Selkirk, Burgh and Earl

[Originally posted on Newsgroup alt.1d]

From 1951 to 1955 I lived in Manchester, England. These were happy and productive years for me, and if I had found there a way to make a living in accordance with my capabilities and tastes, I might still be there. But I did not, so like a lot of people who find it difficult to freeload in their own country, I emigrated to the United States where I lived happily ever after. While I was in Manchester, something veddy British occurred. The Clerk of the City of Manchester one day saw a film at the Theatre Royal. It was no longer a theatre of course; like many such, it had been converted to a cinema. On the large curtain in front of the screen the Clerk saw the arms of the City of Manchester. "Why not?" you may ask. The Clerk, however, did not say this. He was horrified. The Theatre Royal had no authority to display the arms of the City of Manchester, and shortly afterwards he wrote to them something like this:

Dear Sirs,
You are not authorised to display the arms of the City of Manchester. Remove this escutcheon forthwith, if not sooner.

Your obedient servant,
[illegible signature]

British civil servants may have occasion to inform you that five days from date you will be hung, drawn and quartered, but they will always sign themselves "Your obedient servant." The management of the Theatre Royal who are Mancunians, and hence very blunt, replied something like this:

Dear Sir,
No.

I have the honour to be,
Yours very truly,
[illegible signature]

The Clerk immediately asked the legal counsel of the City to go into Court to force compliance with his request. After the legal counsel recovered from the attack of asthma he got from blowing the dust off the old books he had to consult to find out how to do this, he announced that this matter had to be decided by the Court of Chivalry. But there was one problem. The Court had had no business since around 1750, and no one was quite sure how it functioned. No matter. It was duly called into session, having been found to consist of the Lord Chancellor, the Garter King of Arms and the Lord Lyon King of Arms. If you do not know what I am talking about, look up "herald" in the Encyclopedia Britannica, or if you really want to waste time, try searching for it on the Web. These worthies donned their absurd costumes and solemnly decided that the City was right. The Theatre Royal complied of course, because it is a British Theatre. No one was quite sure what would have happened had they refused.

I once told this story to my son, who likes history. Recently he sent me a cutting from the British journal the Economist, which had a somewhat similar story. The account is quite cute and amusing, but I had better not quote it too literally, because the Economist might drag me into the Court of Star Chamber or something. Apparently the tenth Earl of Selkirk died. Selkirk is a small town in Scotland, close to the English border and in the same general area as Lockerbie, the site of that horrible airplane crash. His heir is a member of the British House of Commons, and by consenting to become the eleventh Earl, he would have to vacate his seat, and move to the House of Lords. Mr Major(s) (I can never remember if he is singular or plural) has a razor-thin majority, and the departure of a single MP could conceivably bring down the government. So the heir renounced his claim so that he could continue to support his leader. Veddy noble, veddy British. Big mistake! He discovered too late that the tenth Earl had left a cool half a million pounds to his heir! And you can still buy scads of tea and scones with half a million pounds. Now there is a fight going on between the MP and his cousin, who expected to become the eleventh earl and collect the loot. The MP thinks his son should succeed him. Since it is only recently that it has been possible to renounce a peerage, succession issues have not been fully decided. (The Economist did not point this out. Tut tut.) Now England and Scotland have legal systems which are as different as those of Wisconsin and Louisiana. Like Louisiana, Scotland is ultimately much more dependent on Roman law. For example, Scottish juries have a third option in addition to the usual ones. They can record a verdict of "Not Proven", which implies that the defendant may well be guilty, but there is not sufficient evidence to convict him. That might have been good in the case of -- oh, let's not get into that. Anyway it falls to the Lord Lyon King of Arms to decide the issue. But it isn't about a curtain. It's about a peerage and three quarters of a million dollars! So the LLKOA will again don his absurd costume and have his definitive say, in Scotland, all by himself.

I was grateful to my son for drawing my attention to this. It so happens that I know more about Selkirk and the Earls thereof than he can possibly want to hear. But he is a young man tolerant of his old man, and would doubtless listen politely. But I said to myself: "Why should I bore one person, when, thanks to modern technology, I can bore hundreds at one stroke?" So I decided to place it on the Net. But Kevorkian-like, I shall give you an n to turn me to cyberdust if you choose so to do. Here you are:
n
Of course, if you use one of those new-fangled gooey thingies, you probably have to click on a vacuum cleaner or some equally silly icon. Be informed that I do not like to be dismissed by a vacuum cleaner, and my bits are strictly instructed to gum up your virtual vacuum cleaner if you dare to employ it. You have been warned. Revenons à nos moutons, as the French say.

Now the town, or, as the Scots would say, the burgh, of Selkirk figures in my all-time favorite poem "Yarrow Unvisited" by the great English poet William Wordsworth, and that is why Selkirk is familiar to me. The River Yarrow runs just west of Selkirk, and the Parish of Yarrow takes in part of Selkirk. In the poem, the poet is travelling near Selkirk with his girl friend, whom he charmingly refers to by the archaic word "marrow", and the marrow expresses a desire to visit Yarrow (with which she happens to rhyme.)

From Stirling Castle we had seen
The mazy forth unravelled,
Had trod the banks of Clyde and Tay,
And with the Tweed had travelled;
And when we came to Clovenford,
Then said my winsome marrow:
'Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside
And see the Braes [slopes] of Yarrow.'

Let Yarrow folk, frae Selkirk town, [frae=from]
Who have been buying, selling,
Go back to Yarrow, 'tis their own,
Each maiden to her dwelling!...
But we will downward with the Tweed,
Nor turn aside to Yarrow...

Let beeves and home-bred kine partake [bulls and cows]
The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;
The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow! [What a line! Awesome]
We will not see them; will not go
To-day nor yet tomorrow;
Enough if in our hearts we know
There's such a place as Yarrow. Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!
It must or we shall rue it:
We have a vision of our own,
Ah! Why should we undo it?...

It is good advice. Sometimes it does not pay to try to relive past joys. Feed on the memory, but move on and find joys that are quite new. You might be disappointed with the old ones.

But I have to tell you something. This idyllic picture of beautiful Scotland, with no dumps of disposable diapers and rusty cars to mar the beauty, was not matched by economic realities. Wordsworth wrote his breathtakingly beautiful poem in 1803, and in that year the Scottish peasants, especially in the highlands, were starving to death. Safety net? Even circus entertainers had no safety net, why should peasants have one? Welfare? Never heard of it. But the United Kingdom budget balanced beautifully. The banknotes had written on them "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of One Pound." And it meant what it said. If you walked into a bank, they would give you a gold coin in return for this banknote. But the peasants were not walking into banks. They were dying on their feet with empty stomachs:
"I die, I die, the old man said/ My children die from want of bread...."

The fifth Earl of Selkirk, an ancestor of the tenth Earl who died so inconveniently, was a very charitable, philanthropic individual. He did not think about swans reflected in clear lakes. He wondered what he could do to save human life. And he came up with a remarkable solution. The population of Scotland must be exported! The land cannot support them any longer! So in the very same year (1803) that Wordsworth wrote his poem, he began moving starving Scotsmen to Prince Edward Island in Canada. Hundreds, thousands of Scots. As a direct result, a huge proportion of the population of PEI and Nova Scotia are of Scottish descent to this day, and the ancient Scottish Gaelic language hangs on tenuously in Eastern Canada as it does in the remote Scottish islands. He went further. Some years later, he moved west, and on the site of what is now Winnipeg, he founded the Red River Settlement, where more Scots could trap furs, grow wheat, make a living. But he got into big trouble with the fur companies. He became embroiled in lawsuits that financially ruined him. He returned to Great Britain a broken man, and died a couple of years later. Such was the reward of his philanthropy. But a town in Manitoba is named for him. Let us hope that his shade finds that sufficient reward.