“We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank,
     When a’ the Carlisle bells were rung,
     And a thousand men on horse and foot,
     Cam’ wi’ the keen Lord Scroope along.

     Buccleuch has turn’d to Eden Water,
     Even where it flow’d frae brim to brim,
     And he has plunged in wi’ a’ his band,
     And safely swam them through the stream.

     He turned them on the other side,
     And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he—­
     ‘If ye like na’ my visit in merry England,
     In fair Scotland come visit me!’

     All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope,
     He stood as still as rock of stane;
     He scarcely dare to trew his eyes,
     When through the water they had gane.

     ‘He is either himsel’ a devil frae hell,
     Or else his mother a witch maun be;
     I wadna’ have ridden that wan water
     For a’ the gowd in Christentie.’”

At a place called “Dick’s Tree,” not far from Longtown, there still stands the “smiddy” where lived the blacksmith who had the honour of knocking off Kinmont Willie’s fetters.  Sir Walter Scott has handed on the story of the smith’s daughter who, as a little child, was roused at daybreak by a “sair clatter” of horses, and shouts for her father, followed, as the smith slept soundly, by a lance being thrust through the window.  Looking out in the dim grey of the morning, the child saw “more gentlemen than she had ever seen before in one place, all on horseback, in armour, and dripping wet—­and that Kinmont Willie, who sat woman-fashion behind one of them, was the biggest carle she ever saw—­and there was much merriment in the party.”

Furious was the hive of wasps that Buccleuch brought about his head by thus insultingly casting a stone into the English bike.  The wrath of Queen Elizabeth was unappeasable.  Scrope found it sounded better to multiply the number of the raiders by five, but Scottish tongues were not slow to tell the affronting truth, and the Englishmen of Carlisle had the extra bitterness of being butts for the none too subtle jests of every Scot on the Border.  The success of so daring a venture made the Scottish reivers arrogant.  Between June 19 and July 24 of that year, the spoils of the western Marches were a thousand and sixty-one cattle and ninety-eight horses, and some thirty steadings and other buildings, mostly in Gilsland, were burned.  The angry English made reprisals.  It was in one of them that the Scots who were taken were leashed “like doggis,” and for this degradation Buccleuch and Ker of Cessford made the English pay most handsomely.  Together those “twoo fyrebrandes of the Border” led an incursion into Tynedale, where, in broad daylight, they burned three hundred steadings and dwelling-houses, many stables, barns, and other outhouses, slew with the sword fourteen of those who had been in the Scottish raid, and brought back a handsome booty.