Now, if you travelled North in proper style, in a chaise and four, with post-boys and so forth, you went to the “King’s Head” at Springfield, or, after the change of road, more probably to Gretna Hall; but your exact halting-place was determined at Carlisle. The postillions there, being in league with one or other of the Gretna innkeepers, took you willy-nilly to one or the other hostelry. Were you poor and tramped it, you were glad to get the knot tied at the toll-house. Most of the business fell into a few hands. Indeed, the landlords of the various inns instead of performing the rite themselves usually sent for a so-called priest. A certificate after this sort was given to the wedded couple:—“Kingdom of Scotland, County of Dumfries, Parish of Gretna: these are to certify to all whom it may concern that (here followed the names) by me, both being present and having declared to me that they are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the law of Scotland.” This the parties and their witnesses subscribed.
I shall not attempt to trace the obscure succession of Gretna Green priests. Joseph Paisley, who died in 1811, aged eighty-four, was, it seems, the original blacksmith; but he was no son of Tubal Cain, though he had been fisher, smuggler, tobacconist. He united man with woman even as the smith welds iron with iron—thus the learned explain his title. After Paisley, and connected with him by marriage, there was Robert Elliott, and several people of the name of Laing. In some rather amusing memoirs Elliott assures us that between 1811 and 1839 he performed three thousand eight hundred and seventy-two marriages; also that his best year was 1825, when he did one hundred and ninety-eight, and his worst 1839, when he did but forty-two. At the toll-bar there was a different line, whose most picturesque figure was Gordon, the old soldier. Gordon officiated in full regimentals, a large cocked hat on his head and a sword by his side. Here, too, Beattie reigned for some years before 1843. His occupation went to his head, for latterly he had a craze for marrying, so that he would creep up behind any chance couple and begin to mumble the magic words that made them one. The law has ever terrors for the unlettered, and the rustic bachelor fled at Beattie’s approach, as if he had been the pest. The “priests” sometimes used a mangled form of the Church of England service: which irreverence was probably intended as a delicate compliment to the nationality of most of their clients. The fees were uncertain. When the trembling parties stood hand in hand in inn or toll-bar, whilst the hoofs of pursuing post-horses thundered ever nearer, ever louder, or it might be that irate father or guardian battered at the door, it was no time to bargain. The “priest” saw his chance; and now and again he pouched as much as a hundred pounds.
Each house had its record of famous marriages. There was the story of how Lord Westmoreland sought the hand of the heiress of Child, the banker, and was repulsed with “Your blood, my Lord, is good, but money is better.” My Lord and the young lady were speedily galloping towards the border, while Mr. Child “breathed hot and instant on their trace.” He had caught them too, but his leader was shot down or his carriage disabled by some trick (the legends vary), and he was too late after all. He made the best of it, of course, and in due time Lady Sophia Fane, daughter of the marriage, inherited grandpa’s fortune and his bank at Temple Bar. Odder still was the marriage, in 1826, of Edward Gibbon Wakefield to Ellen Turner. It was brought about by an extraordinary fraud, and a week after the far from happy couple were run to earth at Calais by the bride’s relatives. They “quoted William and Mary upon me till I was tired of their Majesties’ names,” was Wakefield’s mournful excuse for submitting to a separation. He was afterwards tried for abduction, found guilty, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment; while a special Act of Parliament (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 66) declared the marriage null and void. Wakefield ended strangely as a political economist. Is not his “theory of colonisation” writ large in all the text books? A pair of Lord High Chancellors must conclude our list. In November 1772, John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, was married at Blackshiels, in East Lothian, to Bessie Surtees, the bridegroom being but twenty-one. Though the Rev. Mr. Buchanan, minister of an Episcopal congregation at Haddington, officiated, it was a runaway match and an irregular marriage. Lord Erskine, about October 1818, was wedded at the “King’s Head,” Springfield, to Miss Mary Buck (said to have been his housekeeper). He was about seventy, and, one fears, in his dotage. A number of extravagant legends still linger as to the ceremony. He was dressed in woman’s clothes, and played strange pranks. He and his intended spouse had with them in the coach a brace of merry-begots (as our fathers called them), over whom he threw his cloak during the ceremony in order to make them his heirs. It is still a vulgar belief in the North that if the parents of children born out of wedlock are married, the offspring, to be legitimised, must be held under their mother’s girdle through the nuptial rites. Now, by the law of Scotland, such a marriage produces the effect noted; but the presence or absence of the children is void of legal consequence. As far as is known, Erskine had one son called Hampden, born December 5, 1821, and no other by Mary Buck. It is worth noting that Robert Burns, on his road to Carlisle in 1787, fell in by the way “with a girl and her married sister”; and “the girl, after some overtures of gallantry on my side, sees me a little cut with the bottle, and offers to take me in for a Gretna Green affair.” Burns was already wed, Scots fashion, to Jean Armour. And the thing did not come off, so that bigamy is not to be reckoned among the poet’s sins.
They were rather sordid affairs in the end, those Gretna Green marriages. So, at least, the Reverend James Roddick, minister of the parish, writing of the place in 1834 in the New Statistical Account, would have us believe. There were three or four hundred marriages annually: “the parties are chiefly from the sister kingdom and from the lowest rank of the population.” A number came from Carlisle at fair-time, got married, spent a few days together, and then divorced themselves. Competition had brought down the priest’s fee to half-a-crown, and every tippling-house had its own official. Nay, the very roadman on the highway that joined the kingdoms pressed his services on all and sundry! And then the railway came to Gretna, and you had the spectacle of “priests” touting on the platform. Alas for those shores of old Romance! In 1856, Lord Brougham’s Act (19 & 20 Vict. cap. 96), made well-nigh as summary an end of Gretna as Lord Hardwicke’s had of the Fleet unions. It provided that at least one of the parties to an irregular Scots marriage must be domiciled in Scotland, or have resided there during the twenty-one days immediately preceding the espousals; else were they altogether void. What an enemy your modern law-giver is to the picturesque! And what an entertaining place this world must once have been!
The Border Law
The Border Country—Its Lays and Legends—The Wardens and Other Officers—Johnie Armstrong—Merrie Carlisle—Blackmail—The Border Chieftain and His Home—A Raid—“Hot-trod”—“To-names”—A Bill of Complaint—The Day of Truce—Business and Pleasure—“Double and Salffye”—Border Faith—Deadly Feud—The Story of Kinmont Willie—The Debateable Land—The Union of the Crowns and the End of Border Law.
Leges marchiarum, to wit, the Laws of the Marches; so statesmen and lawyers named the codes which said, though oft in vain, how English and Scots Borderers should comport themselves, and how each kingdom should guard against the other’s deadly unceasing enmity. I propose to outline these laws, and the officials by whom and courts wherein they were enforced.
But first a word as to country and people. From Berwick to the Solway—the extreme points of the dividing line between North and South Britain—is but seventy miles in a crow’s flight. But trace its windings, and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half of this space the division is arbitrary. It happed where the opposing forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here, was pushed back a little farther north there; and commissioners and treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the kingdoms met. If it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots’ character, and prevented the growth of commerce and tilth and comfort in Scotland proper, what must have been its effect on the Scots Borderer, ever in the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt the struggle far more than England, yet the English were worse troubled than the Scots Borders: being the richer, they were the more liable to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other Englishmen; they were kept in hand by a strong central authority; they had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now, the Scots clansmen developed unchecked; so it is mainly from them that we take our ideas of Border life.