Dance Meg Merrilees 4293

Meg Merrilees was an important character in Sir Walter Scott’s popular novel Guy Mannering or The Astrologer (1815).

“Her appearance made Mannering start. She was full six feet high, wore a man’s great-coat over the rest of her dress, had in her hand a goodly sloe-thorn cudgel, and in all points of equipment, except her petticoats, seemed rather masculine than feminine. Her dark elf-locks shot out like the snakes of a gorgon, between an old-fashioned bonnet called a bongrace, heightening the singular effect of her strong and weather-beaten features, which were partly shadowed, while her eye had a wild roll that indicated something like real or affected insanity.”

Meg, who put the gipsy curse on Godfrey Bertram, the Laird of Ellangowan, had a real basis in fact. Scott used as his model one Jean Gordon who was born about 1670 at Kirk-Yetholm in Roxburghshire, a town which for centuries was the court, the Little Egypt, of the Scottish gipsies. Jean married Patrick Faa who was transported to the American plantations for the crime of fire-raising. Three of her four sons were hanged for sheep-stealing and the fourth was murdered by another gipsy, Rob Johnstone. Jean herself was reduced to begging from door to door and in 1732 was indicted as a common vagabond. She was a staunch Jacobite and it was after the Rising of 1745 that Jean, very old by then, arrived in Carlisle. It was a fair day and the town was crowded. The old gipsy spied the heads of the Jacobite rebels on top of the Scotchgate and she is reputed to have begun to sing the following words to the Loyalist song:

To wanton me, to wanton me,
Ken ye what maist wad wanton me!
To see King George hung up at Rome,
To see King Jamie croon’d at Scone,
To see England taxed and Scotland free.
This is what maist wad wanton me.

But to daunton me, to daunton me,
This is what sair does daunton me,
To see an ill-faur’d German loon
Keep wrangfu’ haud o’ Scotland’s croon,
And a’ laid low that high should be.
This is what sair doth daunton me.

The Carlisle mob attacked. They threw Jean into the Eden River. Each time she surfaced she would shout another Jacobite slogan and she was left by the rabble to drown. With a final burst of strength the old woman crawled up onto the river bank where she finally died of exposure.

Scott’s novels and narrative poems, though long and immensely involved in plot, are studded with unforgettable characters. During the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, when the steamers of the Clyde were at their most popular, any number of vessels were named for Scott’s works and some of their characters. There were Waverley, Talisman, Redgauntlet, Marmion, Kenilworth, Ivanhoe, Lord of the Isles and Fair Maid as well as Madge Wildfire, Lucy Ashton, Lochinvar, Jeanie Deans, Lady Rowena, Dandie Dinmont, Diana Vernon and, of course, Meg Merrilees.

It is no wonder, thus, that tunes and dances also bore the name of Scott’s characters.