Border Ballads E-Book

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Border Ballads are rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland, a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird, and only then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh. Recording a violent, clannish world of fierce hatreds and passionate loyalties, the ballads tell vivid tales of raids, feuds and betrayals, romances and acts of revenge. They celebrate ungovernable heroes and powerful women, often in laments for the murderous results of breaking tribal codes, and they evoke the presence of an older border, between the natural and the supernatural worlds. The Border Ballads were long regarded as primitive poems. This selection restores their identity within the oral tradition, setting them in the context of their time and place with the aid of maps and a glossary.

Leseprobe

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

BorderBallads

A Selection

Edited with an introduction by

JAMES REED

Mopsa: Pray now buy some. I love a ballet in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true.

TheWinter’sTale

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Maps: i) Border Marches and Surnames

ii) The Borders

Suggestions for Further Study

BALLADS OF THE WEST MARCHES

Kinmont Willie

Jocko o’ the Side

Hobie Noble

Dick o’ the Cow

Johnie Armstrong

The Fray of Suport

Fair Helen of Kirconnel

The Lochmaben Harper

BALLADS OF THE MIDDLE MARCHES (1)

Jamie Telfer in the Fair Dodhead

The Outlaw Murray

The Death of Parcy Reed

The Raid of the Reidswire

The Battle of Otterburn

BALLADS OF THE MIDDLE MARCHES (2)

The Douglas Tragedy

The Dowie Dens of Yarrow

Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow

The Lament of the Border Widow

Lamkin

The Cruel Sister

Edward

Lord Randal

The Twa Corbies

The Flower of Northumberland

The Broom of Cowdenknows

True Tammas

BALLADS OF THE SUPERNATURAL

The Young Tamlane

The Broomfield Hill

Thomas the Rhymer

The Wee Wee Man

The Cruel Mother

Clerk Saunders

Proud Lady Margaret

The Wife of Usher’s Well

Young Benjie

Glossary

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

BORDER BALLADS belong to a period, a place and its people. Their distinction lies in the interaction of all three of these factors; we diminish them if we see them merely as songs, or merely as poems, without taking into account the environment in which they flourished.

Sir Philip Sidney’s famous passage in praise of ‘Chevy Chase’, ‘I never heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooved more then with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blinde Crouder’, is the response of a courtly soldier, but such immediacy was soon lost to more conventionally educated minds, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century we find ballads condescendingly regarded as sub-literary verse.

Where Sidney writes of listening to a minstrel, Joseph Addison in two Spectator essays (1711) on a later broadside version of the same narrative, writes: ‘I must only caution the Reader not to let the simplicity of the Stile, which one may well pardon in so old a Poet, prejudice him against the Greatness of the Thought.’ This view of ballads as primitive poems led Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and his contemporaries to offer ‘improved versions’, in which the taste of English metropolitan literary scholarship was imposed on regional, often very local, language and style. The research of such musicians as Cecil Sharp (1859–1924), later fieldwork, and the folk revival of the mid-twentieth century have restored the identity of the ballads as songs, and excellent recordings are now available. But awareness of literary style and the pleasure of musical rendering are not enough; the full appreciation of Border Ballads remains incomplete without some knowledge of the terrain to which they are native, and of the way of life of the Borderers who recorded their past in this form.

Sir Walter Scott was the first collector and editor of Border Ballads to reflect seriously, both as historian and man of letters, on the relevance in these songs of place names, family and to-names, history and tradition within a specific region characterized by its own vocabulary, laws and social structure. His MinstrelsyoftheScottishBorder (1802, 1803) is valuable mainly because of his intense and far-reaching appreciation of Borders and Borderers in the context of local history and custom. In the Introduction to his edition of SirTristrem (1804) he wrote, ‘Tradition depends upon locality. The scene of a celebrated battle, the ruins of an ancient tower, the “historic stone” over the grave of a hero, the hill and valley inhabited of old by a particular tribe, remind posterity of events which are sometimes recorded in their very names’.

In the following year his LayoftheLastMinstrel was severely dismissed in a review by Francis Jeffrey whose words accurately reflect contemporary literary taste which, under Scott’s influence, was soon to change:

We really cannot so far sympathise with the local partialities of the author as to feel any glow of patriotism or ancient virtue in hearing of the Todrig or Johnston clans or of Elliots, Armstrongs and Tinlinns; still less can we relish the introduction of Black John of Athelstane, Whitslade the Hawk, Arthur-fire-the-Braes, Red Roland Forster, or any other of those worthies who

Sought the beeves that made their broth

In Scotland and in England both

into a poem which has any pretensions to seriousness or dignity. The ancient metrical romance might have admitted those homely personalities, but the present age will not endure them; and Mr Scott must either sacrifice his Border prejudices, or offend all his readers in other parts of the empire.

These words were written when Scott was little more than a provincial lawyer with literary inclinations, years before he became the most celebrated writer of his time. They would not have appeared exceptional in 1805.

As they have survived in the major printed collections of Scott and Child, Border Ballads bear the marks of severe damage inflicted by time, prejudice, oral transmission and literary distortion. Hence it is unwise to make precise generalizations about structure, and the commentator does well to bear in mind Kipling’s lines: ‘There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays / And every single one of them is right!’ I concern myself, therefore, in what follows, not with reductive rules, but with general comment on some of the ways in which these ballads achieve their effects.

The key to an appreciation of action, especially in the Riding Ballads, is an awareness of their consistent economy of language and incident. We are rarely called aside by the singer and asked to admire the view, though exceptions do occur, as in the opening stanzas of ‘The Outlaw Murray’ (p.82), quite untypical in its mild, leisurely description. The outstanding stories of raid and reif open with lines in which the balladist conveys information with a vitality which pitches the audience directly into the action, place and season. The first stanzas of ‘Jamie Telfer’ (p.75) move from the narrator’s brief placing of the event in time to the chief aggressor, the need for a guide and an introductory dialogue. By stanza four the raiders from Bewcastle are assaulting Telfer’s pele. Similarly, ‘Kinmont Willie’ (p.29) opens with a rousing appeal calling distinctive attention to three major characters, ‘fause Sakelde’, ‘keen Lord Scroope’, and ‘bauld Kinmont’; we know now exactly whose side we are on, and the action begins instantly. ‘Hobie Noble’ (p.42) begins with an interesting variant, making the first two stanzas a prelude to the tale of violence and treachery by setting a tone of bitter lament over the betrayal of ‘brave Noble’.

First-person narrative is rare, though it does play a parenthetical part in ‘The Raid of the Reidswire’ (p. 101); ‘Carmichael was our Warden then’; ‘Of other clans I cannot tell / Because our warning was not wide’; and a more telling, partisan local one in ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ (p. 107): ‘The Perssy was a man of strength, / I tell yow in this stounde’.

But the main thrust in the Riding Ballads comes from dialogue, often dramatically presented in terms of question (or challenge) and response, punctuated by brief narrative movements, both illuminating the regional mores, or the Border Law, and driving on the story.

Maps

Border Marches and Surnames

Such elements control pace and tone; most of the normal devices of poetic composition are absent. Ballad narrative is a simple plotless progression; meaning tends to be conveyed through literal, often repetitive statement largely stripped of metaphor and rhetoric. This is what makes the following stanzas from ‘Kinmont Willie’ stand out as a neat literary fabrication, not a singer’s invention:

‘O is my basnet a widow’s curch?

Or my lance a wand of the willow tree?

Or my arm a ladye’s lilye hand

That an English lord should lightly me!’

The action here is frozen while the speaker elaborates cumulatively in figurative terms lines which contrast unfavourably with the compressed power of the ballad’s opening.

Romance in the Borders usually spells tragedy, and in the ballads this often finds expression in a blend of violence and lament; family feud cannot separate lovers in life, though it may in death. ‘The Douglas Tragedy’ (p. 121) is an adventurous, murderous love story, employing in its dialogue and in the energy of its unsentimental narrative many characteristics of the Riding Ballad; but its directness is exceptional. Most ballads of Border tragedy achieve their effects through the very obliqueness of their story-telling; the chill of lonely, vengeful death is nowhere more deeply felt than in ‘The Twa Corbies’ (p. 140), a story of passion and treachery conveyed through the dialogue of a pair of carrion crows. Even the fact that their talk is overheard by the narrator introduces an eavesdropping frisson in the opening lines, intensified by the ironic ‘making a mane’ where their lament takes the form of a discussion of how they will dine on the dead man who has been betrayed by his mistress. Their repast is unlikely to be disturbed by any mourning presence, since the lady is off with her new love: ‘His lady’s ta’en another mate / So we may mak our dinner sweet.’ Such macabre elegance may be due to a literary hand rather than a minstrel tongue, but it is telling in the typical economy of its cool understatement.

‘Lord Randal’ (p. 139) too has been murdered by his true love, but she is never directly accused; what lies behind his poisoning is more vividly imagined than stated. The question and answer form is used also in ‘Edward’ (p. 137), where the audience gradually discovers what the mother already knows, in a manner which slowly releases a rage of guilt and hatred in her son. Similarly, ‘The Lament of the Border Widow’ (p. 128) is a monologue in which the actual tragedy is suggested in a spare, unelaborate language. The Border Widow expresses in a mere seven quatrains simultaneous emotions of true love, treachery, bereavement and the lonely responsibilities of widowhood. The widow’s burden is a commonplace in the official records of appeals for redress under Border Law. We find it again in ‘The Battle of Otterburn’:

Then on the morne they made them beerys

Of byrch and haysell gray;

Many a wydowe, wyth wepyng teyres,

Ther makes they fette away.

In all of this there is a bond of common knowledge, common experience, common language. What we have lost over the past four centuries is not the spirit of song or the flash of minstrel invention but the sense of a Border community to whose members these ballads were both fact and romance, history and entertainment. Family names that crossed the singer’s lips were their names, his places their places, his loyalties theirs. Singer and song remain; print, education, social mobility and peace have done for the rest.

Border Ballads form part of our record of the world of those who lived, long before the present political boundaries were established, in an area whose activities in ballad narrative take place largely between Berwick and Alnwick in the east, and Carlisle and Dumfries in the west. This constitutes the Borders, its people knowing themselves as Borderers first, Scots or English second, and owing their first allegiance to kin and laird rather than to Edinburgh or London. It is for this reason that family names are so vital to an understanding of the literature and history of the region, often linked in a defining manner to places, since so many of the surnames were the same. Jock o’ the Side, for example, belonged to the notorious Armstrong family, distinguished from its other members by his place of residence, the tower of Syid near Mangerton in Liddesdale. Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead takes his title from a Teviotdale pele. This conjunction was often abridged and characters named simply by their dwelling or, collectively, by the river on whose banks they lived. When Jamie Telfer, raided by the English, appeals for help to his protector, Buccleuch of Branksome, the laird replies:

The Borders

‘Gar warn the water, braid and wide,

Gar warn it sune and hastilie!

They that winna ride for Telfer’s kye

Let them never look in the face o’ me!

‘Warn Wat o’ Harden and his sons,

Wi’ them will Borthwick Water ride;

Warn Gaudilands and Allanhaugh,

And Gilmanscleugh, and Commonside.’

Such ringing lines exemplify the vital and complex structure of family relationships and the personal rather than political nature of Border foray. Few Border Ballads commemorate hostilities at a national military level; ‘The Battle of Otterburn’ is an outstanding exception, though even here personalities predominate. Most celebrate raid, feud and vengeance in terms of kinship and family allegiances which take precedence over nationality, so that in ‘The Death of Parcy Reed’ (p.94) we find an English family, the Halls of Redesdale, in league with a Scottish family, the Crosiers of Teviotdale, in the destruction of their English neighbour, Parcy Reed. Cross-border alliances were of course officially discouraged, as were more intimate associations such as football matches and marriages, but remoteness from the capitals, at least before the Union of the Crowns in 1603, meant that national demands were difficult to implement.

One measure of enforcement was the system of administration: local Wardens were appointed by their respective crowns. On either side of the accepted border-line the territory was divided into three Marches, West, Middle and East, each controlled by a Warden and his assistants backed by a fluctuating and inadequate supply of troops. Remote, underpaid and frequently forgotten, Wardens had an unenviable task in so scattered and explosive a community. Their understandable frustration ignites from time to time in communications to their distant masters in Edinburgh and London. On 12 July 1587 Sir Cuthbert Collingwood, Deputy Warden of the Middle March, writes to Lord Walsingham:

I was boulde of late to wryte unto your honour, the ruenous state of this beggerly border, evne so urged by the lamentable spectacle therof, from time to time rather agravayted then reformed, for that nowe of late, in extremitie, exseding all other times of pretended peace to my knoledge, the Scottes in hostiall and warlyke maner, have burned ransomed and utterly impovereshed a greate parte of the Myddle Marche … I am so prycked with the daylye vewe of the abewsed, that I cannot let slippe with sylence one my parte that which behoveth all good subjects to reveale. Wherein I humbly crave and intently beseche your honour (for Godes sake) to be a mean to her Majestie, that we may be protected and have some deffence …

Such correspondence is typical, and a fair indication of the source of such ballads as ‘Jamie Telfer’, ‘Parcy Reed’, ‘Kinmont Willie’ and ‘Jock o’ the Side’.

The areas of greatest activity were those wildest parts of the West and Middle Marches, suitable for short-range incursions through patrolled valley and by guarded ford; the more easily traversed territory of the East Marches was too exposed to surveillance and remains poor in ballads. The Riding Ballads, as well as the ballads of Romance and the Supernatural, spring from these central and western valleys, traced by the waters of Esk, Liddel, Yarrow, Teviot and Tweed, and from Tynedale and Redesdale in Northumberland.

Because of their territorial relevance, the ballads reprinted here have been arranged roughly in relation to the Marches, with Supernatural, largely unlocalized themes grouped separately.

Since they are part of an oral tradition, ballad origins remain obscure, and in studying these narratives it is well to remember that the vitality of oral renderings, with variants according to the singer’s nationality or family, is diminished by print. James Hogg’s mother, who supplied Scott with so many verses, spoke with prophetic bitterness when she declared: ‘There was never ane o’ my songs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, and ye hae spoilt them a’togither. They were made for singin’ and no for readin’, but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair.’

Nevertheless, the singing continued, though literary scholarship laid a heavy hand on some ballads, especially before Scott’s Minstrelsy appeared, while the degenerate broadside style of the seventeenth century is well represented in the popular ‘Chevy Chase’ (1624) so admired by Addison; it marks a distinct decline from the regional vigour of Bishop Percy’s great discovery, ‘The Battle of Otterburn’.

For this story of the conflict between Northumbrian Percy and Scottish Douglas we have the contemporary historical account of Froissart’s Chronicles to refer to as a control. ‘Chevy Chase’ and its predecessor ‘The Hunting of the Cheviot’ are little more than tales of a hunting skirmish, but the actuality of the battle fought in Redesdale in 1388 is sharply realized in two versions of the incident. Though their leader was killed, the invading Scots were victorious. A Scottish ballad account of the affray was assembled by Scott and Hogg from a ballad which originally appeared in David Herd’s ScottishSongs of 1776, with which they combined vocally recited fragments and some additions of their own. The ballad reproduced here (p. 107) is Percy’s discovery, a British Museum manuscript generally believed to date from the early sixteenth century; it clearly presents an English, indeed a Northumbrian view of the battle.

Riding Ballads of the West and Middle Marches are much taken up with the exploits of the Armstrongs and the Elliots. A tract of 1590 addressed to Lord Burghley runs:

The chiefe Armstrong is of Mangerton, and the chiefe Elwood [Elliot] at Cariston. These are two great surnames and most offensive to England at this daie, for the Armestronges, both of Annerdale and Lyddelsdale be ever ryding.

The matter of these ballads is not only the description of the success or failure of an inroad; we find evoked in the compact spaciousness of their stanzas an ingeniously integrated society, a closely woven moral and social fabric, the people for the most part deprived of material comforts and estranged from the consolations of religion. Apart from the ballads, true memorials to the embattled poverty of their lives remain in the pele towers, most now ruinous, to be found scattered over field, fell, farm and vicarage throughout the Marches. These grim stone dwellings measure roughly thirty-five feet by twenty-five feet, with walls anything from four to ten feet thick, rising to three storeys. Above a tunnel-vaulted basement used for storage and cattle lay the main living-room, reached by a ladder and a trap-door which could be sealed at times of attack. Above this was another room surmounted outside by a walkway with a corner look-out turret to which a firepan was attached where an alarm beacon would be lighted when the pele was under assault. Jamie Telfer is raided by the Captain of Bewcastle:

And when they cam to the Fair Dodhead

Right hastily they clam the peel;

They loosed the kye out, ane and a’,

And ranshackled the house right weel.