BORDER ELOPEMENTS
The Border, in fact, was destined to be, above all others, the place to which eloping couples sped. “When Britain first at Heaven’s command, arose from out the azure main,” she was sealed to a high destiny; and when the Border was set between the kingdoms of England and Scotland, it seems, at different times and periods, to have been provided for the express purpose of affording a refuge and a living for moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, and the generally lawless people of the frontiers. It was thus quite in keeping with old Border history that, when brute force went out and legal enormities took its place, it should be the refuge of eloping lovers, of whom a very large proportion were fortune-hunting scamps running away with silly, sentimental schoolgirls.
The flight into Scotland afforded exceptional facilities, for marrying across the Border has ever been (and still is) the simplest of affairs; the chief difficulty being still, as Lord Eldon long ago observed, to find out what does not constitute a marriage in Scotland. My lord himself spoke as doubly an expert, for he was not only the great legal authority of his time, but himself had been married across the Border. Indeed, Lord Deas was of opinion that mere consent, even in the absence of witnesses, constituted lawful wedlock, just as in those primitive days when the man only went to the woman’s home and took her to his own. Pope Innocent III., who does not appear to have been so innocent as his name would imply, in 1198 put an end to this simple plan.
Preposterous although it may seem, the difficulty in Scotland is, not to get married, but how not. The mere verbal acknowledgments exchanged, “This is my wife,” “This is my husband,” are all-sufficient, and equally binding as the most formal marriage-license ever issued by a bishop to his “dearly beloved”; and even words spoken in jest, without any wish or desire that they should be seriously considered, are binding. It is not to be supposed that novelists have remained ignorant of these quaint customs, and indeed Gretna Green in particular, and the Scottish marriage-laws in general, give point to Wilkie Collins’s “Man and Wife,” Mrs. Henry Wood’s “Elster’s Folly,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Little Minister,” among other novels.
“A FALSE ALARM ON THE ROAD: ‘TIS ONLY THE MAIL!”
[After C. B. Newhouse.
“HAND-FASTING”