than the "toot-toot" of the Master's horn and the babble of fox hounds; for at Lanton Tower are the kennels of the Jedforest Hunt, and many a glorious run is had with this pack, sometimes in enclosed country, sometimes among the great round backed Border hills towards Carterfell, over country that will tail off all but the best of men and horses. {130} CHAPTER V JED (continued), FERNIHIRST, RAID OK THE REDESWIRE, OTTERBURNE |Across Jed, on a high and leafy bank nearly opposite to Lintalee, stands the picturesque old stronghold of Fernihirst. The original castle was erected by Sir Thomas Ker probably about the year 1476, and the present building dates only from 1598. Its predecessor "stode marvelous strongly within a grete woode," as Daere and Surrey found to their cost in 1523; yet they took it, after "long skirmyshing and moche difficultie," as Surrey reported. Brief and stormy was the existence of this original Fernihirst, stirring, and in some instances horrible, the deeds done within and around its walls. In 1548 the English held it, Shrewsbury, when he returned to the south in that year, having left there a garrison of something like eighty or ninety men. At this period Scotland, still dazed and stricken under the stunning blow of Pinkie in 1547, was in a deplorable, and apparently a very helpless, condition. Most of her strongholds were in English hands; her chief men for the greater part had come in and made submission to Somerset; the poorer sort in most parts of the Border were at the mercy of the hated invader. Here, at Fernihirst, the English garrison was under the command of one whose oppression and cruel lust were devilish, and whose treatment of unprotected country-folk was such as would justify almost any conceivable form of revenge {131}on the part of the men of Jedforest. M. de Beaugué, a French officer who was then in Scotland, and who in his "_Histoire de la Guerre d'Ecosse_" chronicles the campaigns of 1548, 1549, says that during all the time this savage licentious devil remained near Jedburgh "he never came across a young girl but he outraged her, never an old woman but he put her to death with cruel torture." [Illustration: 0151] And, as the proverb has it: "Like master, like man"; where their captain forgot his manhood, and disgraced the name of Englishman, how were the men under his command likely to conduct themselves? The people of the Forest of Jedworth thus had ghastly wrongs to wipe out; and when their chance came, they seized on it with avidity.