Andrew Lang

“ Now if Scott had only the Sharpe version, he was the last man to “pitchfork” into it, “accidentally,” a stanza from “some other ballad,” that stanza being as Colonel Elliot says “inapplicable” to Telfer and his circumstances. Poor Jamie, a small tenant-farmer, with ten cows, and, as far as we learn, not one horse, had no hawks and hounds; no “vassal lands,” and no reason to say that at the Dodhead he “maun never be again.” He could return from his long run! Scott certainly did not compose these lines; and he could not have pitchforked them into Jamie Telfer, either by accident or design. ”

“ We ride on, as it were, and look down into the dale of the stripling Teviot, electro clarior (then held by the Scotts) ; we descend and ford “Borthwick’s roaring strand,” as Leyden sings, though the burn is usually a purling brook even where it joins Teviot, three miles above Hawick.
Next we pass across the green waves of moorlands that rise to the heights over Ettrick (held by the Scotts) , whence the foragers of the song gallop down to “The Fair Dodhead,” now a heap of grass-covered stones, but in their day a peel tower, occupied, according to the ballad, by one James Telfer. ”

“ At any period, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cheap press might print a sheet of the ballads, edited and interpolated by the very lowest of printer’s hacks; that copy would circulate, be lost, and become in turn a traditional source, though full of modernisms. Or an educated person might make a written copy, filling up gaps himself in late seventeenth or in eighteenth century ballad style, and this might pass into the memory of the children and servants of the house, and so to the herds and to the farm lasses. ”

“ But the Scots were not such poor strategists as to return by the way they had come. In a skirmish or joust at Newcastle, says Froissart, Douglas captured Percy’s lance and pennon, with his blazon of arms, and vowed that he would set it up over his castle of Dalkeith. Percy replied that he would never carry it out of England. To give Percy a chivalrous chance of recovering his pennon and making good his word, Douglas insists on waiting at Otterburn to besiege the castle there; and he is taken by surprise (as in the ballads) when a mounted man brings news of Percy’s approach. ”

“ I do not think that they need end in failure except for one reason. The poet or poetaster cannot, now, except by flat lying and laborious forgery of old papers, produce any documentary evidence to prove the authenticity of his attempt at imitation. Without documentary evidence of antiquity, no critic can approach the imitation except in a spirit of determined scepticism. He knows, certainly, that the ballad is modern, and, knowing that, he easily finds proofs of modernism even where they do not really exist. ”

“ Only a century before, ballads on the Maitlands had certainly been popular, and there is nothing impossible in the suggestion that one such ballad survived in the Lauderdale or Lethington family, and came through Babby Maitland to Andrew Muir, then to Hogg’s mother, to Hogg, and to Scott. ”

“ The Ballad of Otterburne is said to have been constructed from Herd’s version, tempered by Percy’s version, with additions from a modern imagination. We have merely to read Professor Child’s edition of Otterburne, with Hogg’s letter covering his MS. copy of Otterburne from recitation, to see that this is a wholly erroneous view of the matter. We have all the materials for forming a judgment accessible to us in print, and have no excuse for preferring our own conjectures. ”

“ Persons not much interested in, or cognisant of, “antiquarian old womanries,” as Sir Walter called them, may ask “what all the pother is about,” in this little tractate. On my side it is “about” the veracity of Sir Walter Scott. He has been suspected of helping to compose, and of issuing as a genuine antique, a ballad, Auld Maitland. He also wrote about the ballad, as a thing obtained from recitation, to two friends and fellow-antiquaries. If to Scott’s knowledge it was a modern imitation, Sir Walter deliberately lied. ”

“ By far the most blighting of the many charges made by Colonel Elliot against Sir Walter Scott are concerned with the ballad of Auld Maitland. [19a] After stating that, in his opinion, “several stanzas” of the ballad are by Sir Walter himself, Colonel Elliot sums up his own ideas thus:
“My view is that Hogg, in the first instance, tried to palm off the ballad on Scott, and failed; and then Scott palmed it off on the public, and succeeded . . . let us, as gentlemen and honest judges, admit that the responsibility of the deception rests rather on the laird (Scott) than on the herd” (Hogg.) ”

“ Godscroft, up to the mention of Melrose and the prophecy, took his tale direct from Froissart, or, if he took it from George Buchanan’s Latin History, Buchanan’s source was Froissart, but Froissart’s was evidence from Scots who were in the battle.
But who changed the prophecy to a dream of Douglas, and who versified Godscroft’s “a dead man shall winne a field, and I hope in God it shall be I”? Did Godscroft take that from the ballad current in his time and quoted by him? ”

“ That is always a task rather desperate. But the task leads me, in defence of a great memory, into a countryside, and into old times on the Border, which are so alluring that, like Socrates, I must follow where the logos guides me. ”

“ But there is no such place known! Colonel Elliot’s method is to take a place which, he says, is given as “Catlie” Hill, “between Dinlay burn and Hermitage water, on Blaeu’s map of 1654.” We may murmur that Catlie Hill is one thing and Catlock another, but Colonel Elliot points out that “lock” means “the meeting of waters,” and that Catlie Hill is near the meeting of Dinlay burn and the Hermitage water. But then why does Blaeu call it, not Catlockhill, nor Catlie hill, nor “Catlie” even, but “Gatlie,” for so it is distinctly printed on my copy of the map? ”

“ I saw a dead man win the fight,
And I think that man was I?
Scott did not make these two noble lines out of Godscroft, he found them in Hogg’s copy from recitation, only altering “I saw” into “I dreamed,” and the ungrammatic “won” into “win”; and “the fight” into “a fight.”
The whole dream stanza occurs in a part of the ballad where Hogg confesses to no alteration or interpolation, and I doubt if the Shepherd of Ettrick had read a rare old book like Godscroft. If he had not, this stanza is purely traditional; if he had, he showed great genius in his use of Godscroft. ”

“ Now Colonel Elliot has no right, I conceive, to argue that this Scots version, with the Newcastle incident, the captured sword, the challenge, the “backward flight” of Douglas, were introduced by a modern (Scott?) who was deliberately “faking” the English version. There is no reason why tradition should not have retained historical incidents in the Scottish form; it is a mere assumption that a modern borrowed and travestied these incidents from Percy’s Reliques. ”

“ Before studying his next ill deed, we must repeat that the Otterburn ballads prove that in early times one nation certainly pirated a ballad of a rival nation, and very ingeniously altered it and inverted the parts of the heroes.
We have next to examine a case in a later generation, in which a maker who was interested in one clan, pirated, perverted, and introverted the rôles of the heroes in a ballad by a maker interested in another clan. Either an Elliotophile perverted a ballad by a Scottophile, or a Scottophile perverted a ballad by an Elliotophile. ”

“ Now I would stake a large sum that Sir Walter never wrote that “stall-copy” stanza! Colonel Elliot replies that I have said the ballad-faker should avoid being too poetical. The ballad-faker should shun being too poetical, as he would shun kippered sturgeon; but Scott did not know this, nor did Hogg. We can always track them by their too decorative, too literary interpolations. ”

“ So far it seems as if the English balladist borrowed the scene from a Scots version, and perverted it into a description of a fight, between Percy, who wins, and Douglas—in place of the Scots version, the victory over Percy of Sir Hugh Montgomery.
This transference of incidents in the English and Scottish ballads is a phenomenon which we are to meet again in the ballad of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead. One “maker” or the other has, in old times, pirated and perverted the ballad of another “maker.” ”

“ Before Professor Child’s publication of the Elliot version, we had only that given by Scott in The Border Minstrelsy of 1802. Now Scott’s version is at least as absurdly incredible as the Elliot version. In Scott’s version the unhappy Jamie runs, not to Branksome and Buccleuch, to meet a refusal; but to “the Stobs’s Ha’” (on Slitterick above Hawick) and to “auld Gibby Elliot,” the laird. Elliot bids him go to Branksome and the laird of Buccleuch,
For, man, ye never paid money to me! ”

“ By Sir Walter they certainly are not! One tiny hint of Scots originality is dubious. In the English, and in all Scots versions, men “win their hay” at Lammastide. In Scotland the hay harvest is often much later. But if the English ballad be Northumbrian, little can be made out of that proof of Scottish origin. If the English version be a southern version (for the minstrel is a professional) , then Lammastide for hay-making is borrowed from the Scots.
The Scots version (Herd’s) insists on Douglas’s burial “by the bracken bush,” to which Montgomery bids Percy surrender. ”

“ Thus, in another and longer traditional version—Hogg’s—more correspondence must be expected than in Herd’s fourteen stanzas. It is, of course, open to scepticism to allege that Hogg merely made his text, invented the two crazy old reciters, and the whole story about them, and his second “pumping of their memories,” invented “Almonshire,” which he could not understand, and invented his last broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, to give the idea that The Huntiss of Chevets was mingled in the recollections of the reciters with The Battle of Otterburn. ”

“ 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; Satchells, 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. ”

“ It seems to me that if the Ballad of Otterburne, extant in 1550 in England, survived in Scottish memory till Herd’s fragment appeared in 1776, a tradition of Maitland, who was popular in the ballads of 1575, and known to Gawain Douglas seventy years earlier, may also have persisted. There is no impossibility.
Looking next at Scott’s Auld Maitland the story is that King Edward I. reigned for fifty years. He had a nephew Edward (an apocryphal person: such figures are common in ballads) , who wished to take part in the invasion of Scotland. ”

“ Where positive and published information exists, it has not always come within the range of the critic’s researches; had it done so, he would have taken the information into account, but he does not. Of the existence of Scott’s “first copy” of the ballad in manuscript our critic seems never to have heard; certainly he has not studied the MS. Had he done so he would not assign (on grounds like those of Homeric critics) this verse to Hogg and that to Scott. He would know that Scott did not interpolate a single stanza ”

“ A forged or retouched piece could not escape him for a moment: he detected the slightest jar in the ballad ring.” [18a]
But all old traditional ballads are masses of “retouches,” made through centuries, by reciters, copyists, editors, and so forth. Unluckily, Child never gave in detail his reasons for rejecting that treasure of Sir Walter’s, Auld Maitland. Child excluded the poem sans phrase. If he did this, like Falstaff “on instinct,” one can only say that antiquarian instincts are never infallible. We must apply our reason to the problem, “What is Auld Maitland?” ”

“ A modern collector would publish things—legends, ballads, or folk-tales—exactly as he found them in old broadsides, or in MS. copies, or received them from oral recitation. He would give the names and residences and circumstances of the reciters or narrators (Herd, in 1776, gave no such information) . He would fill up no gaps with his own inventions, would add no stanzas of his own, and the circulation of his work would arrive at some two or three hundred copies given away! ”