Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy Part 15

And five and five like a mason gang, That carried the ladders lang and hie; And five and five like broken men, And so they reached the Woodhouselee.

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

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

"For never a word o' lear had he,"

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

Salkeld is met -

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

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

"We gang to harry a corbie's nest, That wons not far frae Woodhouselee."

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

Colonel Elliot makes much of the absence of mention of the Esk, and says "it is AFTER they are in England that the false reports are spread." {139a} But the ballad does not say so--read it! All pa.s.ses with judicious vagueness.

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

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

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

{139b}

In Satch.e.l.ls, Buccleuch leaves half his men at the "Stonish bank"

(Staneshaw bank) "FOR FEAR THEY HAD MADE NOISE OR DIN." An old soldier should have known better, and the ballad (his probable half-remembered source here) DOES know better -

"And there the laird garr'd leave our STEEDS, For fear that they should stamp and nie,"

and alarm the castle garrison. Each man of the post on the ford would hold two horses, and also keep the ford open for the retreat of the advanced party. The ballad gives the probable version; Satch.e.l.ls, when offering as a reason for leaving half the force, lest they should make "noise or din," is maundering. Colonel Elliot does not seem to perceive this obvious fact, though he does perceive Buccleuch's motive for dividing his force, "presumably with the object of protecting his line of retreat," and also to keep the horses out of earshot, as the ballad says. {140a}

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

In Scott's ORIGINAL this river, he says, was the Esk, in Satch.e.l.ls it is the Eden, and Scott says he made this necessary correction in the ballad. In Satch.e.l.ls the storming party

Broke a sheet of leid on the castle top.

In the ballad they

Cut a hole through a sheet o' lead.

Both stories are erroneous; the ladders were too short; the rescuers broke into a postern door. Scrope told this to his Government on the day after the deed, 14th April. {140b}

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

Satch.e.l.ls makes the trumpets sound when the rescuers bring Kinmont Willie to the castle-top on the ladder (which they did not), and again when the rescuers reach the ground by the ladder. They made no use at all of the ladders, which were too short, and Willie, says the ballad, lay "in the LOWER prison." They came in and went out by a door; but the trumpets are not apocryphal. They, and the shortness of the ladders, are mentioned in a MS. quoted by Scott, and in Birrell's contemporary Diary, i. p. 57. In the MS. Buccleuch causes the trumpets to be sounded from below, by a detachment "in the plain field,"

securing the retreat. His motive is to encourage his party, "and to terrify both castle and town by imagination of a greater force."

Buccleuch again "sounds up his trumpet before taking the river," in the MS. Colonel Elliot may claim stanza x.x.xi. for Scott, and also the tune "Wha dare meddle wi' me?" he may even claim here a suggestion from Satch.e.l.ls' "Come if ye dare." Colonel Elliot says that no tune of this t.i.tle ever existed, a thing not easy to prove. {142a}

In the conclusion, with differences, there are resemblances in the ballad and Satch.e.l.ls. Colonel Elliot goes into them very minutely.

For example, he says that Kinmont is "made to ride off; not on horseback, but on Red Rowan's back!"

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

"Then shoulder high, with shout and cry, We bore him down the ladder lang; At every stride Red Rowan made, I wot the Kinmont's airns played clang." {142b}

After this verse Kinmont makes his speech (xl.-xli.). But if he DID ride on Red Rowan's back to Staneshaw bank, it was the best thing that a heavily ironed man could do. In the ballad (xxvii.) no horses of the party were waiting at the castle, ALL horses were left behind at Staneshaw bank (Satch.e.l.ls brings horses, or at least a horse for Willie, to the castle). On what could Willie "ride off," except on Red Rowan? {142c}

Stanzas x.x.xv., x.x.xvi. and xliv. are related, we have seen, to pa.s.sages in Jock o' the Side and Archie o' Cafield, but ballads, like Homer, employ the same formulae to describe the same circ.u.mstances: a note of archaism, as in Gaelic poetic pa.s.sages in Marchen.

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

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

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

He was, as Satch.e.l.ls says, a cousin, he was also a friend of Buccleuch's, and he may conceivably have taken a part in this glorious adventure, though he could not, AT THE MOMENT, be called laird of Stobs. Were I an Elliot, this opinion would be welcome to me! Really, Salkeld was in a good position to know whether Elliot rode with Buccleuch or not.

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

A person who cannot conceive that Scott wrote

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

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