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CHEVY CHASE (Bob Coltman) Going up in the mountains, where the tall trees grow so green, High up on Chevy Chase, to see what can be seen, Come on with me, my friends, away up in the hills, Arrow and bow upon our arm, to see what we can kill. How lovely is the weather, how beautiful is the way, Pity's the child that's not been born to see our hunting day, Percy looked upon his left, he looked upon his right, He wared he seen old Douglas a-coming with his face as black as night. Hello, Douglas, have you come to kill some deer? Douglas cried, Who give you leave to do your hunting here? 1 don't need any leave, my friend, from you or anyone else, I mean to hunt here how I like, I mean to please myself. 'Twas there they had a battle of fifty gallant men, That came to take the lives of deer and stayed to lose their own, Men of land and men of hand and men of honory, And if their legs was cut in two they'd fight upon their knees. An arrow come a-flying, as true as it had eyes, It struck poor Douglas cruel hard, he fell and he could not rise, Montgomery come running, he flung his spear so hard, It took poor Percy in the breast and pierced him by a yard. Word come to King Jamie that Douglas he had died, And Percy in his splendor, and all their men likewise, Lieutenants of the marches, the best that ever I see, I have a hundred captains I could lose more easily. But I shall have a sweet revenge, and I shall have my way, For each of their two murdered heads a hundred men shall die, The widows come a-weeping to carry their men away, Pity the child that's ever been born to see this hunting day. The Hunting of the Cheviot, No. 162 The tale of the chase through the Cheviot hills ending in its tragic border battle is one of the great classics: 60-plus stanzas in the original, already an old and well-known ballad by the middle of the 16th century. The history of it seems to stem from the Battle of Otterburn, celebrated in its own ballad (No. 161), which was one of a long series of fracases between the belligerent border freeholders of northern England and southern Scotland. In the middle of August 1388 a muster of Scots barons and knights invaded England, purposing to attack a number of towns; James Earl of Douglas commanded a detachment of picked men-at-arms and archers moving on Newcastle. When they got there, Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland, rallied the English in defense, but in a running fight his banner was captured. Enraged, Percy followed to Douglas's camp at Otterburn, apart from the main Scots force, and on the 19th, after supper, he struck. By the light of the rising moon the two sides engaged, shouting their Percy! and Douglas! battle cries. The attackers had the early 'advantage; Douglas, trapped, tried to hew his way clear with a two-handed axe, but was borne down by spears. Percy wasn't killed as the ballad claims, but was taken prisoner by Lord Montgomery; he did not die until 1403, but the ballad kills him off for symmetry's sake. The Hunting of the Cheviot makes it a much more sylvan scene and recasts the carnage as a deer hunt in the Cheviots, a clash of shooting rights. Percy and Douglas are crusty old wardens; the fight begins almost without pretext, goring the forest in a manner worthy of Culloden or Flanders, and King Harry (Henry IV, though the dating's wrong by a decade) vows revenge. The vow did, incidentally, bear fruit, as kings' vows are all too likely to do, in the battle of Homildon 14 years later. The courtly poet Sir Philip Sidney reported that he heard the ballad sung by a blind fiddler in about 1580, though he could not help reflecting how much nicer it would have sounded if it were "trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!" Well ... it was my pleasure, also lacking Pindar's gorgeous eloquence, to make this brief telling singable (at the cost of enormous detail) and to bring Cheviot's embattled hills again alive. @Scots Child #162 filename[ CHEVCHA2 SOF Feb07 |
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