The Balladists Part 8

'"But again, dear love, and again, dear love, Will you never love me again?

Alas! for loving you so well, And you not me again."'

From Edinburgh wandered Leezie Lindsay, kilting her coats of green satin to follow her Lord Ronald Macdonald the weary way to the Highland Border; and to its plainstanes came the faithful Lady of Gicht to ransom her Geordie:

'My Geordie, O my Geordie, The love I bear my Geordie!

For the very ground I walk upon Bears witness I lo'e Geordie.'

And these regions of the North have as much of the 'blood-red wine' of ballad romance coursing through them as Tweedside or Lothian, although it may be of harsher and coa.r.s.er flavour. s.p.a.ce does not allow of doing justice to the Northern Ballads, some of them simple strains, made familiar by sweet airs, like _Hunting Tower_, or _Bessie Bell and Mary Gray_, or the _Banks of the Lomond_; others, and these chiefly from the wintry side of Cairn o' Mount, 'bleak and bare' as that wilderness of heather; still others, and from the same quarter, gallant, warm-hearted, light-stepping tunes as ever were sung--_Glenlogie_, for instance:

'There were four-and-twenty n.o.bles Rode through Banchory fair; And bonnie Glenlogie Was flower o' them there.'

For the most part they are variants, many of them badly mutilated in the rhymes, that are familiar, under other names, farther south. They gather about the family history and the family trees of the great houses--the Gordons for choice--planted by Dee and Don and Ythan, where Gadie runs at the 'back o' Benachie,' and in the Bog o' Gicht; and they tell of love adventures and mischances that have befallen the Lords of Huntly or Aboyne, the Lairds of Drum or Meldrum, and even the humble Trumpeter of Fyvie.

CHAPTER VI

THE HISTORICAL BALLAD

'It fell about the Lammas tide, When the muirmen win their hay, The doughty Douglas bound him to ride Into England, to drive a prey.'

_The Battle of Otterburn._

The kindly Scot will not quarrel with the comparative mythologist who tells him that the superst.i.tions embalmed in his ballad minstrelsy are wanderers out of misty times and far countries--primitive ideas and beliefs that may have started with his remote ancestors from the heart of the East, to find harbour in the valleys of the Cheviots and the islands of the West, or that have drifted thither with the tide of later inroads. Nor will he greatly protest when the literary historian a.s.sures him that the plots and incidents in the popular old rhymes of the frenzies and parlous adventures of love have been borrowed or adapted from the metrical and prose romances of the Middle Ages. He can appreciate in his poetry, as in his pedigree, high and long descent; all the more since, as he flatters himself, whencesoever the seed may have come, it has found kindly soil, and drawn from thence a strength and colour such as few other lands and ballad literatures can match.

But to suggest that not even our Historical Songs of fight and of foray against our 'auld enemies' of England are genuine, unalloyed products of the national spirit; to hint that _Kinmont Willie_, _The Outlaw Murray_, or _The Battle of Otterburn_ itself is an exotic--that were a somewhat dangerous exercise of the art of a.n.a.lytic criticism, in the presence of a Scottish audience. In truth, no poetry of any tongue or land is more powerfully dominated by the sense of locality--is more expressive of the manners of the time and mood of the race--than those rough Border lays of moonlight rides, on reiving or on rescue bound, and of death fronted boldly in the press of spears or 'behind the bracken bush.' These are not tales of the infancy of a people. Scotland had already attained to something of national unity of blood and of sentiment before they came to birth. For generations and centuries she had to keep her head and her bounds against an enemy as watchful and warlike as herself, and many times as strong. Blows were struck and returned, keen and sudden as lightning. The 'hammer of the Scots,' wielded by the English kings, had smitten, and under its blows the race had been welded together and wrought to a temper like steel, supple upon occasion to bend, but elastic and unbreakable, and with a sharp cutting edge.

Heroes conquered or fell; and sometimes a minstrel was by to sing the exploit. Patriotism and the joy of combat are leading notes in these Historic Ballads. The annals of Scotland are full of family and clan feuds--the quarrels of kites and crows. But, with a fine and true instinct, the best of these ballads avoid taking account of the bickerings in the household. It is when they sing of 'patriot battles won of old,' where Scot and Southron met, 'red-wat shod,' that the strain rises to its clearest, and 'stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet.' Nor is it always the events that are most noised in the history-book that are best remembered in the ballads. The old singers and their audiences delighted more in personal episode than in filling a big canvas; their genius was dramatic rather than epic. _Hardyknut_, with its commemoration of the battle of Largs and the Northmen, although accepted by the _literati_ of the early Georgian era as a genuine 'antique,' has long been proved to be an imitative production of Lady Wardlaw's. The rhyme which the Scottish maidens sang about Bannockburn is lost. The Wallace group of ballads bears plain marks of spurious intermixture, or later composition. There are no traditional verses preserved in popular memory regarding the disasters of Neville's Cross or of Homildon Hill, where so much good Scots blood soaked an alien sod; or of that shameful day of Solway Moss, about which James the Fifth muttered strange words on his dying-bed. Even the pathetic strain, more lyrical, however, than narrative, in which lament is made for _The Flowers o' the Forest_, that were 'wede awa'' at Flodden, came two centuries later than the woful battle.

Perhaps it is natural that a warlike people should sing of their triumphs rather than of their defeats and humiliations. But if the old ballads have lost sight of some great landmarks in the country's chronicle, they have preserved names and incidents which the duller pen of history has forgotten or overlooked. The breath of poetry pa.s.ses over the Valley of Bones of the national annals, and each knight stands up in his place, a breathing man and a living soul. They are none the less real and living for us because Dry-as-dust has mislaid the vouchers for their birth and their deeds, and cannot fit them into their place in his family trees and chronological tables.

It follows, from the strongly patriotic cast of the ballads of war and fray, that they should have sprung up most rankly on the battle-fields and around the peel-towers of the Borderland. It was on the line of the Tweed and of the Cheviots that the long quarrel was fought out; and thus the Merse, Ettrick Forest, and Teviotdale; the Debateable Land, Liddesdale, and Annan Water became the native countries of the songs of raid and battle. The 'Red Harlaw'--which has had its own homespun bard, although of a different note and fibre from the minstrels of the Border--may be said to have ended the struggle for the mastery between Highlands and Lowlands. From thence onward through the age of ballad-making, there were _spreaghs_ and feuds enow upon and within the Highland Line. But, until the time when Jacobitism came to give change of theme and bent, along with change of scene, to the spirit of Scottish romance, none of these local bloodlettings sufficed to inspire a ballad of more than local fame; unless indeed the story drew part of its power to live and to please from other sources besides the mere zest for fighting. In distinction, as we shall see from the typical Border War Lay, in which woman, if her presence is felt at all, is kept in the background, as looker-on or rewarder of the fight, in such Northern tales of raid and spulzie as _The Baron of Bracklay_, _Edom o' Gordon_, _The Bonnie House o' Airlie_, or even _The Burning o' Frendraught_, she is brought into the heart of the scene and forms an abiding and controlling influence.

In a word, these are at least as much Romantic as Historical Ballads. We suspect that woman's guile and treachery are at work, as soon as we hear the taunting words of Bracklay's lady:

'O rise, my bauld Baron, And turn back your kye, For the lads o' Drumwharron Are driving them bye.'

We are made sure of it, when the minstrel tells us:

'There was grief in the kitchen But mirth in the ha'; But the Baron o' Bracklay Is dead and awa'.'

And in the a.s.sault on the 'House o' the Rhodes,' it is not the wild work of the Gordons on which our thoughts are fixed; it is not even on the Forbeses, riding hard and fast to be in time for rescue:

'Put on, put on, my michty men, As fast as ye can drie; For he that 's hindmost o' my men Will ne'er get good o' me.'

It is 'the bonnie face that lies on the gra.s.s,' and Lady Ogilvie, and not her lord or the 'gleyed Argyll,' is central figure of the tale of the raid of the Campbells against their hereditary foes in Angus.

As a rule, in those ballads of the Borders whose business is with foray and reprisal, we have none of this disturbing element. The sheer love of adventure, the chance of exchanging 'hard dunts' with the Englishmen, is inducement enough for us to follow the lead of the Douglas or Buccleuch across the Waste of Bewcastle or through the wilds of Kidland. The women folks are safe and well defended in the peel-towers, from whence, when the word has gone out to 'warn the water speedilie,' the bale-fires flash up the dales from water-foot to well-e'e, and set the hill-crests aflame with the news of the enemy's coming. They may have given the hint of a toom larder by serving a dish of spurs on the board. They will be the first to welcome home the warden's men or the moss-troopers if they return with full hands, or to rally them if they have brought nothing back but broken heads. But keeping or breaking the peace on the Borders is a man's part; and only men mingle in it. Both sides are too accustomed to surprises, and have too many strong fortalices and friends at hand, to give the foe the chance of 'lifting' whole families as well as their gear and cattle. The last thing one looks for, then, in the moss-trooping ballads is a strain of tender and pathetic sentiment. The tone is hearty and virile even to boisterousness. The minstrel, like the fighters, revels in hard knocks and rough jests. He has ridden with them probably, and has had the piper's share of the plunder and whatever else was going. He has heard 'the bows that bauldly ring and the arrows whiddering near him by,' as he pa.s.ses through the 'derke Foreste.' He took the fell with the other folk in the following of the Scottish warden, and looking down the slope towards Reed Water, witnessed the beginning and end of the skirmish known as _The Raid of the Reidswire_.

'Be this our folk had taen the fell And planted pallions there to bide; We looked down the other side, And saw them breasting ower the brae Wi' Sir John Forster as their guide, Full fifteen hundred men and mae.'

With strokes, graphic and humorous, he describes how the meeting of the two wardens, 'begun with merriment and mowes,' turned to the exchange of such 'reasons rude' between Tyndale and Jed Forest, as flights of arrows and 'dunts full dour.' Pride was at the bottom of the mischief; pride and the memory of old scores.

'To deal with proud men is but pain; For either must ye fight or flee, Or else no answer make again, But play the beast and let them be.'

And so, when the English raised the question of surrendering a fugitive,

'Carmichael bade them speak out plainlie, And cloak no cause for ill or good; The other answering him as vainly, Began to reckon kin and blood; He raise, and raxed him where he stood, And bade him match him wi' his marrows; Then Tyndale heard these reason rude, And they let off a flight of arrows.'

Again, in _Kinmont Willie_, the flower, with one exception to be named, of the ballads that celebrate the exploits of the 'ruggers and rivers,'

the singer lets slip, as it were by accident, that he was of the bold and lawless company that broke Carlisle Castell in time of peace. The old lay tingles and glows with the restless untameable courage, the dramatic fire, the grim humour, and the spirit of good fellowship that were characteristic, along with some less admirable qualities, of the old Borderers. The rage, tempered with a dash of Scots caution, of the Bauld Buccleuch when he heard that his unruly countryman had been taken 'against the truce of border tide' by the 'fause Sakelde and the keen Lord Scroope'; his device for a rescue that while it would set the Kinmont free, would 'neither harm English lad nor la.s.s,' or break the peace between the countries; the keen questionings and adroit replies that pa.s.sed, like thrust and parry, between the divided bands of the warden's men and Sakelde himself, who met them successively as they crossed the Debateable Land, until it came to the turn of tongue-tied d.i.c.kie o' Dryhope, who, having never a word ready, 'thrust the lance through his fause bodie,'--all these are told in the most vigorous and graphic style of rough first-hand narrative. And then the story-teller takes up the parable in his own person, and describes how he and his comrades plunged through the flooded Eden, climbed the bank, and through 'wind and weet and fire and sleet' came beneath the castle wall:--

'We crept on knees and held our breath, Till we placed the ladders against the wa'; And sae ready was Buccleuch himsel'

To mount the first before us a'.

He 's ta'en the watchman by the throat, And flung him down upon the lead-- "Had there not been peace between our lands, Upon the other side thou 'dst gaed!"'

In the 'inner prison' lay Willie o' Kinmont, like a wolf in a trap, sleeping soft and waking oft, with thoughts of the gallows, on which he was to swing in the morning, and of his wife and bairns and the 'gude fellows' in the Debateable Land he was never to see again. But in an instant, at the hail and sight of his friends, the fearless humour of the Border rider comes back to him; mounted, irons and all, on the shoulders of Red Rowan, 'the starkest man in Teviotdale,' he must first take farewell of his host, Lord Scroope, with a significant promise that he would 'pay him lodging maill when first they met on the border side.'

'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.

"O mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie, "I 've ridden a horse baith wild and wud; But a rougher beast than Red Rowan I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode."'

Then comes the wild rush for the Eden, where it flowed from bank to brim, with all Carlisle streaming behind in chase, and the bold plunge of the fugitives into the spate, leaving Lord Scroope staring after them, sore astonished, from the water's edge:

'"He 's either himsel' a devil frae h.e.l.l, Or else his mither a witch maun be; I wadna' have ridden that wan water For a' the gowd in Christentie."'

History attests the main incidents and characters of _Kinmont Willie_ as true to the facts; and tradition has broidered the story with incidents which the ballad itself does not record. The daughter of the smith, on the road between Longtown and Langholm, used to relate, half a century afterwards, how Buccleuch impatiently thrust his spear through the window to arouse her father and rid Armstrong's legs from their 'c.u.mbrous spurs,' and remembered seeing the rough riders grouped in the outer darkness and streaming with wet. The rescue was one of the latest of the episodes of Border warfare before the Union of the Crowns; and Armstrong of Kinmont himself, besides being a typical specimen of his clan,

'Able men, Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame,'

was one of the last of what we may describe as the legitimate line of Border freebooters, before the freebooter became merged in the vulgar thief, as explained quaintly and sympathetically in Scott of Satch.e.l.ls'

rhyme:

'It 's most clear a freebooter doth live in hazard's train; A freebooter 's a cavalier who ventures life for gain; But since King James the Sixth to England went, There has been no cause for grief; And he that hath transgressed since then, Is no cavalier, but a thief.'

No doubt many other like exploits of capture and rescue were enacted and recounted on the Borders in the troublous times. _Jock o' the Side_ and _Archie o' Ca'field_ read almost like variants of _Kinmont Willie_.

Their heroes, too, are 'notour lymours and thieves,' living on or near the margin of the Debateable Land; and he of the Side, in particular, lives in Sir Richard Maitland's bede-roll of the Liddesdale thieves, as only 'too well kend' by his peaceable neighbours,

'A greater thief did never hyde; He never tyris For to brek byris, Owre muir and myris, Owre gude and guide.'

Both are clapped into 'prison strang,' and liberated by a night raid and surprise. But the scene of rescue is shifted from Carlisle to Newcastle in the one case, and to Dumfries Tolbooth in the other. Hobbie n.o.ble, the English outlaw, performs for the redoubtable Jock o' the Side the service rendered by Red Rowan; and 'mettled John Hall o' laigh Teviotdale' clatters down the Tolbooth stairs with Archie Armstrong of the Calfhill on his back, to mount him on his fleet black mare. And from the safe side of Tyne and of Nith, instead of Eden, they send their jeers and challenges back at the discomfited English pursuers. The old balladists may have mixed up places, names, and incidents in their memories, as they were rather wont to do, and laid skaith or credit at the wrong doors. But while their poetic and dramatic merit may vary, the spirit of the very baldest of these ancient songs is irresistible. The Border reiver may play a foul trick in the game; the Armstrongs, for instance, requited scurvily the services of Hobbie n.o.ble, 'the man that lowsed Jock o' the Side;' but the roughest of these tykes, whether they rode behind the Captain of Bewcastle or the Laird of Buccleuch or Ferniehirst, or fought for their own hand, had their own code of honour, and the balladist zealously and jealously measures by it their acts and words. The worst of them had courage; they snap their fingers and laugh in the very teeth of death. Hobbie n.o.ble, with the can of beer at his lips and the rope about his neck, could sing with an approving conscience--

'"Now, fare thee well, sweet Mangerton, For ne'er again I will thee see; I wad hae betrayed nae man alive For a' the gowd in Christentie"'--

a farewell that reminds us of that of the Highland cateran, Macpherson, who 'so rantingly, so dantonly,' played a spring and danced to it beneath the gallows-tree at Banff, crying out the while against 'treacherie,' and broke his fiddle across his knee when none among the crowd would take it from his hand.