Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy Part 7

The Percy and the Douglas met, That either of other was fain, They swapped together while that they sweat, With swords of fine Collayne. (Cologne steel.)

Douglas bids Percy yield, but Percy slays Douglas (as in Walsingham's and other contemporary chronicles, stanzas li.-lvi.). The Scottish losses are then enumerated (only eighteen Scots were left alive!), and stanza lix. runs -

This fray began at Otterburn Between the night and the day.

There the Douglas lost his life, And the Percy was led away.

Herd ends -

This deed was done at Otterburn, About the breaking of the day, Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush, And Percy led captive away.

Manifestly, either the maker of Herd's version knew the English, and altered at pleasure, or the Englishman knew a Scots version, and altered at pleasure. The perversion is of ancient standing, undeniably. But when Scott's original text exhibits the same phenomena of perversion, in a part of the ballad missing in Herd's brief lay, Colonel Elliot supposes that NOW the exchanges are by a modern ballad- forger, shall we say Sir Walter? 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. This is obviously done to hide his body and keep his death secret from both parties, AS IN FROISSART HE BIDS HIS FRIENDS DO. The verse of the English (l.) on the fight between Douglas and Percy, is borrowed by, or is borrowed from, the Scottish stanza (ix.) in Herd, where Sir Hugh Montgomery fights Percy.

Then Percy and Montgomery met, And weel a wot they warna fain; They swaped swords, and they twa swat, And ay the blood ran down between.

The Persses and the Mongomry met,

as quoted, is already familiar in The Complaynte of Scotland (about 1549), and this line is not in the English ballad. 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."

SCOTT'S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED IT

As early as December 1802-January 1803, Scott was "so anxious to have a complete Scottish Otterburn that I will omit the ballad entirely in the first volume (of 1803), hoping to recover it in time for insertion in the third." {67a}

The letter is undated, but is determined by Scott's expressed interest "about the Tus.h.i.+elaw lines, which, from what you mention, must be worth recovering." In a letter (Abbotsford MSS.) from Hogg to Scott (marked in copy, "January 7, 1803") Hogg encloses "the Tus.h.i.+elaw lines," which were popular in Ettrick, but were verses of the eighteenth century.

They were orally repeated, but literary in origin.

Scott, who wanted "a complete Scottish Otterburn" in winter 1802, did not sit down and make one. He waited till he got a text from Hogg, in 1805, and published an edited version in 1806.

SCOTT'S PUBLISHED stanza i. is Herd's stanza i., with slight verbal changes taken from the Hogg MS. text of 1805. (?) Hogg's MS. and Scott, in stanza ii., give Herd's lines on the Lindsays and Gordons, adding the Grahams, and, in place of Herd's

The Earl of Fife, And Sir Hugh Montgomery upon a grey,

they end thus -

But the Jardines wald not wi' him ride, And they rue it to this day.

This is from Hogg's copy; it is a natural Border variant. No Earl of Fife is named, but a reproach to a Border clan is conveyed.

For Herd's iii. (they take Northumberland, and burn "the North s.h.i.+re,"

and the Otter dale), Hogg's reciters gave -

And he has burned the dales o' Tyne, And part o' ALMONs.h.i.+RE, And three good towers in Roxburgh fells, He left them all on fire.

Hogg, in his letter accompanying his copy, says that "Almons.h.i.+re" may stand for the "Bamborows.h.i.+re" of the English vi., but that he leaves in "Almons.h.i.+re," as both reciters insist on it. Scott printed "Bambroughs.h.i.+re," as in the English version (vi.).

Now here is proof that Hogg had a copy, from reciters--a copy which he could not understand. "Almons.h.i.+re" is "Alnes.h.i.+re," or "Alnwicks.h.i.+re,"

where is the Percy's Alnwick Castle. In Froissart the Scots burn and waste the region of Alnes.h.i.+re, all round Alnwick, but the Earl of Northumberland holds out in the castle, unattacked, and sends his sons, Henry and Ralph Percy, to Newcastle to gather forces, and take the retreating Scots between two fires, Newcastle and Alnwick. 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. No tryst is made by Percy and Douglas at Otterburn in Froissart; Douglas merely tarried there by the courtesy of Scotland.

In Hogg's version we have a reason why Douglas should tarry at Otterburn; in the English ballad we have none very definite. No captured pennon of Percy's is mentioned, no encounter of the heroes "at the barriers" of Newcastle. Percy, from the castle wall, merely threatens Douglas vaguely; Douglas says, "Where will you meet me?" and Percy appoints Otterburn as we said. He makes the absurd remark that, by way of supplies (for 40,000 men), Douglas will find abundance of pheasants and red deer. {69a}

We see that the English balladist is an unwarlike literary hack. The author of the Ettrick version knew better the nature of war, as we shall see, and his Douglas objects to Otterburn as a place dest.i.tute of supplies; nothing is there but wild beasts and birds. If the original poem is the sensible poem, the Scott version is the original which the English hath perverted.

In Hogg, Douglas jousts with Percy at Newcastle, and gives him a fall.

Then come two verses (viii.-ix.). The second is especially modern and mawkish -

But O how pale his lady look'd, Frae off the castle wa', When down before the Scottish spear She saw brave Percy fa'!

How pale and wan his lady look'd, Frae off the castle hieght, When she beheld her Percy yield To doughty Douglas' might.

Colonel Elliot asks, "Can any one believe that these stanzas are really ancient and have come down orally through many generations?" {70a}

Certainly not! But Colonel Elliot does not allow for the fact, insisted on by Professor Child, that traditional ballads, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were often printed on broad- sheets as edited by the cheapest broadside-vendors' hacks; that the hacks interpolated and messed their originals; and that, after the broadside was worn out, lost, or burned, oral memory kept it alive in tradition. For examples of this process we have only to look at William's Ghost in Herd's copy of 1776. This is a traditional ballad; it is included in Scott's Clerk Saunders, but, as Hogg told him, is a quite distinct song. In Herd's copy it ends thus -

"Oh, stay, my only true love, stay,"

The constant Marg'ret cry'd; Wan grew her cheeks, she closed her eyes, Stretched her soft limbs, and dy'd.

Let THIS get into tradition, and be taken down from recitation, and the ballad will be denounced as modern. But it is essentially ancient.

These two modern stanzas, in Hogg's copy, are rather too bad for Hogg's making; and I do not know whether they are his (he practically says they are not, we shall see), or whether they are remembered by reciters from a stall-copy of the period of Lady Wardlaw's Hardyknute.

After that, Hogg's copy becomes more natural. Douglas says to the discomfited Percy (x.) -