The Balladists

Nowhere has the ballad inspiration and the ballad touch lingered longer than by Eden and Leader and Whitadder. Lady Grizel Baillie (who also wonned in Mellerstain) had them —

'There once was a may and she lo'ed nae men,
And she biggit her bonnie bower doun in yon glen' —

and it still lives in Lady John Scott, who has sung of The Bonnie Bounds of Cheviot as if the mantle of the Border minstrels had fallen upon her.

After all, the ballads of Yarrow and Ettrick, of the Merse and Teviotdale, owe their superior fame as much as anything to the happy chance that the Wizard of Abbotsford dwelt in the midst of them, and seizing upon them before they were forgotten, made them and the localities classical. Other districts have in this way been despoiled to some extent of their proper meed of honour. Fortune as well as merit has favoured the Border Minstrelsy in the race for survival and for precedence in the popular memory. But Galloway, a land pervaded with romance, claims at least one ballad that can rank with the best. Lord Gregory has aliases and duplicates without number. But the scene is always Loch Ryan and some castled island within sight of that arm of the sea, whither the love-lorn Annie fares in her boat 'wi' sails o' the light green silk and tows o' taffetie,' in quest of her missing lord:

'"O row the boat, my mariners,
And bring me to the land!
For yonder I see my love's castle
Close by the salt sea strand."'

Alas! cold is her welcome as she stands with her young son in her arms, and knocks and calls on her love, while 'the wind blaws through her yellow hair, and the rain draps o'er her chin.' A voice, that seems that of Lord Gregory, bids her go hence as 'a witch or a wil' warlock, or a mermaid o' the flood'; and with a woful heart she turns back to the sea and the storm. And when he wakes up from boding dreams to find his true love and his child have been turned from his door, it is too late. His cry to the waves is as vain as Annie's cry to that 'ill woman,' his mother, who has betrayed them:

'"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!
O Annie, winna ye bide?"
But aye the mair that he cried Annie,
The braider grew the tide.

"And hey, Annie, and how, Annie!
Dear Annie, speak to me!"
But aye the louder he cried Annie,
The louder roared the sea.'

The shores and basin of the Forth have also their rowth of ballads; and some of them have, like The Lass of Lochryan, the sound of the waves and the salt smell of the sea mingled with their plaintive music. Gil Morice has been 'placed' by Carronside – Ossian's 'roaring Carra' – a meet setting for the story. Sir Patrick Spens cleaves to the shores of Fife; though some, eager for the honour of the North, have claimed that it is Aberdour in Buchan that is spoken of in the ballad. By the powerful spell of this old rhyme, the king still sits and drinks the blood-red wine in roofless Dunfermline tower; the ladies still haunt the windy headland – Kinghorn or Elie Ness – with 'their kaims intil their hands' waiting in vain the return of their 'good Scots lords'; the wraith of Sir Patrick himself in misty days strides the silver strand under the Hawes Wood, reading the braid letter. Near by is Donibristle; and it keeps the memory of the 'Bonnie Earl of Moray,' slain here, hints the balladist – though history is silent on the point – for pleasing too well the Queen's eye at Holyrood.

Edinburgh, too, draws a good part of its romance from the ballad bard. Mary Hamilton, of the Queen's Maries, rode through the Netherbow Port to the gallows-foot:

'"Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she 'll hae but three;
There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beaton,
And Marie Carmichael, and me."'

The Marchioness of Douglas wandered disconsolate on Arthur's Seat and drank of St. Anton's well:

'"O waly, waly, love be bonnie
A little time while it is new,
But when it 's auld it waxes cauld
And fades awa' like morning dew.

But had I wist before I kissed
That love had been so ill to win,
I 'd locked my heart within a kist
And fastened it wi' a siller pin"';

and across the hill lies the 'Wells o' Wearie.' Nowhere else has the wail of forsaken love found such wistful expression – except in The Fause Lover:

'"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 coarser flavour. Space 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 nobles
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 superstitions 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 assures 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 analytic 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 passes 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: