THE DUMFRIESSHIRE “AUXENT”

The Dumfries coach branched off at Gretna, but nowadays only an occasional motor-car halts in the village, its driver perplexed by the multiplicity of roads, and, if he be a Southron, no less perplexed by the broad Dumfriesshire accent in which his inquiries are answered. For, of a sudden—as suddenly as the dividing-line between the two countries—Scotch have succeeded to English people. At Longtown even, the people are English; here and henceforward Scottish talk and Scottish physiognomies, if not the national dress, are prominent. There is no mingling, to this day.

I do not suppose the Dumfriesshire folk will realise the existence of their Doric. They will be like the friends of that farmer who went southwards and on returning home complained that the “Enklish” made “remairks” about his speech. ‘Mon,’ said they, ‘we didna ken ony o’us had ony auxent at a’.’

Scotland was of old an almost unknown land to the English, and indeed it largely so remained until Queen Victoria’s preference for North Britain brought about a fashionable exploitation of Caledonia; but such ignorance as that of the lady who declared she “never went to Scotland because the crossing made her sea-sick” cannot ever have been common.

Thomas Kirke, who surely, from his name, should himself have been a Scot, published in 1679 a “Modern Account of Scotland” which was either a joke (in bad taste) or an attempt to exploit this ignorance. “Scotland,” he wrote, “is compared to a louse, whose legs and engrailed edges represent the promontories and buttings-out into the sea, with more nooks and angles than the most conceited of my Lord Mayor’s Custards; nor does the comparison determine here; A Louse preys upon its own Fosterer and Preserver, and is productive of those Minute Animals called Nitts; so Scotland, whose Proboscis joyns too close to England, has suckt away the nutriment from Northumberland.”

Thomas Kirke, it will be observed, did not love Scotsmen. But he could be a good deal more abusive than the specimen already quoted.

“Nemo ne impune LÆcessit,” he continues: “true enough: whoever deals with them shall be sure to smart for it.... The thistle was nicely placed there, partly to show the ‘fertility’ of the country, Nature alone producing plenty of these gay flowers; and partly as an emblem of the people, the top thereof having some colour of a flower, but the bulk and substance of it is only sharp, and poysonous pricks.”

A good deal of fine, unreliable information may be culled from the classic pages of Thomas Kirke. Thus, “Scotland is from Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, King of Egypt. That the Scots derived from the Egyptians is not to be doubted, from divers considerable circumstances: the plagues of Egypt being entailed upon them: that of Lice (being a Judgment unrepealed) is an ample testimony. These loving animals accompanied them from Egypt, and remain with them to this day, never forsaking them (but as Rats leave a House) till they tumble into their Graves. The Plague of Biles and Blains is hereditary to them, as a distinguishing mark from the rest of the World, which (like the Devil’s cloven hoof) warns all men to beware of them. The Judgment of Hail and Snow is naturalized and made free Denizan here, and continues with them from the Sun; first ingress into Aries, till he has passed the 30th degree of Aquary.

“The Plagues of Darkness was said to be thick darkness, to be felt, which most undoubtedly these people have a share in: the darkness being appliable to their gross and blockish understandings (as I had it from a scholar of their own Nation).

“Woods they have none: that suits not with the frugality of the people, who are so far from propagating any, that they destroy those they had upon this politick State Maxim, that Corn will not grow on the land pestered with its Roots, and their branches harbour Birds, Animals above their humble conversation, that exceeds not that of Hornless Quadrupedes; marry, perhaps some of their houses lurk under the shelter of a plump of trees (the Birds not daring so high a presumption) like Hugh Peters Puss in her Majesty, or an Owl in an Ivy-Bush. Some fir-woods there are in the High-lands, but so inaccessible, that they serve for no other use than Dens for those ravenous Wolves with 2 hands, that prey upon their neighbourhood and shelter themselves under this Covert; to whom the sight of a stranger is as surprizing as that of a Cockatrice. The Vallies for the most part are covered with Beer or Bigg, and the Hills with Snow.

“If the air was not so pure and well-refined by its agitation, it would be so infected with the stinks of their Towns and the steam of the Nasty Inhabitants that it would be pestilential and destructive.

“The people are Proud, Arrogant, Vainglorious boasters; Bloody, Barbarous and Inhuman Butchers. Couzenage and Theft is in perfection among them, and they are perfect English-haters. Their spirits are so mean that they rarely rob, but they take away life first. Lying in Ambush, they send a brace of bullets through the traveller’s body, and to make sure work they sheath their Durks in his liveless trunk.

“Their cruelty descends to their Beasts, it being a custom in some places to feast upon a living Cow. They tie it in the middle of them, near a great fire, and then cut collops off this poor living beast, and broil them on the fire, till they have mangled her all to pieces: nay, sometimes they will only cut off as much as will satisfy their present Appetites, and let her go till their greedy Stomachs call for a new supply: such horrible cruelty as can scarce be paralleled in the whole world.”

“The Highlanders talk only Erse, the Lowlanders understand and talk English, but they are so currish that if a stranger enquires the way in English they will certainly answer in Erse, and find no other language until you force it from them with a Cudgel.”

Let us hope, for the travellers’ own sakes, that they did not take this advice. But let us follow Mr. Kirke indoors. This, according to him, was a Scottish interior: “To enter a kitchen is to enter Hell alive: the stew and stink enough to suffocate you,” while “Musick they have, but not the Harmony of the Spheres, but loud Terrene noises, like the bellowing of beasts: the loud Bagpipe is their chief delight.”

As for the inns: “Change-houses they call them, poor small cottages, where you must be content to take what you find, perhaps Eggs with Chicks in them, and some Long Cale; at the better sort of them a dish of chop’d Chickens, which they esteem a dainty dish, and will take it unkindly if you do not eat very heartily of it.”

Oddly enough, he says nothing of porridge. But St. Jerome attributed the heresy of Pelagius to his feeding upon oatmeal porridge, which may perhaps be responsible for more religious difficulties than we are aware of. The heresy of Pelagius (whose real name was Morgan, and himself therefore presumably a Welshman), was divided into six points, chief of them being what one is tempted to characterise as the “common-sense” view that Adam’s sin was confined to his own person. The daring Pelagius was condemned, A.D. 418, as an heretic, but he lived on, notwithstanding, to the age of threescore years and ten: a jolly, fat man, by all accounts, and of distinctly anti-celibate views.

It is rarely, nowadays, you see a plaid, and not often a kilt. Nowhere is the sight now seen that once astonished travellers: the sight of countryfolk walking barefoot, carrying shoes and stockings in their hands, for sake of economy, until they reached the outskirts of a town, where, for sake of appearance, they put them on. The once poor country has grown a great deal beyond that. But kilts formed the only wear at the time of the rebellion of 1745, when one unhappy detachment of rebels found them rather embarrassing. An English subaltern, in command of a few men, had the good fortune to secure a numerically superior body of rebels, and was sorely at a loss what to do with them on the march to Carlisle; being afraid that they would on their way, finding themselves more powerful, turn upon his small force and wreak a terrible revenge. The happy idea struck him of having the waist-bands of the prisoners’ kilts cut before the march was begun: and thus they went; the Scotsmen being too busily engaged in holding their petticoats up to be in any way dangerous.

Only on festive occasions is the kilt in evidence, in all its barbaric varieties of tartan. The Royal Stuart tartan is an eye-searing affair of bright red, with a pattern of green, black, blue, and white stripes, calculated to make an Æsthete faint. The Macmillan tartan would please the old negress who wanted “nothing startling: just plain red and yellow.” It is bright yellow with a plaid pattern in light red. One of the Macdonald clans sports a nice thing in red with bright green patterns. Such a taste in dress seems oddly at variance with the grey, Calvinistic religious temper of Scotland, and a direct challenge to dull northern skies.

To argue from this old love of colour in dress a corresponding delight in flowers would be a mistake, for rural Scotland has few indeed of the English type of cottage, with clustered roses and jessamine and a very wealth of colour in its old-fashioned garden. All through Dumfriesshire and Lanarkshire, eighty-five miles along the road to Glasgow, the country cottages are merely un-ornamental living-boxes, and flower-gardens are vanities not indulged in. Perhaps we see in this, again, the Scottish practical character that has advanced Scotland so far along the road to material wealth, has made Glasgow what it is, and has set Scotsmen in commanding positions.

The proverbial tenacity of the Scot has fathered many good stories, of which that of the farmer returning from market is one of the best. Attacked by three burly ruffians for sake of the gold he was supposed to be carrying, he fought desperately, felling one of his assailants with a blow that knocked him senseless, until at last a well-delivered butt in the stomach laid him low; whereupon the footpads went thoroughly over his pockets. But searching diligently though they did, all they could find was a sixpenny-piece, instead of the expected wealth.

“My goodness!” exclaimed one of them, feeling his bruised face, “if he’d had eighteen-pence he would have killed the three of us.”

The pawky “canny” qualities of the Scots were never more admirably illustrated than on that occasion in the football season of 1905, when the visit of the New Zealand team, known as the “All Blacks,” was under arrangement. The Glasgow authorities had not at the time arrived at anything like a proper idea of the New Zealanders’ qualities, nor of the great assemblage of spectators that any game in which they were engaged would attract; and so they cautiously refused the offer of half the gate-money and stipulated for a guarantee of £50 or so, conceding the “gate” to the visitors.

An agreement was arrived at upon that basis, but as the season advanced and the extraordinary triumphs of the New Zealanders elsewhere made it abundantly evident that the “gate” at the Glasgow match would be phenomenal, the Glaswegians made heroic attempts to alter the arrangement—without success.

An incredible number of saxpences went bang over that affair, for the Glasgow folks received £50 and paid over £1,000, taken at the gates. And the New Zealanders won the game, in addition to pouching the boodle. Scotland was sair humeeliated the day, ye ken, and showed it sourly. The New Zealanders came without a welcome into the city, were “booed” in the field, and left amid something like a hostile demonstration.