” 92

After this verse Kinmont makes his speech (xl.–xli.). But if he did ride on Red Rowan’s back to Staneshaw bank, it was the best thing that a heavily ironed man could do. In the ballad (xxvii.) no horses of the party were waiting at the castle, all horses were left behind at Staneshaw bank (Satchells brings horses, or at least a horse for Willie, to the castle). On what could Willie “ride off,” except on Red Rowan? 93

Stanzas xxxv., xxxvi. and xliv. are related, we have seen, to passages in Jock o’ the Side and Archie o’ Cafield, but ballads, like Homer, employ the same formulæ to describe the same circumstances: a note of archaism, as in Gaelic poetic passages in Märchen.

I do not pretend always to know how far Scott kept and emended old stanzas mangled by reciters: there are places in which I am quite at a loss to tell whether he is “making” or copying.

I incline to hold that Satchells was occasionally reminiscent of a ballad for the reasons and traces given, and I think that Scott when his and Satchells’ versions coincide, did not borrow direct from Satchells, but that both men had a ballad source.

That ballad was later than the popular belief, held by Satchells, that Gilbert Elliot was at the time (1596) laird of Stobs, which he did not acquire till after the Union (1603), and that he (the only man not a Scot, says Satchells, wrongly) rode with Buccleuch. Elliot is not accused of doing so in Scrope’s dispatches, but he may have come as far as Staneshaw bank, where half the company were left behind, says Satchells, with the horses, which were also left, says the ballad. In that case Elliot would not be observed in or near the Castle. Yet it may have been known in Scotland that he was of the party.

He was, as Satchells says, a cousin, he was also a friend of Buccleuch’s, and he may conceivably have taken a part in this glorious adventure, though he could not, at the moment, be called laird of Stobs. Were I an Elliot, this opinion would be welcome to me! Really, Salkeld was in a good position to know whether Elliot rode with Buccleuch or not.

The whole question is not one on which I can speak dogmatically. A person who suspects Scott intensely may believe that there were no ballad fragments of Kinmont in his possession. The person who, like myself, thinks Satchells, with his “It fell about the Martinmas,” knew a ballad vaguely, believes that Satchells had some ballad sources bemuddled in his old memory.

A person who cannot conceive that Scott wrote

Except Sir Gilbert Elliot, calledThe laird of Stobs, I mean the same,

will hold that Scott knew some ballad fragments, disjecta membra. But I quite agree with Colonel Elliot, that the ballad, as it stands (with the exception, to my mind, of some thirty stanzas, themselves emended), “belongs to the early nineteenth century, not to the early seventeenth.” The time for supposing the poem, as it stands, to be “saturated with the folk-spirit” all through is past; the poem is far too much contaminated by the genius of Scott itself; like Burns’ transfiguration of “the folk-spirit” at its best.

Near the beginning of this paper I said, in answer to a question of Colonel Elliot’s, that I myself was the person who had suspected Scott of composing the whole of Kinmont Willie, and I have given my reasons for not remaining constant to my suspicions. But in a work which Colonel Elliot quotes, the abridged edition of Child’s great book by Mrs. Child-Sargent and Professor Kittredge (1905), the learned professor writes, “Kinmont Willie is under vehement suspicion of being the work of Sir Walter Scott.” Mr. Kittredge’s entire passage on the matter is worth quoting. He first says – “The traditional ballad appears to be inimitable by any person of literary cultivation,” “the efforts of poets and poetasters” end in “invariable failure.”

I do not think that they need end in failure except for one reason. The poet or poetaster cannot, now, except by flat lying and laborious forgery of old papers, produce any documentary evidence to prove the authenticity of his attempt at imitation. Without documentary evidence of antiquity, no critic can approach the imitation except in a spirit of determined scepticism. He knows, certainly, that the ballad is modern, and, knowing that, he easily finds proofs of modernism even where they do not really exist. I am convinced that to imitate a ballad that would, except for the lack of documentary evidence, beguile the expert, is perfectly feasible. I even venture to offer examples of my own manufacture at the close of this volume. I can find nothing suspicious in them, except the deliberate insertion of formulæ which occur in genuine ballads. Such wiederholungen are not reasons for rejection, in my opinion; but they are suspect with people who do not understand that they are a natural and necessary feature of archaic poetry, and this fact Mr. Kittredge does understand.

Mr. Kittredge speaks of Sir Walter’s unique success with Kinmont Willie; but is Sir Walter successful? Some of his stanzas I, for one, can hardly accept, even as emended traditional verses.

Mr. Kittredge writes – “Sir Walter’s success, however, in a special kind of balladry for which he was better adapted by nature and habit of mind than for any other, would only emphasise the universal failure. And it must not be forgotten that Kinmont Willie, if it be Scott’s work, is not made out of whole cloth; it is a working over of one of the best traditional ballads known (Jock o’ the Side), with the intention of fitting it to an historical exploit of Buccleuch. Further, the subject itself was of such a nature that it might well have been celebrated in a ballad, – indeed, one is tempted to say, it must have been so celebrated.”

Not a doubt of that!

“And, finally, Sir Walter Scott felt towards ‘the Kinmont’ and ‘the bold Buccleuch’ precisely as the moss-trooping author of such a ballad would have felt. For once, then, the miraculous happened… ” 94 Or did not happen, for the exception is “solitary though doubtful,” and “under vehement suspicion.” But Mr. Kittredge must remember that no known Scottish ballad “is made out of whole cloth.” All have, in various degrees, the successive modifications wrought by centuries of oral tradition, itself, in some cases, modifying a much modified printed “stall-copy” or “broadside.”

Take Jock o’ the Side. The oldest version is in the Percy MS. 95 As Mr. Henderson says, “it contains many evident corruptions,”

“Jock on his lively bay, Wat’s on his white horse behind.”

There is an example of what the original author could not have written!

We do not know how good Jock was when he left his poet’s hands; and Scott has not touched him up. We cannot estimate the original excellence of any traditional poem by the state in which we find it,

Corrupt by every beggar-man,And soiled by all ignoble use.

CONCLUSIONS

We have now examined critically the four essentially Border ballads which Sir Walter is suspected of having “edited” in an unrighteous manner. Now he helps to forge, and issues Auld Maitland. Now he, or somebody, makes up Otterburne, “partly of stanzas from Percy’s Reliques, which have undergone emendations calculated to disguise the source from which they came, partly of stanzas of modern fabrication, and partly of a few stanzas and lines from Herd’s version.” 96 Thirdly, Scott, it is suggested, knew only what I call “the Elliot version” of Jamie Telfer, perverted that by transposing the rôles of Buccleuch and Stobs, and added picturesque stanzas in glorification of his ancestor, Wat of Harden. Fourthly, he is suspected of “writing the whole ballad” of Kinmont Willie, “from beginning to end.”

Of these four charges the first, and most disastrous, we have absolutely disproved. Scott did not write one verse of the Auld Maitland; he edited it with unusual scrupulosity, for he had but one copy, and an almost identical recitation. He could not “eke and alter” by adding verses from other texts, as he did in Otterburne.

Secondly, Scott did not make up Otterburne in the way suggested by his critic. He took Hogg’s MS., and I have shown minutely what that MS. was, and he edited it in accordance with his professed principles. He made “a standard text.” It is only to be regretted that Hogg did not take down verbatim the words of his two reciters and narrators, and that Scott did not publish Hogg’s version, with his letter, in his notes; but that was not his method, nor the method of his contemporaries.

Thirdly, as to Jamie Telfer, long ago I wrote, opposite

“The lyart locks of Harden’s hair,”

aut Jacobus aut Diabolus, meaning that either James Hogg or the devil composed that stanza. I was wrong. Hogg had nothing to do with it; on internal evidence Scott was the maker. But that he transposed the Scott and Elliot rôles is incapable of proof; and I have shown that such perversions were made in very early times, where national, not clan prejudices were concerned. I have also shown that Scott’s version contains matter not in the Elliot version, matter injurious to the poem, as in one stanza, certainly not composed by himself, the stanza being an inappropriate stray formula from other ballads. But, in the absence of manuscript materials I can only produce presumptions, not proofs.

Lastly, Kinmont Willie, and Scott’s share in it, is matter of presumption, not of proof. He had been in quest of the ballad, as we know from his list of desiderata; he says that what he got was “mangled” by reciters, and that, in what he got, one river was mentioned where topography requires another. He also admits that, in the three ballads of rescues, he placed passages where they had most poetical appropriateness. My arguments to show that Satchells had memory of a Kinmont ballad will doubtless appeal with more or less success, or with none, to different students. That an indefinite quantity of the ballad, and improvements on the rest, are Scott’s, I cannot doubt, from evidence of style.

“Sir Walter Scott it is impossible to assail, however much the scholarly conscience may disapprove,” says Mr. Kittredge. 97 Not much is to be taken by assailing him! “Business first, pleasure afterwards,” as, according to Sam Weller, Richard III. said, when he killed Henry VI. before smothering the princes in the Tower. I proceed to pleasure in the way of presenting imitations of “the traditional ballad” which “appears to be inimitable by any person of literary cultivation,” according to Mr. Kittredge.