By ROBERT MACGREGOR.

Though it has often been hastily assumed that the annals of the bow in the northern kingdom would require no more space in the writing than did Olaus Magnus’s famous chapter on the snakes of Iceland, yet this is only true of archery in battle; and it is a curious fact that, though the Scots could never be induced to take to the bow as a military weapon, they became very fond of archery as a pastime, when firearms took the place of bows and arrows as “artilyere,” and there was no further need of statutes forcing the bow into their hands, and forbidding all outdoor amusements that interfered with its practice. It is a curious problem why, in two races so akin as the English and the Lowland Scots, national bent should in this respect take such opposite directions. While the southern yeoman delighted in his long-bow and the sheaf of shafts—“the twelve Scots’ lives” he bore under his girdle—his kinsman foe across the Tweed could never be compelled either by experience or a long series of penal statutes to take to the weapon whose power in skilful hands he had felt on many a bloody field. “Few of thaim was sekyr of archarie,” laments Blind Harry, the minstrel, of Wallace’s followers; and not only was this true of all succeeding Scottish soldiers, but it may be that the same national prejudice can be traced back for centuries before the Blind Minstrel’s time, to the days of the sculptured stones that stud the northeastern districts of Scotland. While on them are many delineations of the hunter aiming his arrow at deer or wild boar, there is only one instance, in all their many scenes of war, in which fighting men are armed with the bow.

When the first James of Scotland returned to his northern kingdom with his “fairest English flower,” Lady Jane Beaufort, he brought back with him from his long captivity a deep impression of the value of the bow. Under the careful instruction of the constable of Pevensey, James had become a fine marksman, and he tried by every means in his power to popularize the exercise at home. He forbade football and other “unprofitable sports;” he ordered every man to shoot at the bow marks near his parish church every Sunday; he chose a bodyguard for himself from among the most skilful archers at the periodical “Wappinshaws;” and in his poem of “Christ’s Kirk on the Green” he published a scathing satire on the clumsiness and inefficiency of his peasantry in archery. What the most energetic of the Stuart kings set his mind to he generally succeeded in; and possibly, if the dagger of “that mischant traitor, Robert Grahame,” had spared his life at Perth, James might have done what so many Scottish kings failed to do; as it was, we see signs of improvement among his people.

The bodyguard that the author of the “King’s Quhair” embodied for himself was the origin of the famous “Royal Company of Archers” that still flourishes vigorously in Edinburgh. So say the present “Bodyguard for Scotland,” though their oldest extant records stop short two centuries and a half of King James’s time.

With James’s assassination at Perth, the new-born zeal for archery seems to have died away; and it is not till we come to the time of James V. that any noteworthy traces of its practice can be found. If we may judge from a story told in Lindsay of Pitscottie’s quaint old chronicle of Scotland, the Commons’ king had some fine archers in his kingdom; for Lindsay tells us how the Scottish marksmen were victorious in what must surely have been the earliest friendly shooting-match between England and Scotland. The occasion of this international match was Henry VIII. sending an embassy with the garter to his nephew, the young King of Scots, in 1534. “In this year,” says Pitscottie, whose spelling we modernize, “came an English ambassador out of England, called Lord William Howard: a bishop and other gentlemen, to the number of three score horse: who were all able wailled [picked] gentlemen for all kinds of pastimes, as shooting, leaping, wrestling, running, and casting of the stone. But they were well essayed in all these before they went home, and that by their own provocation, and they almost ever tint [lost]: while at the last the king’s mother favored the Englishmen, because she was the king of England’s sister; and therefore she took a wager of archery upon the Englishmen’s hands, contrary to the king her son, and any half dozen Scotsmen, either noblemen, gentlemen, or yeomen, that so many Englishmen should shoot against them at ‘rovers,’ ‘butts,’ or ‘prick-bonnet.’ The king hearing of this bonspiel [sporting match] of his mother was well content. So there was laid a hundred crowns, and a tun of wine pandit [staked] on each side. The ground was chosen in St. Andrews. The Scottish archers were three landed gentlemen and three yeomen, to wit: David Wemyss of that ilk, David Arnott of that ilk, and Mr. John Wedderburn, vicar of Dundee. The yeomen were John Thomson in Leith, Steven Tabroner, and Alexander Baillie, who was a piper. [The Scottish archers] shot wondrous near, and won the wager from the Englishmen; and thereafter went into the town, and made a banquet to the queen and the English ambassador, with the whole two hundred crowns and the two tuns of wine.”

Archery from this time became an established pastime in Scotland, amicably sharing men’s leisure with its old enemies golf and football, while with the ladies it took rank as their chief, if not only, outdoor pastime. Queen Margaret herself might possibly have taken her place with credit beside the six Englishmen she backed in this match against her son; for we are told by Leland and others that Henry’s sister was no mean shot, while her unfortunate grandchild, Mary Queen of Scots, was as fond of archery as was her cousin Elizabeth of England and many another lady of that time.