feebly endeavoured to controul a lawless nobility, to whom his manners appeared strange, and his person [Sidenote:  1516] despicable.  It was in vain that he inveigled the Lord Home to Edinburgh, where he was tried and executed.  This example of justice, or severity, only irritated the kinsmen and followers of the deceased baron:  for though, in other respects, not more sanguinary than the rest of a barbarous nation, the borderers never dismissed from their memory a deadly feud, till blood for blood had been exacted, to the uttermost drachm[5].  Of this, the fate of Anthony d’Arcey, Seigneur de la Bastie, affords a melancholy example.  This gallant French cavalier was appointed warden of the east marches by Albany, at his first disgraceful retreat to France.  Though De la Bastie was an able statesman, and a true son of chivalry, the choice of the regent was nevertheless unhappy.  The new warden was a foreigner, placed in the office of Lord Home, as [Sidenote:  1517] the delegate of the very man, who had brought that baron to the scaffold.  A stratagem, contrived by Home of Wedderburn, who burned to avenge the death of his chief, drew De la Bastie towards Langton, in the Merse.  Here he found himself surrounded by his enemies.  In attempting, by the speed of his horse, to gain the castle of Dunbar, the warden plunged into a morass, where he was overtaken and cruelly butchered.  Wedderburn himself cut off his head; and, in savage triumph, knitted it to his saddle-bow by the long flowing hair, which had been admired by the dames of France.—­Pitscottie, Edit. 1728, p. 130. Pinkerton’s History of Scotland, Vol.  II. p. 169 [6].

[Footnote 5:  The statute 1594, cap. 231, ascribes the disorders on the border in a great measure to the “counselles, directions, receipt, and partaking, of chieftains principalles of the branches, and househalders of the saides surnames, and clannes, quhilkis bears quarrel, and seeks revenge for the least hurting or slauchter of ony ane of their unhappy race, although it were ardour of justice, or in rescuing and following of trew mens geares stollen or reft.”]

[Footnote 6:  This tragedy, or, perhaps, the preceding execution of Lord Home, must have been the subject of the song, the first two lines of which are preserved in the Complaynt of Scotland;

  God sen’ the Duc hed byddin in France,
  And de la Baute had never come hame.

P, 100, Edin. 1801.]

The Earl of Arran, head of the house of Hamilton was appointed to succeed De la Bastie in his perilous office.  But the Douglasses, the Homes, and the Kerrs, proved too strong for him upon the [Sidenote:  1520] border.  He was routed by these clans, at Kelso, and afterwards in a sharp skirmish, fought betwixt his faction and that of Angus, in the high-street of the metropolis[7].