Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
Walter Scott to George Ellis, 27 August 1803
“Lasswade, August 27, 1803.
“Dear Ellis,
“My conscience has been thumping me as hard as if it
had studied under Mendoza, for letting
your kind favour remain so long unanswered. Nevertheless, in this it is like
Launcelot Gobbo’s, but a hard
kind of conscience, as it must know how much I have been occupied with Armies
of Reserve, and Militia, and Pikemen, and Sharpshooters, who are to descend
from Ettrick Forest to the confusion of all invaders. The truth is, that this
country has for once experienced that the pressure of external danger may
possibly produce internal unanimity; and so great is the present military zeal,
that I really wish our rulers would devise some way of calling it into ![]()
| 390 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. | |
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action, were it only on the economical principle of saving
so much good courage from idle evaporation.—I am interrupted by an
extraordinary accident, nothing less than a volley of small shot fired through
the window, at which my wife was five minutes before arranging her flowers. By
Camp’s assistance, who run the
culprit’s foot like a Liddesdale bloodhound, we detected an unlucky
sportsman, whose awkwardness and rashness might have occasioned very serious
mischief—so much for interruption.—To return to Sir Tristrem. As for Thomas’s name, respecting which you
state some doubts,* I request you to attend to the following particulars: In
the first place, surnames were of very late introduction into Scotland, and it
would be difficult to show that they became in general a hereditary
distinction, until after the time of Thomas the Rhymer;
previously they were mere personal distinctions peculiar to the person by whom
they were borne, and dying along with him. Thus the children of Alan Durward were not called
Durward, because they were
not Ostiarii, the circumstance from
which he derived the name. When the surname was derived from property, it
became naturally hereditary at a more early period, because the distinction
applied equally to the father and the son. The same happened with patronymics, both because the name of the father is
usually given to the son; so that Walter Fitzwalter would
have been my son’s name in those times as well as my own; and also
because a clan often takes a sort of general patronymic from one common
ancestor, as Macdonald, &c. &c. But though these
classes of surnames become hereditary at an early period, yet, in the natural
course of things, epithets merely per- * Mr Ellis had
hinted that “Rymer
might not more necessarily indicate an actual poet, than the name
of Taylor does in modern times an actual
knight of the thimble.” |
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sonal are much longer of becoming a
family distinction.* But I do not trust, by any means, to this general
argument; because the charter quoted in the Minstrelsy contains written evidence, that
the epithet of Rymour was peculiar
to our Thomas, and was dropped by his son, who designs
himself simply, Thomas of
Erceldoune, son of Thomas the Rymour of Erceldoune; which I
think is conclusive upon the subject. In all this discussion, I have scorned to
avail myself of the tradition of the country, as well as the suspicious
testimony of Boece, Dempster, &c., grounded probably upon that
tradition, which uniformly affirms the name of Thomas to
have been Learmont or Leirmont, and
that of the Rhymer a personal epithet. This circumstance may induce us,
however, to conclude that some of his descendants had taken that name certain
it is that his castle is called Leirmont’s Tower,
and that he is as well known to the * The whole of this subject has derived much
illustration from the recent edition of the “Ragman’s Roll,” a contribution to the Bannatyne
Club of Edinburgh by two of Sir Walter
Scott’s most esteemed friends, the Lord Chief
Commissioner Adam and
Sir Samuel Shepherd. That
record of the oaths of fealty tendered to Edward I., during his Scotch usurpation, furnishes,
indeed, very strong confirmation of the views which the Editor of
“Sir
Tristrem” had thus early adopted concerning the origin
of surnames in Scotland. The landed gentry, over most of the country,
seem to have been then generally distinguished by the surnames still
borne by their descendants—it is wonderful how little the land seems to
have changed hands in the course of so many centuries. But the
towns’ people have, with few exceptions, designations apparently
indicating the actual trade of the individual; and, in many instances,
there is distinct evidence that the plan of transmitting such names had
not been adopted; for example, Thomas the Tailor
is described as son of Thomas the Smith, or vice versâ. The chief magistrates of the
burghs appear, however, to have been, in most cases, younger sons of
the neighbouring gentry, and have of course their hereditary
designations. This singular document, so often quoted and referred to,
was never before printed in
extenso. |
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| 392 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. | |
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country people by that name, as by the appellation of the
Rhymer.
“Having cleared up this matter, as I think, to every
one’s satisfaction, unless to those resembling not Thomas himself, but his namesake the Apostle,
I have, secondly, to show that my Thomas is the
Tomas of Douce’s MS. Here I must again refer to
the high and general reverence in which Thomas appears to
have been held, as is proved by Robert de
Brunne; but above all, as you observe, to the extreme similarity
betwixt the French and English poems, with this strong circumstance, that the
mode of telling the story approved by the French
minstrel, under the authority of his Tomas, is the very
mode in which my Thomas has told it. Would you desire
better sympathy?
“I lately met by accident a Cornish gentleman, who
had taken up his abode in Selkirkshire for the sake of fishing—and what should
his name be but Caerlion? You will
not doubt that this interested me very much. He tells me that there is but one
family of the name in Cornwall, or as far as ever he heard any where else, and
that they are of great antiquity. Does not this circumstance seem to prove that
there existed in Cornwall a place called Caerlion, giving name to that family?
Caerlion would probably be Castrum Leonense, the chief
town of Liones, which in every romance is stated to have been Tristrem’s country, and from which he
derived his surname of Tristrem de
Liones. This district, as you notice in the notes on
the Fabliaux, was swallowed up by the
sea. I need not remind you that all this tends to illustrate the Caerlioun mentioned by Tomas, which
I always suspected to be a very different place from Caerlion on Uske—which is
no seaport. How I regret the number of leagues which prevented my joining you
and the sapient Douce, and how much
ancient lore I have ![]()
| CORRESPONDENCE WITH ELLIS—1803. | 393 |
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lost. Where I have been, the people talked more of the praises of Ryno and Fillan (not
Ossian’s heroes, but two Forest
greyhounds which I got in a present) than, I verily believe, they would have
done of the prowesses of Sir Tristrem, or
of Esplandian, had either of them appeared
to lead on the levy en masse. Yours
ever,
Sir Frederick William Adam (1784-1853)
The son of William Adam (1751-1839); he served in Spain, fought at Waterloo, and was
afterwards lord high commissioner of the Ionian Islands (1824-1832).
Hector Boece (1465 c.-1536)
Scottish scholar who composed a Latin history of Scotland; he was the first principal of
the University of Aberdeen (1498).
Thomas Dempster (1579-1625)
Scottish humanist and historian whose
Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Scotorum (1627) acquired the reputation of being particularly unreliable.
Francis Douce (1757-1834)
Keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum and friend of Isaac D'Israeli and Samuel
Weller Singer; he published
Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Ancient
Manners, 2 vols (1807).
George Ellis (1753-1815)
English antiquary and critic, editor of
Specimens of Early English
Poets (1790), friend of Walter Scott.
Robert Mannyng of Brunne (1338 fl.)
English poet, author of the verse chronicle
Story of England
written in middle English.
Daniel Mendoza (1765 c.-1836)
Jewish pugilist who defeated Sam Martin, the Bath Butcher; he published
The Art of Boxing (1789).
Ossian (250 fl.)
Legendary blind bard of Gaelic story to whom James Macpherson attributed his poems
Fingal and
Temora.
Sir Samuel Shepherd (1760-1840)
English barrister educated at Merchant Taylors' School and the Inner Temple; he was
king's serjeant (1796), solicitor-general (1813), attorney-general (1817) and a friend of
Sir Walter Scott.
Thomas of Erceldoune (1220 c.-1297 c.)
Scottish poet and prophet; author (or supposed author) of the romance,
Sir Tristrem.
