CHAPTER XII WOMEN OF LETTERS IN the ... - Electric Scotland

SCOTTISH MEN OF LETTERS
minstrelsy. It strikes a familiar chord, it is homely; but there is a touch of pathos in
it which gives it life, especially in the recurring burden of the words, which have
fallen from many lips in later generations, to express their own emotions, and at
times came bitterly from the lips of Robert Burns*:
Werena my heart licht I wad dee.
*[When a friend asked Burns to cross the street at Dumfries and join a party of ladies and gentlemen, with whom he
had lost caste, “Nay, my young friend, that is all over now,” he rejoined, and he quoted Lady Grisell’s verses:
His bonnet stood aye fu’ round on his brow,
His auld ane look’d better than ony ane’s new;
And now he lets ’t wear ony gait it will hing
And casts himsel’ down upon the corn-bing.
Oh! were we young now as we ance had been,
We would hae been gallopin’ down on yon green,
And buskin’ it ower the lily-white lea;
And werena my heart licht I wad dee.
Chambers’s Life and Works, iv. 18.]
High-born ladies of those days did not keep aloof from the common affairs
of the common people; they spoke the broad Scots tongue themselves, and the work
of byre and barn, the wooings of servants and ploughmen, were of lively interest to
them in their parlour and drawing-room, and did not seem themes unworthy of their
verse. This we find in the fragmentary verses of Lady Grisell:
The ewe buchtin’s bonnie, baith e’ening and morn,
When our blithe shepherds play on the bag, reed, and horn;
While we’re milking, they’re lilting baith pleasant and clear,
But my heart’s like to break when I think on my dear.
The scenes of the ewe-milking in Lady Grisell’s verse and in Miss Jean
Elliot’s “Flowers of the Forest” are reminiscent of an aspect of rural life which has
long ago vanished. Up to the end of the century it was still the practice of the
farmers of Ettrick forest to milk ewes for seven or eight weeks after the lambs were
weaned. [About 2 quarts of milk were given by a score of ewes. If out of a flock of 50 score of ewes 36 score
were milked every morning and evening, the farm got 70 quarts to make into cheese. Latterly it became usual for the
farmers to let the milking of the ewes at l½d. a week or 1s. for the season (Craig-Brown’s Selkirkshire, i. 408).] In
the evening were hundreds of ewes all gathered, and the voices of the peasantry
would be heard “lilting” while the men “buchted” (folded) the sheep, and the
women sat on their “leglans” milking. Those were days when the women as they
worked sang songs which their grandmothers had sung before them, and when men