Highways and Byways in the Border. Lang Andrew
still capable of being leapt across. The run of water is, comparatively speaking, insignificant, not exceeding on the average a cubic foot. This, however, as it proceeds, is every now and then expanded over a considerable surface, and forms a pool of some depth; in fact, the whole stream, from head to foot, pursuing, as it does, a winding course for upwards of twelve miles, is a continued chain of pools, fringed, during the summer, on both sides, with rushes and water-flags, and choked up in many parts with pickerel weed and other aquatic plants. The channel of Leet contains shell marl, and its banks, being hollowed out beneath, afford, independent of occasional vines and tree roots, excellent shelter for trout. Not many years ago the whole course of it was infested with pike, but the visit of some otters, irrespective of the angler's art, has completely cleared them out, and thus allowed the trout, which were formerly scarce, to become more numerous. On the first occasion of my fishing Leet, which happened to be early in April 1841, before the sedge and rushes had assumed the ascendency, I captured, with the fly, twenty-six trout, weighing in all upwards of twenty-nine pounds. Of these, five at least were two-pounders, and there were few, if any, small-sized fish." On another occasion, in June 1846, Stoddart caught in the same water, in four hours, three dozen and five fish, the biggest of which weighed 3 lbs., and a dozen of the others 1 lb. apiece. This stream, in its characteristics so unlike the usual Scottish burn, is not open to the public, but it may be assumed that no such fishing is now obtainable there, any more than it is to be got elsewhere in Scotland. Once they establish themselves and make unchecked headway, pike are very hard to extirpate; it is not in every stream that one finds otters so accommodating, and so careful of the interests of anglers, as they appear to have been in Leet in Stoddart's day.
Coldstream, where Leet joins Tweed, was of old chiefly known for its ford, the first of any consequence above Berwick. It was here that the invading army of Edward the First crossed the river into Scotland in 1296; here, indeed, it was that most armies, English or Scottish, plunged into country hostile to them once they had quitted their own bank of the river; it was here that all Scottish travellers, from royalty to peasant, must halt when southward bound, and await the falling of the waters should Tweed chance to be in flood. Consequently, at a very early date a settlement sprang up, and in it many an historical personage has temporarily sojourned. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder says that as late as his own day an old thatched two storied building in the village was pointed out as the house in which "many persons of distinction, including kings and queens of Scotland, are enumerated by tradition as having resided… occasionally several days at a time," waiting till the river was fordable. It was not till 1766, when Smeaton completed his fine bridge, that any other crossing of the stream than by the ford was possible. In pre-Reformation times, there was in Coldstream a rich Priory of Cistercian Nuns, not a stone of which, however, now remains. But in its little burial ground, between the river and what used to be the garden of the Priory, in 1834 there was dug up a great quantity of human bones, and a stone coffin. The bones were supposed to be probably those of various Scottish persons of rank who fell but a short five or six miles away on the fatal field of Flodden. Tradition tells that the Abbess of that day, anxious to give Christian burial to her slain countrymen, caused the bodies of many Scots of rank and birth to be borne from the field of battle to the Priory, and there laid them to rest in consecrated ground.
Till about 1865 there stood in the village another interesting old house, and on the building which now occupies its site may be read the following inscription: "Headquarters of the Coldstream Guards, 1659; rebuilt, 1865." Here it was that General Monk formed that famous regiment, than which there is but one in the British army whose history goes further back, none which in achievements can surpass it. In one of his works on England at the period of the Restoration of Charles the Second, M. Guizot, the French historian, records that Monk "spent about three weeks at Coldstream, which was a favourable spot for the purpose, as the Tweed was there fordable; but he seems to have found it a dismal place to quarter in. On his first arrival, he could get no provisions for his own dinner, and was obliged to content himself with a quid of tobacco. His chaplains, less easily satisfied, roamed about till they obtained a meal at the house of the Earl of Home, near by." This place, to which the fine instinct of those preachers guided them, was no doubt The Hirsel, which is at no great distance from Coldstream.
There is yet another thing for which this little town was famed in former days. In the time of our grandsires, and indeed, down to as late a date as 1856, when clandestine weddings were prohibited by Act of Parliament, it was a common sight to see a post-chaise come racing over Coldstream Bridge, or, in days before a bridge existed, splashing through the water from the English side, bearing in it some fond couple (like Mr. Alfred Jingle and the Spinster Aunt), flying on love's wings from stony-hearted parent or guardian. Coldstream was almost as famous a place for run-away marriages as was Gretna Green itself. At the former place, the ceremony was usually performed in the toll-house at the Scottish end of the bridge, where "priests" were always in readiness to tie up the run-away couples, and to issue to them thereafter a Certificate of Marriage, such as the following, which is a copy of one issued in 1836: "This is to certify that John Chambers, Husbandman, from the Broomhouse, in the Parish of Chatton, with Mary Walker from Kelso, in the Parish of Kelso, in Roxboroughshire, was married by me this Day. As witness to my hand, William Alexander, Coldstream, 15th Dec., 1836. Witnesses' names: Miss Dalgleish, Miss Archer."
But though for convenience' sake, and probably for speed of dispatch, the toll-house was chiefly patronised, those who had command of money and were not unduly pressed for time could arrange to have their nuptials celebrated in less public fashion than would probably be the case at the bridge-end. It is I believe an undoubted fact that in 1819 Lord Brougham was married in the chief inn of the village.
Those irregular marriages were in the eighteenth century a great source of trouble and annoyance to the Kirk Session of Kelso. A good many of them at one time were celebrated by a certain Mr. Blair, whom the Privy Council had ejected from the incumbency of Coldstream in 1689 because he had refused to pray for the King and Queen, (William and Mary), and would neither read the proclamation of the Estates nor observe the national thanksgiving. Mr. Blair, however, after the loss of his incumbency continued to live in the village, and, it was alleged, was, in the matter of these marriages sometimes over accommodating and good-natured regarding dates; in his certificates he did not always rigidly adhere to the true day of month or year in cases where it might be represented to him that a fictitious date would be less compromising to the contracting parties. Mr. Blair was "sharply rebukit" by the Session. The reverend gentleman was not in Coldstream later than 1728, and he died at Preston, in Northumberland, in 1736, at the age of eighty-five. The following is the epitaph composed on him:
"Here lies the Reverend Thomas Blair,
A man of worth and merit,
Who preached for fifty years and mair,
According to the spirit.
He preached off book to shun offence,
And what was still more rare,
He never spoke one word of sense —
So preached Tammy Blair."
In examining Scottish Border records of those times, nothing strikes one more than the power of the Kirk Sessions; it is indeed hard to imagine a country more priest ridden than Scotland in the eighteenth century. The "Sabbath" was then as easy to break as a hedge-sparrow's egg, and there were a thousand – to modern eyes not very heinous – ways of breaking it. What in the way of punishment may have been meted out to the unfortunate who fell asleep under the infliction of a long, dull, prosy sermon in a stuffy, ill-ventilated church on a warm summer's day, one hardly cares to conjecture, so rigidly enforced was the duty of listening to sermons; whilst to be abroad "in time of sermon" was sin so heinous that Elders were, so to speak, specially retained to prowl around and nose out offenders. Walking on the Sabbath day – "vaguing," they called it, – was looked on with horror, and called for stern reprimand. In 1710, it was observed that sundry persons in Kelso were "guiltie of profaning the Sabbath by walking abroad in the fields after sermons," and the Session called on the parish minister to "give them a general reproof out of the pulpit the next Loird's Day, and to dehort them from so doing in time coming, with certification that the Session will take strict notice of any one guiltie of it." For less than