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The Battle of Otterburnand the Hunting of theCheviotO. ArngartPublished online: 21 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: O. Arngart (1975) The Battle of Otterburn and the Huntingof the Cheviot , Studia Neophilologica, 47:1, 7-13

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393277508587608

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The Battle of Otterburn and theHunting of the Cheviot

It has generally been taken for granted that the Otterburn ballad wasthe earlier of the two texts referred to in the heading above, and that theCheviot poet made use of it for his own verses. In their edition of 'BishopPercy's Folio Manuscript' (1867-8, II, pp. 5 ff.) Hales and Furnivallspeak of the Hunting of the Cheviot ballad as being 'borrowed largely fromthat on the Battle of Otterburn'. Similarly in his 'English and ScottishPopular Ballads' (1882-98, III, p. 304) Professor F. J. Child says that'the differences in the story of the two ballads, though not trivial, are stillnot so material as to forbid us to hold that both may be founded upon thesame occurrence, the Hunting of the Cheviot being of course the later version[my italics], and following in part its own tradition, though repeatingsome portions of the older ballad' (i.e. Otterburn). This authoritativepronouncement has usually been accepted as indicating the true rela-tionship between the two poems. It is not until recently that it has beenquestioned and in fact reversed by Professor D. C. Fowler,1 who con-siders Cheviot the older text, of Scottish origin, and the source of Otter-burn. Yet all of these three propositions are controversial or open todoubt for different reasons, as will be clear from the sequel. They do notagree very well with the testimony of the texts, and disregard some fairlyimportant circumstances connected with them, while leaving others un-explained.

Contrary to what is suggested in LHPB there is no linguistic evidenceto prove the Otterburn ballad later than the Cheviot ballad. The 'gram-matical forms of Cheviot' referred to there (p. 108) and supposed to beearly are just traditional, as was noted in a paper of mine on the twoballads.2 Similar forms also occur in Otterburn, and can be paralleled inlater poetry. Nor is there any linguistic evidence to show that the home of

1 A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (LHPB).2 Two English Border Ballads. Acta Universitatis Lundensis, sect. I, no. 18

(CWK Gleerup, Lund, Sweden), p. 55, note 13.

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8 O. ARNGART

the Cheviot ballad was in Scotland rather than in the North of England.The dialectal peculiarities of the piece that may be Scottish are charac-teristic of Scotland and the North of England alike. They can be used toindicate a Northern English just as well as a Scottish origin and somefeatures are too uncertain to be of great use for either purpose.

The literary analysis offered in LHPB (pp. 110-13) and intended todemonstrate the Scottish provenience of the Cheviot ballad might havecarried greater conviction had it been less patently fashioned to fit theobjective contemplated. It seems as certain as ever, for reasons given inmy paper, that the ballad is of English, not of Scottish origin. Its Scottishconnection was explained there, p. 91. It is not very realistic or reasonableto hold the almost completely unhistoric Cheviot ballad to be the sourceof Otterburn, which is on the whole in accord with history. The reverse isquite naturally the case as will be shown below.

The view of the relationship between the two ballads put forward inLHPB depends for its acceptance on the assumption (p. 114) that thelatter—and most unmistakably English—portions of Cheviot, fromstanza 59 on, or at least stanzas 59-65, in Child, were not part of theoriginal poem but are a later addition. It is true some of these passagesare not very good textually or metrically, but metrical reasons only arehardly sufficient to prove them unauthentic, and moreover they arecapable of improvement and emendation as I have suggested previouslyand will attempt further to indicate here. If these sections of the text areto be accepted as genuine the fresh interpretation theory of LHPB cannotbe upheld. A solution that in order to become at all feasible requires theelimination of a considerable proportion of the text it is meant to explain,is not a priori a very attractive one nor very likely to be correct.

At least stanza (Child) no. 66 of the Cheviot ballad must belong withthe 'genuine' part, as is indicated through proof afforded by the contextitself. In Otterburn we read, stanzas 67-68,

67Then on the morne they mayde them beerys

Of byrch and haysell grave;Many a wydowe wyth wepyng teyres

Ther makes they fette awaye.

68Thys fraye bygan at Otterborne

Bytwene the nyght and the day,

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THE Battle of Otterburn AND THE Hunting of the Cheviot 9

Ther the Dowglas lost hys lyffe,And the Perssy was lede awaye.

The first of these two stanzas also occurs in Cheviot as (Child) no. 57, Soon the morrowe etc., see below. It is perhaps not equally apparent thatCheviot offers a counterpart of stanza 68 of Otterburn as well, for inCheviot (Child no. 66) it has become displaced to a position after no. 65.It runs,

66At Otterburn begane this spurne

vppone a Monnynday;Ther was the doughte Doglas slean,

the Perse neuer went away.

The general resemblance between Otterburn no. 68 and Cheviot no. 66can hardly be denied, and it is also evident that in this case the Cheviotstanza is derived from that of Otterburn. The latter correctly reports themain facts. Hotspur was taken prisoner, or 'lede awaye' as the ballad putsit with a euphemistic twist intended, as Chambers suggests,1 a little toslur over history in the interest of the Percys. In Cheviot the entire courseof events is changed by adding the death of Hotspur to that of Douglasfor it is of course well known (not least from Shakespeare's Henry IV)that Hotspur did not fall at Otterburn in 1388 but at Shrewsbury in1403, fifteen years later. So the expression 'was led away' of Otterburnafter all states what actually happened, since Hotspur was captured inthe battle, and was altered by the Cheviot poet to 'never went away' toagree with his own recast and unhistorical variety of the story.

It is clear for several reasons that Child's stanza no. 66 of Cheviot doesnot come in its correct order in the ballad text as we have it. First of allboth metre and context alike show plainly enough that where it nowstands stanza 66 is a later insertion. The reiteration it implies is meaning-less, and it differs metrically from the surrounding lines.2 Further theparallel of Otterburn indicates that its original place was after stanzano. 57 in Child. It was doubtless attracted, in the course of transmission,to its present position after stanza 65 by the renewed mention of 'Otter-

1 E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, p. 160.2 The present arrangement of the text also involves the repetition of the open-

ing Ther was at the beginning of two successive (long) lines of Cheviot, which canhardly have been an original feature of the poem and is done away with throughthe alteration here suggested.

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IO O. ARNGART

burn' in that stanza. Third, by removing stanza 66 from where it nowappears to the place it occupies according to the Otterburn ballad, we canrecover another one of the four line cross-rhymed stanzas in whichCheviot was composed from the outset (cf. below) by a slight change ofthe word-order, namely:

So on the morrowe the mayde them1 byearsoff birch and hasell so gray;

Many wedous with wepyng tearscam to fache ther makys away.

At Otterburn this spurne beganevppone a Monnynday,

Ther was the doughte Doglas slean,2

the Perse neuer went away.

Fourth, and most important, the correct context is restored to Chevionos. 57 ff. through the alteration proposed. The present stanza (Child)no. 58 of Cheviot reads,

Tivydale may carpe off care,Northombarlond may mayk great mon,

For towe such captayns as slayne wear thearon the March-parti shall neuer be non.

'Towe such captayns' in the above passage, as it stands, lacks a referentin the preceding lines, for it is obvious that the expression refers toDouglas and Percy, and the mention of the two commanders has beenlost from the existing context through the removal of the present stanzano. 66 (where their names occur) to come after no. 65. There can be noquestion but that stanza no. 66 originally followed no. 57, as it still doesaccording to the text of Otterburn, and that the restitution of it to itsproper place in the Cheviot ballad restores the correct connection withstanza no. 58, just as it does the metre.

The transposition of lines assumed here likewise helps to put togetheranother one of the original four line stanzas at the end of the Hunting ofthe Cheviot ballad (Child nos. 65 and 67); nos. 63 and 64 in Child too

1 'Made for them' (not as previously rendered).2 For MS. slean should be substituted Northern slan, rhyming with begane.

Speaking of Northernisms, it should have been made clear in my paper, p. 79,note to 107-10, that the lines ending Agerstone:Hearone:renowen:dowene rhymein Northern undiphthongized -ūn, a type of rhyme that also occurs in Otterburn,stanza 60, growynd ('ground'): Agurstoune, st. 28, bowen: Agurstone.

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THE Battle of Otterburn AND THE Hunting of the Cheviot 11

form one fairly uniform four line stanza rhyming renow(e)n: HornbyII-dovm:down:town, as was pointed out in my previous paper, where asuggestion was also made for adding a missing internal rhyme to no. 63;and (Child) nos. 59 and 60 were there taken to rhyme together in Jamy.he:me:be, yet without at the time arriving at a complete solution.1 Thereremain nos. 61 and 62 in Child, a couple of passages that are compara-tively irregular and more difficult than the surrounding lines to reconcileto the metrical pattern of the ballad. Yet it seems more likely that thesefive (long) lines represent an amalgamation by the minstrel of two originalcross-rhymed stanzas, and that some lines were lost in the process (whileothers were altered), than that anything was added.

Be that as it may, there is clearly some corruption here, due to thetransmission of the poem, as frequently in other parts of it, and thepresent metrical or textual inferiority of some lines is hardly in itself acogent reason for doubting the general authenticity of the whole of thelatter section of the ballad, (Child) stanzas nos. 59 ff., or even nos. 59-65,nor for accepting Professor Fowler's cancellation of them. As I haveshown previously, it is not in fact well founded to speak of Cheviot asbeing composed in ballad quatrains but rather, as was suggested manyyears ago by Professor W. W. Skeat,2 in four line cross-rhymed stanzas.This metrical form is prevalent in the poem, apart from textual corrup-tion, and where it fails to occur the failure is chiefly due to a fairly longtradition of oral transmission. This stanza type was in use from the 13thcentury up to modern times; a parallel of the metrical pattern of the

1 See ibid., pp. 81 f.—I now think that text B ('Chevy Chase'), which hereoffers (stanza 57), That braue Erle Douglas soddainlye / was with an arrow slaine,after all affords a clue for reconstructing the corresponding line, now obviously-corrupt, of Cheviot, and recovering another cross-rhymed stanza by reading forexample,

Word ys commen to Eddenburroweto the Skottishe kynge Jamy

That dougheti Duglas with an arroweslean in Chyviat lay he.

He dyd weal [wail] and wryng his handdes,he sayd, 'Alas! and woe ys me!

Such anothar captayn within Skotland,'he sayd, 'yefeth shuld neuer be.'

As was stated in my paper (ibid. 58 f.), 'Chevy Chase' is based on a differenttext or recension from the Bodl. MS. Ashmole text of Cheviot, and provides anumber of indications for restoring the latter.

2 Specimens of English Literature A.D. 1394-A.D. 1579, p. 396.

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12 O. ARNGART

Cheviot ballad that may be apposite here is the Ballad on the ScottishWars (part I; Northumberland; late 14th century), for example stanzaone,1

As y yod on ay moundayBytwene Wyltinden and Walle,

Me ane after brade waye,Ay litel man y met withalle, .

The leste pat ever y sathe, [soth] to say,Oiper in bour, oiper in halle:

His robe was noiper grene na gray, 'Bot alle yt was of riche palle.

Here as in the following stanzas of part I the rhyme arrangement is ab abab ab. As a corresponding specimen of this rhyme scheme in Cheviot onemay adduce the stanza particularly quoted by Skeat, namely:

The dryvars throrowe the woodes wentfor to reas the dear,

Bomen byckarte vppone the bentwith ther browd aros cleare;

Then the wyld thorowe the woodes wenton euery syde shear,

Greahondes thorowe the grevis glentfor to kyll thear dear.

The cross-rhymed stanza arrangement, rhyming ab ab ab ab or ab ab cbcb, is especially clearly preserved at the beginning of 'fit' two of the ballad(lines 52 ff. in Skeat's numbering), but can be recovered by emendationin most other places where it has been disturbed through transmission.It is not unimportant for the interpretation of the poem to recognizewhat was its original stanza structure, for there is agreement and harmonybetween subject-matter, contents and stanza form, as has already beenpointed out previously, and the Cheviot stanza can be regarded as adevelopment of the quatrains of Otterburn.2

There are other circumstances, left out of account in LHPB, to causeone to doubt the conclusions on the ballad that are reached there. As longago as the i86o's it was emphasized by Hales and Furnivall (I.e.) that theOtterburn and Cheviot ballads represent 'two different features of the old

1 Ritson-Hazlitt, Anc. Ballads and Songs3, 1877, p. 35; Brandl-Zippel, Mit-telenglische Sprach- und Literaturproben2, 1927, p. 137.

2 Cf. my paper, as above, p. 52, et passim, pp. 91 f.

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THE Battle of Otterburn AND THE Hunting of the Cheviot 13

Border life—the Raid and the defiant Hunt.'1 This difference in the con-tents of the two poems is nowhere referred to in the LHPB chapter onCheviot and Otterburn, yet as has already been suggested, our correctprocedure must be to take the rehandling of the subject offered by theHunting of the Cheviot, where the border raid is turned into a hunt, to bebased on the Battle of Otterburn, which still retains the original story ofa raid, and by and large reflects the authentic historical setting.2 Allrelevant evidence combines to make one think that Otterburn came firstand that Cheviot was borrowing from it, and in so thinking one is ofcourse in agreement with the majority of the writers on the two ballads.

O. ARNGART

1 On this see further ibid., pp. 88-92.1 It goes without saying that Cheviot is not necessarily dependent on just the

text preserved in the two extant copies of Otterburn, but rather perhaps on somepreceding link in the descent of that ballad, for Otterburn may naturally also betaken to have suffered changes through transmission, though apparently to a muchless extent than Cheviot. On the question of the transmission of ballads generallyand Cheviot in particular, see more fully ibid., 50-52. (It may be added that areference to 'B Text, V. 402' should be inserted ibid., p.90, foot-n. 11, and 'gather'substituted for 'dry' at p. 99, col. 2, line 13.)

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