The Sources of Some Ballads in the "Border Minstrelsy"
A. Lang
Folklore, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jun. 24, 1902), pp. 191-197
[Footnotes (long) moved to the end.]
THE SOURCES OF SOME BALLADS IN THE "BORDER MINSTRELSY."
WHEN writing the life of Lockhart I received from a member of the family of Sir William Laidlaw, the amanuensis and friend of Sir Walter Scott, some unpublished letters of Scott, Hogg, and Lockhart. These throw a little light on a difficult subject, Scott's method of editing the Border Minstrelsy. In the summer of 1800 Scott made the acquaintance of Laidlaw, at Blackhouse on the Douglas burn, a tributary of the Yarrow. Sir Walter was then collecting the ballads, and received much aid from Laidlaw, who was helped by James Hogg, then a shepherd. I found a letter of Scott's to Laidlaw, dated July 20, 1801. He was trying to recover the ballad of -The Outlaw Murray. This ballad is much of a mystery as to any historical grains of fact which it may contain.[1] Hogg had an uncle who remembered a few verses, including the Outlaw's boast as to his landed property:
" I took it frae the Soudan Turk,
When you and your men durst na come see."
" Who the devil," asks Hogg, "was this Soudan Turk " In an Abbotsford copy in Laidlaw's hand, is:
" I took it frae the Souden Turk
Where nae sic cuckold king might be."
The orthodox reading is :
" Frae Soudron I this forest won,
When the king nor's knights were not to see."
We can only conclude that the ballad was fairly old in 1801, when a reciter had already confused the English, "the Southron," with the "Soldan " or "Soudan Turk." Hogg at this time was anxious to make songs of his own on the lines of the ballad fragments, but doubted if this would be fair to Scott, himself busy with the subject.
Hogg is connected with the most puzzling of all the ballads, Auld Maitland, which I cannot find in Professor Child's great collection. On January 21, 1803, Scott writes to Laidlaw, in the unpublished correspondence: " Whenever the third volume is finished you shall have a copy, and you will see how very much it owes to our Selkirkshire collections. AuldJMaitland, laced and embroidered with antique notes and illustrations, makes a most superb figure." In his notes to the Minstrelsy Scott says that Hogg's mother got the ballad " from a blind man who died at the advanced age of ninety ..... She " (his mother) " sings or rather chants it with great animation." [2] Scott thought that a modern ballad-maker could not have introduced archaic words like "springalds," "sowies," and " portcullize," in which he rejoiced like his own Antiquary over "chafron" in Elspeth's ballad of the Red Harlaw.
Moreover, the three heroic sons of Auld Maitland, who lived till the wars of Scotland against Edward I. (1296), are mentioned in a poem addressed, about 1575, to Sir Richard Maitland, father of the famous Secretary of Queen Mary, Maitland of Lethington. Again "Auld Maitland upon auld beard gray" is mentioned by the poet Bishop of Dunkeld, Gawain Douglas (circ. 1410). Moreover another poem to Lethington's father (circ. 1560-1570) actually declares that the three sons of Auld Maitland "Are sung in monie far countries Albeit in rural rhyme."
These Maitland poems, in 1801, were unpublished. Thus there undeniably was a romantic Maitland legend, sung in rural verse, as early as I56o-i58o. Yet the ballad chanted by Hogg's mother (and, according to Hogg, known to "most of the old people hereabouts ") has a most dubious aspect. Hogg, in 1801, suggested that reciters had modernised it as the language altered. He specially marked such interpolations of his own as were meant to fill up lacune. Scott backed Hogg's statements, which include the fact that the ballad was known to many old people in the Forest. Yet even in 1801, before the ballad was published, Hogg writes to Scott: "I am surprized to hear that this song is suspected by some to be a modern forgery." Professor Child, in his early ballad collection (186i), says, "it is with reluctance that I make for it the' room which it requires." Later, he omitted the piece. In 1859, Aytoun gave his reasons for scepticism. "The ballad refers to remote events little likely to have been selected as a theme by a minstrel, even of the sixteenth century." But that, in the sixteenth century, Auld Maitland, "and his nobile sonnis three" were really topics of ballad, Scott proves by quotations from the Maitland MSS. Aytoun next sees no proof that Scott or Leyden " had heard the ballad recited by old Mrs. Hogg. I find no such statement. On the contrary it is expressly said " (by Scott writing to Ellis) "that the ballad was written down from her recitation 'by a country farmer.' " But in this letter to Ellis, Scott says that, not Mrs. Hogg, but " an old shepherd," was the reciter. Leyden was with him, he says, when he received this "my first copy." (Lockhart, ii., pp. 99, 109.) The phrase, "my first copy," implies that Scott obtained more than one copy, and the copy which he published is not that recited by the "old shepherd," but that chanted by old Mrs. Hogg. It is certain that Scott knew her, and had heard her ballad chants.
Everyone knows Hogg's account of his first meeting with Scott. "My mother chaunted the ballad of Old Maitlan' to him, with which he was highly delighted, and asked it it had ever been in print. And her answer was, 'O na, na, sir, it never was printed in the world, for my brothers and me learned it and many mae frae auld Andrew Moor, and he learned it frae auld Baby Metlin' (Maitland), 'who was housekeeper to the first laird' (in the Anderson family) 'of Tushilaw."' This sounds veracious enough it was written in 1834.
As to Scott's letter to Ellis; probably the "country farmer" who wrote the ballad from "the old shepherd's " recitation was Laidlaw. Aytoun himself published MS. notes of Laidlaw's, in which he says that he first heard of the ballad from one of the girls on his own farm, who communicated several stanzas of which he kept the copy. The girl said that Hogg's grandfather could repeat the whole, but this was obviously an error. It was from his uncle, Will of Phawhope, and his mother that Hogg got the ballad when Laidlaw asked for it. They, again, learned it from their father, Hogg's grandfather, and from another old man, Andrew Moor, who had been in the service of the famous Boston, minister of Ettrick. The blind reciter mentioned by Scott was probably this Andrew Moor.
This is the external evidence for the authenticity of Auld Maitland. Laidlaw's good faith is undoubted. Scott, he says, had not made previous inquiries as to Auld Maitland. Laidlaw first heard of it from a girl on his farm who knew some verses. Laidlaw is clearly the "country farmer" who took the song down from the lips of "the old shepherd," Hogg's uncle, the man who
made the confusion about the "Soudan Turk" in The Outlaw Murray. This was Scott's " first copy." He preferred to publish the piece as recited by old Mrs. Hogg, sister of " the old shepherd." Laidlaw reckoned this " a good pedigree for the old ballad,
though it is possible that Hogg may have dashed in a few stanzas 'to trap the Shirra' and evince his own powers."
Aytoun adds that there was a rival collector, Jamieson, in the field, and that the advent of a collector stimulates forgery. But where are we tb look for the forger? A literary hoax was notoriously dear to Hogg. But, if there was no real ballad, how could Hogg hit on the theme of Auld Maitland? No inquiry by Scott for the piece gave him the hint, and Scott heard of the ballad from Laidlaw. Clever as he was, Hogg could not, in 1801, have read the Maitland MSS. in the Library of the University of Edinburgh and reconstructed a ballad on the hints supplied in MSS. of the sixteenth century. Even if he had read Gawain Douglas's Palace of Honour, nothing is said there of Maitland's three sons. How, then, and whence, could Hogg draw his materials? Is it probable that he made the ballad, and taught it to Laidlaw's servant girl, to his old uncle, and his old mother, "and the same with intent to deceive"? If a forger there was, Hogg alone can have been the man; and the difficulties of the hypothesis are immense. If there was no real ballad, he must have been acquainted, in 1801, with MSS. in an old hand which he could not read, and must have laid a complicated plot, involving his uncle, his mother, and a rustic maid. Even if the old people were likely to lend themselves to it, we can hardly believe that the memory of old age could have acquired a long new poem. Thus, on the whole, it seems probable that there really existed, in the memories of old people, a ballad of Auld Maitland.
What Hogg did to it, if anything, we can only conjecture. If he did much, it is not easy to see how his old mother and uncle learned his additions off by rote. But Scott overlooked the obvious circumstance that a forger could have found the old words which impressed him in an accessible source.
The ballad has :-
" They laid their sowies to the wall,
Wi' mony a heavy peal,
But he threw ower to them agen
Buith pitch and tar barrel,
W4ith springalds, stanes, and gads of Airn,
Among them fast he threw.
Now Scott himself cited, as an illustration, Blind Harry's
" Uppitch and tar on feil sowis they lest ....
Stones on springalds they did cast out so fast
And goads of iron made many grone agast."
Blind Harry was probably well known to Hogg; it was a favourite of the peasantry. If he wanted local colour he would go to Blind Harry. Thus there is a balance of probabilities. The shepherd loved a hoax, but I fail to see how he would obtain a base for his operations; for in I 8o it is all but physically impossible that he would have even heard of the Maitland MSS. of 1560-1580. The ballad of Otterbourne has caused many searchings of heart, and Scott has even been charged with writing in,
" Take thou the vanguard of the three
And bury me by the bracken bush
That grows upon yon lilye lea."
If so, he foisted them into his first edition, where the Douglas is killed by his own page. This variant of the tale Scott later
rejected. His final edition, in place of " Earl Douglas to the Montgomery said
Take thou the vanguard of the three,"
has
" My wound is deep, I fain would sleep,
Take thou the vanguard of the three."
In this latter verse the first line may be Scott's own, but the rest is certainly traditional. In 1802 (no date of month), I find Scott writing to Laidlaw, " I am so anxious to have a compleat Scottish Otterburn that I will omit the ballad entirely in the first volume, hoping to recover it in time for insertion in the third." His sources were Herd's version (1774), and "two copies obtained from the recitation of old persons residing at the head of Ettrick Forest," possibly Hogg's mother and uncle.
Hogg, in his letter of July 20oth, 1801, professed his readiness to supply the story of " the unnatural murder of the son and heir of Sir Robert Scott, of Thirlestane, the downfall of the house of Tushielaw, and of the horrid spirit that still haunts the Alders." Probably the tale alluded to is that of the death of Thirlestane's third son in a duel with his brother-in-law, Scott of Tushielaw; the ballad on the subject is The Dowie Dens of Yarrow. The inscribed stone near the spot, however, is probably a thousand years older than the event which Scott thought that it commemorated. Scott's version of the ballad is certainly "contaminated." In writing to Laidlaw he admires, in Tamlane, "the highly poetical verses descriptive of fairy land," but attributes them to "some poetical schoolmaster or clergyman." However, he retained the stanzas, which, he justly remarks, "seem quite modern." Among these notes, that on Auld Maitland is the most significant. As we have MS. evidence, which Hogg could not have known, that the ballad was current in Queen Mary's time, I must disbelieve that Hogg was the forger, and must regret that Professor Child decided to omit this enigmatic poem.
A. LANG.
1. This ballad professes to relate the origin of the Hereditary Sheriffdom of Ettrick Forest, in the family of Murray of Philiphaugh. The King of Scotland hearing that " there was an outlaw in Ettrick Forest, counted him nought, nor all his courtrie," sends a messenger desiring him to " come and be my man, and hold of me that forest free," or else " I will cast his castle down and make a widow of his gay ladye." The Outlaw Murray refuses (" 'The lands are mine' the outlaw said, ' I ken nae King in Christentie' "), backed by his wife, who fears treachery in Edinburgh. The King sets forth with 5,000 troops, halts on the borders of the Forest, and trysts Murray to a parley. Finally, Murray is " made Sheriff of Ettrick Forest, surely while upward grows the tree; and if he was na traitour to the King, forfaulted he should never be."-ED.
2. This ballad, notwithstanding its present appearance, has a claim to very high antiquity. It has been preserved by tradition, and is, perhaps, the most authentic instance of a long and very old poem exclusively thus preserved. It is only known to a few old people upon the sequestered banks of the Ettrick, and is published as written down from the recitation of the mother of Mr. James Hogg,* * This old woman is still alive, and at present resides at Craig of Douglas, in Selkirkshire] who sings, or rather chaunts it, with great animation. She learned the ballad from a blind man, who died at the advanced age of ninety, and is said to have been possessed of much traditionary knowledge. Although the language of this poem is much modernised, yet many words which the reciters have retained without understanding them still preserve traces of its antiquity " (&c.). Introduction to Auld Maitland, Border Minstrelsy, 5th ed., iii., 15.
The ballad relates how "young Edward," apparently an unhistorical personage, sister's son to King Edward, demands 1,500 picked men to ride against the Scots. His foray is checked at Thirlestane, Maitland's castle, and after besieging it in vain for fifteen days, he takes ship to rejoin the King in France. Here Auld Maitland's three sons, who are "learning at school at Billop-Grace," by a daring rush carry off the English standard to their uncle's castle; and, hearing that the feat is ascribed to the French, avow themselves the raiders and demand to be matched with three English champions, whom they slay and hang on the drawbridge. Young Edward then attacks the eldest Maitland, who grapples with him, throws him, and, refusing the King's entreaty for his life, stabs him and hangs him beside the other three. The last two stanzas seem to be put into the mouth of the King. They contain a wellknown detail of folklore :
" Now takefrae me thatfeather-bed !
Make me a bed o' strae !
I wish I had na lived this day
To mak my heart sae wae.
" If I were ance at London tower,
Where I was wont to be,
I never mair suld gang frae hame
Till borne on a bier-tree." ED.]