Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (V. 1) Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION [edin. 1802.] From the remote period, when the Roman province was contracted by the ramparts of Severus, until the union of the Kingdoms, the Borders of Scotland formed the stage, upon which were presented the most memorable conflicts of two gallant nations. The inhabitants, at the commencement of this era, formed the first wave of the torrent, which assaulted, and f1nally overwhelmed, the barriers of the Roman power in Britain. The subsequent events, in which they were engaged, tended little to diminish their military hardihood, or to reconcile them to a more civilised state of society. We have no occasion to trace the state of the Borders during the long and obscure period of Scottish history, which preceded the accession of the Stuart family. To illustrate a few ballads, the earliest of which is hardly coeval with James v., such an inquiry would be equally difficult and vain. If we may trust the Welsh bards, in their account of the wars betwixt the Saxons and Danes of Deira and the Cumraig, imagination can hardly form any idea of conflicts more desperate, than were maintained, on the Borders, between the ancient British and their Teutonic invaders. Thus, the Gododin1 describes the waste and devastation of mutual havoc, in colours so glowing, as strongly to recall the words of Tacitus: 'Et ubi solitudinem jaciunt, pacem appellant? At a later period, the Saxon families, who fled from the exterminating sword of the Conqueror, with many of the Normans themselves, whom discontent and intestine feuds had driven into exile, began to rise into eminence upon the Scottish Borders. They brought with them arts, both of peace and of war, unknown in Scotland; and, among their descendants, we soon number the most powerful Border chiefs. Such, during the reien of the l...Read More