THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE
Scott’s version of the Ballad of Otterburne, as given first in The Minstrelsy of 1806, comes under Colonel Elliot’s most severe censure. He concludes in favour of “the view that it consists partly of stanzas from Percy’s Reliques, which have undergone emendations calculated to disguise the source from which they came, partly of stanzas of modern fabrication, and partly of a very few stanzas and lines from Herd’s version” (1776). 32
As a matter of fact we know, though Colonel Elliot does not, the whole process of construction of the Otterburne in The Minstrelsy of 1806. Professor Child published all the texts with a letter. 33 It is a pity that Colonel Elliot overlooks facts in favour of conjecture. Concerning historical facts he is not more thorough in research. The story, in Percy’s Reliques, of the slaying of Douglas by Percy, “is, so far as I know, supported neither by history nor by tradition.” 34 If unfamiliar with the English chroniclers (in Latin) of the end of the fourteenth century, Colonel Elliot could find them cited by Professor Child. Knyghton, Walsingham, and the continuator of Higden (Malverne), all assert that Percy killed Douglas with his own hand. 35 The English ballad of Otterburne (in MS. of about 1550) gives this version of Douglas’s death. It is erroneous. Froissart, a contemporary, had accounts of the battle from combatants, both English and Scottish. Douglas, fighting in the front of the van, on a moonlight night, was slain by three lance-wounds received in the mellay. The English knew not whom they had slain.
The interesting point is that, while the Scottish ballads give either the English version of Percy’s death (in Minstrelsy, 1806) or another account mentioned by Hume of Godscroft (circ. 1610), that he was slain by one of his own men, the Scottish versions are all deeply affected in an important point by Froissart’s contemporary narrative, which has not affected the English versions. 36 The point is that the death of Douglas was by his order concealed from both parties.
When both the English version in Percy’s Reliques (from a MS. of about 1550), and Scott’s version of 1806, mention a “challenge to battle” between Percy and Douglas, Colonel Elliot calls this incident “probably purely fanciful and imaginary,” and suspects Scott’s version of being made up and altered from the English text. But the challenge which resulted in the battle of Otterburn is not fanciful and imaginary!
It is mentioned by Froissart. Douglas, he says, took Percy’s pennon in an encounter under Newcastle. Percy vowed that Douglas would never carry the pennon out of Northumberland; Douglas challenged him to come and take it from his tent door that night; but Percy was constrained not to accept the challenge. The Scots then marched homewards, but Douglas insisted on besieging Otterburn Castle; here he passed some days on purpose to give Percy a chance of a fight; Percy’s force surprised the Scots; they were warned, as in the ballads, suddenly, by a man who galloped up; the fight began; and so on.
Now Herd’s version says nothing of Douglas at Newcastle; the whole scene is at Otterburn. On the other hand, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s MS. text did bring Douglas to Newcastle. Of this Colonel Elliot says nothing. The English version says nothing of Percy’s loss of his pennon to Douglas (nor does Sharpe’s), and gives the challenge and tryst. Scott’s version says nothing of Percy’s pennon, but Douglas takes Percy’s sword and vows to carry it home. Percy’s challenge, in the English version, is accompanied by a gross absurdity. He bids Douglas wait at Otterburn, where, pour tout potage to an army absurdly stated at 40,000 men, Percy suggests venison and pheasants! In the Scottish version Percy offers tryst at Otterburn. Douglas answers that, though Otterburn has no supplies – nothing but deer and wild birds – he will there tarry for Percy. This is chivalrous, and, in Scott’s version, Douglas understands war. In the English version Percy does not. (To these facts I return, giving more details.) Colonel Elliot supposes some one (Scott, I daresay) to have taken Percy’s, – the English version, – altered it to taste, concealed the alterations, as in this part of the challenge, by inverting the speeches and writing new stanzas of the fight at Otterburn, used a very little of Herd (which is true), and inserted modern stanzas.
Now, first, as regards pilfering from the English version, that version, and Herd’s undisputed version, have undeniably a common source. Neither, as it stands, is “original”; of an original contemporary Otterburn ballad we have no trace. By 1550, when such ballads were certainly current both in England and Scotland, they were late, confused by tradition, and, of what we possess, say Herd’s, and the English MS. of 1550, all were interblended.
The Scots ballad version, known to Hume of Godscroft (1610), may have been taken from the English, and altered, as Child thought, or the English, as Motherwell maintained, may have been borrowed from the Scots, and altered. One or the other process undeniably occurred; the second poet, who made the changes, introduced the events most favourable to his country, and left out the less favourable. By Scott’s time, or Herd’s, the versions were much degraded through decay of memory, bad penny broadsides (lost), and uneducated reciters. Herd’s version has forgotten the historic affair of the capture of Percy’s pennon (and of the whole movement on Newcastle, preserved in Sharpe’s and Scott’s); Scott’s remembers the encounter at Newcastle, forgets the pennon, and substitutes the capture by Douglas of Percy’s sword. The Englishman deliberately omits the capture of the pennon. The Scots version (here altered by Sir Walter) makes Percy wound Douglas at Otterburn —
Till backward he did flee.
Now Colonel Elliot has no right, I conceive, to argue that this Scots version, with the Newcastle incident, the captured sword, the challenge, the “backward flight” of Douglas, were introduced by a modern (Scott?) who was deliberately “faking” the English version. There is no reason why tradition should not have retained historical incidents in the Scottish form; it is a mere assumption that a modern borrowed and travestied these incidents from Percy’s Reliques. We possess Hogg’s unedited original of Scott’s version of 1806 (an original MS. never hinted at by Colonel Elliot), and it retains clear traces of being contaminated with a version of The Huntiss of Chevet, popular in 1459, as we read in The Complaynte of Scotland of that date. There is also an old English version of The Hunting of the Cheviot (1550 or later, Bodleian Library). The unedited text of Scott’s Otterburne then contained traces of The Huntiss of Chevet; the two were mixed in popular memory. In short, Scott’s text, manipulated slightly by him in a way which I shall describe, was a thing surviving in popular memory: how confusedly will be explained.
The differences between the English version of 1550 and the Scots (collected for Scott by Hogg), are of old standing. I am not sure that there was not, before 1550, a Scottish ballad, which the English ballad-monger of that date annexed and altered. The English version of 1550 is not “popular”; it is the work of a humble literary man.
The English is a very long ballad, in seventy quatrains; it greatly exaggerates the number of the Scots engaged (40,000), and it is the work of a professional author who uses the stereotyped prosaic stopgaps of the cheap hack —
I tell you withouten dread,
is his favourite phrase, and he cites historical authority —
The cronykle wyll not layne (lie).
Scottish ballads do not appeal to chroniclers! A patriotic and imbecile effort is made by the Englishman to represent Percy as captured, indeed, but released without ransom —
There was then a Scottysh prisoner tayne,
Sir Hew Mongomery was his name;
For sooth as I yow saye,
He borrowed the Persey home agayne.
This is obscure, and in any case false. Percy was taken, and towards his ransom Richard II. paid £3000. 37
It may be well to quote the openings of each ballad, English and Scots.
ENGLISH (1550)
I
It fell about the Lammas tyde,
When husbands win their hay,
The doughty Douglas bound him to ride,
In England to take a prey.
II
The Earl of Fife, withouten strife,
He bound him over Solway;
The great would ever together ride
That race they may rue for aye.
III
Over Hoppertop hill they came in,
And so down by Rodcliff crag,
Upon Green Linton they lighted down,
Stirring many a stag.
IV
And boldly brent Northumberland,
And harried many a town,
They did our Englishmen great wrong,
To battle that were not boune.
V
Then spake a berne upon the bent.
SCOTTISH, HERD (1776)
I
It fell and about the Lammas time,
When hushandmen do win their hay;
Earl Douglas is to the English woods,
And a’ with him to fetch a prey.
II
He has chosen the Lindsays light,
With them the gallant Gordons gay;
And the Earl of Fyfe, withouten strife,
And Hugh Montgomery upon a grey.
(The last line is obviously a reciter’s stopgap.)
III
They have taken Northumberland,
And sae hae they the north shire,
And the Otterdale they hae burned hale,
And set it a’ into fire.
IV
Out then spak a bonny boy;
Manifestly these copies, so far, are not independent. But now Herd’s copy begins to vary much from the English.
In both ballads a boy or “berne” speaks up. In the English he recommends to the Scots an attack on Newcastle; in the Scots he announces the approach of an English host. Douglas promises to reward the boy if his tale be true, to hang him if it be false. The scene is Otterburn. The boy stabs Douglas, in a stanza which is a common ballad formula of frequent occurrence —
The boy’s taen out his little pen knife,
That hanget low down by his gare,
And he gaed Earl Douglas a deadly wound,
Alack! a deep wound and a sare.
Douglas then says to Sir Hugh Montgomery —
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And bury me at yon bracken bush,
That stands upon yon lilly lea. (Herd, 4–8.)
Hume of Godscroft (about 1610), author of the History of the Douglases, was fond of quoting ballads. He gives a form of the first verse in Otterburn which is common to Herd and the English copy. He says that, according to some, Douglas was treacherously slain by one of his own men whom he had offended. “But this narration is not so probable,” and the fact is fairly meaningless in Herd’s fragment (the boy has no motive for stabbing Douglas, for if his report is true, he will be rewarded). The deed is probably based on the tradition which Godscroft thought “less probable,” – the treacherous murder of the Earl.
In the English ballad, Douglas marches on Newcastle, where Percy, without fighting, makes a tryst to meet and combat him at Otterburn, on his way home from Newcastle to Scotland. Thither Douglas goes, and is warned by a Scottish knight of Percy’s approach: as in Herd, he is sceptical, but is convinced by facts. (This warning of Douglas by a scout who gallops up is narrated by Froissart, from witnesses engaged in the battle.) After various incidents, Percy and Douglas encounter each other, and Douglas is slain. After a desperate fight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, a prisoner of the English,
Borrowed the Percy home again.
This is absurd. The Scots fought on, took Percy, and won the day. Walsingham, the contemporary English chronicler (in Latin), says that Percy slew Douglas, so do Knyghton and the continuator of Higden.
Meanwhile we observe that the English ballad says nothing of Douglas’s chivalrous fortitude, and soldier-like desire to have his death concealed. Here every Scottish version follows Froissart. In Herd’s fragment, Montgomery now attacks Percy, and bids him “yield thee to yon bracken bush,” where the dead Douglas’s body lies concealed. Percy does yield – to Sir Hugh Montgomery. The fragment has but fourteen stanzas.
In 1802, Scott, correcting by another MS., published Herd’s copy. In 1806 he gave another version, for “fortunately two copies have since been obtained from the recitation of old persons residing at the head of Ettrick Forest.” 38
Colonel Elliot devotes a long digression to the trivial value of recitations, so styled, 39 and gives his suggestions about the copy being made up from the Reliques. When Scott’s copy of 1806 agrees with the English version, Colonel Elliot surmises that a modern person, familiar with the English, has written the coincident verses in with differences. Percy and Douglas, for example, change speeches, each saying what, in the English, the other said in substance, not in the actual words. When Scott’s version touches on an incident known in history, but not given in the English version, the encounter between Douglas and Percy at Newcastle (Scott, vii., viii.), Colonel Elliot suspects the interpolator (and well he may, for the verses are mawkish and modern, not earlier than the eighteenth century imitations or remaniements which occur in many ballads traditional in essence).
So Colonel Elliot says, “We are not told, either in The Minstrelsy or in any of Scott’s works or writings, who the reciters were, and who the transcribers were.” 40 We very seldom are told by Scott who the reciters were and who the transcribers, but our critic’s information is here mournfully limited – by his own lack of study. Colonel Elliot goes on to criticise a very curious feature in Scott’s version of 1806, and finds certain lines “beautiful” but “without a note of antiquity,” that he can detect, while the sentiment “is hardly of the kind met with in old ballads.”
To understand the position we must remember that, in the English, Percy and Douglas fight each other thus (1.) —
The Percy and the Douglas met,
That either of other was fain,
They swapped together while that they sweat,
With swords of fine Collayne. (Cologne steel.)
Douglas bids Percy yield, but Percy slays Douglas (as in Walsingham’s and other contemporary chronicles, stanzas li.–lvi.). The Scottish losses are then enumerated (only eighteen Scots were left alive!), and stanza lix. runs —
This fray began at Otterburn
Between the night and the day.
There the Douglas lost his life,
And the Percy was led away.
Herd ends —
This deed was done at Otterburn,
About the breaking of the day,
Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush,
And Percy led captive away.
Manifestly, either the maker of Herd’s version knew the English, and altered at pleasure, or the Englishman knew a Scots version, and altered at pleasure. The perversion is of ancient standing, undeniably. But when Scott’s original text exhibits the same phenomena of perversion, in a part of the ballad missing in Herd’s brief lay, Colonel Elliot supposes that now the exchanges are by a modern ballad-forger, shall we say Sir Walter? By Sir Walter they certainly are not! One tiny hint of Scots originality is dubious. In the English, and in all Scots versions, men “win their hay” at Lammastide. In Scotland the hay harvest is often much later. But if the English ballad be Northumbrian, little can be made out of that proof of Scottish origin. If the English version be a southern version (for the minstrel is a professional), then Lammastide for hay-making is borrowed from the Scots.
The Scots version (Herd’s) insists on Douglas’s burial “by the bracken bush,” to which Montgomery bids Percy surrender. This is obviously done to hide his body and keep his death secret from both parties, as in Froissart he bids his friends do. The verse of the English (l.) on the fight between Douglas and Percy, is borrowed by, or is borrowed from, the Scottish stanza (ix.) in Herd, where Sir Hugh Montgomery fights Percy.
Then Percy and Montgomery met,
And weel a wot they warna fain;
They swaped swords, and they twa swat,
And ay the blood ran down between.
The Persses and the Mongomry met,
as quoted, is already familiar in The Complaynte of Scotland (about 1549), and this line is not in the English ballad. So far it seems as if the English balladist borrowed the scene from a Scots version, and perverted it into a description of a fight, between Percy, who wins, and Douglas – in place of the Scots version, the victory over Percy of Sir Hugh Montgomery.
This transference of incidents in the English and Scottish ballads is a phenomenon which we are to meet again in the ballad of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead. One “maker” or the other has, in old times, pirated and perverted the ballad of another “maker.”
SCOTT’S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED IT
As early as December 1802–January 1803, Scott was “so anxious to have a complete Scottish Otterburn that I will omit the ballad entirely in the first volume (of 1803), hoping to recover it in time for insertion in the third.” 41
The letter is undated, but is determined by Scott’s expressed interest “about the Tushielaw lines, which, from what you mention, must be worth recovering.” In a letter (Abbotsford MSS.) from Hogg to Scott (marked in copy, “January 7, 1803”) Hogg encloses “the Tushielaw lines,” which were popular in Ettrick, but were verses of the eighteenth century. They were orally repeated, but literary in origin.
Scott, who wanted “a complete Scottish Otterburn” in winter 1802, did not sit down and make one. He waited till he got a text from Hogg, in 1805, and published an edited version in 1806.
Scott’s published stanza i. is Herd’s stanza i., with slight verbal changes taken from the Hogg MS. text of 1805. (?) Hogg’s MS. and Scott, in stanza ii., give Herd’s lines on the Lindsays and Gordons, adding the Grahams, and, in place of Herd’s
The Earl of Fife,
And Sir Hugh Montgomery upon a grey,
they end thus —
But the Jardines wald not wi’ him ride,
And they rue it to this day.
This is from Hogg’s copy; it is a natural Border variant. No Earl of Fife is named, but a reproach to a Border clan is conveyed.
For Herd’s iii. (they take Northumberland, and burn “the North shire,” and the Otter dale), Hogg’s reciters gave —
And he has burned the dales o’ Tyne,
And part o’ Almonshire,
And three good towers in Roxburgh fells,
He left them all on fire.
Hogg, in his letter accompanying his copy, says that “Almonshire” may stand for the “Bamborowshire” of the English vi., but that he leaves in “Almonshire,” as both reciters insist on it. Scott printed “Bambroughshire,” as in the English version (vi.).
Now here is proof that Hogg had a copy, from reciters – a copy which he could not understand. “Almonshire” is “Alneshire,” or “Alnwickshire,” where is the Percy’s Alnwick Castle. In Froissart the Scots burn and waste the region of Alneshire, all round Alnwick, but the Earl of Northumberland holds out in the castle, unattacked, and sends his sons, Henry and Ralph Percy, to Newcastle to gather forces, and take the retreating Scots between two fires, Newcastle and Alnwick. But the Scots were not such poor strategists as to return by the way they had come. In a skirmish or joust at Newcastle, says Froissart, Douglas captured Percy’s lance and pennon, with his blazon of arms, and vowed that he would set it up over his castle of Dalkeith. Percy replied that he would never carry it out of England. To give Percy a chivalrous chance of recovering his pennon and making good his word, Douglas insists on waiting at Otterburn to besiege the castle there; and he is taken by surprise (as in the ballads) when a mounted man brings news of Percy’s approach. No tryst is made by Percy and Douglas at Otterburn in Froissart; Douglas merely tarried there by the courtesy of Scotland.
In Hogg’s version we have a reason why Douglas should tarry at Otterburn; in the English ballad we have none very definite. No captured pennon of Percy’s is mentioned, no encounter of the heroes “at the barriers” of Newcastle. Percy, from the castle wall, merely threatens Douglas vaguely; Douglas says, “Where will you meet me?” and Percy appoints Otterburn as we said. He makes the absurd remark that, by way of supplies (for 40,000 men), Douglas will find abundance of pheasants and red deer. 42
We see that the English balladist is an unwarlike literary hack. The author of the Ettrick version knew better the nature of war, as we shall see, and his Douglas objects to Otterburn as a place destitute of supplies; nothing is there but wild beasts and birds. If the original poem is the sensible poem, the Scott version is the original which the English hath perverted.
In Hogg, Douglas jousts with Percy at Newcastle, and gives him a fall. Then come two verses (viii.–ix.). The second is especially modern and mawkish —
But O how pale his lady look’d,
Frae off the castle wa’,
When down before the Scottish spear
She saw brave Percy fa’!
How pale and wan his lady look’d,
Frae off the castle hieght,
When she beheld her Percy yield
To doughty Douglas’ might.
Colonel Elliot asks, “Can any one believe that these stanzas are really ancient and have come down orally through many generations?” 43
Certainly not! But Colonel Elliot does not allow for the fact, insisted on by Professor Child, that traditional ballads, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were often printed on broad-sheets as edited by the cheapest broadside-vendors’ hacks; that the hacks interpolated and messed their originals; and that, after the broadside was worn out, lost, or burned, oral memory kept it alive in tradition. For examples of this process we have only to look at William’s Ghost in Herd’s copy of 1776. This is a traditional ballad; it is included in Scott’s Clerk Saunders, but, as Hogg told him, is a quite distinct song. In Herd’s copy it ends thus —
“Oh, stay, my only true love, stay,”
The constant Marg’ret cry’d;
Wan grew her cheeks, she closed her eyes,
Stretched her soft limbs, and dy’d.
Let this get into tradition, and be taken down from recitation, and the ballad will be denounced as modern. But it is essentially ancient.
These two modern stanzas, in Hogg’s copy, are rather too bad for Hogg’s making; and I do not know whether they are his (he practically says they are not, we shall see), or whether they are remembered by reciters from a stall-copy of the period of Lady Wardlaw’s Hardyknute.
After that, Hogg’s copy becomes more natural. Douglas says to the discomfited Percy (x.) —
Had we twa been upon the green,
And never an eye to see,
I should hae had ye flesh and fell,
But your sword shall gae wi’ me.
That rings true! Moreover, had either Hogg or Scott tampered here (Scott excised), either would have made Douglas carry off – not Percy’s sword, but the historic captured pennon of Percy. Scott really could not have resisted the temptation had he been interpolating à son dévis.
But your pennon shall gae wi’ me!
It was easy to write in that!
Percy had challenged Douglas thus —
But gae ye up to Otterburn,
And there wait days three (xi.),
as in the English (xiii.). In the English, Percy, we saw, promises game enough there; in Hogg, Douglas demurs (xii., xiii., xiv.). There are no supplies at Otterburn, he says —
To feed my men and me.
The deer rins wild frae dale to dale,
The birds fly wild frae tree to tree,
And there is neither bread nor kale,
To fend my men and me.
These seem to me sound true ballad lines, like —
My hounds may a’ rin masterless
My hawks may fly frae tree to tree,
in Child’s variant of Young Beichan. The speakers, we see, are “inverted.” Percy, in the English, promises Douglas’s men pheasants – absurd provision for the army of 40,000 men of the English ballad. In the Ettrick text Douglas says that there are no supplies, merely feræ naturæ, but he will wait at Otterburn to give Percy his chance.
Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions them, and the “prettier verses,” with a note of exclamation (!). 44 But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd’s old copy, and nobody says that Scott or Hogg or any modern faker made the inversions in Herd’s text. The differences and inversions in the English and in Herd are very ancient; by 1550 “the Percy and the Montgomery met,” in the line quoted in The Complaynte of Scotland. At about the same period (1550) it was the Percy and the Douglas who met, in the English version. Manifestly there pre-existed, by 1550, an old ballad, which either a Scot then perverted from the English text, or an Englishman from the Scots. Thus the inversions in the Ettrick and English version need not be due (they are not due) to a modern “faker.”
In the Hogg MS. (xxiii.), Percy wounds Douglas “till backwards he did flee.” Hogg was too good a Scot to interpolate the flight of Douglas; and Scott was so good a Scot that – what do you suppose he did? – he excised “till backwards he did flee” from Hogg’s text, and inserted “that he fell to the ground” from the English text!
In the Hogg MS. (xviii., xix.), in Scott xvii., xviii., Douglas, at Otterburn, is roused from sleep by his page with news of Percy’s approach. Douglas says that the page lies (compare Herd, where Douglas doubts the page) —
For Percy hadna’ men yestreen
To dight my men and me.
There is nothing in this to surprise any one who knows the innumerable variants in traditional ballads. But now comes in a very curious variation (Hogg MS. xx., Scott, xix.). Douglas says (Hogg MS. xx.) —
But I have seen a dreary dream
Beyond the Isle o’ Skye,
I saw a dead man won the fight,
And I think that man was I.
Here is something not in Herd, and as remote from the manner of the English poet, with his as Heine is remote from, say, – Milman. The verse is magical, it has haunted my memory since I was ten years old. Godscroft, who does not approve of the story of Douglas’s murder by one of his men, writes that the dying leader said: —
The Chronicle will not lie,
“First do yee keep my death both from our own folke and from the enemy” (Froissart, “Let neither friend nor foe know of my estate”); “then that ye suffer not my standard to be lost or cast downe” (Froissart, “Up with my standard and call Douglas!”;) “and last, that ye avenge my death” (also in Froissart). “Bury me at Melrose Abbey with my father. If I could hope for these things I should die with the greater contentment; for long since I heard a prophesie that a dead man should winne a field, and I hope in God it shall be I.” 45
I saw a dead man won the fight,
And I think that man was I!
Godscroft, up to the mention of Melrose and the prophecy, took his tale direct from Froissart, or, if he took it from George Buchanan’s Latin History, Buchanan’s source was Froissart, but Froissart’s was evidence from Scots who were in the battle.
But who changed the prophecy to a dream of Douglas, and who versified Godscroft’s “a dead man shall winne a field, and I hope in God it shall be I”? Did Godscroft take that from the ballad current in his time and quoted by him? Or did a remanieur of Godscroft turn his words into
I saw a dead man win the fight,
And I think that man was I?
Scott did not make these two noble lines out of Godscroft, he found them in Hogg’s copy from recitation, only altering “I saw” into “I dreamed,” and the ungrammatic “won” into “win”; and “the fight” into “a fight.”
The whole dream stanza occurs in a part of the ballad where Hogg confesses to no alteration or interpolation, and I doubt if the Shepherd of Ettrick had read a rare old book like Godscroft. If he had not, this stanza is purely traditional; if he had, he showed great genius in his use of Godscroft.
In Hogg’s Ettrick copy, Douglas, after telling his dream, rushes into battle, is wounded by Percy, and “backward flees.” Scott (xx.), following a historical version (Wyntoun’s Cronykil), makes
Douglas forget the helmit good
That should have kept his brain.
Being wounded, in Hogg’s version, and “backward fleeing,” Douglas sends his page to bring Montgomery (Hogg), and from stanza xxiv. to xxxiv., in Hogg, all is made up by himself, he says, – from facts given “in plain prose” by his reciters, with here and there a line or two given in verse. Scott omitted some verses here, amended others slightly, by help of Herd’s version, left out a broken last stanza (xl.) and put in Herd’s concluding lines (stanza lxviii. in the English text).
This deed was done at the Otterburn. (Herd.)
The fraye began at Otterburn. (English.)
Now what was the broken Ettrick stanza that Scott omitted in his published Otterburne (1806)? It referred to Sir Hugh Montgomery, who, in Herd, captured Percy after a fight; in the English version is a prisoner apparently exchanged for Percy. In the Ettrick MS. the omitted verse is
He left not an Englishman on the field
That he hadna either killed or taen
Ere his heart’s blood was cauld.
Scott ended with Herd’s last stanza; in the English version the last but two.
Now the death, at Otterburn, of Sir Hugh, is recorded in an English ballad styled The Hunting of the Cheviot. By 1540–50 it was among the popular songs north of Tweed. The Complaynte of Scotland (1549) mentions among “The Songis of Natural Music of the Antiquitie” (volkslieder), The Hunttis of Chevet. Our copy of the English version is in the Bodleian (MS. Ashmole, 48). It ends: “Expliceth, quod Rychard Sheale,” a minstrel who recited ballads and tales at Tamworth (circ. 1559). The text was part of his stock-in-trade.
The Cheviot ballad, in a Scots form popular in 1549, is later in many ways than the English Battle of Otterburne. It begins with a brag of Percy, a vow that, despite Douglas, he will hunt in the Cheviot hills. While Percy is hunting with a strong force, Douglas arrives with another. Douglas offers to decide the quarrel by single combat with Percy, who accepts. Richard Witherington refuses to look on quietly, and a general engagement ensues.
At last the Duglas and the Perse met,
Lyk to Captayns of myght and of mayne,
They swapte together tylle they both swat
With swordes that wear of fyn myllan.
We are back in stanza I. of the English Otterburne, in stanza xxxv. (substituting Hugh Montgomery for Douglas) of the Hogg MS. In The Hunting, Douglas is slain by an English arrow (xxxvi.–xxxviii.).
Sir Hugh Montgomery now charges and slays Percy (who, of course, was merely taken prisoner). An archer of Northumberland sends an arrow through good Sir Hugh Montgomery (xliii.–xlvi.). Stanza lxvi. has