Indeed he shows that every word which is of strange origin has come from Scandinavia. This work of Mr. Tate’s was reviewed some ten years since, in the Builder, in a very interesting article, from which I do not hesitate to borrow.
The writer says that in general the people who visit Alnwick for the first time feel sadly disappointed. They look upon it as the ancient home of the Percies, and almost expect to find men in mediæval costume, or at any rate they do think that the town should have the appearance of some newly fought field, and there should be some few pieces of armour lying about; and often the disappointment is expressed loudly at the first sight of the small quiet gray town lying in its green basin. Wordsworth and Pennant even make no secret of their chagrin, as they found their hopes all scattered; and Halleck, the American poet, is very much exercised at the appearance of the liveried menial who let him through the ancient halls of Hotspur and his wife, for the modest sum of “ten shillings and sixpence sterling.” Yet it seems that the inhabitants are all antiquaries, either from the associations with which they are surrounded or the force of old customs, and there is hardly a tradesman that does not possess some collection of local antiquities. Mr. Tate reinvests Alnwick, as it were, with some of its ancient glories. He says, “When several of our great towns were mere villages, Alnwick was a walled town and enjoyed a corporate existence; warlike barons, wielding power little less than regal, resided within its great castle, ruled their vassals, and hatched their plots against their sovereign, or devised schemes for public liberty. Malefactors were executed there, and grisly and gory heads were exhibited over the gates; mitred abbots and cowled monks lived hard by, and dispensed a splendid hospitality within their abbeys. Old customs lingered long here; and there yet remains somewhat of the racy savour of olden times, in the tastes and associations of the inhabitants.”
The Percies were in possession of Alnwick at least 120 years before it was walled and fortified, and the wall that surrounded it does not seem to have differed very much from that of Chester. The Border warfare, or rather perhaps armed plunder, that one might almost have supposed was inherited from the Danish blood that flowed in the veins of the northern people, accounts for much of their architecture.
When Worcester says—
——“The fox
Who ne’er so tame, so cherished, and locked up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors,”
he might have been alluding to the neighbours by whom Hotspur was surrounded. It is computed that no less than 2000 men must have been employed in a complicated system of day and night watching to guard against the lawless raids of the Middle Ages. The day watches began their duty at daylight, and blew a horn on the approach of the foe, and all men were bound on pain of death to follow the fray with hue and cry. Goods captured from the Scots were restored to the owner, and the capturer was rewarded. No man was permitted to speak to a Scotsman without leave from the warder, so great a terror did the inroads of the Northerners cause among the English.
Perhaps there may have been a reverse to this picture, and the hands of the Englishmen were not quite clean. The conduct of the stout Earl of Northumberland in Chevy Chase is not such as we can well excuse. He certainly had no pretence of right on his side to take three summer days of pleasure in the Scottish woods, and kill and bring back to Alnwick the chiefest harts in Douglas’s manor. This must always have struck even the most youthful admirer of the beautiful ballad. Then they were not satisfied with moderate, or indeed excellent sport. A hundred fallow deer did not appease the “stout Earl” and his friends, for they seem to have coolly prepared for further hunting. The chronicler simply says—
“And long before high noon they had
A hundred fat bucks slain;
Then, having dined, the drovers went
To rouse them up again.”
This ballad is evidently written in the interests of the English, and whoever may have been generally most to blame in the Border quarrels, it is clear that the English on the occasion of Chevy Chase had a good deal of wrong on their side.