Lang Andrew
Highways and Byways in the Border
"Might he see the basket?" the baffled enquirer asked Proudly the lid was thrown back, and the contents displayed – a basket half filled with parr, and with trout, not one of which could have been six inches in length. Thus are the streams depleted.
It is a pleasant valley, that of the Oxnam. Across it runs the old Roman Road, – in days not very remote a favourite camping place of gipsies, – and up the valley to the south lies that noble sweep of blue hills, the Cheviots, smiling and friendly enough in summer, but dour and forbidding when the north east blast of winter strikes their blurred and gloomy faces.
Did those "muggers" and "tinklers," who of old frequented the Roman Road that runs south over Teviot and Jed and Oxnam, and away over the Cheviots down into Rede valley past Bremenium (High Rochester), did they ever come upon buried treasure or hoarded coins, one wonders. It is not many years since a well-known Professor, as he sat resting one day by the side of the old Road a little farther south than Oxnam valley, idly pushed his walking stick into a rabbit hole close to where he was seated. A few scrapes with the point of the stick, and something chinked and fell; then another, and another. But this buried treasure consisted only of copper coins, a vast number, none very rare; and no farther search revealed anything of value. Yet there must be plenty along that route, if one could but chance upon the proper spots. And surely, wherever there befell one of those countless fights or skirmishes that were for ever taking place in these Border hills, both in the days of the Romans and since, there must lie buried weapons. At Bloodylaws, up Oxnam, for instance. The {89}name is suggestive; but what occurred there, one cannot say – though there is the vague tradition of a mighty battle that left Oxnam for three days running red with blood. The country people, if you enquire from them the name of that hill, pronounce it with bated breath; – "Bluidylaws," they say in lowered voice. But I doubt that their tone is less the effect of old unhappy tradition telling how some great slaughter took place here, than the fact that "bluidy" is a word banned by the polite. This "three days red with blood," too, is an expression curiously common in the account given by country folk of any battle of which they may have local tradition. You will rind it used in connection with at least half a dozen other places in the Border-land besides Bloodylaws; and in the ballad of "The Lads of Wamphray" there occurs the line: "When the Biddes-burn ran three days blood." Wamphray is in Annandale, and the fight alluded to was between the Johnstons and the Crichtons in 1593. But the affair was a mere skirmish; "three days blood" is but a figure of speech in this and probably in most other instances. Still, on a spur of Bloodylaws there exists a well-defined circular camp, and there may be foundation for the local tradition of some grim slaughter.
CHAPTER IV JEDBURGH, AND THE JED
Two or three miles up Teviot from the junction of Oxnam Water, we come to Jed, a beautiful stream, on whose banks dreams the pleasant county town where, close on ninety years ago, they cried that cry of which they do not now like to think – "Burke Sir Walter!"
In all the Border there stands no place more picturesquely situated than Jedburgh, nor in historical interest can any surpass it. And though its ancient castle, and the six strong towers that once defended the town, have long since vanished, there remain still the noble ruins of its magnificent abbey, and other relics of the past, less noticeable but hardly less interesting; whilst the surrounding countryside brims over with the beauty of river, wood, and hill.
History gives no very definite information as to the date at which first took place the building of a castle at Jedburgh, but it appears certain that as early as the year 950 a.d. there existed in these parts some great stronghold, if, at least, "Judan-byrig" – where, when he had suppressed an insurrection in Northumbria, King Edred of England confined the rebel Archbishop of York – may be identified with "Jedburgh." Probably, however, there was in this neighbourhood a castle of sorts long prior to the date above mentioned, for both "Gedde-wrdes," or "Jedworths," the old and the new, were known settlements before the expiry of the earlier half of the ninth century, and in those turbulent days no community was rash enough to plant itself in hamlet or town except under the protecting shield of castle or strong place of arms.
In any case, before the end of the eleventh century, there certainly existed at Jedburgh a castle of formidable strength, which at frequent intervals continued to be used by the Scottish kings as a royal residence. Here, in 1165, died Malcolm the Maiden. From Jedvvorth was issued many a Charter by Malcolm's predecessor, David I, by William the Lion, by Alexander II. Here, too, the queen of Alexander III bore him a son in the year 1264; and here at a masque held after Alexander's second marriage in 1285, appeared and vanished the grizzly skeleton that danced a moment before the king, threading its ghastly way through the ranks of dismayed guests; frightened women shrank screaming from its path, men brave to face known dangers yet fell back from this horror, hurriedly crossing themselves. An evil omen, they said, a presage of misfortune or of death to the highest in the land. And surely the portent was borne out, for less than six months saw Scotland mourning the violent death of her King.
Like its not distant neighbour, the more famed castle of Roxburgh, Jedburgh castle as time went on became a stronghold continually changing hands; to-day garrisoned by Scots, to-morrow held by English, taken and retaken again and again, too strong and of importance too great to be anything but a continuous bone of contention between the two nations, yet more often, and for longer periods, in English than in Scottish keeping. When in the summer of the year 1316, King Robert the Bruce went to Ireland, Sir James Douglas was one of the wardens left by him in charge of the Scottish Kingdom. Jedburgh Castle, probably with a garrison far from strong, was then in English keeping. Douglas established himself at Lintalee, little more than a mile up the river from Jedburgh, where, by throwing across the neck of a promontory between the river and a precipitous glen, fortifications which even now are not quite destroyed, he converted a post of great natural strength into a position almost unassailable. Here, or in the immediate neighbourhood, in 1317 he inflicted two severe defeats on separate bodies of English troops, detachments from a larger army under the Earl of Arundel. As the outcome of these victories, Jedburgh Castle was probably regained by the Scots, for the English monks in Jedburgh Abbey were expelled by their Scottish brethren in February, 1318, a step they would scarcely have dared to attempt had an English garrison still been in the castle. In 1320 town and castle were bestowed by the Bruce on Sir James Douglas, and five years later the grant was confirmed, with further additions of land. But in 1334 Edward Baliol, who two years earlier had assumed the Crown of Scotland, handed over to King Edward III, to remain for ever in the possession of England, amongst other places, the town, castle, and forest of Jedworth. These Edward now bestowed on Henry Percy, thus providing ground for a very pretty quarrel between the Douglases and Percies. From now onward, practically for seventy-five years, Jedburgh Castle remained in English hands.
Ultimately, its fate was as that of a land wilfully devastated by its own people to hamper the march of an invading army. If the Scots could not permanently hold it, neither, they resolved, should it any more harbour those vermin of England. Accordingly, when in 1409 the men of Teviotdale, fierce progenitors of the more modern reiving Border Elliots and Scotts, wiping out the English garrison, retook the castle, they at once set about its final destruction. Burnt, so far as it would burn, cast down bit by bit to its very foundations, with strenuous toil riven asunder stone from stone, ere their work was ended little part of its massive walls remained to speak of former glories. Walter Bower, Abbot of Inchcolm, who was a young man at the time of its destruction writes in the "Scotichronicon" that: "Because the masonry was exceedingly holding and solid, not without great toil was it broken down and demolished."
Perched above the town on a commanding eminence that on one side sloped steeply to the river, and on the other to a deep glen or ravine, defended also, doubtless, on the side farthest from the burgh by a deep fosse, the castle must once have been of great strength – how strong as regards position may best be judged from the bird's-eye view of it to be gained if one climbs at the back of Jedburgh the exceedingly steep direct road that runs to Lariton village. From this point, too, one sees to advantage the venerable Abbey nestling among the surrounding houses, and can best appreciate the wisdom of the old monks, who chose for their abode a site so pleasant. A valley smiling in the mellow sunshine; a place to which one may drop down from the heights above where bellows and raves a north westerly gale, to find peace and quiet, undisturbed by any blustering wind; a valley rich in the fruits of the earth, and wandering through it a trout stream more beautiful than almost any of the many beautiful Border "Waters," a stream that once was, and now should be, full of lusty yellow trout rising under the leafy elms in the long, warm, summer evenings. An ideal water for trout in Jed, and many a pretty dish must those old monks have taken from it, by fair means or foul; pity that woollen-mills below, and netting, and the indiscriminate slaughter of fingerlings, above the town, should have so greatly damaged it as a sporting stream.
Possibly upper Jed is not now quite so bad as it was a few years ago, but what of the lower part of that beautiful river? The same may be said of it that may be said of Teviot immediately below Hawick, or of Gala, and, alas! of Tweed, below Galashiels. The waters are poisoned by dyes and by sewage, rendered foul by sewage fungus, reeking with all manner of uncleanness, an offence to nostril and to eye. Five and thirty years ago Ruskin wrote: "After seeing the stream of the Teviot as black as ink, a putrid carcase of a sheep lying in the dry channel of the Jed, under Jedburgh Abbey, the entire strength of the summer stream being taken away to supply a single mill, I know finally what value the British mind sets on the beauties of nature." What, indeed, are the 'beauties of nature' that they should interfere with the glories of commerce! Truly we are a Commercial Nation. Here is the condition of things that Ruskin found in the Borderland in the mid-seventies of last century, as described by him in a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1877.
"Two years ago," he said, "I went, for the first time since early youth to see Scott's country by the shores of Yarrow, Teviot, and Gala Waters." Then to his hearers he read aloud from "Marmion" that picture of the Border country which is familiar to everyone:
" Oft in my mind surh thoughts awake,
By lone St. Mary's silent lake;
Thou know'st it well, – nor fen, nor sedge,
Pollute the clear lake's crystal edge;
Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink
At once upon the level brink;
And just a trace of silver sand
Marks where the water meets the land.
Far in the mirror, bright and blue,
Each hill's huge outline you may view;
Shaggy with heath, but lonely bare,
Nor tree, nor bush, nor brake is there,
Save where, of land, yon slender line
Bears thwart the lake the scatter'd pine.
Yet even this nakedness has power,
And aids the feeling of the hour:
Nor thicket, dell, nor copse you spy,
Where living thing conceal'd might lie;
Nor point, retiring, hides a dell,
Where swain, or woodman lone, might dwell;
There's nothing left to fancy's guess,
You see that all is loneliness:
And silence aids – though the steep hills
Send to the lake a thousand rills;
In summer tide, so soft they weep,
The sound but lulls the ear asleep;
Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,
So stilly is the solitude.
Nought living meets the eye or ear,
But well I ween the dead are near;
For though, in feudal strife, a foe
Hath laid Our Lady's chapel low,
Yet still, beneath the hallow'd soil,
The peasant rests him from his toil,
And, dying, bids his bones be laid,
Where erst his simple fathers pray'd."
"What I saw myself, in that fair country," continued Ruskin, "of which the sight remains with me, I will next tell you. I saw the Teviot oozing, not flowing, between its wooded banks, a mere sluggish injection, among the poisonous pools of scum-covered ink. And in front of Jedburgh Abbey, where the foaming river used to dash round the sweet ruins as if the rod of Moses had freshly cleft the rock for it, bare and foul nakedness of its bed, the whole stream carried to work in the mills, the dry stones and crags of it festering unseemly in the evening sun, and the carcase of a sheep, brought down in the last flood, lying there in the midst of the children at their play, literal and ghastly symbol, in the sweetest pastoral country in the world, of the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
That is how these once fair scenes struck the outraged eye of one who was a sincere lover of our beautiful Border land. What might he say of these rivers now that five and thirty years have passed? Compared to Teviot, ink is a fluid that may claim to be splendidior vitro, and Jed below the town is in little better case.
However, to return to Jedburgh. Of the old castle no trace now remains; but early in the nineteenth century a small portion of one wall yet stood, some outline of foundations yet met the eye. Probably the fosse was filled up when the buildings were razed – it was a convenient place to shoot rubbish; indeed, when about 1820 the site was being cut down preparatory to the erection of a new "castle" (until recent years used as a County Prison), charred oaken beams and blackened stones were unearthed, relics certainly of the ancient building. A few coins have also been found, and at various dates an iron lock, a key of curious design, a rusty dagger, arrowheads, and portions of a gold chain.
Jedburgh, deprived of her castle, was yet a strong place; but if her townsmen and the fierce men of Teviotdale imagined that by harrying and destroying the nest that so long had sheltered them, the English birds of prey would be permanently-scattered down the wind, they made a vast mistake. No more than a year had passed ere the English returned under Sir Robert Umphraville and burned the town about their ears; and in 1416 the same commander repeated the performance of six years earlier. Again and again as the years rolled on were fire and sword the fate of Jedworth. The town, with its flanking towers, was strong, strong in natural position, and, owing to the manner of building of its houses, difficult of access except by one or other of its four ports; but it had no walls or defending fosse, and however brave its men, however skilled in the use of arms, their numbers were generally too meagre to cope with the formidable bands the English could bring against them. Time and again the place was sacked, and on each occasion her magnificent Abbey suffered grievously at the hands of the stormers.
Founded about the year 1118, the ancient Abbey occupies the site of a building more ancient still by probably two or three hundred years, a church built in the ninth century by Ecgred, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who died A.D. 845. Osbert was the first Abbot of Jedburgh (1152-1174); previous to his day the establishment ranked merely as a Priory. In the troublous times between 1297 and 1300, the Abbey suffered much. Sacked and partially destroyed, the lead stripped from its roof, the conventual buildings to such an extent gutted that the brethren, fleeing, were forced to seek refuge for a time in Abbeys and Monasteries south of the Border, it can have been but the massiveness of its walls that then preserved it from total destruction.
But compared to the treatment later meted out to Abbey and town by the Earl of Surrey, all former chastenings were as a comparatively mild scourging with whips; Surrey chastised with scorpions. In this matter, his little finger was thicker than the loins of those who had preceded him. In 1523, an English force – compared to the meagre number of defenders, a vast army – marched on the town. All that human power could do in defence of hearth and home was done that day by the men of Jedworth. When, since history began, has it ever been recorded of them that they shrank from battle?
"And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,"
summed up their creed, then and ever. There were of them, now, but two thousand at the most, opposed to an army many times their number one man as against four, or perhaps even as one to five. Yet so stubborn was their resistance, so fiercely they fought, that at the last it was only by the aid of fire that this wasps' nest was laid waste. Driven back at length by superior numbers, forced to retire to the towers and to the Abbey, the attack could be pushed home no farther till Surrey gave orders to set fire to the town. Even then, Jedworth held out till far in the night, when the entire place was little more than a smouldering heap of embers. "I assure your Grace," wrote the Earl to his King, "I fownd the Scottis at this tyme the boldest men and the hottest that ever I sawe any nation, and all the journey upon all parts of the armye kepte us with soo contynual skyrmish that I never sawe the like."… "Could 40,000 such men be assembled," he says in the same letter, "it would bee a dreadful enterprise to withstand them." If valour alone could have won the day, to the men of Jedburgh had now been the victory. They fought like fiends incarnate. The Devil himself, in truth, must have been amongst them, for, says Surrey farther: "I dare not write the wonders that my Lord Dacre and all hys company doo saye they sawe that nyght six tyms of sperits and fereful syghts. And universally all their company saye playnly the devyl was that nyght among theym six tyms."
Thus was Jedburgh wiped out, "soo surely brent that no garnysons nor none others shal bee lodged there unto the tyme it bee newe buylded." And to rebuild equal to what it had been, would surely be no light undertaking, for, says Surrey, "the towne was much better than I went (weened) it had been, for there was twoo tymys moo houses therein than in Berwicke, and well buylded, with many honest and faire houses therein sufficiente to have lodged a thousand horsemen in garnyson, and six good towres therein, which towne and towres be clenely destroyed, brent, and throwen downe." The slaughter of Jedworth's defenders no doubt must also have been great. But that the inhabitants were not indiscriminately put to the sword is evidenced by the fact that some time during the night, wlien Lord Dacre's picketed horses – terrified no doubt by the same Scottish devil that had troubled the hearts of the storniers in the town – suddenly stampeding, galloped wildly through Surrey's camp, over two hundred of them, bursting in amongst the still burning houses, were caught and carried off by the Scottish women who still clung to the place – "keening," probably, over their devastated hearths. In all, before this stampede ended, Surrey lost upwards of eight hundred horses; for when the maddened beasts came thundering through his camp, the English soldiers, imagining that they were being attacked by a fresh army of Scots, loosed off into the mob flights of arrows, and fired into the terrified animals with musketry. It is scarcely the method best suited to calm a maddened mob of horses; little wonder that many in their helpless terror plunged over the great "scaurs," or cliffs, that near the town overhang Jedwater, and were dashed to pieces.
In his letter of 27th September, to Henry VIII, Surrey thus describes the incident: "And he [Lord Dacre] being with me at souper, about viij a clok, the horses of his company brak lowse, and sodenly ran out of his feld, in such nombre, that it caused a marvellous alarome in our field; and our standing watche being set, the horses cam ronnyng along the campe, at whome were shot above one hundred shief of arrowes, and dyvers gonnys, thinking they had been Scotes that wold have saulted the camp; fynally, the horses w'ere so madde that they ran like wilde dere into the feld, above xv c at the leest, in dyvers companys; and in one place above felle downe a gret rok, and slew theymself, and above it ran into the towne being on fire, and by the women taken, and carried awaye right evill brent, and many were taken agayne. But, fynally, by that I can esteme by the nombre of theym that I sawe goe on foote the next daye, I think there is lost above viij c horses, and all with foly for lak of not lying within the campe." So, for a time, Jedburgh perished. But the recuperative power of settlements in those days was great – like the eels, they were used to the process of skinning – and in no long time a rejuvenated township sprang from the ashes of the old burgh. When Surrey gave orders that the towers should be "throwen downe," possibly his commands were not obeyed to the letter. In a district where a plentiful supply of stone is not lack ing, doubtless these defending towers would be massive buildings constructed of that material, run together – as was the custom in those days – with a semi-liquid mortar, or kind of cement, which, when it hardened, bound the entire mass into a solid block that clung stone to stone with extraordinary tenacity. Probably the towers may not have been so "clenely destroyed" as he supposed them to be. In any case, in twenty years' time the place was again formidable, its men as prone as had been their fathers to shout the old battle-cry of "Jethart's here," and fly at the throat of their hereditary foe.
Nor was the hereditary foe in any way reluctant to afford them opportunity. In 1544 Lord Evers stormed and captured the town; and again the roar and crackle of flaming houses smote on the ears of Jedburgh's women. According to an Englishman's account of "The late Expedition in Scotland made by the King's Highness' Army under the Conduct of the Right Honourable the Earl of Hertford, the year of owr Lord God 1544," an account "Sent to the Right Honourable Lord Russell, Lord Privy Seal; from the King's Army there, by a Friend of his," the men of Jedburgh on this occasion did not behave with their wonted valour. But if this writer is to be trusted, nowhere during Hertford's entire campaign of 1544 did the Scots make a stand. It was a sort of triumphal English progress; everywhere the Scots fled almost without striking a blow, everywhere they were cut down. Only occasionally, and almost as it were by accident, was an Englishman hurt, whilst the slaughter among the Scots was prodigious. They "used for their defence their light feet, and fled in so much haste that divers English horses were tired in their pursuit: but overtaken there was a great number, whereof many were slain, partly by the fierceness of the Englishmen, partly by the guilty cowardice of the Scots… And yet in this skirmish, not one Englishman taken, neither slain: thanks be to God." Everywhere it is the same story – a pleasant picnic for Hertford and his men; death and destruction, and panic flight for the Scots. Men, women, and children, it was all the same apparently in that campaign, if one may judge by incidents such as this at Dunbar: "And by reason that we took them in the mornynge, who, having wautched all nyghte for our comynge and perceyvynge our Army to dislodge and depart, thoughte themselves safe of us, were newly gone to their beds; and in theyr fyrste slepes closed in with fyre, men, women, and children were suffocated and burnt… In these victories," comments this pious and humane scribe, "who is to bee moste highest lauded but God?" But war is a rough game, and such happenings were the natural outcome at that time of Henry's orders anent the giving of quarter, and to the "putting man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, when any resistance shall be made against you."
Here, at Jedburgh, "upon the approachment of the men to their entries, the Scots fled from their ordnance, leaving them unshot, into the woods thereabout, with all other people in the same town." Thereafter, having caught and slain something over one hundred and sixty Scots, with "the loss of six English men only," Abbey, and Grey Friars, the town, and "divers hostel and fortified houses" were sacked and given to the flames, "the goods of the same toune being first spoyled, which laded, at their departing, five hundred horses." Again, in his notice of the capture of Skraysburgh, "the greatest towne in all Teviotdale," we are told that "it is a marvellous truth… not one Englishman was either hurt or wounded." A craven band, those Scots, it would appear, fallen strangely from the level at which Surrey had found them so few years before – "the boldest men and the hottest that ever I sawe any nation"; far sunk, too, beneath the level of their immediate descendants, the men who turned the day in the fight of the Redeswire in 1575. And yet one remembers to have heard of a certain fight about this period, in the near neighbourhood of Jedburgh, at a place called Ancrum Moor, when Angus, Arran, and Scott of Buccleuch, with a force numerically very inferior, turned the tables on the "auld enemy" to a lusty tune. It may all be quite accurate, of course, this story told to Lord Russell, but it smacks somewhat of a tale told by one who himself was not a very bold fighting man. The warrior whose place is ever the forefront of the battle is not the man who belittles his enemies, nor is he usually one who regards with complacency the sufferings of helpless women and children. Accurate, or not, however, Hertford seems to have had a partiality for harrying this district and slaying its hapless people, for he returned the following year with a larger following – a mongrel gang, in which Turks and Russians were almost the only European nations unrepresented – and completed his work of destruction so far as it lay in his power. He could not utterly destroy the glorious Abbey, but the Brethren were scattered, never to return, and so far as it could be done, the building that for four hundred years had sheltered them was wrecked. Mute now the solemn chants that had been wont to echo through its dim lit aisles, gone for ever the day of matins and vespers; in Jedburgh the sway of the Church was over. Black with the smoke of sacrilegious fires, stained by the flames that had licked its desecrated walls, still a rudely fitted fragment of the great Abbey for a little time continued to be used by worshippers; for the rest, the building would appear to have been regarded chiefly as an excellent and useful outlook or watch tower.
It was the followers of the Reformed Faith that next held public worship there. Did no one of the old-time Abbots who lie asleep within its ancient walls turn in his grave, one wonders, when in 1793 the south aisle was pulled down, and "a wall built between the pillars to make the church more comfort able"?
They had no room in their compositions for any sentiment of reverence, little use for such a thing as respect for historical buildings, those eighteenth century Scottish ancestors of ours. Our old foes of England at least had the excuse that what they did was done in the heat of conflict; it was left to our own people in cold blood to lay sacrilegious hands on a glorious relic of the past; like monkeys to deface and tear to pieces something the beauty and value of which they had not wit to recognise. All that could be done, however, to atone for past misdeeds was done in 1875 by the Marquess of Lothian. The "comfortable church" of 1793 has been removed, and what remains of the Abbey is reverently cared for. Safe now from further desecration,
"The shadows of the convent towers
Slant down the snowy sward;"
and in the peace of long-drawn summer twilights only the distant cries of children, the scream of swift or song of thrush, may now set the echoes flying through those ruined aisles. The Presbyterian Manse that once stood in the Abbey grounds – itself no doubt, like other houses in the town, built wholly or in part of stone quarried from the Abbey ruins – has long since been removed, and little now remains which may break the tranquil sadness that broods over these relics of past grandeur.
A few hundred yards from the Abbey, down a back street, there stands a picturesque old house, robbed now of some of its picturesqueness by the substitution of tiles for the old thatched roof that once was there. It is the house where, in a room in the second story whose window overlooks a pleasant garden and the once crystal Jed, Mary, Queen of Scots lay many days, sick unto death, – a house surely that should now be owned and cared for by the Burgh. Local tradition (for what it may be worth) has it that the Queen lodged first in the house which is now the Spread Eagle Hotel, but that a fire breaking out there, she was hastily removed to that which now goes by the name of "Queen Mary's House." It stands in what must in her day have been a beautiful garden, sloping to the river. Hoary, moss-grown apple trees still blossom there and bear fruit. "With its screen of dull trees in front," says Dr. Robert Chambers, "the house has a somewhat lugubrious appearance, as if conscious of connection with the most melancholy tale that ever occupied the page of history." In those long past days, however, its appearance must have been far from lugubrious; and indeed even now, on a pleasant sunny evening of late spring when thick-clustered apple and pear blossom drape the boughs, and thrushes sing, and Jed ripples musically beneath the worn arches of that fine
