Short Fiction

of a tale. Rome gave me nothing⁠—the fog of years lay too thick over that greatest of mortal pages; but I hazarded a guess that the broken Satyr’s head, found in some unknown Border earthwork and now in the Grange collection, had come from my glen. Perhaps the Melrose monks had found it and copied it in their gargoyles. But of the Christian shrine I had something to tell. The chapel seems to have had an ill reputation for a holy place. The chapter of Melrose in or about 1250 held an inquisition into the doings of a certain John of Fawn, who tended the shrine with unhallowed service. There were complaints of his successor, a monk who bore the name of Lapidarius; and the grand climax was reached in the fate of one Andrew de Faun, a priest, says the record, who had the unpleasing gift diabolosconvocandi. He was hand in glove with Lord Soulis, whose castle of Hermitage lay some twenty miles over the hills. Of his iniquities it is recorded that the country folk grew weary, and one October night surprised him at the business. He confessed his sins under the pressure of boiling lead, was duly burned, and his ashes cast into Tweed to be borne to the cleansing sea.

To the monks succeeded the Barons, the first being the tragically fated house of Home. But side by side with the record of their moorland wars I found a ballad history. Fawn had caught the fancy of the wandering minstrel. The heroine of the ghastly “Riding of Etterick” had eyes “grey as Fawn.” (The other reading “grey as a fawn” is obvious nonsense.) The tryst for true love on Beltane’s E’en was the Fawn side, and it was in the Green Glen that young Brokyn found himself asleep on his return from Fairyland.

“And when ye come to Fawn water,”

says the wise wife in “May Margaret,”

“I bid ye lout fu’ low,
And say three prayers to Christes grace
Afore ye ride the flow.”

In the lovely fragment, “The Thorn of Life,” there is a variant, not given by Child, which tells how on Midsummer morning the lady washed herself with dew “clear as dawn”⁠—an absurd literary phrase which spoils the poem. My emendation “Fawn” is, I take it, certain. In the later riding ballads the name is still more frequent. The doomed raider in “Carlisle Town” swears that Fawn will run red as blood ere his wrongs are forgotten. In “Castle Gay” the dying Home craves, like King David, for a draught of Fawn water; and in “Lord Archibald’s Good Night” there is a strange line about “the holy wells of Fawn.” No doubt the line is corrupt, but the form of the corruption testifies to the spell of the Green Glen.

The Homes of Hardriding marched through disorder and violence to catastrophe. Never more than a hill clan, and kin to no powerful house, they persisted for three centuries by sheer audacity and pride. They held the Fawn glen and built a tower in it, but their real seat was Hardriding in the lower valley. The wave of Douglas aggression flowed round them, but they stoutly resisted, and it was only the power of the great Warden of the Marches that seized Fawnside for the Cauldshaw branch of his house. The battle in which Piers Home died by the hand of young Cauldshaw was fought in the Green Glen. Presently the Douglases were in trouble with the King, and a younger Piers, under a King’s commission, won back his lands and chased Cauldshaw into Northumberland. The Douglas clan was as often as not in treaty with the English Warden, while the Hardriding folk were vehemently Scottish, and, alone of their name, gave a good account of themselves at Flodden. The fortunes of the two houses seesawed so long as lands were won and kept by the strong arm alone. By-and-by came the day of smooth things, when a parchment was more potent than the sword, and both Home and Douglas withered, like hill plants brought into a lowland garden.

It was all an unedifying tale of blood and treason, but in reading it I was struck by one curious fact. Every critical event in the fortunes of the two clans befell in the Green Glen. There the leaders died in battle or in duel, and there a shameless victor celebrated his mastery. It was, so to speak, the citadel, of which the possession was the proof of triumph. It can have had but little value in itself, for the tower by the burn was scarcely a fortalice, and was never seriously dwelled in. Indeed it is referred to not as a castle but as a “bower.” When a Douglas defied a Home he summoned him to meet him by the “Bower o’ Fawn.” This same Bower was the centre of a pretty tale, when for once the bloodstained record emerges into the clear air of pastoral. The Fawn glen did not always pass by war; once it fell to the Douglases by marriage. Marjory of Hardriding, walking one evening by the stream, fell in with the young Douglas, sore wounded in a forest hunt. In the Bower she tended his wounds, and hid him from her fierce clan. Love ripened, and one July morn came the heir of Cauldshaw to Hardriding gates on an errand of peace. But the Home was surly, and the Douglas retired with a bitter denial and an arrow in his corselet. Thereupon Maid Marjory took the matter into her own hands, and rode over the hills to her lover. A gallant lass this, for, after a hurried wedding at the Kirk o’ Shaws, she returned with her man to the Fawn Bower to confront an angry father and six angrier brothers. She offered peace or war, but declared that, if war it should be, she herself would fight in the first rank of