"The shadows of the convent towers

Slant down the snowy sward;"

and in the peace of long-drawn summer twilights only the distant cries of children, the scream of swift or song of thrush, may now set the echoes flying through those ruined aisles. The Presbyterian Manse that once stood in the Abbey grounds—itself no doubt, like other houses in the town, built wholly or in part of stone quarried from the Abbey ruins—has long since been removed, and little now remains which may break the tranquil sadness that broods over these relics of past grandeur.

Yet there is sadness too, when one thinks of the—at least on this occasion—sorely maligned woman who lay there in grievous suffering in the darkening days of that October of 1566. "Would that I had died at Jedworth," she sighed in later years. She had been spared much, the Fates had been less unkind, if death had then been her part. And not least, she might have been spared the malignant slanders of the historian Buchanan, who, at any rate in this matter, showed himself a master of the art of suppressing the true and suggesting the false.

When, according to Buchanan, news was brought to Mary at Borthwick Castle of the wounding of Bothwell by "a poor thief, that was himself ready to die,"—how, one wonders, would the famous "Little Jock Elliot" have relished that description of himself?—"she flingeth away in haste like a mad woman, by great journeys in post, in the sharp time of winter." As a matter of fact, when the news of Bothwell's mishap reached the Queen, she was already on her way to Jedburgh, to hold there a Circuit Court; and the time, of course, was not winter, but early October, not unusually one of the pleasantest times of the whole year in the south of Scotland.

In mid-October the sun sets a few minutes after 5 o'clock. Therefore, in returning, the Queen and her escort must have made a reasonably early start; for to find oneself, either on horseback or afoot, among peat bogs and broken, swampy ground after dark is a thing not to be courted. As it was, Mary and her horse were bogged in what has ever since been called the Queen's Mire, where years ago was found a lady's spur of ancient design—perhaps hers. The day had turned out wet and windy,—it is a way that October days have, after fine weather with a touch of frost,—and the Queen and her escort were soaked to the skin, bedraggled, and splashed to the eyes with black peaty mud from the squelching ground through which their horses had been floundering.

On the evening of the ninth day of this severe illness, after a particularly acute attack of convulsions, the Queen sank, and her whole body became cold and rigid. "Every one present, especially her domestic servants, thought that she was dead, and they opened the windows. The Earl of Moray began to lay hands on the most precious articles, such as her silver plate and jewels. The mourning dresses were ordered, and arrangements were made for the funeral." * John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, writing from Jedburgh at the time, says that on the Friday "her Majesty became deid and all her memberis cauld, her Eene closit, Mouth fast, and Feit and Armis stiff and cauld."

She left Jedburgh within fifteen days of the date of M. Le Croc's letter, not an excessive time in which to recover from an illness which admittedly had brought her to the point of death, and which must have left her in a condition of extreme weakness. Yet, according to Buchanan, this time of convalescence was devoted to "their old pastime again, and that so openly, as they seemed to fear nothing more than lest their wickedness should be unknown." His conscience must have been of an elastic nature, if, having any knowledge of the facts, he could so write; and if he had no knowledge of the farts, one wonders how it is possible that a man of his position and ability should commit himself to statements so foul and uncharitable.

But at any cost, and by any means, he wanted to make out his case; and he knew his audience.

According to Buchanan, Darnley, when he did reach Jedburgh, found no one ready to receive him, or "to do him any reverence at all"; the Queen, he says, had "practised with" the Countess of Moray to feign sickness and keep her bed, as an excuse for not receiving him. "Being thus denied all duties of civil kindness, the next day with great grief of heart he returned to his old solitary corner." A pathetic story, if it were wholly true; a heart-stirring picture, that of the "solitary corner." But all the King's horses and all the King's men could not have set Darnley back again in the place he had forfeited in the esteem of the Nobles, and in the esteem of the country at large. If the nobles were not pleased to welcome him, if he was forsaken of all friends, whose fault was that but Darnley's? "The haughty spirit of Darnley, nursed up in flattery, and accustomed to command, could not bear the contempt into which he had now fallen, and the state of insignificance to which he saw himself reduced." * Darnley was an undisciplined cub. It was the sulky petulance of a spoilt child, that delayed his visit to Jedburgh; it was the offended dignity of an unlicked schoolboy that took him out of it again so hurriedly. The Queen's sufferings were as nought, weighed in the scale against a petty dignity offended by the lack of "reverence" with which he was received in Jedburgh. Truly, Queen Mary at her marriage had "placed her love on a very unworthy object, who requited it with ingratitude and treated her with neglect, with violence, and with brutality." **

On 9th November Jedburgh saw its last of this most unfortunate among women. On that day the Queen and her Court set out for Craigmillar, travelling on horseback by way of Kelso, Home Castle, Berwick, and Dunbar. But the effects of that grievous sickness at Jedburgh long remained with her.

Of this visit, local tradition has not much to tell. There is the story that the advance guard of that section of the Prince's army which he himself led, marching from Kelso, reached Jedburgh on the Sunday when the entire community was at church, and it is said that a message was sent to the minister of the Abbey church requiring him to close the service and send his congregation home to prepare rations for the main body of the army. The order, if it were really given, was apparently not resented, for when the Prince himself marched in, the women of Jedburgh, at least, flocked into the street to kiss his hand. The regard and homage of the women he got here, as elsewhere, but of that of which he stood most in need, the swords of the men, he got none. As at Kelso, not a single recruit followed him. One, indeed, a neighbouring farmer, did ride in to join the Royal standard, but he was a day after the fair; the army had already marched. Did the sound that tradition says Jedburgh heard long ere the Prince's arrival, the sound as of an army on the march, the distant rumble of moving artillery, the tramp of innumerable feet, and the dull throb of drums pulsing on the still night air, scare Borderers away from his enterprise? Was it superstition, or was it a real lack of interest, or was it merely "canniness," that so effectually damped the ardour of recruits both at Kelso and at Jedburgh? Whatever the cause, no man followed him; only the blessings and good wishes of the women were his wherever he went.

One unlooked-for result of the Prince's march through those desolate regions, was a very great increase in the number of illicit stills, and in the consumption of whisky that had paid no revenue to King George. So impressed were the Highlanders with the wild solitude of the glens on all sides of their line of march, and with the facilities presented by the amber-clear burns that tinkle through every cleuch, that when the rebels were returning from Derby, numbers of the men got no farther north than the hills of Liddesdale and the Border, but entered there on the congenial pastime of whisky-making.

Though the proportion of Borderers who followed Prince Charlie down into England, or throughout his campaign, was so very meagre, yet there lived among those solemn Border hills many faithful hearts, whose King he was to the end.

"Follow thee! Follow thee! Wha wadna follow thee?

King o' our Highland hearts,

Bonnie Prince Charlie,"

Jedburgh, of course, amongst other claims to distinction was famed for its witches—as what place was not, indeed, in times when harmless old women were adjudged innocent or guilty of the charge of witchcraft according as they sank or floated when thrown into deep water. If they sank—well and good, that meant that they were innocent, and they went to Heaven, having at any rate the satisfaction of knowing beforehand that, in such case, at least their memory would be cleared of the suspicion under which they had lain; if they floated—again well and good; that proved conclusively that the charge against them was a true one, and they were rescued from the water only to be burned alive. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," was the text which our ancestors regarded as the Eleventh Commandment. We were not a whit better even at as late a date as the seventeenth century, than are those West African tribes of the present day whose medicine-men still "smell out" witches. Only, the West Africans practise the art now more or less in secret, and they are more humane in the death they inflict than were our ancestors; they do not burn.

The Ettrick Shepherd must have known this story well. Perhaps it suggested some of the verses in "The Witch of Fife," in "The Queen's Wake."

"Where have ye been, ye ill woman,

These three lang nichts frae hame?

What gars the sweit drap frae yer brow, '

Like clots o' the saut sea faem?

"It fears me muckle ye have seen

What guid man never knew;

It fears me muckle ye have been

"Sit down, sit down, my leal auld man,

Sit down and listen to me;

I'll gar the hair stand on yer crown

And the cauld sweit blind yer e'e.

"The first leet nicht, when the new moon set,

When all was douf and mirk,

We saddled our naigs wi* the moon fern leaf,

And rode frae Kilmorran Kirk.

"Some horses were of "the broom-cow framed,

And some of the green bay tree:

But mine was made of a hemlock-shaw,

And a stout stallion was he.

"We rode the tod doon on the hill,

The martin on the law;

And we hunted the hoolit out o' breath,

And forcit him doon to fa'."

"What guid was that, ye ill woman?

What guid was that to thee?

Ye wad better have been in yer bed at hame

Wi' yer dear little bairns and me."

"And aye we rade and sae merrylie we rade,

Through the merkist gloffs o' the night;

And we swam the flood, and we darnit the wood,

Till we cam to the Lommond height.

"And when we cam to the Lommond height,

Sae blythlie we lighted down;

And we drank frae the horns that never grew

The beer that was never brewin.

"And aye we danced on the green Lommond

Till the dawn on the ocean grew,

Nae wonder I was a weary wicht

When I cam hame to you.

And we flew ow'r hill, and we flew ow'r dale,

And we flew ow'r firth and sea,

Until we cam to merry Carlisle,

"We gaed to the vault beyond the tow'r

Where we entered free as air,

And we drank, and we drank of the Bishop's wine,

Until we could drink nae mair."

If, however, our forbears were drastic in their manner of dealing with witches and warlocks, and rigid in the infliction of capital punishment on criminals guilty of very minor offences, they were extraordinarily lax as regards the condition in which they kept their prisons. It is told that, sometime during the eighteenth century, the chief magistrate of Jedburgh was waited on by the burgh gaoler, who complained that the main door of the gaol had parted company with its hinges—which, in fact, had long been eaten through with rust. He had no means of securing his prisoners. What was he to do? It was a question calculated to puzzle any ordinary person. But the magistrate was a man of resource. "Get a harrow," said he. "And set it on end in the doorway, wi' its teeth turned inwards. If that winna keep them in,—'deed then they're no worth the keepin'." To as late a date as 1833, Selkirk also was not much better off than this, as regards its prison. The writer of the Statistical Account of the Parish at that date complains that prisoners "have been frequently in the practice of coming out in the evening, and returning again before the jailor's visit in the morning."

It was a heavily wooded district this in former days, and one or two of the giants of old still survive,—the widespreading "Capon tree," for instance, that you pass on the road a mile from Jedburgh (but why "Capon" it passes the knowledge of man to decide); and the "King of the Woods," near Fernihirst, a beautiful and still vigorous oak, with a girth of 17 feet, four feet from the ground.

Scattered all over the Jedburgh district are many ancient camps—hoary even in the day when Douglas fortified Lintalee; many old castles and peel-towers, all, or nearly all, now in ruins, some indeed with very little left save tradition to indicate where once they stood; and here and there are found vestiges of chapels or shrines, of which possibly there may remain hardly more in some instances than the green mounds which cover their fallen walls. The monks wandered far up this pleasant vale of Jed, carrying the Gospel of Peace through a land that knew of little save war, but the history of their resting places is even more vague than is now the outline of their chapel walls. At Old Jed ward, however, five miles up stream from Jedburgh, you may still in some measure trace the line of foundations of that venerable little building which is said to have been built here away back in the ninth century. Of camps, the number is legion. That near Monklaw, the writer has not seen, but it is said to be Roman, and its measurements are something like one hundred and sixty yards each way. At Scraesburgh there is a circular camp, with a diameter of about one hundred and eighty feet, and with ramparts still nearly twenty feet in height,—surely that "Skraysburgh, the greatest towne in all Teviotdale," which, according to the English version, seems in 1544 to have fallen almost as fell Jericho of old, when the enemy shouted and blew their trumpets.