J. W. Buchan and Rev. H. Paton. Published 1925-7.
Of the name Stobo there are eighteen different spellings of which the earliest is STOBOC (AD 1116-1125). The present form was in use by 1473. Characteristic variations like STOBHOPE (1208) and STOBHOWE have suggested that the name may mean The Hollow of Stumps, as if from the charred trunks after a forest fire, or from the wrath of first cultivators having to stub out the roots. It has been translated Thorn Dale from the imagined effulgence of the native hawthorns', blackthorns', buckthorns' greeting to early cleric visitors. But such derivations may be little better than the old schoolmaster's Sto, Lat., I stand, and Beau, Fr., Beautiful. The two syllables of STOBOC like such neighbour place-names as Dreva, Dawyck, Happrew, may have a Celtic or Saxon significance quite alien from the Scoto-English sounds.
Originally Stobo comprised the whole region from the Wells of Tweed down to the confluence of Tweed with Lyne Water. The growth of the parochial system delimited now one parish then another - Tweedsmuir Drumelzier, Glenholm, Broughton, Dawyck, Lyne - and left the plebania, the mother parish, within its present narrow boundaries. Not so narrow however, as to justify the tourists' jibe that there is room for nothing but the three R's - road, railway and river. The parish, stretching up side valleys and over uplands of pasture, forest and heather to beyond the skyline north of Tweed, has a breadth of about 5 and 3/4 miles to 7 miles in length. The area is given as 10,309 acres.
The mean elevation of the parish is high - the church and post office are 6oo feet, Easter Happrew 700, Stobo Castle 750, Dreva 800. It may be noted for comparison that the height of Arthur's Seat (Edinburgh) is 822 feet. The hills are many but of no great eminence. The highest, Pyked Stane is only 1872 feet. Where the lower heights excel is in the sonorous dignity of their ancient names Penvalla, Penvinney, Trahenna, Dromore.
The earliest vestiges of the life of man in Stobo are the five circular camps - now almost faded from the landscape - at Muirburn, Dreva, Kersknowe, Hog-hill and Torbank. Unlike the Roman camp at Lyne, they are distinctly British and may have been here centuries before the Romans first saw Tweed. Neither are they camps. They were forts, but only as every cluster of houses had to be a fortress then. It is likely that they were just the pristine villages built and intrenched high enough above river and marsh to suffer neither from floods nor from the unobserved approach of an enemy. Kersknowe - probably Caerknowe, Fort-hill - seems to have been our largest town. Its spacious circumvallations still evince where most of the parishioners of Stobo sheltered before the dawn of history. The great difficulty of this, as of every theory of their ever having been inhabited, is the amazing fact that in not one of them is there any spring or any trace of a well. To Kersknowe, for example, all the water apparently must have been carried up the long steep slope a couple of furlongs from, at nearest, the spring above Easterknowe farm. It may be that our forebears were more expert than we imagine in the art of finding water and more abstemious in its use. But so far as one nowadays can reconstruct the situation, the water supply, however stinted, must have entailed constant toil in peace - and in war a recurrent heroism to rival that of David's mighty men fetching water 'from the Well of Bethlehem which is by the gate.'
'That ditch Tweed!' Romance and the 'tales of a grandfather' had in the expectant imagination of a young Scot-American equalled the river of the Scottish Border with the Amazon. But, small though it be, Tweed here, as in all its reaches, whether overarched with trees or 'gliding the bare hills under' whether hurrying along in sweeping current and sparkling ford or loitering in the deep Bummel Pool where of old lived the water kelpie, owns a peculiar, almost a personal grace, not only delighting eye and ear, but enchanting the inner sense with a charm beyond the genius of artist to depict or of poet to express.
Frequent floods used to inundate and devastate the meadows until about 1850, when the river was embanked with a stone dyke and sloping earthen ramparts from below Crownhead to Burnfoot. Sir Graham Graham Montgomery, who had this done, took great pride in it. Regularly on his return from London his first walk was along the embankment to make sure that no rabbit burrows or dilapidation threatened its stability. The normal floods at Lammas, Yule, and so forth have been largely abated by Talla Reservoir retaining enough of the surplus rainfall to keep spates in moderation. Only after a wet season like 1920, when Talla is already full, is there any great flood on this reach of Tweed.
Salmon poaching on winter nights with torch or lantern and leister (a three-pronged barbed fork) or Carlisle Fly (a lump of lead bristling with large hooks to be jerked into the fish when it is lying fascinated by the light) used to be so common that Sir G. Graham Montgomery, when asked if there were any salmon poachers among the people on his estate, said they were all poachers but two: 'The minister of the parish, they say, never poached; and I have given it up.' The sport, for sport it may be called, since on occasion it diverted The Ettrick Shepherd and his friend the Shirra himself, has just that spark of adventure which makes it a mighty lure for boys brought up on Tweed. The hazards are considerable. The take is neither 'bonnie fish nor halesome fairin' and it is wasteful inhumanity to kill a fine creature in its breeding season.
Trout fishing once upon a time was good here. The old soutar, Robbie Hope, who lived in a half of the Crownhead Cottage, is said to have justified any evening the description in the Noctes of a successful angler: 'Creel fou, pouches fou and a lot o' great muckle anes hangin' on a string.'
But baskets now are seldom good until in town next week. Trouting was ruined by the intelligent miners. For scientifically exploding a dynamite cartridge or two in a pool, they were rewarded by every trout in that pool drifting down to their net ready for the fishmonger. Against this sort of thing the riparian proprietors combining in 1908, closed the water except to holders of permits, and employed a watchman, who has been on duty ever since. Sport in some measure has improved. But what with the drainage and reclamation of back-water marshes, the long depletion, the ladling out of gravid trout voracious when the waters are rising in autumn floods, the otters, the herons, the graylings gluttonous of limited rations, the old bull trout turning cannibal and all the other ills that trout flesh is heir to, much water will get over the Sheriff's Ford before our reach of river regains its old time plenty.
Tweed was completely frozen over in the ten weeks frost which began about the New Year 1895 and curlers had a game on the river - the bachelors being sent on first to make sure that the ice was bearing.
The bridge over Lyre Water at Lyne Toll, 'a stone bridge with three arches' was so dilapidated in 1715 that three years later it was replaced by the present bridge built out of the vacant stipend of Peebles parish. Soon after this entrance to Stobo on the east had been secured the exit on the west was expedited by the building of the bridge over Biggar Water at Dreva Craig-end. Presently the Harrow burn beside the kirk was bridged. It was repaired in 1778 'for access to Church and School' at a cost of one shilling. After the completion of the Castle - perhaps about 1815 - a bridge was built over Stobo burn; and thus, not much more than a century since, the ordinary convenience of an unbroken highway through the parish, clear above miry hollows and flooded fords, was put on a solid basis
Over Lyne the Five-Mile Bridge was in process in 1775 'on the new road leading from Peebles to Glasgow'; the Beggar-Path Bridge, being part of Montgomery's new route over the Meldons to Edinburgh, dates from about 1825.
But Tweed in Stobo was bridge-less as The Bible until the builders of the railway, 1864, closed the Crown Ford and erected at the Crownhead, a bow-string iron girder bridge. Insecure for heavy traffic, it was replaced by the present cumbrous reinforced concrete structure begun in 1913, interrupted for the war, and finished in 1921. There are besides two wire-suspension footbridges, one at the Sheriff's Ford and one opposite the station; a footbridge at the Willow Crook, and two wooden farm-service bridges, one for Easter Dawyck, the other at Dawyck Mill - the latter being put up in 1917 by and for the German prisoners of war encamped at the Lour.
'There is a road,' wrote Armstrong in 1775, 'called Stobo Hedges justly execrated by every traveller where difficulty in passing for a mile and a half through a continued mass of mortared earth, confined between two hedges is truly pitiable.' This public nuisance, however he adds 'is now likely to be remedied.' It was remedied forthwith. The hedges themselves were spared; but between them a first-rate road, on Macadam's then novel system, was constructed for the Lord Chief Baron's frequent visits to his new estate. Along this road, prior to railway facilities, a waggoner working his way through fair and foul once a week between Peebles and Tweedsmuir, supplied the sole public conveyance to and from the parish.
Right-of-way continues in the old Thief's Road, which, after passing through Manor comes by one of its branches over the east shoulder of Scrape and enters Stobo at the Deid Wife, an opening in the boundary dyke where, according to tradition, an Irishwoman, fleeing with her husband from the battle of Philiphaugh, was overtaken and along with her husband killed by Leslie's troopers. The trail winding down past the Lour, meets 'the old thoroughfare between east and west.'
Here halt a moment and note that the 'old thoroughfare between cast and west' seems to have proceeded from Peebles over the Sware, up Manor, over the Glack, down to the peel tower which stood at Easter Dawyck, and thence along by the still evident right-of-way and open lane above Dawyck Mill, past Dawyck Kirk, below Tinnies, and on over Tweed at Drumelzier Ford. By this unlevelled and hindersome highway Montrose and his surviving cavaliers, fugitive from Philiphaugh (13th September, 1645), with Sir John Dalziel as guide, rode so early on the morning after the battle that passing through Biggar they had crossed the Clyde by break of day.
Return now to the Thief's Road. After crossing 'the old thoroughfare' above Dawyck Mill it forded Tweed and coincided with the present main road eastward. Before going over Lyne Water at the point where the Beggar Path Bridge now stands, it owned a resting-place, a sort of Mumper's Dingle, where from time immemorial wanderers assumed the right to encamp: it is only a dozen years or so since this was enclosed and planted. Thence the track wound on by Lyne and Linton through the Cauld Stane Slap into Midlothian. Besides being the Thief's Road, 'the usual pass of that formidable banditti, the Moss Troopers,' it was the regular route for shepherds and drovers going to markets and trysts as well as for smugglers, pedlars and all wayfarers to and from the south west. 'The king might come the cadgers' road.'
When Stobo first appears in the written records, the proprietors of the land were in some degree proprietors also of the tillers of the soil. But already such rights of ownership were becoming questionable. This comes out in a charter 2 of date 1225 by which the new laird of Stobo, the Bishop of Glasgow, acquired from Mr. Adam 'whatever right we had in Gillemil, son of Bowein, and his son Gillemor, and Buy, and Gillys, son of Eldrid, quitclaimed for ever to the foresaid Bishop and his successors.' The acknowledged indefiniteness of the claim 'whatever right we had' indicates the rising apprehension of man's right to liberty. This continued to rise so steadily that the agricultural labourer attained his freedom centuries before his brothers in the coal-mines (1799) attained to theirs. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the land was let to tenant farmers usually in small holdings of 'ane ox-gang,' about 13 acres, sometimes of two or three, very rarely of so much as four ox-gangs. The dwelling-houses and 'steadings' of these crofts, instead of being dotted about each on its own little plot, were grouped together for economy and mutual protection in 'towns' whence the farmers radiated to their work. Half-a-dozen such holdings were ranged round Easter Town Knowe and as many more about the Harrow.
The lease was in most cases granted for life, and succession was nearly always continued in the family. The usual cause of a change of tenant is: 'Wacand be the decesse of hys fathyr,' 'Wakand be the decesse of hys modir' or 'be deces of his bruther.' Two brothers might be in partnership, as in 1545 were James and Thomas Johnstone for the Mill and Mill lands - one belike as farmer, the other as miller. Often a woman was tenant. In 1539 'Mareon Pruves is rentallit in ane oxgang of land vacand be the decesse of hyr fadyr and consend of hyr modyr.' Katryn Curry, Margret Dixon and Agnes Johnstone worked their own farms. It was a hereditary valour which, in the absence of the men during the late war, enabled the women to 'carry on' so sturdily. A widow might not only continue in her husband's farm, but, after proper procedure, might call in a second husband to her comfort: 'Gevin our licence to Malie Stewart to marie and to bruk the oxingang of land that hyr husband deit in rentall of notwithstanding our statutes in the contrar ' (1555).
The term oxgang reminds us that not very long ago ploughing was done here by oxen. So recently as the end of the eighteenth century it was argued by the minister of the parish in the first Statistical Account that where the land is 'cross and stoney,' oxen do better in the plough than horses, being less expensive, less restive, and 'able to continue in the yoke two hours longer.' The old practice, however, disappeared like the kilt before trousers when the masterly and beautiful equipment of the modern two-horse plough enabled the ploughman without assistant, whip, or goad both to hold the plough and guide the team.
Other land measures mentioned in the records affecting Stobo are:
'a sax schilings three penny land,'
'a twelf schilings sax penny land,'
'a saxtene schilings awcht penny land.'
One entry has a fine jumble of Latin, French, Cockney, and Scots:
'1511 Robertus Zong rentalizatur in una bovata videlicet ane hoxgang terrarum de Stobo.'
Eight ox-gangs made one 40s. land (104 acres). Brownsland near Wester Happrew is short for Brown's forty shilling land.
Four 40s. lands made one Davach (Dawyck) - 416 acres.
Through the steadily improving organisation of industry, small holdings - with the bondage of the small-holder's self, wife, and children to the small-holder, and the expense of about as much time at ins and outs as for the actual ploughing of the diminutive rigs - became obsolete as the ox-plough. That was before there was an agricultural labourer's vote for politicians to palter with. By the beginning of the nineteenth century farms large enough for economic management had become general. About that time the farmer of Easter Happrew was Charles Alexander, one of a family which has farmed land in Stobo for four hundred years. An ancestor of his in 1537 was 'rentallit in ane ox gang land callit Bullis Croft,' and to-day the name of one of his descendants is in the lease of Easter Happrew. This Charles Alexander is noted in The View of Agriculture. for having 'inclosed and subdivided with stone dikes and brought into high cultivation ... no less than 120 acres of arable land.' Similarly, the then minister of the parish awards himself the credit of having 'inclosed the most part of the glebe with stone walls and quick-set hedges at his own expense.' These walls seldom strike us otherwise than as having grown up by themselves like mushrooms. Far more than we realise are we indebted to the old - time farmers for the immense labour they devoted to clearing the boulders off the fields and building those endless lines of dry-stone dykes which have done almost as much as drainage for the benefit of agriculture.
At present the parish is worked under eight farms, all on a nineteen years lease - the total annual rent being £2,703 8s. 1d., some advance on the £12 6s. 8d. paid to Edward I.
The numbers of live stock are now: sheep 5,530, an increase (since the year 1800) of 330; cattle 233, an increase of 43. Horses, now 57, show, because of rail and motor traction, a decrease of 24. Pigs, from none in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and perhaps forty in the last quarter of the nineteenth, are now twelve.
Although the soil is in general light and gravelly the crops are fair and, in a year of generously regulated rainfall, good. The rainfall varies from 35 to 45 inches per annum. The average fertility may be set at 4 and 1/2 quarters grain, 7 tons tubers to the acre. The principal crops are oats, potatoes, turnips, and hay. Occasionally a few acres of barley are sown. Rape also is an occasional crop. Lint, which was once extensively grown - there was a lint-mill near Lyne Toll Bridge - ceased with the practice of using it as thatch.
Next to pasture for sheep the principal product of the parish is timber. Where Pennecuik in 1715 found only 'some few bushes of trees about the houses of the gentry and not one wood worth naming in all this open and windy country,' sixty years later, when Dr. Johnson's walking stick was the finest piece of timber in Scotland, and where therefore of course he lost it, Armstrong notes the growth of 'extensive plantations which to a succeeding generation may afford no small degree of profit and pleasure.' Since then forestry has been developed with diligence and success. In 1882, Stobo Manse was so densely shrouded with trees that Robert Louis Stevenson, who meant to spend a summer there found a fortnight of it more than enough. When a gap in the lime-tree avenue was made by a gale in the eighties, the blown trees were shored up by Lady Graham Montgomery's directions, and being mounded round with earth and boulders, they are as stately to-day as their undisturbed comrades. Here are many grand individual trees, conspicuous clumps and far extending woodlands.
Besides the normal timber crop passing regularly into the market,' there was an enormous clearance during the war. The labour of German prisoners, encamped in comfortable wooden huts at the Lour, was utilised to fell and manufacture timber; and, as there were a hundred and twenty of them, they did in spite of themselves wear through some work - notwithstanding a fine bonfire one night which destroyed a valuable steam engine, saw-mill, and piles of manufactured wood. Small groups of sturdy Scotsmen put on rail very much more. Many thousands of tons were despatched to supply the country's need. Large spaces which had been densely wooded are at present resting in fox-glove and bracken. But enough of the forest remains to make this still a beautifully wooded valley.
Cottage gardens are fairly, a few of them admirably, kept. The annual flower show was a great success in pre-war times; but in the course of, the war the show was stopped and its money in the bank disbursed among war charities.
As many as a thousand brace of grouse have been shot of a season on Stobo moors, the average being about 700 brace. Pheasants thrive splendidly. Even during the war when none were specially reared or hand-fed the bag was about 200 brace. Partridges are comparatively scarce sixty or seventy brace being reckoned good. A few wood-cock, about thirty wild-duck and a score each of black-cock and snipe vary the annual bag. Although blue hares are numerous on the hills, the brown hare has never done well here. But rabbits! In 1802 it was thought worth noting that they were found wild in the sand-hills of West Linton. And within living memory an old man told of his boyhood wonder at seeing a rabbit in Stobo for the first time. Now they are extraordinarily plentiful, many thousand couple being consigned yearly to city markets.
Deer are seen very rarely - a native roe-deer occasionally or a Japanese escape from Dawyck Park. There has to be a fox-drive with a kill of three or four foxes about the end of every winter to protect the coming lambs. Magpies and squirrels, common in Stobo thirty years ago, have disappeared. Weasels, so common in the days of turf dykes and few gamekeepers, that folk lived in, perhaps unfounded, fear of them, now hardly ever give one the pleasure of seeing how straight they can flit across the road.
For long school was held in church. The pupils are said to have made the grooves in the arch of the church. porch by sharpening scales of slate into 'skaillie,' slate pencil. In 1633, however, it was enacted by the industrious parliament 'that a school be built in every parish.' Stobo school probably dates from about 1640.
But no provision was made for the schoolmaster. To remedy this defect a public meeting was held at which the parishioners declared their readiness to subscribe. The heritors, however, thrice called at the most patent door of the church, failed to appear. A deputy was appointed to interview them. He waited on the Countess of March, heritor for Happrew, in Edinburgh once and again; but her ladyship being 'throng with company' did not see him. He was ordered to try once more; and being at last admitted he found her polite, as was to be expected, and willing to do her part 'when others having a larger interest did theirs.'
These others were the young laird and the old factor of Stanhope. The old factor was of the grim breed to which is attributed the motto, 'Damn the dominies; keep them puir.' Nothing to be made out of him. Recourse was had to young Stanhope himself, who, like the Countess, was quite nice about it - only he was just starting on a six weeks visit to London. As soon as he returned he would have the matter put right. Six weeks in London either taught him how to spend his money on other objects than schoolmasters, or left him with no money to spend; for on his return he avoided those who wished to see him on business and when cornered at length got out of the corner by making fair promises which he made no attempt to keep.
How to bring pressure to bear on these fainéants? Reverend members of the Presbytery were commissioned to 'discourse' the Earl of March. Much he cared for their discourses. Application was made to the General Assembly, 1718, where, if talk were business, business would be done. Nothing was done. Appeal was threatened to a powerful court of those days - the Commissioner of Supply. This sounded serious. The Earl of March came forward and 'promised very fair'; but on reflection that the Commissioners were friends of his own he risked the threat, and the threat came to nothing. The appellants, undaunted, 'took instruments.' Fine things instruments if they can be used. They were useless. The Countess and young Stanhope passed away. Their successors to the third and fourth generation practised the old finesse. One hundred and twelve years elapsed in the intermittent process of trying to make the gentry who owned the whole parish 'stent themselves' for a schoolmaster's salary.
All this, diverting in a way, meant that the children through several generations were defrauded of whatever better chance in life education would have opened to them. The Countess, young Stanhope and the rest of them, therefore need not be grudged an intimate view of the region which Dante assigns to 'plentiful in promise with meagre performance' (Inferno 27,. 110)
Meanwhile there was an amusing interlude. The schoolmaster was promoted to additional income by acting as beadle. Not only so. One, William Chisholm, was so concerned about the backward state of education that when he fell sick and believed himself to be on his death-bed, he 'mortified' eight hundred merks in favour of a schoolmaster for Stobo. He meant the document to remain in the hands and apparently at the discretion, of his wife to be or not to be put in force as she should decide. But the minister who had drawn it up took it with him and handed it over for safe custody to the Presbytery. By and by the said William Chisholm began to recover and to desire also the recovery of that mortifying deed. But his wife hadn't it; the minister hadn't it; down therefore went Mr. Chisholm to the Presbytery. Pawky Scot that he was, he played the diplomatist over that reverend Court. Granting in lieu of his Mortification an assurance 'that if he were worth so much at his decease, or so much as was left, he would oblige himself to bestow it on behalf of a school at Stobo' - an obligation which bound him to nothing - he got the deed into his own hands again. By and by there is the significant entry in the records: 'No Mortifications in Stobo.' Happy Stobo.
At last in 1745, after a polite and patient putting off an acknowledged duty from day to day for some forty thousand days, the landowners came forward handsomely and agreed that a legal salary be modified for the schoolmaster of one hundred - pounds? - No, merks. Now a merk was worth just a little more than a shilling. A hundred merks were worth £5 11s. 1 and 1/3d.; and that was the guaranteed annual income of the schoolmaster of Stobo up to the time of the first Statistical Account, 1792. If to eke out a frugal living the schoolmaster kept a cow, the cow had to go and die, and that on a Sunday morning. At once he called in assistants and set about not only bleeding the carcase with a view to beef - that, although done on the Sabbath, might be condoned as a 'work of necessity and mercy' - but also 'fleaying of' the hide with a view to leather, which could have waited till Monday, and for which therefore he was suspended from his precentorship and sentenced to undergo the kirk-session's judicial rebuke.
Howbeit he had rent free a comfortable house - built about 1777. He also received one shilling a quarter from each beginner learning only English, and one shilling and sixpence from each pupil taking also writing and arithmetic. But as his whole school in 1792 numbered only twenty-four scholars, of whom six were beginners paying him £1 4s. per annum and eighteen advanced paying him £5 8s., his total emoluments did not exceed £12 a year. By acting as Precentor and Session Clerk and 'for his trouble in ringing the (Kirk) Bell and carrying in the minister's Bible on Sabbath,' he earned yearly an additional £3 10s. Even so, ample room was left for progress towards the modest ideal of 'passing rich at forty pounds a year.' If a schoolmaster died early, his widow was pitiably unprovided for 'To Anne M'George, Relict of William Stewart, late schoolmaster at Stobo, a woman in very indigent circumstances, 2s. 6d.' A single payment of a single half-crown to the widow of a man qualified to teach, precent, and keep the parish registers! Out of this slough the teaching profession rose very slowly. A new generation was in being before the relief of another schoolmaster's widow attained to the munificence of £1 1s. By and by - in 1789 - the salary rose to what was then the average income of schoolmasters in the county - £32 with school fees amounting to about another £12. Forty-four pounds in all - 'with good accommodation.'
It was no meanly qualified pedagogue who was engaged at these restricted rates. The first man to draw the £5 l1s. 1 and 1/3d. 'acquitted himself to the brethren in the Latin tongue, in the Classics, and in Arithmetic and Writing.' Men of ability and character, men of such gifts as in other walks of life would have brought them wealth and eminence, patiently communicated their best to their scholars and sent them out into the world to vindicate place among the world's most capable workers. The first Montgomery got all his schooling from the West Linton parish schoolmaster. Occasionally a teacher by private study trained himself for the ministry; but this use of school as a stepping-stone to the pulpit was deprecated as tending to neglect of the pupils. The great majority of the teachers without any ulterior aim devoted themselves to teaching. Their success, measured by wealth to themselves, was nil; measured by the efficiency of their scholars and by the service which these scholars in turn rendered to mankind, their work was of world-wide beneficence. In person they were often grimy and gruff, cynical sometimes, snuffy, and irascible. But in their office they were men of such calibre that even now there arises in the mind of every Scotsman a sense not of respect merely but of reverence at the name of the 'Old Parochial Schoolmaster.'
The old order has changed, doubtless by and by for the better. The schoolmaster's salary, which had risen by 1914 under the School Board to £140 with house and garden, rent and rates free (and a female assistant at £70) for a school of 33 Pupils rose in 1923 under the Education Authority to £335 - with a female assistant at £200 for a school with about the same number of pupils on the roll. When the Scots child becomes able to assimilate the new teaching, or when the new teaching becomes such as he can assimilate, and the Scots intellect is developed in proportion to the increased expense of developing it, the world should find the new Scot an eminently useful creature.
The schoolmaster has always acted as Registrar, Clerk to Parish Council, Heritors' Clerk, etc., efficiently performing many exacting duties and remunerated for them at the present rate of £40 per annum.
The old school (1640) endured with many re-thatchings and re-roofings until 1887, when occasion was taken of Queen Victoria's Jubilee to build the present school, which since then has been re-desked, partitioned and otherwise improved. The school house, from the first rather a creditable feature of the provision for the schoolmaster, was in 1914 brought well abreast of modern ideas of convenience and comfort by the addition of a fourth bedroom, scullery, bathroom, with hot and cold water, a second lavatory, coal-house, and renewed drainage.
With the progress of agriculture and of civilisation generally there has been a sure rise in the standard of comfortable living. Much of the de rigueur frugality which our ancestors practised has been outgrown. An old tax schedule shows that in 1802 there were only six silver watches in the parish and - the laird being from home, - not a single gold watch. Dissenters, when they went to meeting in Peebles, carried their boots and stockings over their shoulders to the foot of the Castle Hill, where, reversing the Mosaic order, they put them on for worship; then doffed them again outside the town and walked home bare-foot. This was done, not as in 'The Holy Fair' by the women only -
'At slaps the billies halt a blink
Till lassies strip their shoon.'
but by men and women alike.
On market days men carried their mid-day meal as meal which, borrowing hot water at a way-side house, they made into brose. The bannock, made of equal quantities of barley-meal and peasemeal, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the ordinary bread of the cottar, is now unknown. Unknown also are sowins, even by name. Porridge is still in regular use, and still spoken of as plural, 'the porridge that were hott'rin' on the fire' but oatcakes, once Scotland's distinctive food, are seldom baked. Their place has been taken by the white wheaten scone with its variant the droptscone or scriever which all the wives excel in baking. Traik or braxie - the flesh of a sheep that had died by disease or accident - has quite passed out of use, except on rare occasions by shepherds when they know all the circumstances. The Biblical prejudice against bacon, noted by Findlater in 1802 as daily giving way - there was not a pig in the parish then - gave way completely. For several generations the pig was part of every cottar's 'plenishing.' But the Sanitary Inspector, cheap foreign bacon before the war, and the enormous price of young pigs since - at six weeks old they were sold in May, 1920, for £6 5s. apiece - have made the 'rouch' home-cured hams hanging from every cottage ceiling things of the past. Neither is there anything like the same dependence on milk-food as formerly. Almost all hinds have ceased keeping a cow. The hardship of each wife having to turn out to the byre in all weathers, the uninsured loss when 'the coo' died, and the lack of approved dairy accommodation have stopped that which was once the principal means of bringing up 'the weans.' As a part of the same economic process shepherds have relinquished payment by the 'pack,' that is, a fixed number of sheep of their own kept along with their employer's: the last pack on Stobo Estate was surrendered in 1920.
Hives of bees throve beside almost every cottage up to a few years ago when they were exterminated by the so called Isle of Wight disease - a result perhaps of the purblind ingenuity which debarred the bee from working her natural proportion of wax, every ounce of which represents about a pound of marketable honey. By fitting the frames with old wax manufactured and re-manufactured the bee was coerced into making sixteen ounces of honey instead of one ounce of wax. But the balance of the bee system, the cycle of her energy, cannot but have been vitiated. At any rate one solitary hive was left in Stobo at the end of 1922 where there used to be more than a hundred. A fresh start has been made with appliances new or disinfected and a stock reputed immune. It remains to be seen - the omens are sinister - if in the trying climate of Peeblesshire the most ingenious of insects will succeed, despite atrocious maltreatment by bee-keepers of the old school and the new, in adapting herself permanently to the severe strain of nature-disturbing conditions.
Poultry has improved greatly within recent years. Almost every householder keeps now not any sib and aged medley but a thoughtfully chosen and intelligently cared for breed. The discovery that even in country places poultry, when penned or excluded from the earth by frost and snow, require flint and lime as much as food and water brought no small profit when, as in the winter of 1920-1921, eggs were sold at sixpence each.
So far as homely fare is concerned the people are ever so much less self-supporting than they used to be. But there is a vast amelioration in wholesome variety. Butcher, baker, grocer, fish-monger, fruiterer, by one-horse van or motor car, visit the district regularly, and all find custom enough to keep them going.
'Ere coffee and tea and such slip-slops were known,' whisky, which then cost only a shilling a bottle, was the synonym for prompt hospitality. So far from being suspect as a luxury or a curse, it was held in conscientious practice and strict accounting, one of the things folk simply could not do without. Thus the Kirk Session Cash- Book:
'1777, Feb. 22. To a bottle of whiskie, candles, and other necessaries, 3s. and 1/2d.'
This was for a pauper's funeral, the expenses of which, having to be defrayed out of the Poor Box, were kept down to what was reckoned the barest need. Similar entries are numerous.
'1811. To John Ramage for two bottles of whisky and two quartern loaves for his wife's funeral, 8s.'
Next year John required the same service for himself and was accorded it although, owing to the rise in the price of bread to 1s. 4 and 1/2d. a loaf, the bill this time was 8s. 9d. By the same custom a poor man, with difficulty paying his own way, would deny himself many things rather than scrimp the conventional refreshment to his neighbours before burying his dead. Whisky for the men; and for the women and for boys attending a funeral for the first time, funeral port. At the obsequies of the well-to-do so lavish was the supply of liquor that there may have been no sarcasm meant by the incomer who denied that Peeblesshire is the least hospitable place on earth, for although in the course of a three years' residence he had received only one invitation and that to a tea-party, he had been asked to all the funerals. This kind of hospitality only went out of use about half a century ago.
Under the old Poor Law, port wine in relief of the poor was readily granted by the most thrifty of kirk-sessions.
'1815, 6th Decr. To Mary Aitken, a bottle of port wine as a cordial when ill during last summer, 5s.'
'1812, June 2. To four bottles of Port Wine to Alex. Porteous in Westerhaprew for a cordial to his children when in distress, 18s.'
Considering what wash drugs were and what confidence the rural sick have in 'a bottle,' probably wine was the best medicine a bottle could contain for them; and at any rate that 'cordial' does something to redeem the pitiful parsimony of the old accounts.
While now there is no ale-house, there used to be three; at the Cloy (Burnfoot), the Cless, and the Crownhead. On avowedly convivial occasions liquor plentiful and undiluted was . the rule. When first at a tenantry dinner -Sir James Montgomery gave instead of whisky neat, whisky-toddy, he was remonstrated with by his principal tenant Charlie Alexander, for trying to put them off with 'bee's meat.' Sir Graham, happening to look in late at the Kirn or Harvest Home, was so annoyed to discover many of his men on a revolving floor among reversing furniture that he made this Kirn the last and sent instead to every cottager at Hogmanay the still continued gift of groceries, shortbread, and Selkirk Bannock. Since then Stobo has gone the way of most well-ordered parishes - tolerably temperate, with, notably in the rising generation, a wholesome leaven of total abstinence.
There is a tennis club, also a good bowling green beside the hall with seven or eight strong and merry rinks. Carpet bowls are keenly played in the hall on winter nights. Quoits engage a few in the summer evenings. Curling is at best an intermittent game; but at long intervals the beautifully engraved medal of the, at present defunct, Stobo Curling Club receives the name of a new champion. There is a fine corps of Girl Guides, and the Stobo Boy Scouts were the first to win and again to win the county flag.
SIR JOHN REID
There lived at the end of the fifteenth century a notable man 'John Reid (Reide or Rede), alias Stobo.' How did he come by this alias? - Not, one would suppose, from Stobo being his birthplace. The name of the parish was administered to foundlings brought up at the parish expense; but Reid had his own patronymic. Certainly not from ownership of the land; for the land belonged to 'God, St. Kentigern and the Bishop of Glasgow.' From his being priest of the parish is the remaining conclusion. But he evidently devolved his parochial duties largely on vicar or curate and kept himself free for more distinguishing vocations.
None but a man of great ability and adroitness could from the sleepy hollow of the cure of Stobo have commanded himself to three kings of Scotland. John Reid did this. He received from James III. an annuity of twenty pounds - the same as Chaucer had from Richard II - in recognition of 'services rendered to our late progenitor and us in writing our letters to our most Holy Father, the Pope, the sundry kings, princes, and magnates beyond our kingdom, and his expenses in parchment, paper, red and white wax and other costs incurred for the said letters and foreign writings.' Such an honorarium implies that he was no mere scrivener, but in some degree, like Milton for the Commonwealth, Secretary of Foreign Tongues, as the Secretary for Foreign Affairs was then called. He drew this income during the whole of the reign of James III. and had it confirmed to him by James IV., the payment only ceasing after thirty-one years, in 1505 - the year, as is surmised, of Reid's death.
The lifelong security of his lien on the confidence of monarch after monarch betokens powers of no mean order. But bare ability never long secured royal favour. Good humour appears to have been the distinction of his personal relation with his royal masters. He had an occasional deal with them in horses - always a chance for wit against wit. James IV. 'pinched' from him, and presently of course paid for, 'Stobo's ring and chain.' Stobo sent the King, James of the Iron Belt, when in Peebles in 1501, a present of capons. The King gave 'Stobo's maiden' who carried the fowls from Stobo manse to Neidpath Castle a kingly vail of 14s. (Scots) for her trouble; and then appreciating the well-fed birds, or pretending for fun that they were underfed, he decreed Stobo a grant of '45s. to cause feed the capons.'
For all his familiarity with successive sovereigns it is to his credit that even during the reign of James III., when favourites were the scandal of the realm, he knew his place, and kept it, and so saved his neck from inconvenience at Lauder Bridge. He acquired no wealth. All the preferment he ever got was the indefinite promotion to be 'Rector of Kirkcriste' and the best of the royal gifts to him was but the price of a new gown. He procured no honorary rank: 'Sir' before his name was then what the more arrogant form 'Rev.' is now the general title of address for the clergy. He must have been a man of rare discretion, scholarly and humorous, with a sound working knowledge of statesmanship and courtier craft.
Was he also a poet ? Dunbar in his Lament for the Makers writes:
'And he (i.e. Death) has now tane last of a'
Gud gentil Stobo and Quintane Schaw,
Of quhome all wichtis hes pitie:
Timor Mortis conturbat me.'
It may be that 'good gentil Stobo' was a person of whom nothing but that phrase is known. On the other hand, John Reid is described officially not only by his proper name, and by his name with the alias, but also simply as 'Stobo' He was a contemporary of Dunbar's, like Dunbar he was a clergyman, a penman, and a courtier; at Court he was on the same level with Dunbar - both being on the Civil List for £20 a year. Thus the name Stobo in Dunbar's mind would connote John Reid. Further John Reid alias Stobo ceased to draw his salary from the Exchequer in 1505; in 1507 Dunbar commemorates Stobo's death. All that is known of Reid agrees with the character Dunbar gives of his brother poet. Most likely, therefore, John Reid is the 'good gentil Stobo,' the poet of Dunbar's Lament.
If so, is there any of his work extant? None under his designation. But it has been surmised that he may have been the author of the anonymous poem, The Thre Prestis of Peblis how thai tald thar talis, which has been translated out of the ancient Scots vernacular, and made an entertaining modern book (1894) by Dr. Clement Bryce Gunn. The question of authorship is fully discussed by Mr. T. D. Robb in his preface to the beautiful edition which he has edited for the Scottish Text Society (1920).
That the date of the poem is 'somewhere between 1484 and 1488' seems fairly clear: it thus falls within Stobo's floruit. The clerkly exactitude of its proportions, is in keeping with Stobo's discipline as a Secretary. The whole poem is a trio; so is every one of the stories; and it is composed throughout with such precision as if at every pause one could overhear the unwritten, 'Minute approved and signed.' The clerical decorum of eight-ninths of the poem is in harmony with Stobo's profession as clergyman. The last story especially is in the mood of a 'most gentle pulpiter.' And although in the other ninth (lines 809-991 which Dr. Gunn, without indicating; any hiatus, has omitted) the author had to deal with the king's conjugal infidelity, he had more regard for his cloth than to chuckle as Chaucer would have chuckled at the episode, or to laugh as Dunbar, maugre his cloth, would have laughed. The courtly attitude is seen in every part of the poem: in the air of refined self-indulgence over the whole scene; in the purely academic zeal for reform in all three estates of the realm lightly appeased by a word from his Majesty; in the complete silence about such a clamant grievance as the debased currency; in the discreet side-glance rebuke of royal favourites for their youth instead of for the actual mischief of low birth and breeding; and even in such a, trait of an eyewitness as that on a royal progress the King had to switch the flies and midges from his face with twigs of birch. Considerations like these show Stobo's authorship possible, perhaps even in some measure probable.
But in the absence alike of any ascription of the poem to him by any ancient authority and of anything in the work itself distinctive of the person or the parish, one has somewhat ruefully to admit that 'conclusive proof is wanting.'
To his memory an oak tablet made and presented by Dr. Gunn hangs in the Vestry.
(2) THE BLACK DWARF
David Ritchie, the original of Scott's novel The Black Dwarf was native of Stobo born at Easter Happrew about 1740. His father, a labourer in the Slate Quarries - three miles distant - had that long tramp to his daily work, a long severe day's toil, and a long tramp home: hence when poor wee David arrived he was Boo'd Davie. He lived his life at Manor, and an account of him is given in the chapter on that parish.
The tribute paid him by his native parish was mean. He came hirpling over the hill for the customary annual distribution of alms on Communion Monday, 26th Aug., 1771, and was presented with a sixpence. Two years later he came again, and again got sixpence only - and this although some Betty Frazer or other received two shillings. Davie, a connoisseur of charity, disdained such stinginess. He stayed away nine years, and then, 8th September, 1782, hoping perhaps that a new heart had been created within the penurious Stobonians, he gave them one more chance. He got one shilling and came again no more.
The first Statistical Account surmises 'from the remains of old houses and old towers which are now much defaced but are still in the remembrance of old people that the population has considerably decreased.' This is what has been well called the deserted village fallacy. Old buildings were let go to ruin not because the population had vanished but because it had moved aside to dwell in new houses on new sites. The 'nineteen towns of Stobo' which Captain Armstrong commemorates were 'towns' only in the Scots and provincial English sense of farm-houses. Light soil, lack of mineral wealth, and seclusion from markets must always have kept the Stobo population sparse. From 313 in 1755, it rose to 478 when in 1861 there was an influx of navvies for railway building, and has again receded to 362. Exactly the same number of pupils attended Stobo School in 1802 as in 1920, viz. 32. The number of deaths for the eight years ending 1792 and the same space of time ending 1919 were nearly alike, viz. 23 and 24. For the same periods the marriages were 10 and 12 respectively. But the birth-rate shows a great variation. The average birth-rate for the eight years after the passing in 1855 of the Registration Act was 17; for the last eight years, 6.
One observer in the eighteenth century alleges that the people of this district are comely but lacking in cleanliness; another that they are 'prolific beyond belief.' Now they are as cleanly as comely, and their fecundity not more than normal. Pennecuik's note that they never sing or whistle at their work, still holds good; Land of Song although the Scottish Border is, the Borderer's life was such as to develop an instinct of cautious silence which they have never outgrown.
The Stobo character is at once of great strength and kindliness. The courage which of old rose into the heroism of fighting for Wallace at Happrew and for Prince Charlie at Culloden reappeared valiant as ever in the Great War when the Roll of Service showed 58 serving in the Army. The Roll of Honour enshrines the names of twelve men who laid down their lives for our sake. To the kindliness of the folk a beautiful tribute is paid in the first Statistical Account (1792) by the then minister of the parish:
'My residence among them has been for upwards of sixty years. I have known many respectable, benevolent, and kind-hearted parishioners. They are gone and I have mourned their loss. Yet they have left behind them successors to whose integrity of life and manners I am happy to have the opportunity to bear testimony. There is, in one word, perhaps no parish where the moral character and conduct of the people are in all respects more uniformly unexceptionable.'
1927 : Still true.
This information is reproduced from A History of Peeblesshire by J. W. Buchan and Rev. H. Paton, published in three volumes between 1925-7 by Jackson, Wylie and Co. of Glasgow. The original book includes many refences to the sources of the information, pedigrees and plates.
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