Is Auld Maitland a sheer forgery by Hogg, or is it in any sense, and if so, in what sense, antique and traditional? That Hogg made the whole of it is to me incredible. He had told Laidlaw on 20th July 1801, that he would make no ballads on traditions without Scott’s permission, written in Scott’s hand. Moreover, how could he have any traditions about “Auld Maitland, his noble Sonnis three,” personages of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? Scott had read about them in poems of about 1580, but these poems then lay in crabbed manuscripts. Again, Hogg wrote in words (“springs, wall-stanes”) of whose meaning he had no idea; he took it as he heard it in recitation. Finally, the style is not that of Hogg when he attempts the ballad. Scott observed that “this ballad, notwithstanding its present appearance, has a claim to very high antiquity.” The language, except for a few technical terms, is modern, but what else could it be if handed down orally? The language of undoubted ballads is often more modern than that which was spoken in my boyhood in Ettrick Forest. As Sir Walter Scott remarked, a poem of 1570–1580, which he quotes from the Maitland MSS., “would run as smoothly, and appear as modern, as any verse in the ballad (with a few exceptions) if divested of its antique spelling.”
We now turn to the historical characters in the ballad.
Sir Richard Maitland of Lauder, or Thirlestane, says Scott, was already in his lands, and making donations to the Church in 1249. If, in 1296, forty-seven years later, he held his castle against Edward I., as in the ballad, he must have been a man of, say, seventy-five. By about 1574 his descendant, Sir Richard Maitland, was consoled for his family misfortunes (his famous son, Lethington, having died after the long siege of Edinburgh Castle, which he and Kirkcaldy of Grange held for Queen Mary), by a poet who reminded him that his ancestor, in the thirteenth century, lost all his sons—“peerless pearls”—save one, “Burdallane.” The Sir Richard of 1575 has also one son left (John, the minister of James VI.). [41a]
From this evidence, in 1802 in MS. unpublished, and from other Maitland MSS., we learn that, in the sixteenth century, the Auld Maitland of the ballad was an eminent character in the legends of that period, and in the ballads of the people. [41b] His
Nobill sonnis three,
Ar sung in monie far countrie,
Albeit in rural rhyme.
Pinkerton published, in 1786, none of the pieces to which Scott refers in his extracts from the Maitland MSS. How, then, did Hogg, if Hogg forged the ballad, know of Maitland and his “three noble sons”? Except Colonel Elliot, to whose explanation we return, I am not aware that any critic has tried to answer this question.
It seems to me that if the Ballad of Otterburne, extant in 1550 in England, survived in Scottish memory till Herd’s fragment appeared in 1776, a tradition of Maitland, who was popular in the ballads of 1575, and known to Gawain Douglas seventy years earlier, may also have persisted. There is no impossibility.
Looking next at Scott’s Auld Maitland the story is that King Edward I. reigned for fifty years. He had a nephew Edward (an apocryphal person: such figures are common in ballads), who wished to take part in the invasion of Scotland. The English are repulsed by old Maitland from his “darksome house” on the Leader. The English, however, (stanza xv.) conquer Scotland, and join Edward I. in France. They besiege that town,
Which some call Billop-Grace (xviii.).
Here Maitland’s three sons are learning at school, as Scots often were educated in France. They see that Edward’s standard quarters the arms of France, and infer that he has conquered their country. They “will try some jeopardy.” Persuading the English that they are themselves Englishmen, they ask leave to carry the royal flag. The eldest is told that he is singularly like Auld Maitland. In anger he stabs the standard-bearer, seizes the flag, and, with his brothers, spurs to Billop-Grace, where the French captain receives them. There is fighting at the gate. The King says that three disguised lads of France have stolen his flag. The Maitlands apparently heard of this; the youngest goes to Edward, and explains that they are Maitland’s sons, and Scots; they challenge any three Englishmen; a thing in the manner of the period. The three Scots are victorious. Young Edward then challenges one of the dauntless three, who slays him. Edward wishes himself home at London Tower.
Such is the story. It is out of the regular line of ballad narrative, but it does not follow that, in the sixteenth century, some such tale was not told “in rural rhyme” about Maitland’s “three noble sons.” That it is not historically true is nothing, of course, and that it is not in the Scots of the thirteenth century is nothing.
Colonel Elliot asks, What in the ballad raised suspicion of forgery (in 1802–03)? The historical inaccuracies are common to all historical ballads. (In an English ballad known to me of 1578, Henry Darnley is “hanged on a tree”!)
Next, “there are occasional lines, and even stanzas, which jar in style to such a degree that they must have been written by two separate hands.”
But this, also, is a common feature. In “Professor Child and the Ballad,” Mr. W. M. Hart gives a list of Professor Child’s notes on the multiplicity of hands, which he, and every critic, detect in some ballads with a genuinely antique substratum. [44a]
Colonel Elliot quotes, as in his opinion the best, stanzas viii., ix., x., xi., while he thinks xv., xviii. the worst. I give these stanzas—
VIII.
They lighted on the banks o’ Tweed,
And blew their coals sae het,
And fired the Merse and Teviotdale,
All in an evening late.
IX.
As they fared up o’er Lammermoor,
They burned baith up and doun,
Until they came to a darksome house,
Some call it Leader Town.
X.
“Wha hauds this house?” young
Edward cried,
“Or wha gi’est ower to me?”
A grey-hair’d knight set up his head,
And crackit right crousely:
XI.
“Of Scotland’s king I haud my
house,
He pays me meat and fee;
And I will keep my guid auld house,
While my house will keep me.”
I cannot, I admit, find any fault with these stanzas: cannot see
any reason why they should not be traditional.
Then Colonel Elliot cites, as the worst—
XV.
Then fifteen barks, all gaily good,
Met them upon a day,
Which they did lade with as much spoil
As they could take away.
XVIII.
Until we came unto that town
Which some call Billop-Grace;
There were Auld Maitland’s sons, a’ three,
Learning at school, alas!
Now, if I venture to differ from Colonel Elliot here, I may plead that I am practised in the art of ballad-faking, and can produce high testimonials of skill! To me stanzas xv., xviii. seem to differ much from viii.–xi., but not in such a way as Hogg would have differed, had he made them. Hogg’s error would have lain, as Scott’s did, in being, as Scott said of Mrs. Hemans, too poetical.
Neither Hogg nor Scott, I think, was crafty enough to imitate the prosaic drawl of the printed broadside ballad, or the feeble interpolations with which the “gangrel scrape-gut,” or bänkelsänger, supplied gaps in his memory. The modern complete ballad-faker would introduce such abject verses, but Scott and Hogg desired to decorate, not to debase, ballads with which they intermeddled, and we track them by their modern romantic touch when they interpolate. I take it, for this reason, that Hogg did not write stanzas xv., xviii. It was hardly in nature for Hogg, if he knew Ville de Grace in Normandy (a thing not very probable), to invent “Billop-Grace” as a popular corruption of the name—and a popular corruption it is, I think. Probably the original maker of this stanza wrote, in line 4, “alace,” an old spelling—not “alas”—to rhyme with “grace.”
Colonel Elliot then assigns xv., xviii. as most likely of all to be by Hogg. On that I have given my opinion, with my reasons.
These verses, with xviii., lead us to France, and whereas Scott here suspects that some verses have been lost (see his note to stanza xviii.), Colonel Elliot suspects that the stanzas relating to France have been interpolated. But the French scenes occupy the whole poem from xvi. to lxv., the end.
What, if Hogg were the forger, were his sources? He may have known Douglas’s Palice of Honour, which, of course, existed in print, with its mention of Maitland’s grey beard. But how did he know Maitland’s “three noble sons,” in 1801–1802, lying unsunned in the Maitland MSS.?
This is a point which critics of Auld Maitland studiously ignore, yet it is the essential point. How did the Shepherd know about the three young Maitlands, whose existence, in legend, is only revealed to us through a manuscript unpublished in 1802? Colonel Elliot does not evade the point. “We may be sure,” he says, that Leyden, before 1802, knew Hogg, and Hogg might have obtained from him sufficient information to enable him to compose the ballad. [47a] But it was from Laidlaw, not from Leyden, that Scott, after receiving his first copy at Blackhouse, in spring 1802, obtained Hogg’s address. [47b] There is no hint that before spring 1802 Leyden ever saw Hogg. Had he known him, and his ballad-lore, he would have brought him and Scott together. In 1801–02, Leyden was very busy in Edinburgh helping Scott to edit Sir Tristram, copying Arthour, seeking for an East India appointment, and going into society. Scott’s letters prove all this. [47c]
That Hogg, in 1802, was very capable of writing a ballad, I admit; also that, through Blind Harry’s Wallace, he may have known all about “sowies,” and “portculize,” and springwalls, or springald’s, or springalls, mediæval balistas for throwing heavy stones and darts. But Hogg did not know or guess what a springwall was. In his stanza xiii. (in the MS. given to Laidlaw), Hogg wrote—
With springs; wall stanes, and good o’ern
Among them fast he threw.
Scott saw the real meaning of this nonsense, and read—
With springalds, stones, and gads o’ airn.
In his preface he says that many words in the ballad, “which the reciters have retained without understanding them, still preserve traces of their antiquity.” For instance, springalls, corruptedly pronounced springwalls. Hogg, hearing the pronunciation, and not understanding, wrote, “with springs: wall stanes.” A leader would not throw “wall stanes” till he had exhausted his ammunition. Hogg heard “with springwalls stones, he threw,” and wrote it, “with springs: wall stones he threw.”
Hogg could not know of Auld Maitland “and his three noble sons” except through an informant familiar with the Maitland MSS. in Edinburgh University Library. On the theory of a conspiracy to forge, Scott taught him, but that theory is crushed.
Hogg says, in Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott, that when his mother met Scott she told him that her brother and she learned the ballad from auld Andrew Muir, and he from “auld Babby Mettlin,” housekeeper of the first (“Anderson”) laird of Tushielaw. This first Anderson, laird of Tushielaw, reigned from 1688 to 1721 (?) or 1724. [48a] Hogg’s mother was born in 1730, and was only one remove—filled up by Andrew Muir—from Babby, who was “ither than a gude yin,” and knew many songs. Does any one think Hogg crafty enough to have invented Babby Maitland as the source of a song about the Maitlands, and to have introduced her into his narrative in 1834? I conjecture that this Maitland woman knew a Maitland song, modernised in time, and perhaps copied out and emended by one of the Maitland family, possibly one of the descendants of Lethington. We know that, under James I., about 1620, Lethington’s impoverished son, James, had several children; and that Lauderdale was still supporting them (or their children) during the Restoration. Only a century before, ballads on the Maitlands had certainly been popular, and there is nothing impossible in the suggestion that one such ballad survived in the Lauderdale or Lethington family, and came through Babby Maitland to Andrew Muir, then to Hogg’s mother, to Hogg, and to Scott.
If a manuscript copy ever existed, and was Babby’s ultimate source, it would be of the late seventeenth century. That is the ascertained date of the oldest known MS. of The Outlaw Murray, as is proved from an allusion in a note appended to a copy, referring to a Judge of Session, Lord Philiphaugh, as then alive. The copy was of 1689–1702. [49a]
Granting a MS. of Auld Maitland existing in any branch of the Maitland family in 1680–1700, Babby Mettlin’s knowledge of the ballad, and its few modernisms, are explained.
As Lockhart truly says, Hogg “was the most extraordinary man that ever wore the maud of a shepherd.” He had none of Burns’ education. In 1802 he was young, and ignorant of cities, and always was innocent of research in the crabbed MSS. of the sixteenth century. Yet he gets at legendary persons known to us only through these MSS. He makes a ballad named Auld Maitland about them. Through him a farm-lass at Blackhouse acquires some stanzas which Laidlaw copies. In a fortnight Hogg sends Laidlaw the whole ballad, with the pedigree—his uncle, his mother, their father, and old Andrew Muir, servant to the famous Rev. Mr. Boston of Ettrick. The copy takes in Scott and Leyden. Later, Ritson makes no objection. Mrs. Hogg recites it to Scott, and, according to Hogg, gives a casual “auld Babby Maitland” as the original source.
Is the whole fraud conceivable? Hogg, we must believe, puts in two stanzas (xv., xviii.), of the lowliest order of printed stall-copy or “gangrel scrape-gut” style, and the same with intent to deceive. He introduces “Billop-Grace” as a deceptive popular corruption of Ville de Grace. This is far beyond any craft that I have found in the most artful modern “fakers.” One stanza (xlix.)—
But Ethert Lunn, a baited bear,
Had many battles seen—
seems to me very recent, whoever made it. Scott, in lxii., gives a variant of “some reciters,” for “That Edward once lay under me,” they read “That Englishman lay under me.” This, if a false story, was an example of an art more delicate than Scott elsewhere exhibits.
One does not know what Professor Child would have said to my arguments. He never gave a criticism in detail of the ballad and of the circumstances in which Scott acquired it. A man most reasonable, most open to conviction, he would, I think, have confessed his perplexity.
Scott did not interpolate a single stanza, even where, as Hogg wrote, he suspected a lacuna in the text. He neither cut out nor improved the cryingly modern stanzas. He kept them, as he kept several stanzas in Tamlane, which, so he told Laidlaw, were obviously recent, but were in a copy which he procured through Lady Dalkeith. [51a]
By neither adding to nor subtracting from his MS. copy of Auld Maitland, Scott proved, I think, his respect for a poem which, in its primal form, he believed to be very ancient. We know, at all events, that ballads on the Maitland heroes were current about 1580. So, late in the sixteenth century, were the ballads quoted by Hume of Godscroft, on the murder of the Knight of Liddesdale (1354), the murder of the young Earl of Douglas in Edinburgh Castle (1440), and the battle of Otterburn. Of these three, only Otterburne was recovered by Herd, published in 1776. The other two are lost; and there is no prima facie reason why a Maitland ballad, of the sort current in 1580, should not, in favourable circumstances, have survived till 1802.
As regards the Shepherd’s ideas of honesty in ballad-collecting at this early period, I have quoted his letter to Laidlaw of 20th July 1802.
Again, in the case of his text from recitation of the Ballad of Otterburne (published by Scott in The Minstrelsy of 1806), he gave the Sheriff a full account of his mode of handling his materials, and Scott could get more minute details by questioning him.
To this text of Otterburne, freely attacked by Colonel Elliot, in apparent ignorance, as before, of the published facts of the case, and of the manuscript, we next turn our attention. In the meantime, Scott no more conspired to forge Auld Maitland than he conspired to forge the Pentateuch. That Hogg did not forge Auld Maitland I think I have made as nearly certain as anything in this region can be. I think that the results are a lesson to professors of the Higher Criticism of Homer.
Scott’s version of the Ballad of Otterburne, as given first in The Minstrelsy of 1806, comes under Colonel Elliot’s most severe censure. He concludes in favour of “the view that it consists 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 very few stanzas and lines from Herd’s version” (1776). [53a]
As a matter of fact we know, though Colonel Elliot does not, the whole process of construction of the Otterburne in The Minstrelsy of 1806. Professor Child published all the texts with a letter. [53b] It is a pity that Colonel Elliot overlooks facts in favour of conjecture. Concerning historical facts he is not more thorough in research. The story, in Percy’s Reliques, of the slaying of Douglas by Percy, “is, so far as I know, supported neither by history nor by tradition.” [53c] If unfamiliar with the English chroniclers (in Latin) of the end of the fourteenth century, Colonel Elliot could find them cited by Professor Child. Knyghton, Walsingham, and the continuator of Higden (Malverne), all assert that Percy killed Douglas with his own hand. [54a] The English ballad of Otterburne (in MS. of about 1550) gives this version of Douglas’s death. It is erroneous. Froissart, a contemporary, had accounts of the battle from combatants, both English and Scottish. Douglas, fighting in the front of the van, on a moonlight night, was slain by three lance-wounds received in the mellay. The English knew not whom they had slain.
The interesting point is that, while the Scottish ballads give either the English version of Percy’s death (in Minstrelsy, 1806) or another account mentioned by Hume of Godscroft (circ. 1610), that he was slain by one of his own men, the Scottish versions are all deeply affected in an important point by Froissart’s contemporary narrative, which has not affected the English versions. [54b] The point is that the death of Douglas was by his order concealed from both parties.
When both the English version in Percy’s Reliques (from a MS. of about 1550), and Scott’s version of 1806, mention a “challenge to battle” between Percy and Douglas, Colonel Elliot calls this incident “probably purely fanciful and imaginary,” and suspects Scott’s version of being made up and altered from the English text. But the challenge which resulted in the battle of Otterburn is not fanciful and imaginary!
It is mentioned by Froissart. Douglas, he says, took Percy’s pennon in an encounter under Newcastle. Percy vowed that Douglas would never carry the pennon out of Northumberland; Douglas challenged him to come and take it from his tent door that night; but Percy was constrained not to accept the challenge. The Scots then marched homewards, but Douglas insisted on besieging Otterburn Castle; here he passed some days on purpose to give Percy a chance of a fight; Percy’s force surprised the Scots; they were warned, as in the ballads, suddenly, by a man who galloped up; the fight began; and so on.
Now Herd’s version says nothing of Douglas at Newcastle; the whole scene is at Otterburn. On the other hand, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s MS. text did bring Douglas to Newcastle. Of this Colonel Elliot says nothing. The English version says nothing of Percy’s loss of his pennon to Douglas (nor does Sharpe’s), and gives the challenge and tryst. Scott’s version says nothing of Percy’s pennon, but Douglas takes Percy’s sword and vows to carry it home. Percy’s challenge, in the English version, is accompanied by a gross absurdity. He bids Douglas wait at Otterburn, where, pour tout potage to an army absurdly stated at 40,000 men, Percy suggests venison and pheasants! In the Scottish version Percy offers tryst at Otterburn. Douglas answers that, though Otterburn has no supplies—nothing but deer and wild birds—he will there tarry for Percy. This is chivalrous, and, in Scott’s version, Douglas understands war. In the English version Percy does not. (To these facts I return, giving more details.) Colonel Elliot supposes some one (Scott, I daresay) to have taken Percy’s,—the English version,—altered it to taste, concealed the alterations, as in this part of the challenge, by inverting the speeches and writing new stanzas of the fight at Otterburn, used a very little of Herd (which is true), and inserted modern stanzas.
Now, first, as regards pilfering from the English version, that version, and Herd’s undisputed version, have undeniably a common source. Neither, as it stands, is “original”; of an original contemporary Otterburn ballad we have no trace. By 1550, when such ballads were certainly current both in England and Scotland, they were late, confused by tradition, and, of what we possess, say Herd’s, and the English MS. of 1550, all were interblended.
The Scots ballad version, known to Hume of Godscroft (1610), may have been taken from the English, and altered, as Child thought, or the English, as Motherwell maintained, may have been borrowed from the Scots, and altered. One or the other process undeniably occurred; the second poet, who made the changes, introduced the events most favourable to his country, and left out the less favourable. By Scott’s time, or Herd’s, the versions were much degraded through decay of memory, bad penny broadsides (lost), and uneducated reciters. Herd’s version has forgotten the historic affair of the capture of Percy’s pennon (and of the whole movement on Newcastle, preserved in Sharpe’s and Scott’s); Scott’s remembers the encounter at Newcastle, forgets the pennon, and substitutes the capture by Douglas of Percy’s sword. The Englishman deliberately omits the capture of the pennon. The Scots version (here altered by Sir Walter) makes Percy wound Douglas at Otterburn—
Till backward he did flee.
Now Colonel Elliot has no right, I conceive, to argue that this Scots version, with the Newcastle incident, the captured sword, the challenge, the “backward flight” of Douglas, were introduced by a modern (Scott?) who was deliberately “faking” the English version. There is no reason why tradition should not have retained historical incidents in the Scottish form; it is a mere assumption that a modern borrowed and travestied these incidents from Percy’s Reliques. We possess Hogg’s unedited original of Scott’s version of 1806 (an original MS. never hinted at by Colonel Elliot), and it retains clear traces of being contaminated with a version of The Huntiss of Chevet, popular in 1459, as we read in The Complaynte of Scotland of that date. There is also an old English version of The Hunting of the Cheviot (1550 or later, Bodleian Library). The unedited text of Scott’s Otterburne then contained traces of The Huntiss of Chevet; the two were mixed in popular memory. In short, Scott’s text, manipulated slightly by him in a way which I shall describe, was a thing surviving in popular memory: how confusedly will be explained.
The differences between the English version of 1550 and the Scots (collected for Scott by Hogg), are of old standing. I am not sure that there was not, before 1550, a Scottish ballad, which the English ballad-monger of that date annexed and altered. The English version of 1550 is not “popular”; it is the work of a humble literary man.
The English is a very long ballad, in seventy quatrains; it greatly exaggerates the number of the Scots engaged (40,000), and it is the work of a professional author who uses the stereotyped prosaic stopgaps of the cheap hack—
I tell you withouten dread,
is his favourite phrase, and he cites historical authority—
The cronykle wyll not layne (lie).
Scottish ballads do not appeal to chroniclers! A patriotic and imbecile effort is made by the Englishman to represent Percy as captured, indeed, but released without ransom—
There was then a Scottysh prisoner tayne,
Sir Hew Mongomery was his name;
For sooth as I yow saye,
He borrowed the Persey home agayne.
This is obscure, and in any case false. Percy was taken, and towards his ransom Richard II. paid £3000. [59a]
It may be well to quote the openings of each ballad, English and Scots.
ENGLISH (1550)
I.
It fell about the Lammas tyde,
When husbands win their hay,
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride,
In England to take a prey.II.
The Earl of Fife, withouten strife,
He bound him over Solway;
The great would ever together ride
That race they may rue for aye.III.
Over Hoppertop hill they came in,
And so down by Rodcliff crag,
Upon Green Linton they lighted down,
Stirring many a stag.IV.
And boldly brent Northumberland,
And harried many a town,
They did our Englishmen great wrong,
To battle that were not boune.V.
Then spake a berne upon the bent . . .
SCOTTISH, HERD (1776)
I.
It fell and about the Lammas time,
When hushandmen do win their hay;
Earl Douglas is to the English woods,
And a’ with him to fetch a prey.II.
He has chosen the Lindsays light,
With them the gallant Gordons gay;
And the Earl of Fyfe, withouten strife,
And Hugh Montgomery upon a grey.
(The last line is obviously a reciter’s stopgap.)
III.
They have taken Northumberland,
And sae hae they the north shire,
And the Otterdale they hae burned hale,
And set it a’ into fire.IV.
Out then spak a bonny boy;
Manifestly these copies, so far, are not independent. But now Herd’s copy begins to vary much from the English.
In both ballads a boy or “berne” speaks up. In the English he recommends to the Scots an attack on Newcastle; in the Scots he announces the approach of an English host. Douglas promises to reward the boy if his tale be true, to hang him if it be false. The scene is Otterburn. The boy stabs Douglas, in a stanza which is a common ballad formula of frequent occurrence—
The boy’s taen out his little pen knife,
That hanget low down by his gare,
And he gaed Earl Douglas a deadly wound,
Alack! a deep wound and a sare.
Douglas then says to Sir Hugh Montgomery—
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And bury me at yon bracken bush,
That stands upon yon lilly lea. (Herd, 4–8.)
Hume of Godscroft (about 1610), author of the History of the Douglases, was fond of quoting ballads. He gives a form of the first verse in Otterburn which is common to Herd and the English copy. He says that, according to some, Douglas was treacherously slain by one of his own men whom he had offended. “But this narration is not so probable,” and the fact is fairly meaningless in Herd’s fragment (the boy has no motive for stabbing Douglas, for if his report is true, he will be rewarded). The deed is probably based on the tradition which Godscroft thought “less probable,”—the treacherous murder of the Earl.
In the English ballad, Douglas marches on Newcastle, where Percy, without fighting, makes a tryst to meet and combat him at Otterburn, on his way home from Newcastle to Scotland. Thither Douglas goes, and is warned by a Scottish knight of Percy’s approach: as in Herd, he is sceptical, but is convinced by facts. (This warning of Douglas by a scout who gallops up is narrated by Froissart, from witnesses engaged in the battle.) After various incidents, Percy and Douglas encounter each other, and Douglas is slain. After a desperate fight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, a prisoner of the English,
Borrowed the Percy home again.
This is absurd. The Scots fought on, took Percy, and won the day. Walsingham, the contemporary English chronicler (in Latin), says that Percy slew Douglas, so do Knyghton and the continuator of Higden.
Meanwhile we observe that the English ballad says nothing of Douglas’s chivalrous fortitude, and soldier-like desire to have his death concealed. Here every Scottish version follows Froissart. In Herd’s fragment, Montgomery now attacks Percy, and bids him “yield thee to yon bracken bush,” where the dead Douglas’s body lies concealed. Percy does yield—to Sir Hugh Montgomery. The fragment has but fourteen stanzas.
In 1802, Scott, correcting by another MS., published Herd’s copy. In 1806 he gave another version, for “fortunately two copies have since been obtained from the recitation of old persons residing at the head of Ettrick Forest.” [62a]
Colonel Elliot devotes a long digression to the trivial value of recitations, so styled, [62b] and gives his suggestions about the copy being made up from the Reliques. When Scott’s copy of 1806 agrees with the English version, Colonel Elliot surmises that a modern person, familiar with the English, has written the coincident verses in with differences. Percy and Douglas, for example, change speeches, each saying what, in the English, the other said in substance, not in the actual words. When Scott’s version touches on an incident known in history, but not given in the English version, the encounter between Douglas and Percy at Newcastle (Scott, vii., viii.), Colonel Elliot suspects the interpolator (and well he may, for the verses are mawkish and modern, not earlier than the eighteenth century imitations or remaniements which occur in many ballads traditional in essence).
So Colonel Elliot says, “We are not told, either in The Minstrelsy or in any of Scott’s works or writings, who the reciters were, and who the transcribers were.” [63a] We very seldom are told by Scott who the reciters were and who the transcribers, but our critic’s information is here mournfully limited—by his own lack of study. Colonel Elliot goes on to criticise a very curious feature in Scott’s version of 1806, and finds certain lines “beautiful” but “without a note of antiquity,” that he can detect, while the sentiment “is hardly of the kind met with in old ballads.”
To understand the position we must remember that, in the English, Percy and Douglas fight each other thus (1.)—
The Percy and the Douglas met,
That either of other was fain,
They swapped together while that they sweat,
With swords of fine Collayne. (Cologne steel.)
Douglas bids Percy yield, but Percy slays Douglas (as in Walsingham’s and other contemporary chronicles, stanzas li.–lvi.). The Scottish losses are then enumerated (only eighteen Scots were left alive!), and stanza lix. runs—
This fray began at Otterburn
Between the night and the day.
There the Douglas lost his life,
And the Percy was led away.
Herd ends—
This deed was done at Otterburn,
About the breaking of the day,
Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush,
And Percy led captive away.
Manifestly, either the maker of Herd’s version knew the English, and altered at pleasure, or the Englishman knew a Scots version, and altered at pleasure. The perversion is of ancient standing, undeniably. But when Scott’s original text exhibits the same phenomena of perversion, in a part of the ballad missing in Herd’s brief lay, Colonel Elliot supposes that now the exchanges are by a modern ballad-forger, shall we say Sir Walter? By Sir Walter they certainly are not! One tiny hint of Scots originality is dubious. In the English, and in all Scots versions, men “win their hay” at Lammastide. In Scotland the hay harvest is often much later. But if the English ballad be Northumbrian, little can be made out of that proof of Scottish origin. If the English version be a southern version (for the minstrel is a professional), then Lammastide for hay-making is borrowed from the Scots.
The Scots version (Herd’s) insists on Douglas’s burial “by the bracken bush,” to which Montgomery bids Percy surrender. This is obviously done to hide his body and keep his death secret from both parties, as in Froissart he bids his friends do. The verse of the English (l.) on the fight between Douglas and Percy, is borrowed by, or is borrowed from, the Scottish stanza (ix.) in Herd, where Sir Hugh Montgomery fights Percy.
Then Percy and Montgomery met,
And weel a wot they warna fain;
They swaped swords, and they twa swat,
And ay the blood ran down between.The Persses and the Mongomry met,
as quoted, is already familiar in The Complaynte of Scotland (about 1549), and this line is not in the English ballad. So far it seems as if the English balladist borrowed the scene from a Scots version, and perverted it into a description of a fight, between Percy, who wins, and Douglas—in place of the Scots version, the victory over Percy of Sir Hugh Montgomery.
This transference of incidents in the English and Scottish ballads is a phenomenon which we are to meet again in the ballad of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead. One “maker” or the other has, in old times, pirated and perverted the ballad of another “maker.”
As early as December 1802–January 1803, Scott was “so anxious to have a complete Scottish Otterburn that I will omit the ballad entirely in the first volume (of 1803), hoping to recover it in time for insertion in the third.” [67a]
The letter is undated, but is determined by Scott’s expressed interest “about the Tushielaw lines, which, from what you mention, must be worth recovering.” In a letter (Abbotsford MSS.) from Hogg to Scott (marked in copy, “January 7, 1803”) Hogg encloses “the Tushielaw lines,” which were popular in Ettrick, but were verses of the eighteenth century. They were orally repeated, but literary in origin.
Scott, who wanted “a complete Scottish Otterburn” in winter 1802, did not sit down and make one. He waited till he got a text from Hogg, in 1805, and published an edited version in 1806.
Scott’s published stanza i. is Herd’s stanza i., with slight verbal changes taken from the Hogg MS. text of 1805. (?) Hogg’s MS. and Scott, in stanza ii., give Herd’s lines on the Lindsays and Gordons, adding the Grahams, and, in place of Herd’s
The Earl of Fife,
And Sir Hugh Montgomery upon a grey,
they end thus—
But the Jardines wald not wi’ him ride,
And they rue it to this day.
This is from Hogg’s copy; it is a natural Border variant. No Earl of Fife is named, but a reproach to a Border clan is conveyed.
For Herd’s iii. (they take Northumberland, and burn “the North shire,” and the Otter dale), Hogg’s reciters gave—
And he has burned the dales o’ Tyne,
And part o’ Almonshire,
And three good towers in Roxburgh fells,
He left them all on fire.
Hogg, in his letter accompanying his copy, says that “Almonshire” may stand for the “Bamborowshire” of the English vi., but that he leaves in “Almonshire,” as both reciters insist on it. Scott printed “Bambroughshire,” as in the English version (vi.).
Now here is proof that Hogg had a copy, from reciters—a copy which he could not understand. “Almonshire” is “Alneshire,” or “Alnwickshire,” where is the Percy’s Alnwick Castle. In Froissart the Scots burn and waste the region of Alneshire, all round Alnwick, but the Earl of Northumberland holds out in the castle, unattacked, and sends his sons, Henry and Ralph Percy, to Newcastle to gather forces, and take the retreating Scots between two fires, Newcastle and Alnwick. But the Scots were not such poor strategists as to return by the way they had come. In a skirmish or joust at Newcastle, says Froissart, Douglas captured Percy’s lance and pennon, with his blazon of arms, and vowed that he would set it up over his castle of Dalkeith. Percy replied that he would never carry it out of England. To give Percy a chivalrous chance of recovering his pennon and making good his word, Douglas insists on waiting at Otterburn to besiege the castle there; and he is taken by surprise (as in the ballads) when a mounted man brings news of Percy’s approach. No tryst is made by Percy and Douglas at Otterburn in Froissart; Douglas merely tarried there by the courtesy of Scotland.
In Hogg’s version we have a reason why Douglas should tarry at Otterburn; in the English ballad we have none very definite. No captured pennon of Percy’s is mentioned, no encounter of the heroes “at the barriers” of Newcastle. Percy, from the castle wall, merely threatens Douglas vaguely; Douglas says, “Where will you meet me?” and Percy appoints Otterburn as we said. He makes the absurd remark that, by way of supplies (for 40,000 men), Douglas will find abundance of pheasants and red deer. [69a]
We see that the English balladist is an unwarlike literary hack. The author of the Ettrick version knew better the nature of war, as we shall see, and his Douglas objects to Otterburn as a place destitute of supplies; nothing is there but wild beasts and birds. If the original poem is the sensible poem, the Scott version is the original which the English hath perverted.
In Hogg, Douglas jousts with Percy at Newcastle, and gives him a fall. Then come two verses (viii.–ix.). The second is especially modern and mawkish—
But O how pale his lady look’d,
Frae off the castle wa’,
When down before the Scottish spear
She saw brave Percy fa’!
How pale and wan his lady look’d,
Frae off the castle hieght,
When she beheld her Percy yield
To doughty Douglas’ might.
Colonel Elliot asks, “Can any one believe that these stanzas are really ancient and have come down orally through many generations?” [70a]
Certainly not! But Colonel Elliot does not allow for the fact, insisted on by Professor Child, that traditional ballads, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were often printed on broad-sheets as edited by the cheapest broadside-vendors’ hacks; that the hacks interpolated and messed their originals; and that, after the broadside was worn out, lost, or burned, oral memory kept it alive in tradition. For examples of this process we have only to look at William’s Ghost in Herd’s copy of 1776. This is a traditional ballad; it is included in Scott’s Clerk Saunders, but, as Hogg told him, is a quite distinct song. In Herd’s copy it ends thus—
“Oh, stay, my only true love, stay,”
The constant Marg’ret cry’d;
Wan grew her cheeks, she closed her eyes,
Stretched her soft limbs, and dy’d.
Let this get into tradition, and be taken down from recitation, and the ballad will be denounced as modern. But it is essentially ancient.
These two modern stanzas, in Hogg’s copy, are rather too bad for Hogg’s making; and I do not know whether they are his (he practically says they are not, we shall see), or whether they are remembered by reciters from a stall-copy of the period of Lady Wardlaw’s Hardyknute.
After that, Hogg’s copy becomes more natural. Douglas says to the discomfited Percy (x.)—
Had we twa been upon the green,
And never an eye to see,
I should hae had ye flesh and fell,
But your sword shall gae wi’ me.
That rings true! Moreover, had either Hogg or Scott tampered here (Scott excised), either would have made Douglas carry off—not Percy’s sword, but the historic captured pennon of Percy. Scott really could not have resisted the temptation had he been interpolating à son dévis.
But your pennon shall gae wi’ me!
It was easy to write in that!
Percy had challenged Douglas thus—
But gae ye up to Otterburn,
And there wait days three (xi.),
as in the English (xiii.). In the English, Percy, we saw, promises game enough there; in Hogg, Douglas demurs (xii., xiii., xiv.). There are no supplies at Otterburn, he says—
To feed my men and me.
The deer rins wild frae dale to dale,
The birds fly wild frae tree to tree,
And there is neither bread nor kale,
To fend my men and me.
These seem to me sound true ballad lines, like—
My hounds may a’ rin masterless
My hawks may fly frae tree to tree,
in Child’s variant of Young Beichan. The speakers, we see, are “inverted.” Percy, in the English, promises Douglas’s men pheasants—absurd provision for the army of 40,000 men of the English ballad. In the Ettrick text Douglas says that there are no supplies, merely feræ naturæ, but he will wait at Otterburn to give Percy his chance.
Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions them, and the “prettier verses,” with a note of exclamation (!). [73a] But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd’s old copy, and nobody says that Scott or Hogg or any modern faker made the inversions in Herd’s text. The differences and inversions in the English and in Herd are very ancient; by 1550 “the Percy and the Montgomery met,” in the line quoted in The Complaynte of Scotland. At about the same period (1550) it was the Percy and the Douglas who met, in the English version. Manifestly there pre-existed, by 1550, an old ballad, which either a Scot then perverted from the English text, or an Englishman from the Scots. Thus the inversions in the Ettrick and English version need not be due (they are not due) to a modern “faker.”
In the Hogg MS. (xxiii.), Percy wounds Douglas “till backwards he did flee.” Hogg was too good a Scot to interpolate the flight of Douglas; and Scott was so good a Scot that—what do you suppose he did?—he excised “till backwards he did flee” from Hogg’s text, and inserted “that he fell to the ground” from the English text!
In the Hogg MS. (xviii., xix.), in Scott xvii., xviii., Douglas, at Otterburn, is roused from sleep by his page with news of Percy’s approach. Douglas says that the page lies (compare Herd, where Douglas doubts the page)—
For Percy hadna’ men yestreen
To dight my men and me.
There is nothing in this to surprise any one who knows the innumerable variants in traditional ballads. But now comes in a very curious variation (Hogg MS. xx., Scott, xix.). Douglas says (Hogg MS. xx.)—
But I have seen a dreary dream
Beyond the Isle o’ Skye,
I saw a dead man won the fight,
And I think that man was I.
Here is something not in Herd, and as remote from the manner of the English poet, with his
The Chronicle will not lie,
as Heine is remote from, say,—Milman. The verse is magical, it has haunted my memory since I was ten years old. Godscroft, who does not approve of the story of Douglas’s murder by one of his men, writes that the dying leader said:—
“First do yee keep my death both from our own folke and from the enemy” (Froissart, “Let neither friend nor foe know of my estate”); “then that ye suffer not my standard to be lost or cast downe” (Froissart, “Up with my standard and call Douglas!”;) “and last, that ye avenge my death” (also in Froissart). “Bury me at Melrose Abbey with my father. If I could hope for these things I should die with the greater contentment; for long since I heard a prophesie that a dead man should winne a field, and I hope in God it shall be I.” [75a]
I saw a dead man won the fight,
And I think that man was I!
Godscroft, up to the mention of Melrose and the prophecy, took his tale direct from Froissart, or, if he took it from George Buchanan’s Latin History, Buchanan’s source was Froissart, but Froissart’s was evidence from Scots who were in the battle.
But who changed the prophecy to a dream of Douglas, and who versified Godscroft’s “a dead man shall winne a field, and I hope in God it shall be I”? Did Godscroft take that from the ballad current in his time and quoted by him? Or did a remanieur of Godscroft turn his words into
I saw a dead man win the fight,
And I think that man was I?
Scott did not make these two noble lines out of Godscroft, he found them in Hogg’s copy from recitation, only altering “I saw” into “I dreamed,” and the ungrammatic “won” into “win”; and “the fight” into “a fight.”
The whole dream stanza occurs in a part of the ballad where Hogg confesses to no alteration or interpolation, and I doubt if the Shepherd of Ettrick had read a rare old book like Godscroft. If he had not, this stanza is purely traditional; if he had, he showed great genius in his use of Godscroft.
In Hogg’s Ettrick copy, Douglas, after telling his dream, rushes into battle, is wounded by Percy, and “backward flees.” Scott (xx.), following a historical version (Wyntoun’s Cronykil), makes
Douglas forget the helmit good
That should have kept his brain.
Being wounded, in Hogg’s version, and “backward fleeing,” Douglas sends his page to bring Montgomery (Hogg), and from stanza xxiv. to xxxiv., in Hogg, all is made up by himself, he says,—from facts given “in plain prose” by his reciters, with here and there a line or two given in verse. Scott omitted some verses here, amended others slightly, by help of Herd’s version, left out a broken last stanza (xl.) and put in Herd’s concluding lines (stanza lxviii. in the English text).
This deed was done at the Otterburn. (Herd.)
The fraye began at Otterburn. (English.)
Now what was the broken Ettrick stanza that Scott omitted in his published Otterburne (1806)? It referred to Sir Hugh Montgomery, who, in Herd, captured Percy after a fight; in the English version is a prisoner apparently exchanged for Percy. In the Ettrick MS. the omitted verse is
He left not an Englishman on the field
. . .
That he hadna either killed or taen
Ere his heart’s blood was cauld.
Scott ended with Herd’s last stanza; in the English version the last but two.
Now the death, at Otterburn, of Sir Hugh, is recorded in an English ballad styled The Hunting of the Cheviot. By 1540–50 it was among the popular songs north of Tweed. The Complaynte of Scotland (1549) mentions among “The Songis of Natural Music of the Antiquitie” (volkslieder), The Hunttis of Chevet. Our copy of the English version is in the Bodleian (MS. Ashmole, 48). It ends: “Expliceth, quod Rychard Sheale,” a minstrel who recited ballads and tales at Tamworth (circ. 1559). The text was part of his stock-in-trade.
The Cheviot ballad, in a Scots form popular in 1549, is later in many ways than the English Battle of Otterburne. It begins with a brag of Percy, a vow that, despite Douglas, he will hunt in the Cheviot hills. While Percy is hunting with a strong force, Douglas arrives with another. Douglas offers to decide the quarrel by single combat with Percy, who accepts. Richard Witherington refuses to look on quietly, and a general engagement ensues.
At last the Duglas and the Perse met,
Lyk to Captayns of myght and of mayne,
They swapte together tylle they both swat
With swordes that wear of fyn myllan.
We are back in stanza I. of the English Otterburne, in stanza xxxv. (substituting Hugh Montgomery for Douglas) of the Hogg MS. In The Hunting, Douglas is slain by an English arrow (xxxvi.–xxxviii.).
Sir Hugh Montgomery now charges and slays Percy (who, of course, was merely taken prisoner). An archer of Northumberland sends an arrow through good Sir Hugh Montgomery (xliii.–xlvi.). Stanza lxvi. has
At Otterburn begane this spurne,
Upon a Monnynday;
There was the doughte Douglas slean,
The Perse never went away.
This is a form of Herd’s stanza xiv. of the English Otterburn (lxviii.), made soon after the battle. We see that the original ballad has protean variants; in time all is mixed in tradition.
Now the curious and interesting point is that Hogg, when he collected the ballad from two reciters, himself noticed that the Cheviot ballad had merged, in some way, into the Otterburn ballad, and pointed this out to Scott. I now publish Hogg’s letter to Scott, in which, as usual, he does not give the year-date: I think it was 1805.
Ettrick House, Sept. 10, [?1805].
Dear Sir,—Though I have used all diligence in my power to recover the old song about which you seemed anxious, I am afraid it will arrive too late to be of any use. I cannot at this time have Grame and Bewick; the only person who hath it being absent at a harvest; and as for the scraps of Otterburn which you have got, they seem to have been some confused jumble made by some person who had learned both the songs you have, [79a] and in time had been straitened to make one out of them both. But you shall have it as I had it, saving that, as usual, I have sometimes helped the metre without altering one original word.
Hogg here gives his version from recitation as far as stanza xxiv.
Here Hogg stops and writes:—
The ballad, which I have collected from two different people, a crazy old man and a woman deranged in her mind, seems hitherto considerably entire; but now, when it becomes most interesting, they have both failed me, and I have been obliged to take much of it in plain prose. However, as none of them seemed to know anything of the history save what they had learned from the song, I took it the more kindly. Any few verses which follow are to me unintelligible.
He told Sir Hugh that he was dying, and ordered him to conceal his body, and neither let his own men nor Piercy’s know; which he did, and the battle went on headed by Sir Hugh Montgomery, and at length—
Here follow stanzas up to xxxviii.
Hogg then goes on thus:—
Piercy seems to have been fighting devilishly in the dark. Indeed my narrators added no more, but told me that Sir Hugh died on the field, but that
He left not an Englishman on the field,
. . .
That he hadna either killed or ta’en
Ere his heart’s blood was cauld.Almonshire (Stanza iii.) may probably be a corruption of Bamburghshire, but as both my narrators called it so I thought proper to preserve it. The towers in Roxburgh fells (Stanza iii.) may not be so improper as we were thinking, there may have been some [English] strength on the very borders.—I remain, Dear Sir, your most faithful and affectionate servant, James Hogg.
Hogg adds a postscript:
Not being able to get the letter away to the post, I have taken the opportunity of again pumping my old friend’s memory, and have recovered some more lines and half lines of Otterburn, of which I am becoming somewhat enamoured. These I have been obliged to arrange somewhat myself, as you will see below, but so mixed are they with original lines and sentences that I think, if you pleased, they might pass without any acknowledgment. Sure no man will like an old song the worse of being somewhat harmonious. After stanza xxiv. you may read stanzas xxv. to xxxiv. Then after xxxviii. read xxxix.
Now we know all that can be known about the copy of the ballad which, in 1805, Scott received from Hogg. Up to stanza xxiv. it is as given by the two old reciters. The crazy man may be the daft man who recited to Hogg Burns’s Tam o’ Shanter, and inspired him with the ambition to be a poet. The deranged woman, like mad Madge Wildfire, was rich in ballad scraps. From stanza xxv. to xxxiv., Hogg confessedly “harmonises” what he got in plain prose intermixed with verse. Stanza xxxix. is apparently Hogg’s. The last broken stanza, as Hogg said, is a reminiscence of the Hunting of the Cheviot, in a Scots form, long lost.
Hogg was not a scientific collector: had he been, he would have taken down “the plain prose” and the broken lines and stanzas verbally. But Hogg has done his best.
We have next to ask, How did Scott treat the material thus placed before him? He dropped five stanzas sent by Hogg, mainly from the part made up from “plain prose”; he placed in a stanza and a line or two from Herd’s text; he remade a stanza and adopted a line from the English of 1550, and inserted an incident from Wyntoun’s Cronykil (about 1430). He did these things in the effort to construct what Lockhart calls “a standard text.”
1. In stanza i., for Hogg’s “Douglas went,” Scott put “bound him to ride.”
2. (H.) “With the Lindsays.”
(S.) “With them the Lindesays.”
3. (H.) “Almonshire.”
(S.) “Bamboroughshire.”
(H.) “Roxburgh.”
(S.) “Reidswire.”
6. (H.) “The border again.”
(S.) “The border fells.”
7. (H.) “Most furiously.”
(S.) “Right furiouslie.”
9. (H.) A modernised stanza.
(S.) Scott deletes it.
15. (H.) Scott rewrites the stanza thus,
(H.)
But I will stay at Otterburn,
Where you shall welcome be;
And if ye come not at three days end,
A coward I’ll call thee.
(S.)
“Thither will I come,” proud Percy
said,
“By the might of Our Ladye.”
“There will I bide thee,” said the Douglas,
“My troth I’ll plight to
thee.”
19. (H.) “I have seen a dreary dream.”
20. (S.) “I have dreamed a dreary dream.”
21. (H.)
Where he met with the stout Percy
And a’ his goodly train.
21. (S.)
But he forgot the helmet good
That should have kept his brain.(From Wyntoun.)
22. (H.) Line 2. “Right keen.”
(S.) Line 2. “Fu’ fain.”
Line 4.
The blood ran down like rain.
Line 4.
The blood ran them between.
23. (H.)
But Piercy wi’ his good broadsword
Was made o’ the metal free,
Has wounded Douglas on the brow
Till backward did he flee.
24. (S.)
But Piercy wi’ his broadsword good
That could so sharply wound,
Has wounded Douglas on the brow,
Till he fell to the ground.
25. (H.) Here Hogg has mixed prose and verse, and does his best. Scott deletes Hogg’s 25.
27. (H.) Douglas repeats the story of his dream. Scott deletes the stanza.
28. In Hogg’s second line,
Nae mair I’ll fighting see.
Scott gives, from Herd,
Take thou the vanguard of the three.
29. Hogg’s verse is
But tell na ane of my brave men
That I lie bleeding wan,
But let the name of Douglas still
Be shouted in the van.
This is precisely what Douglas does say, in Froissart, but Scott deletes the stanza. Probably Hogg got the fact from his reciters, “in plain prose,” with a phrase or two in verse.
31. (H.) Line 4.
On yonder lily lee.
27. (S.)
That his merrie men might not see.
33. (H.) Scott deletes the stanza.
35. (H.)
When stout Sir Hugh wi’ Piercy met.
30. (S.)
The Percy and Montgomery met. [83a]
36. (H.)
“O yield thee, Piercy,” said Sir Hugh,
“O yield, or ye shall die!”
“Fain would I yield,” proud Percy said,
“But ne’er to loon like thee.”
31. (S.)
“Now yield thee, yield thee, Percy,” he said,
“Or else I vow I’ll lay thee low,”
“To whom must I yield,” quoth Earl Percy,
“Now that I see it must be so?”
Scott took this from Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s MS. copy. [84a]
38. (H.)
38. (S.) Scott makes a slight verbal alteration.
39. (H.) Line 1.
34. (S.) Line 1.
Scott substitutes Herd’s
As soon as he knew it was Montgomery.
40. (H.) Hogg’s broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, derived from a lost form of the Huntiss of Chevets, named in The Complaynte of Scotland.
35. (S.) Scott omits giving the formula common to the English of 1550 and to Herd. This was the whole of Scott’s editorial alteration. Any one may discover the facts from Professor Kittredge’s useful abbreviation of Child’s collection into a single volume (Nutt. London, 1905). Colonel Elliot quotes Professor Kittredge’s book three or four times, but in place of looking at the facts he abounds in the Higher Criticism. Colonel Elliot says that Scott does not tell us of a single line having been borrowed from Percy’s version. [84b] Scott has only “a single line” to tell of, the fourth line in his stanza xxii., “Till he fell to the ground.”
For the rest, the old English version and Herd’s have many inter-borrowings of stanzas, but we do not know whether a Scot borrowed from an Englishman, or vice versa. Thus, in another and longer traditional version—Hogg’s—more correspondence must be expected than in Herd’s fourteen stanzas. It is, of course, open to scepticism to allege that Hogg merely made his text, invented the two crazy old reciters, and the whole story about them, and his second “pumping of their memories,” invented “Almonshire,” which he could not understand, and invented his last broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, to give the idea that The Huntiss of Chevets was mingled in the recollections of the reciters with The Battle of Otterburn. He also gave the sword in place of the pennon of Percy as the trophy of Douglas, “and the same with intent to deceive,” just as he pretended, in Auld Maitland, not to know what “springwalls” were, and wrote “springs: wall-stanes.” If this probable theory be correct, then Scott was the dupe of Truthful James. At all events, though for three years Scott was moving heaven and earth and Ettrick Forest to find a copy of a Scottish ballad of Otterburn, he did not sit down and make one, as, in Colonel Elliot’s system, he easily could and probably would have done.
Before studying his next ill deed, we must repeat that the Otterburn ballads prove that in early times one nation certainly pirated a ballad of a rival nation, and very ingeniously altered it and inverted the parts of the heroes.
We have next to examine a case in a later generation, in which a maker who was interested in one clan, pirated, perverted, and introverted the rôles of the heroes in a ballad by a maker interested in another clan. Either an Elliotophile perverted a ballad by a Scottophile, or a Scottophile perverted a ballad by an Elliotophile.
This might be done at the time when the ballad was made (say 1620–60). But Colonel Elliot believes that the perversion was inflicted on an Elliotophile ballad by a Scottophile impostor about 1800–1802. The name of this desperate and unscrupulous character was Walter Scott, Sheriff of Ettrick Forest, commonly called Selkirkshire.
In this instance I have no manuscript evidence. The name of “Jamie of the Fair Dodhead,” the ballad, appears in a list of twenty-two ballads in Sir Walter’s hand, written in a commonplace book about 1800–1801. Eleven are marked X. “Jamie” is one of that eleven. Kinmont Willie is among the eleven not marked X. We may conjecture that he had obtained the first eleven, and was hunting for the second eleven,—some of which he never got, or never published.