Then, the next day, having burned their camp, they marched unmolested back up the Rede valley into Scotland; and with them they bore the honoured bodies of Douglas and of others who had fallen in the fight. Percy went with them, a captive, and many another distinguished Englishman against his will sadly followed the victors. But those prisoners who were too badly hurt to endure the march into Scotland were sent under parole back to Newcastle, among them Sir Ralph Percy, who was returned in a horse litter. Huge sums are mentioned as having been paid in ransom by the English prisoners, the estimate of some writers reaching the extravagant figure of £600,000, a sum that in those days would have enriched the entire Scottish nation beyond the dreams of avarice. Even that number of pounds Scots (equal to £50,000) seems beyond reason. Froissart's 200,000 francs (£8,000 in our money) is probably about what was paid—in that day a most handsome sum.
A cheerful little village is the Otterburne of the present day,—even though there are not wanting evidences that some part of it, down by the inn, for example,-has planted itself in too close proximity to a river and a burn which still, as in those early eighteenth century days of "Mad" Jack Hall, are capable of sudden and vindictive flood. As regards the battlefield, however, there is not a great deal to see. The so-called Percy's Cross, which stands in a thin clump of trees to the east of the road three-quarters of a mile on the Scottish side of the village, is a comparatively modern erection. The true site ot the original "Battle Stone," according to maps of date 1769, was about a couple of hundred yards more to the east, and there it stood, or rather, lay, till 1777, when the then proprietor of the land, a Mr. Ellison, put up the cross now standing, within view of the new turnpike road which was then being made up the valley of the Rede. Mr. Ellison used the ancient socket of the original cross, but the rough pedestal on which the socket stands has nothing to do with the old memorial.
Nor has the present shaft, which, says Mr. Robert White in his "History of the Battle of Otterburne" (1857), was nothing but "an old architrave which had been removed from the kitchen fireplace at Otterburne Hall. This stone, the cross-section of which is fifteen and a half by eight inches, still shows a bevelled corner throughout its length; besides, two small pieces of iron project from one of its sides, which, in its former period of usefulness, were probably connected with some culinary apparatus. On its top is another stone, tapering to a point, which completes the erection. The entire length of the shaft above the base is nine and a half feet. The socket is a worn, weather-beaten sandstone, about two feet square, without any tool-marks upon it, and appears to have been in use much longer than any of the stones connected with it."
A still more modern memorial of the battle is a large semicircular seat cut in freestone, bearing on darker coloured panels various inscriptions, which stands by the road-side a little farther to the north. This was erected in 1888 by Mr. W. H. James, then M.P. for Gateshead. It may be noted that one of the panels gives the date of the battle as tenth August, 1388, which is almost certainly a mistake.
Douglas, of course, had satisfactory reasons for camping that night where he did,—reasons not unconnected probably with the question of shelter from English arrows. A wood protected him, it is said. Had he gone four or five miles farther on up the valley, he might have occupied the old Roman camp of Bremenium, a strong position, not sheltered from arrow-flight by trees, it is true, but protected on two sides by what in old days must have been swamps, and surrounded by a heavy wall which, even in its present condition, would be, to a defending force, a considerable protection in hand to hand fighting. Five hundred years ago, before the day of agricultural improvement and the custom of using ancient monuments as a quarry, such a defence must have made the camp a place of very considerable strength. Portions only now remain of the formidable wall which originally protected Bremenium, but enough stands to show what its strength must have been in the days when the Roman Legions manned it. The face is composed of great blocks of hewn freestone, accurately fitted; in height it must have been about fourteen feet, in thickness something like seventeen,—the inner portion, of course, being rubble work; outside there were two or more fosses. One of the gateways is still intact to a very considerable height, but the camp as a whole has to a most pitiable extent been used as a quarry, perhaps for hundreds of years. Even yet, one doubts if it is held quite sacred from vandal raids. As late as 1881, when members of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club visited the camp they found masons deliberately quarrying stones from one corner of the wall, in order to build a hideous modern cottage, and I daresay some of the houses in the immediate neighbourhood may be composed entirely of stones taken from the old walls. The writer has not seen the Roman tombs which exist about half a mile to the east of the camp. The largest of these is said to have still two courses of stones standing, besides the flat stones of the foundation. This tomb has in front a small carving, regarding which Dr. Collingwood Bruce, in "The Roman Wall," suggests that it may have been intended to represent "the head of a boar—the emblem of the twentieth legion." The writer is given to understand that the carving bears no resemblance whatever to the head of a boar. A coin of the Emperor Alexander Severus was found in this tomb, together with a jar containing calcined bones, and a coin of the Emperor Trajan was found in the camp.
How many of Douglas's wounded, one wonders, were carried from the field of battle over to Southdean, and, succumbing there to their wounds, were buried at the church? Two or three years ago, when the ash-trees were cut down and the grassy mound carted away that had so long concealed the ruins of the old building, quantities of human bones were dug up within and about the walls, some of the skulls showing unmistakably that the owners had died no peaceful death. No doubt the main body of the Scottish army would follow the dead Douglas to his tomb in Melrose Abbey, and would therefore never come so far west as Southdean, but the severely wounded would naturally be left wherever they could be attended to. It is certain that the Southdean district was in old days much less sparsely populated than is now the case; two important yearly fairs, for instance, used formerly to be held at Lethem, (three miles nearer the Border than Southdean,)—where also, on a knoll still called the Chapel Knowe, was a chapel, subsidiary to the church of Southdean. These fairs were for the sale of "horse, nolt, sheep, fish, flesh, malt, meal," and all sorts of merchandise, and in the permit to hold the Fairs Lethem is described as being "by reason of its situation, lying near the Border, a very convenient and fit place for traffic and trade."
The church of Southdean, therefore, as its ruins indicate, was probably of considerable importance, surrounded by a settlement of some size, where wounded men might well be left to take their chance of recovery. Whether the Scots returned from Otterburne up Rede valley and over the pass by way of Catcleuch Shin, or (as is more probable) followed the Roman Road which passes Bremeirum Camp and runs over the Cheviots some miles to the east of Carter-fell, and thence crossing Kale, Oxnam, Jed, and Teviot, goes in more or less direct line towards Newstead and Melrose, it would be easy and natural for them to detach a party with the wounded, and perhaps with the bodies of some of the more notable dead, to Southdean. And those of them who died there would of course be buried in or close to the church.
During the excavations, it is of interest to note that numbers of skulls were found all together at one spot, pointing to the probability of many bodies having been, from some common cause, buried in a common grave. The inference seems not illegitimate that this cause was the fight at Otterburne. The English appear to have carried away from the field many of their dead, as well as their wounded:
"Then on the morne they mayde them beerys
Of birch and haysell graye;
Many a wydowe, with wepynge teyrs
Ther makes they fette awaye."
It is not unlikely that the Scots also brought away some, at least, of their dead, and, as Southdean was the nearest spot in their own country where they could find consecrated ground, the probability is that these bodies, as well as those of the wounded who died later, would find rest there.
In his "History and Poetry of the Scottish Border," Professor Veitch mentions that "a recent discovery made at Elsdon Church, about three miles from the scene of conflict, may be regarded as throwing some light on the slaughter. There skulls to the amount of a thousand have been disinterred, all lying together. They are of lads in their teens, and of middle-aged men; but there are no skulls of old men, or of women. Not improbably these are the dead of Otterburne."
The length of the old building at Southdean, including tower and chancel, was ninety-seven feet, and the nave was about twenty-three feet in width. Many notable things were unearthed during the work of excavation, those of most interest possibly being a massive octagonal font, cut from one block of stone, and a small stone super-altar incised with the usual five crosses.
At Southdean, as elsewhere, the old church has for generations been used as a quarry. The retaining wall of the adjacent Newcastle road is full of dressed stones taken from the building, and others, some of them carved, have been built into the walls of an adjoining barn. Certainly our ancestors in this instance had more excuse than usual to offer for their depredations, for the building was a hopeless ruin. The roof of the church fell in one Sunday in the year 1689, and the walls—not unhelped by human hands—speedily followed suit. Stones from the principal doorway seem to have been used in 1690 in the building of a new church at Chesters. That too is now in ruins.
As we ascend Teviot, after Jed its next important tributary is the Ale, not so named from the resemblance of its waters, when flooded, to a refreshing beverage. Sir Herbert Maxwell says that the name was originally written "Alne" (as in Aln, Alnwick) and this form survives in the place-name in Ale, Ancrum, the site of a desirable Scottish victory. The word would at first be Alne crumb, the crook of Alne or "Ale." Crom does mean "crook" in Gaelic, I understand, and Ale does make a crook or bend round Ancrum, so the names are tokens of the possession of the dale by Gaelic-speaking people, very long ago. In Timpendean, the name of a ruined tower opposite the point where Ale enters Teviot, we have the English "dene" or "den," as in the neighbouring Hassendoan The places of most historical interest on lower Ale are Ancrum Moor and Lilliard's Edge, the scene of a battle in which the Scots partly avenged the incessant burnings and slayings by the men of Henry VIII, inflicted while the prince was furious at his failure to secure the hand of the baby Queen, Mary Stuart, for his puny son, later Edward VI. Henry first hoped, by the aid of these professional traitors, chiefs of the Douglases,—the Earl of Angus and his brother, Sir George—to obtain the Royal child and the great castles, and the Crown of Scotland, without drawing sword. Baffled in this by the adroitness and patriotic courage of Cardinal Beaton, he sent his forces to rob, burn, and slay through all the eastern and central Marches. In February 1545, Hertford had finished his own work of ruin, despite which the Earl of Angus declared that he loved Henry VIII "best of all men." There followed a breach in this tender sentiment, amantium irai. Hertford's lieutenants, Evers and Laiton, with "assured Scots" of Teviotdale, wearing St George's cross, were harrying the Border. The Scottish Regent, the fickle, futile, good-humoured Earl of Arran, called for forces, but met little response, for, as a contemporary diarist writes, all men suspected the treachery of Henry's lover, and of the Douglases, "ever false, as they alleged." Yet Scott, in his ballad of "The Eve of St John," speaks of "the Douglas true and the bold Buccleugh"; the Scotts of Buccleuch, in fact, were ever loyal. The Laird, approached with bribes in English gold, rejected them in language of such pardonable profanity as frightened and astonished the English envoy, accustomed to buy Scottish traitors by the gross.
So mixed were affairs that while Wharton was trying to kidnap Sir George Douglas for Henry, Sir George was endeavouring to betray Arran to the English. They worsted the pacific Regent near Melrose, burned town and abbey, and desecrated the ancestral graves there of the Douglases, among them the resting place of the Earl who fell, when "a dead man won a fight," at Otterburne. The English clearly did not understand that Angus and his brother were eager to make their peace with Henry by relieving their treacheries to their country.
The ruining of his ancestors' tombs aroused the personal fury of Angus, moreover Henry had made large gifts of Angus's lands to Evers and Laiton. Angus therefore gathered his forces, breathed out threats, and joined hands with Arran, who was also supported by a very brave man, Norman Leslie, presently to be one of the assassins of Cardinal Beaton—in Henry's interest. Norman, however, was patriotic for the moment, and the bold Buccleuch was ever trusty. As Angus and Arran followed the English, Leslie and Buccleuch "came lightly riding in" and the Scots united on the wide airy moor of Ancrum.
The English saw their approach, and saw their horses moving to the rear. Supposing that the Scots were in retreat, (they meant to fight on foot, and only sent their mounts to the rear,) the lances of Evers and Laiton galloped gaily in pursuit. But what they found was "the dark impenetrable wood" of stubborn spears. With the sun and the wind and blown smoke in their faces, the English cavalry charged, and were broken on the schiltroms or serried squares as they were broken at Bannockburn. Hereon the clan Ker, the men of Cessford and Ferniehirst, "assured Scots," tore off their crosses of St. George, and charged with Leslie, the Douglases, and Buccleuch. The English were routed, the country people rose against them; Evers and Laiton lost their new lands with their lives, eight hundred of the English were slain, and two thousand were taken alive—which is rather surprising. The English evacuated Jedburgh, and the Scots recovered Coldingham.
Meanwhile the good-natured, false, feckless Regent Arran wept over the dead body of Sir Ralph Evers. "God have mercy on him, for he was a fell cruel man, and over cruel. And welaway that ever such a slaughter and blood shed should be among Christian men," sobbed the Regent. His heart was better than his head. Even George Douglas had warned Henry VIII of what would result from "the extreme war that is used in killing women and young children." In my childhood I heard and never forgot, the country rhyme on an Amazon of a girl, who, to avenge her lover, took arms at Ancrum moor. She fell, and on her tomb, which has been many times restored, the following epitaph is engraved:
"Fair Maiden Lilliard
Lies under this stane;
Little was her stature,
But muckle was her fame.
Upon the English loons
She laid many thumps,
And when her legs were cuttit oft
She fought upon her stumps."
Clearly this is a form of
"For Widrington I must bewail as one in doleful dumps,
For when his legs were cutten off he fought upon his stumps."
Lilliard's Edge, the ancient name of the scene of this fair lady's fall, must have suggested the idea of a girl styled Lilliard, and her story was thus suggested to the rhymer and became a local myth.
About Ancrum the Ale, like the Jed, and, over the Border, the Eden and Coquet, beautifies itself by cutting a deep channel through the fine red sandstone of which Melrose Abbey is built. These channels are always beautiful, but Ale, otherwise, as we ascend its valley, is a quiet trout stream "that flows the green hills under." In my boyhood, long, long ago, Ale abounded in excellent trout, and was my favourite among all our many streams. It does not require the angler to wade, like Tweed and Ettrick; it is narrow and easily commanded. The trout were almost as guileless as they were beautiful and abundant; but I presume that they are now almost exterminated by fair and unfair methods. The Scot, when he does not use nets, poisons, and dynamite, is too often a fisher with the worm, and, as I remember him, had no idea of returning even tiny fish to the water, as James Thomson, author of The Seasons, himself a Border angler, advises us to do.
Guileless, indeed, since old time has been the character of the trout of Ale. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder tells how in his boyhood he went once with a chance-met "souter" from Selkirk to the long pool in Ale above Midlem bridge, and how there, by a most unsporting device, they captured the innocent trout almost by the sack-load. "We came," he says, "to a very long gravelly-bottomed pool, of an equal depth all over of from three to four feet. Here the souter seated himself; and, shortening both our rods, and fitting each of them with the three hooks tied back to back, he desired us to follow him, and then waded right into the middle of the pool. The whole water was sweltering with fine trouts, rushing in all directions from the alarm of our intrusion among them. But after we had stood stock still for a few moments, their alarm went off, and they began to settle each individually in his own place. 'There's a good one there,' said the souter, pointing to one at about three yards from him; and throwing the hooks over him, he jerked him up, and in less than six seconds he was safe in his creel. We had many a failure before we could succeed in catching one, whilst the souter never missed; but at length we hit upon the way; and so we proceeded with our guide, gently shifting our position in the pool as we exhausted each particular spot, until the souter's creel would hold no more, and ours was more than half filled with trouts, most of which were about three-quarters of a pound in weight; and very much delighted with the novelty of our sport, we made our way back to Melrose by the western side of the Eildon hills, and greatly astonished our companion with the slaughter we had made, seeing that he had been out angling for a couple of hours in the Tweed, without catching a single fin." A slaughter of the innocents, indeed! But the most inveterate poacher could not now, in any Border stream, hope to rival a feat so abominable in the eyes of present-day fishers. Nor, if he did attempt it, would he be likely to find trout so utterly devoid of guile as to submit thus quietly to be hooked out of the water one by one till the pool was emptied. Trout are better educated, if fewer in number, than they appear to have been eighty or ninety years ago. It is difficult, too, to see where the fun of this form of fishing comes in, after the rather cheap excitement of catching the first one or two. But they did curious things in the name of Sport in the earlier half of last century. Many of the methods of catching salmon that are written of approvingly by Scrope, that great angler of Sir Walter's day, are now the rankest of poaching, and are prohibited by law.
The mid course of Ale is through "ancient Riddel's fair domain," as Scott says in the great rhymes of William of Deloraine's midnight ride from Branksome Tower to Melrose. There is now no Riddel of Riddel.
Here I shall mercilessly quote the whole of William of Deloraine's Itinerary from Branksome Tower till he rides Ale when "great and muckle o' spate."
"Soon in his saddle sate he fast
And soon the steep descent he past,
Soon cross'd the sounding barbican,
And soon the Teviot side he won.
Eastward the wooded path he rode,
Green hazels o'er his basnet nod;
"He pass'd the Peel of Goldiland,
And cross'd old Borthwick's roaring strand;
Dimly he view'd the Moat-hill's mound.
Where Druid shades still flitted round;
In Ilawick twinkled many a light;
Behind him soon they set in night;
And soon he spurr'd his coarser keen
Beneath the tower of hazeldean.
"The clattering hoofs the watchmen mark:—
'Stand, ho! thou courier of the dark.'—
'For Branksome, ho!' the knight rejoin'd,
And left the friendly tower behind.
He turn'd him now from Teviotside,
And guided by the tinkling rill,
Northward the dark ascent did ride,
And gained the moor at Horslichill;
Broad on the left before him lay,
For many a mile, the Roman way.=
"A moment now he slack'd his speed,
A moment breathed his panting steed;
Drew saddle-girth and corslet-band,
And loosen'd in the sheath his brand.
On Minto-crags the moonbeams glint,
Where Barnhill hew'd his bed of flint;
Who flung his outlaw'd limbs to rest,
Where falcons hang their giddy nest,
Mid cliffs, from whence his eagle eye
From many a league his prey could spy;
Cliffs, doubling, on their echoes borne,
The terrors of the robbers' horn;
Cliffs, which, for many a later year,
The warbling Doric reed shall hear,
When some sad swain shall teach the grove,
Ambition is no cure for love!
"Unchallenged, thence pass'd Deloraine,
To ancient Riddel's fair domain,
Where Aill, from mountains freed,
Down from the lakes did raving come;
Each wave was crested with tawny foam,
Like the mane of a chestnut steed.
In vain! no torrent, deep or broad,
Might bar the bold moss-trooper's road.
At the first plunge the horse sunk low,
And the water broke o'er the saddlebow;
Above the foaming tide, I ween,
Scarce half the charger's neck was seen;
For he was barded from counter to tail,
And the rider was armed complete in mail;
Never heavier man and horse
Stemm'd a midnight torrent's force.
"The warriors very plume, I say,
Was daggled by the dashing spray;
Yet, through good heart, and Our Ladye's grace,
At length he gained the landing place."
Above the point where William rode the water, the scenery is quiet and pastoral; about Ashkirk and Synton we are in the lands of lairds whose genealogies are recounted in the rhymes of old Satchells, who
"can write nane
But just the letters of his name."
Further up, Ale rests in the dull deep loch of Alemuir, which looks as if it held more pike than trout. And so we follow her into the hills and the water-shed that, on one side, contributes feeders to the Ettrick. It is a lofty land of pasture and broken hills, whence you see the airy peaks of Skelfhill, Penchrise, the Dumon, and the ranges of "mountains" as Scott calls the hills through which the Border Waters run, Yarrow, Ettrick, Borthwick Water and Ale Water. A "water" is larger than a "burn," but attains not to the name of a river.
Rule, the next tributary as we ascend Teviot, is but a "Water," a pretty trout stream it would be if it had fair play. The question of fishing in this country is knotted. Almost all the trout streams were open to everybody, in my boyhood, when I could fish all day in Tweed or Ale, and never see a rod but my own. The few anglers were sportsmen. "Duffer" as I was, I remember a long summer day on Tweed at Yair, when, having come too late for the ten o'clock "rise" of trout, I had an almost empty creel. Just before sunset I foregathered with old Adam Linton, his large creel three-quarters full of beauties. "What did you get them with?" I asked. At the moment he was using the tiniest midges, and the finest tackle. "Oh, wi' ae thing and another, according to the time o' day," he answered. I daresay he used the clear water worm, fished up stream; deadly sin m Hampshire, but not in the Forest. Since these days the world has gone wild on angling, the waters are crowded like the Regent's canal with rods. Now I am all for letting every man have his cast; but the only present hope for the survival of trout is in the associations of anglers who do their best to put down netting and dynamiting. A close time when trout are out of season, we owe to Sir Herbert Maxwell, opposed as he was by the Radical Member for the Border Burghs. I am not sure that there is a rule against slaying trout under, shall we say, seven inches? However it may be, I had my chance and wasted it; being a duffer. Trout may become extinct like the Dodo; it makes no odds to me. I never cast fly in Rule, nor even examined "the present spiritless parish church," on the site of a Norman church of the early twelfth century. The few relics of carved stone fill Sir Herbert Maxwell's heart with bitterness against the dull destroyers. Our Presbyterian forefathers, as far as in them lay, destroyed every vestige of the noble art whereof these glens were full, when, in the twelfth century, the Border was part of a civilised country. For all that I know, they were innocent of ruin at Bedrule; the English of Henry VIII may here, as all through this region, have been the destroyers. They were Protestants of a sort. Moreover in Rule dwelt the small but fierce clan of Turnbull, who, between Scotts and Kers, fought both of these great clans, and now, as a power, "are a' wede awa'." Perhaps an enemy of theirs took sanctuary in the church, and they "burned the chapel for very rage," as the Scotts burned St. Mary of the Lowes shortly before the Reformation.
Somewhere about 1620, Rule Water had her minstrel, named Robin, nick-named "Sweet-milk," from the place of his residence. In my opinion these singers of the late days of James VI and I, were the survivors of the Border minstrels who, says Queen Mary's Bishop of Ross, Lesley, the historian, made their own ballads of raids and rescues, such as Jock o' the Cow, and as much as is not Scott's of Kinmont Willie. There was a rival minstrel, Willie Henderson, whom I take to have sided with the Scotts, while Robin was the Demodocus of the Eliotts of Stobs. The pair met, drank, fought, and Willie pinked "Sweet-Milk" Robin, the Eliotts' man.
"Tuneful hands with blood were dyed,"
says Sir Walter, but what was the cause of the quarrel? I have a hypothesis. The famous ballad of Jamie Telfer exists in two versions. In one the Scotts are covered with laurels, while Martin Eliott plays the part of a cur. In the other, the Eliotts gain all the glory, while Scott of Buccleuch acts like a mean dastard. One of these versions is the original, the other is a perversion. The ballad itself, which takes us all through the Border, from Bewcastle on the English side, to the fair Dodhead on Upper Ettrick, is not of the period of the incidents described. As far as these are historical, the date is about 1596. The author of the ballad does not know the facts, and makes incredible statements. Consequently he is late, writes years after the Union of the Crowns (1603) and the end of Border raids. I guess that either Will Henderson was the author of the ballad in favour of the Scotts, and that Robin, the minstrel of the Eliotts, perverted it into the Eliott version, or vice versa, Robert was the original author, Will the perverter. Here, in any case, was infringement of copyright and deadly insult. The poets fought. Certainly, Robin fell, and the Eliotts hanged Will, gave him "Jeddart justice." To the ballad we shall return; it is, though inaccurate, full of the old Border spirit, and is in itself an itinerary of the Marches.
These high powers, the Scott and Eliott clans, like the States of Europe, were now allies, cementing their federacy by intermarriages; and again were bitter foes. The strength of the chief of the Eliotts was in Liddesdale, of the Scotts, in Teviotdale. They were allies for young James V against his Keepers, the Douglases,
"When gallant Cessford's life-blood dear
Reeked on dark Eliott's Border spear"
at "Turn Again," a spot on Scott's estate of Abbotsford. They were foes in 1564-66, in Queen Mary's reign, when Martin Eliott, chief of his clan, plotted with the Armstrongs to betray her strong fortress of Hermitage to the English.
In this feud the Eliotts attacked Scott of Hassendean in his tower on Hassendean burn, the next tributary of Teviot, but the ballad of Kinmont Willie makes Gilbert Eliott of Stobs ride with the bold Buccleuch to the rescue of Willie from Carlisle Castle (1596). Unluckily, in 1596 Gilbert Eliott was not yet the Laird of Stobs.
This Gilbert, at all events, married the daughter of the Flower of Yarrow, the wife of Auld Wat Scott of Harden, himself the neighbour and foremost fighting man of the laird of Branksome in Teviot, the bold Buccleuch. His descendant, Sir Walter, has made Auld Wat's name immortal, and, in Jamie Telftr, has certainly interpolated a spirited stanza.
In the village of Denholm, on Teviot, opposite to Hassendean, was born John Leyden, the great friend of Scott, a poet in his way, but much more remarkable as a man of amazing energy of character, an Orientalist, and a collector of ballads. But few now know what
"distant and deadly shore
Holds Leyden's cold remains,"
His memory is twined with that of Sir Walter, and he is one of the most living figures in Lockhart's Life of Scott. Leyden had the poetic quality, not judiciously cultivated, of the old Border minstrels, while the energy which the clans expended in war was given by him to omnivorous studies.
Below Denholm, but on the other side of the river, nearly opposite the junction of Rule Water with Teviot, is Minto, in the fourteenth century a property owned by one of that unruly clan, the Turnbulls. Later, it passed to the family of Stewart, and finally, somewhere about the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was bought by Sir Gilbert Elliot, ancestor of the Minto branch of that family. The present house dates only from 1814, but it has a curious legend attached to it, which is mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's diary, under date 23rd December, 1825. He says: "It is very odd that the common people about Minto and the neighbourhood will not believe at this hour that the first Earl is dead." [He died in June, 1814.] "They think he had done something in India which he could not answer for—that the house was rebuilt on a scale unusually large to give him a suite of secret apartments, and that he often walks about the woods and crags of Minto at night, with a white nightcap and long white beard. The circumstances of his having died on the road down to Scotland is the sole foundation of this absurd legend, which shows how willing the public are to gull themselves when they can find no one else to take the trouble. I have seen people who could read, write, and cipher, shrug their shoulders and look mysterious when this subject was mentioned. One very absurd addition was made on occasion of a great ball at Minto House, which it was said was given to draw all people away from the grounds, that the concealed Earl might have leisure for his exercise."
To the east of Minto House are Minto Crags, towering precipitous to a height of over seven hundred feet. On the summit is the ruin called Fatlips Castle, which is said to have been the stronghold of the fourteenth-century owner of Minto, Turnbull of Barnhill, a notorious Border freebooter. A small grassy platform, or level space, a little below the ruin, is called Barnhill's Bed, "Where Barnhill hew'd his bed of flint,"—a convenient spot, no doubt, in old days on which to station a sentry or look-out.
The third Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto was apparently in his own way something of a poet, but the ever tolerant Sir Walter Scott, to whom he used to read his compositions, confesses that the verses were "but middling," Sir Gilbert had, however, a better title, at least to collateral fame; he was the brother of the Jean Elliot who wrote that undying lament, the "Flowers of the Forest."
It is curious to note that in 1374 the church of Minto belonged to the diocese of Lincoln.
Here at Minto, if credence in the reality of Fairies no longer lingers amongst the people,—one of the writers of this volume records, some chapters back, that he found traces of the belief not very many years ago still surviving at Flodden Edge,—at least but a very few generations have passed since it died. Throughout Teviotdale, perhaps to a greater extent than in any other part of the Border, tales still are told which show how strong was once this belief in the existence of the Little Folk, and many of the customs that, we are told, were followed by country dwellers in order to propitiate the Good People, or to thwart their malevolence, are very quaint, Should it chance, for instance, that at the time a child was born the blue bonnet usually worn by the husband was not kept continually lying on the mother's bed, then there would be the most imminent danger of that child being carried off by the Fairies, and a changeling being left in its place. Many a fine child has been lost through neglect of this simple precaution. Generally, if the abduction took place before the child had been christened, a pig or a hedgehog, or some such animal, was substituted for the infant; but if the Fairies did not succeed in their design till after the child's baptism, then they left another bairn in its place, usually a peevish, ill-thriven, wizen-faced little imp. A tale is told of a woman who lived at Minto Cragfoot, and whose child, in consequence of some trifling lark of precaution in the matter of the blue bonnet, was carried off, and in the end was rescued only by the superior knowledge and power of a Presbyterian minister. Whilst she herself was engaged one day in gathering sticks for her fire, the woman had laid her child beside a bush on the hill side. She neither heard nor saw anything unusual, but on going to pick up her child at the close of her task, instead of her bonny, smiling little son she found only a thin, wasted, weird little creature, which "yammered" and wept continually. Recourse was had to the Reverend Mr. Borland, (first Presbyterian minister of Bedrule after the Reformation,) and that gentleman at once unhesitatingly pronounced that this was no mere human child. The mother must go to the cliffs, said Mr. Borland, and there gather a quantity of the flowers of the fox glove, (locally called "witches thimbles,") and bring them to him. These Mr. Borland boiled, poured some of the extract into the bairn's mouth, scattered the boiled flowers all over its body, then put it in its cradle wrapped in a blanket, and left it all night alone in the barn. Mr. Borland took the key of the door away with him, and gave instructions that under no circumstances was anybody to enter the barn until he returned next day. The anxious mother watched all night by the door, but heard no sound; never once did the child wail. And next morning when Mr. Borland arrived he was able to hand to the mother her own child, fat and smiling as when carried off by the fairies. It was a heroic remedy, but probably the sick child did not swallow much of that decoction of digitalis. In any case, they did not have coroners' inquests in those days, and had the worst come to the worst, the uncomplaining fairies would have borne the blame.
It was up Teviot, in the days when witches flourished, that a poor woman lived, whose end was rather more merciless than that inflicted on most of her kind. A man's horse had died suddenly,—elf-struck, or overlooked by a witch, of course. To break whatever spell the witch or elf might have cast over other animals the owner of the dead horse cut out and burnt its heart. Whilst the fire was at its fiercest and the heart sizzling in the glow, there rushed up a large black greyhound, flecked all over with foam and evidently in the last stage of fatigue, which tried persistently to snatch the heart from the fire. One of the spectators, suspecting evil, seized a stick and struck the animal a heavy blow over the back, whereupon, with a fearful yell, it fled, and disappeared. Almost at that instant, a villager ran up, saying that his wife had suddenly been taken violently ill; and when those who had been engaged in burning the heart went in to the man's cottage, they found his wife, a dark-haired, black-eyed woman, lying, gasping and breathless, with her back, to their thinking, broken. She, poor woman, was probably suffering from a sudden and particularly acute attack of lumbago. But to those wise men another inference was only too obvious. She was, of course, a witch, and it was she who, in the guise of a greyhound, had tried to snatch the horse's heart from the fire, and who had then got a stroke across her back that broke it. They insisted that she should repeat the Lord's prayer,—an infallible test, for if she were a witch she would be sure to say: "lead us into temptation, and deliver us not from evil." And so, when the poor woman, her pain failed to get through the prayer to their satisfaction, they bound her, carried her away, and burnt her alive in the fire where the horse's heart had been roasted.
Two or three miles across the river from Minto is Ruberslaw, a rugged hill, towering dark and solitary, a land-mark for half the Border. More than any of its distant neighbours in the Cheviot range, it seems to draw to itself the hurrying rain clouds, more than any other it seems to nurture storms. About its grim head all Teviotdale may
"see with strange delight the snow clouds form
When Ruberslaw conceives the mountain storm—
Dark Ruberslaw, that lifts his head sublime,
Rugged and hoary with the wrecks of time;
On his broad misty front the giant wears
The horrid furrows of ten thousand years."
Like many another wild Border hill, Ruberslaw was a favourite lurking place for the persecuted Covenanters, and near its top is a craggy chasm from which, it is said, Wodrow's "savoury Mr. Peden" used to preach to his scattered congregation. It was on this hill that the pursuing dragoons all but caught the preacher and his flock one day; they were caught, indeed, like rats in a trap, had it not been for Ruberslaw's well known character for breeding bad weather. The soldiers were advancing in full view of the conventicle. Way of escape there was none, nor time to disperse; mounted men from every quarter were scrambling up the steep face of the hill, and in that clear light what chance was left now to hide among the rocks and boulders!" "O Lord," prayed Peden with extreme fervour, "lap the skirts of thy cloak ower puir auld Sandy." And as if in answer to his petition, there came over the entire hill a thick "Liddesdale drow," so dense that a man might not see two feet around him. When the mist cleared again, there was no one left for the dragoons to take.
Above Hassendean, but on the other side of Teviot, is one of the few remaining possessions in this country, namely Cavers, of the great and ancient House of the Black Douglases. The relics are a very old flag; its date and history are variously explained by family legend and by antiquaries. It is not a pennon, therefore not Hotspur's pennon taken by the Earl of Douglas before the battle of Otterburne. It is nothing of the Percys', for it bears the Douglas Heart and a Douglas motto. On the whole it seems to have belonged not to the Black, but to their rivals and successors, the Red Douglases, who were as unruly, and "ill to lippen to" by Scottish kings, as the elder branch. The lady's embroidered glove, with the letters K.P., ought to have belonged to Hotspur's wife, who is Kate in Shakespeare, a better authority than you mere genealogists.