From The Border Minstrelsy. The account in Satchells has either been based on the ballad, or the ballad is based on Satchells. After a meeting, on the Border of Salkeld of Corby, and Scott of Haining, Kinmont Willie was seized by the English as he rode home from the tryst. Being “wanted,” he was lodged in Carlisle Castle, and this was a breach of the day’s truce. Buccleugh, as warder, tried to obtain Willie’s release by peaceful means. These failing, Buccleugh did what the ballad reports, April 13, 1596. Harden and Goudilands were with Buccleugh, being his neighbours near Branxholme. Dicky of Dryhope, with others, Armstrongs, was also true to the call of duty. A few verses in the ballad are clearly by aut Gualterus aut diabolus, and none the worse for that. Salkeld, of course, was not really slain; and, if the men were “left for dead,” probably they were not long in that debatable condition. In the rising of 1745 Prince Charlie’s men forded Eden as boldly as Buccleuch, the Prince saving a drowning Highlander with his own hand.
Jamie Telfer.—p. [52]
Scott, for once, was wrong in his localities. The Dodhead of the poem is not that near Singlee, in Ettrick, but a place of the same name, near Skelfhill, on the southern side of Teviot, within three miles of Stobs, where Telfer vainly seeks help from Elliot. The other Dodhead is at a great distance from Stobs, up Borthwick Water, over the tableland, past Clearburn Loch and Buccleugh, and so down Ettrick, past Tushielaw. The Catslockhill is not that on Yarrow, near Ladhope, but another near Branxholme, whence it is no far cry to Branxholme Hall. Borthwick Water, Goudilands (below Branxholme), Commonside (a little farther up Teviot), Allanhaugh, and the other places of the Scotts, were all easily “warned.” There are traces of a modern hand in this excellent ballad. The topography is here corrected from MS. notes in a first edition of the Minstrelsy, in the library of Mr. Charles Grieve at Branxholme’ Park, a scion of “auld Jock Grieve” of the Coultart Cleugh. Names linger long in pleasant Teviotdale.
The Douglas Tragedy.—p. [59]
The ballad has Norse analogues, but is here localized on the Douglas Burn, a tributary of Yarrow on the left bank. The St. Mary’s Kirk would be that now ruinous, on St. Mary’s Loch, the chapel burned by the Lady of Branxholme when she
“gathered a band
Of the best that would ride at her command,”
in the Lay of the Last Minstrel. The ancient keep of Blackhouse on Douglas Burn may have been the home of the heroine, if we are to localize.
The Bonny Hind.—p. [62]
Herd got this tragic ballad from a milkmaid, in 1771. Mr. Child quotes a verse parallel, preserved in Faroe, and in the Icelandic. There is a similar incident in the cycle of Kullervo, in the Finnish Kalevala. Scott says that similar tragedies are common in Scotch popular poetry; such cases are “Lizzie Wan,” and “The King’s Dochter, Lady Jean.” A sorrow nearly as bitter occurs in the French “Milk White Dove”: a brother kills his sister, metamorphosed into a white deer. “The Bridge of Death” (French) seems to hint at something of the same kind; or rather the Editor finds that he has arbitrarily read “The Bonny Hind” into “Le Pont des Morts,” in Puymaigre’s Chants Populaires du Pays Messin, p. 60. (Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, p. 63)