Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy

by Andrew Lang

We get the same information as to the perils of the Captain’s path from the places marked on Blaeu’s map of 1600–54. There are Hollhouse and Thornythaite, Armstrong towers, and the active John Armstrong of Langholm can come at a summons.

It seems to be a great error to suppose that the route chosen for the Captain by Colonel Elliot could lead him into anything better than a death-trap. I must insist that it would have been madness for a Captain of Bewcastle to ride far through Armstrong country, deep into Buccleuch’s country, and return on another line through Scott, and near Elliot, and through Armstrong country—and all for no purpose but to steal ten cows in remote Selkirkshire!

Here I may save the reader trouble, by omitting a great mass of detail as to the deplorable condition of Bewcastle itself in 1580–96. Sir Simon, the Captain, declares himself old and weary. The hold is “utterly decayed,” the riders are only thirty-seven men fairly equipped. Soldiers are asked for, sometimes fifty are sent from the garrison of Berwick, then they are withdrawn. Bewcastle is forayed almost daily; “March Bills” minutely describe the cattle, horses, and personal property taken from the Captain and the people by the Armstrongs and Elliots.

Once, in 1582, Thomas Musgrave slew Arthur Graham, a near neighbour, and took one hundred and sixty kye, but this only caused such a feud that the Musgraves could not stir safely from home. From 1586 onwards, Thomas Musgrave, officially or unofficially, was acting Captain of Bewcastle. He had no strength to justify him in raiding to remote Ettrick, through enemies who penned him in at Bewcastle.

I look on Musgrave as the Captain whose existence is known to the ballad-maker, and I find the origin of the tale of his defeat and capture in the ballad, in a distorted memory of his actual capture.

On 3rd July 1596, Thomas (having got Scrope’s permission, without which he dared not cross the Border on affairs of war) attempted a retaliatory raid on Armstrongs within seven miles of the Border, the Armstrongs of Hollace, or Hollhouse. “He found only empty houses;” he “sought a prey” in vain; he let his men straggle, and returning homeward, with some fifteen companions, he was ambushed by the Armstrongs near Bewcastle, was refused shelter by a Graham, was taken prisoner, and was sent to Buccleuch at Branksome. On 15th July he came home under a bond of £200 for ransom. [106a] As every one did, in his circumstances, the Captain made out his Bill for Damages. It was indented on 28th April 1597. We learn that John (Armstrong) of Langholm, Will of Kinmont (not Liddesdale men), and others, who took him, are in the Captain’s debt for “24 horses and mares, himself prisoner, and ransomed to £200, and 16 other prisoners, and slaughter.” The charges are admitted by the accused; the Captain is to get £400. [106b]

In my opinion this capture of the Captain of Bewcastle and others, poetically handled, is, with other incidents, the basis of the ballad. Colonel Elliot says that the incident “is no proof that a Captain of Bewcastle was not also taken or killed at some other place or at some other time.” But what Captain, and when? Sir Simon, in 1586, had been Captain, he says, for thirty years. Thenceforth till near the Union of the Crowns, Thomas was Captain, or acting Captain.

So considerable an event as the taking of a Captain of Bewcastle, who, in the ballad, was shot through the head and elsewhere, could not escape record in dispatches, and the periodical “March Bills,” or statements of wrongs to be redressed. Colonel Elliot’s reply takes the shape of the argument that the ballad may speak of some other Captain, at some other time; and that, in one way or another, the sufferings and losses of that Captain may have escaped mention in the English dispatches from the Border. These dispatches are full of minute details, down to the theft of a single mare. I am content to let historians familiar with the dispatches decide as to whether the Captain’s mad ride into Ettrick, with his dangerous wounds, loss of property, and loss of seventeen men killed and wounded (as in the ballad), could escape mention.

The capture of Thomas Musgrave, I think, and two other incidents,—confused in course of tradition, and handled by the poet with poetic freedom,—are the materials of Jamie Telfer. One of the other incidents is of April 1597. [107a] Here Buccleuch in person, on the Sabbath, burned twenty houses in Tynedale, and “slew fourteen men who had been in Scotland and brought away their booty.” Here we have Buccleuch “on the hot trod,” pursuing English reivers, recovering the spoils probably, and slaying as many of the raiders as the Captain lost, in the ballad. Again, not a son of Elliot of Preakinhaugh (as I had erroneously said), but a nephew named Martin, was slain in a Tynedale raid into Liddesdale. [108a] Soldiers aided the English raiders. A confused memory of this death of Elliot’s nephew in 1597 may be the source of the story of the death of his son, Simmy, in the ballad.

Our traditional ballads all arise out of some germs of history, all handle the facts romantically, and all appear to have been composed, in their extant shapes, at a considerable time after the events. I may cite Mary Hamilton; The Laird of Logie is another case in point; there are many others.