Stories of the Scottish Border — Chapter 31 Barthram's Dirge
*Barthram's Dirge* The story of how this ballad came to be preserved to us is a very interesting one.
A Mr Surtees, who was very interested in the old ballads, used to give work to a poor old Scotswoman to weed in his garden.
Finding that she had learnt ballads in her young days, he encouraged her to talk about them, and this was amongst those which she recited to him.
She told him that it referred to a young man named Bertram or Barthrum, who made love to a young lady against the wish of her brothers.
The cruel brothers slew him, but the lady had him buried at the very spot where he was wont to come to visit her in the days of their love.
Sir Walter Scott thinks that perhaps Barthram was an Englishman and the lady was Scottish, and that the anger of the lady's brothers against him was partly on that account.
It must be remembered that in those stormy days, when Border rivalry was keen, and all the Border chiefs, on both sides, were men of war-like mould, intermarriage between the two races was punishable by Border law.
Each side felt equally that such mixed marriages would sooner or later produce a race that was neither loyal English nor loyal Scotch.
A
spirit of aloofness and rivalry was deliberately encouraged, right up to the time of the union of the two countries under one king.
*BARTHRAM'S DIRGE*
They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig, Beside the Headless Cross, And they left him lying in his blood, Upon the moor and moss.
* * * * * They made a bier of the broken bough, The sauch and the aspin gray, And they bore him to the Lady Chapel, And waked him there all day.
A lady came to that lonely bower, And threw her robes aside, She tore her long yellow hair, And knelt at Barthram's side.
She bathed him in the Lady-Well, His wounds so deep and sair, And she plaited a garland for his breast, And a garland for his hair.
They rowed him in a lily-sheet, And bare him to his earth, And the Gray Friars sung the dead man's mass, As they pass'd the Chapel Garth.
They buried him at the mirk midnight, When the dew fell cold and still, When the aspin gray forgot to play, And the mist clung to the hill.
They dug his grave but a bare foot deep, By the edge of the Ninestone Burn, And they covered him o'er with the heather-flower, The moss and the Lady fern.
A Gray Friar staid upon the grave, And sang till the morning tide, And a friar shall sing for Barthram's soul, While the Headless Cross shall bide.
[#] [#] Mr Surtees observes, on this passage, that in the return made by the commissioners, on the dissolution of Newminster Abbey, there is an item of a Chauntery, for one priest to sing daily _ad crucem lapideam_.
Probably many of these crosses had the like expiatory solemnities for persons slain there.
They certainly did bury, in former days, near the Ninestone Burn, for Sir Walter Scott found there, lying among the heather, a small monumental cross, with initials, which he reverently placed upright.
*Chapter XXXII*
