Walter Scott - Marmion

line 203. ‘Hardriding Dick is not an epithet referring to horsemanship, but means Richard Ridley of Hardriding.’-SCOTT. The families named all belonged to the north and north-east of Northumberland. Scott adds (from Surtees), ‘A feud did certainly exist between the Ridleys and Featherstons, productive of such consequences as the ballad narrates.’ In regard to the ‘Northern harper,’ see Prof. Minto’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ p. 121.

Stanza XV. line 231. wassail-bowl. ‘Wassell’ or ‘wassail’ (A. S. waes hael ) was first the wish of health, then it came to denote festivity (especially at Christmas). As an adj. it is compounded not only with bowl, but with cup, candle, &c. Cp. Comus, line 179:-

Cp. also note on ‘gossip’s bowl’ of Midsummer Night’s Dream, ii. I. 47, in Clarendon Press edition, and Prof. Minto’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ p. 174.

line 232. Cp. Iliad i. 470, and ix. 175, and Chapman’s translation, ‘The youths crowned cups of wine.’

line 238. Raby Castle, in the county of Durham, the property of the Duke of Cleveland.

line 254. As a page in a lady’s chamber. ‘Bower’ is often contrasted with ‘hall,’ as in ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’:-

Cp. below, 281.

Stanza XVI. line 264. For Lindisfarn, or Holy Island, see note to Canto II. St. i.

Stanza XVII. line 284. leash, the cord by which the greyhound is restrained till the moment when he is slipt in pursuit of the game. Cp. Coriolanus, i. 6. 38:-

Stanza XVIII. line 289. bide, abide. Cp. above, 215.

line 294. pray you= I pray you. Cp. ‘Prithee,’ so common in Elizabethan drama.

line 298. Scott annotates as follows:

‘The story of Perkin Warbeck, or Richard, Duke of York, is well known. In 1496, he was received honourably in Scotland; and James IV, after conferring upon him in marriage his own relation, the Lady Catharine Gordon, made war on England in behalf of his pretensions. To retaliate an invasion of England, Surrey advanced into Berwickshire at the head of considerable forces, but retreated, after taking the inconsiderable fortress of Ayton. Ford, in his Dramatic Chronicle of Perkin Warbeck, makes the most of this inroad:-

“SURREY.

line 301. Ayton is on the Eye, a little above Eyemouth, in Berwickshire.

Stanza XIX. line 305. ‘The garrisons of the English castles of Wark, Norham, and Berwick were, as may be easily supposed, very troublesome neighbours to Scotland. Sir Richard Maitland of Ledington wrote a poem, called “The Blind Baron’s Comfort,” when his barony of Blythe, in Lauderdale, was harried by Rowland Foster, the English captain of Wark, with his company, to the number of 300 men. They spoiled the poetical knight of 5000 sheep, 200 nolt, 30 horses and mares; the whole furniture of his house of Blythe, worth 100 pounds Scots (L8. 6s. 8d.), and every thing else that was portable. “This spoil was committed the 16th day of May, 1570, (and the said Sir Richard was threescore and fourteen years of age, and grown blind,) in time of peace; when nane of that country lippened [expected] such a thing.”-”The Blind Baron’s Comfort” consists in a string of puns on the word Blythe , the name of the lands thus despoiled. Like John Littlewit, he had “a conceit left him in his misery-a miserable conceit.”

‘The last line of the text contains a phrase, by which the Borderers jocularly intimated the burning a house. When the Maxwells, in 1685, burned the castle of Lochwood, they said they did so to give the Lady Johnstone “light to set her hood.” Nor was the phrase inapplicable; for, in a letter, to which I have mislaid the reference, the Earl of Northumberland writes to the King and Council, that he dressed himself at midnight, at Warkworth, by the blaze of the neighbouring villages burned by the Scottish marauders.’-SCOTT.

Stanza XXI. line 332. Bp. Pudsey, in 1154, restored the castle and added the donjon. See Jemingham’s ‘Norham Castle,’ v. 87.

line 341. too well in case, in too good condition, too stout. For a somewhat similar meaning of case, see Tempest, iii. 2. 25:-

line 342. Scott here refers to Holinshed’s account of Welsh, the vicar of St. Thomas of Exeter, a leader among the Cornish insurgents in 1549:-

‘“This man,” says Holinshed, “had many good things in him. He was of no great stature, but well set, and mightilie compact. He was a very good wrestler; shot well, both in the long-bow, and also in the cross-bow; he handled his hand-gun and peece very well; he was a very good woodman, and a hardie, and such a one as would not give his head for the polling, or his beard for the washing. He was a companion in any exercise of activitie, and of a courteous and gentle behaviour. He descended of a good honest parentage, being borne at Peneverin, in Cornwall; and yet, in this rebellion, an arch-captain, and a principal doer.”-Vol. iv. p. 958, 4to edition. This model of clerical talents had the misfortune to be hanged upon the steeple of his own church.’-SCOTT.

‘The reader,’ Lockhart adds, ‘needs hardly to be reminded of Ivanhoe.’

line 349. Cp. Chaucer’s friar in Prologue, line 240:-

The character and adventures of Friar John owe something both to the ‘Canterbury Tales’ and to a remarkable poem, probably Dunbar’s, entitled ‘The Friars of Berwick.’

line 354. St. Bede’s day in the Calendar is May 27. See below, line 410.

Stanza XXII. line 372. tables, backgammon.

line 387. fay= faith, word of honour. See below 454, and cp. Hamlet, ii. 2. 271, ‘By my fay, I cannot reason.’

Stanza XXIII. line 402. St. James or Santiago of Spain. Cp. ‘Piers the Plowman,’ i. 48 (with Prof. Skeat’s note), Chaucer’s Prologue, 465, and Southey’s ‘Pilgrim to Compostella,’ valuable both for its poetic beauty and its ample notes. In regard to the cockleshell, Southey gives some important information in extracts from ‘Anales de Galicia,’ and he says-

line 403. Montserrat, a mountain, with a Benedictine abbey on it, in Catalonia. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood cherish a myth to the effect that the fantastic peaks and gorges of the mountain were formed at the Crucifixion.