Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field in Six CantosScott, Walter
General
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field in Six Cantos
Scott, Walter
Flodden, Battle of, England, 1513 -- Poetry
'As they had no pavilions, or round houses, of any commendable
compass, so wear there few other tentes with posts, as the used
manner of making is; and of these few also, none of above twenty
foot length, but most far under; for the most part all very
sumptuously beset, (after their fashion,) for the love of France,
with fleur-de-lys, some of blue buckeram, some of black, and some of
some other colours. These white ridges, as I call them, that, as we
stood on Fauxsyde Bray, did make so great muster toward us, which I
did take then to be a number of tentes, when we came, we found it a
linen drapery, of the coarser cambryk in dede, for it was all of
canvas sheets, and wear the tenticles, or rather cabyns and couches
of their soldiers; the which (much after the common building of
their country beside) had they framed of four sticks, about an ell
long a piece, whereof two fastened together at one end aloft, and
the two endes beneath stuck in the ground, an ell asunder, standing
in fashion like the bowes of a sowes yoke; over two such bowes (one,
as it were, at their head, the other at their feet), they stretched
a sheet down on both sides, whereby their cabin became roofed like a
ridge, but skant shut at both ends, and not very close beneath on
the sides, unless their sticks were the shorter, or their wives the
more liberal to lend them larger napery; howbeit, when they had
lined them, and stuff'd them so thick with straw, with the weather
as it was not very cold, when they wear ones couched, they were as
warm as they had been wrapt in horses dung.'--PATTEN'S Account of
Somerset's Expedition.
line 578. 'The well-known arms of Scotland. If you will believe
Boethius and Buchanan, the double tressure round the shield
(mentioned above, vii. 141), counter fleur-de-lysed, or lingued and
armed azure, was first assumed by Achaias, King of Scotland,
contemporary of Charlemagne, and founder of the celebrated League
with France but later antiquaries make poor Eochy, or Achy, little
better than a sort of King of Brentford, whom old Grig (who has also
swelled into Gregorius Magnus) associated with himself in the
important duty of governing some part of the north-eastern coast of
Scotland.'--SCOTT.
Stanza XXIX. lines 595-9. Cp. the 'rash, fruitless war,' &c., of
Thomson's 'Edwin and Eleonora,' i. 1, and Cowper's 'Task,' v. 187:--
'War's a game which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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