But it may have been that this custom originated at Gretna Green about 1738, on the suppression of the infamous Fleet marriages, though, without doubt, irregular marriage was far from unknown long prior to this time in the Border parishes. At all events, acting on his knowledge that Scotch marriages, where parties accepted each other as man and wife before witnesses, were legal, one Scott opened a place at the Rigg, in the parish of Gretna, and there marriages were celebrated between runaway couples about the year 1753. Scott was succeeded by an old soldier named Gordon, who was wont to officiate in uniform, wearing a huge cocked-hat, and girt about the waist with a ponderous sword. In 1842 were published by Robert Elliott the _Gretna Green Memoirs_, wherein we are told how Elliott—a retired stagecoach driver—became acquainted with Joseph Paisley, successor of the veteran Gordon in 1810. Paisley, who had been a tobacconist, fisherman, nay, even, it is more than hinted, a smuggler, became known as ‘the blacksmith,’ from the speed with which he riveted the bonds of runaway couples. Elliott, who married Paisley’s daughter, and eventually succeeded him in his office, continued sole and only ‘parson’ of Gretna Green for twenty-nine years, during which period he is said to have united more than three thousand couples of all ranks and grades in society, the greatest number in any one year (1825) having been one hundred and ninety-eight, and the average from 1829 to 1835 inclusive upwards of one hundred and sixty each year. Although tradition says that Lord Erskine paid as much as eighty guineas on the occasion of his marriage, the average fee at Gretna Green is estimated at fifteen guineas; whence we may at anyrate infer how much more highly paid was the Border ‘parson’ than the majority of the more regular clergy on either side of the Sark. In a will-case tried some years ago at Liverpool, the plaintiff, Robert Ker, had been married on two occasions at Gretna Green—in 1850, and again in 1853—the first marriage having been solemnised in a beerhouse at Springfield, near Gretna; and the second in an alehouse kept by William Blythe, when Thomas Blythe, in presence of his wife, performed the ceremony, which was thus described: ‘I went in and had some conversation, and asked him [Thomas Blythe] to do this little job. He said he would, and asked me if I was willing to take this lady as my wife, and I said yes. Then he asked her if she was willing to take me for her husband, and she said she was; and I got hold of her hand and put the ring on, and we were declared man and wife; and that was how we were married.’ At this trial, a book containing a register of marriages performed by the Blythes was produced in evidence.