In this and the following verse, the attack and defence of a fortress, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is described accurately and concisely.  The sow was a military engine, resembling the Roman testudo.  It was framed of wood, covered with hides, and mounted on wheels, so that, being rolled forwards to the foot of the besieged wall, it served as a shed, or cover, to defend the miners, or those who wrought the battering ram, from the stones and arrows of the garrison.  In the course of the famous defence, made by Black Agnes, Countess of March, of her husband’s castle of Dunbar, Montague, Earl of Salisbury, who commanded the besiegers, caused one of these engines to be wheeled up to the wall.  The countess, who, with her damsels, kept her station on the battlements, and affected to wipe off with her handkerchief the dust raised by the stones, hurled from the English machines, awaited the approach of this new engine of assault.  “Beware, Montague,” she exclaimed, while the fragment of a rock was discharged from the wall—­“Beware, Montague! for farrow shall thy sow!"[94] Their cover being dashed to pieces, the assailants, with great loss and difficulty, scrambled back to their trenches.  “By the regard of suche a ladye,” would Froissart have said, “and by her comforting, a man ought to be worth two men, at need.”  The sow was called by the French Truie.—­See Hailes’ Annals, Vol.  II. p. 89. Wintown’s Cronykil, Book VIII. William of Malmesbury, Lib.  IV.

The memory of the sow is preserved in Scotland by two trifling circumstances.  The name given to an oblong hay-stack, is a hay-sow; and this may give us a good idea of the form of the machine.  Children also play at a game with cherry stones, placing a small heap on the ground, which they term a sowie, endeavouring to hit it, by throwing single cherry-stones, as the sow was formerly battered from the walls of the besieged fortress.  My companions, at the High School of Edinburgh, will remember what was meant by berrying a sowie.  It is strange to find traces of military antiquities in the occupation of the husbandman, and the sports of children.

[Footnote 94:  This sort of bravade seems to have been fashionable in those times:  “Et avec drapeaux, et leurs chaperons, ils torchoient les murs a l’endroit, ou les pierres venoient frapper.”—­Notice des Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque Nationale.]

The pitch and tar-barrels of Maitland were intended to consume the formidable machines of the English.  Thus, at a fabulous siege of York, by Sir William Wallace, the same mode of defence is adopted: 

The Englishmen, that cruel were and kene, Keeped their town, and fended there full fast; Faggots of fire among the host they cast, Up pitch and tar on feil sowis they lent; Many were hurt ere they from the walls went; Stones on Springalds they did cast out so fast, And goads of iron made many grome agast.

Henry the Minstrel’s History of Wallace.—­B. 8. c. 5.