Though no undoubted Scottish specimen was drawn from this pedlar's pack, we know, from the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists and other evidence, that Border minstrelsy had already raised echoes in London town, before King Jamie went thither with Scotland streaming in his train. During the last troublous half century of Scotland's history as an independent kingdom, the raw material of ballads was being manufactured as actively as at any period of her history, especially on the Borders and in the North. It may be called, indeed, the Moss-trooping Age, and the chief members of the Moss-trooping Cycle date from the latter years of the sixteenth century. _The Raid of the Reidswire_ happed in 1575; the expedition of _Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead_ is conjecturally set down for 1582; _The Lads of Wamphray_ commemorates a Dumfriesshire feud of the year 1593; while the more famous incident sung with immortal fire and vigour in _Kinmont Willie_ took place in 1596. To the same period belong the exploits of _Dick of the Cow_ (who had made a name for himself in London while Elizabeth was on the throne), Archie of Ca'field, Hobbie Noble, Dickie of Dryhope, the Laird's Jock, John o' the Side, and other 'rank reivers,' whose title to the gallows is summed up in Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington's terse verse on the Liddesdale thieves; and their match in spulzying and fighting was to be found on the other side of the Esk and the Cheviot. With the Union of the Crowns, Sir Walter Scott half sadly reminds us in _Nigel_, one stream of Scottish romance and song ran dry; the end of the Kingdom became the middle of it; and as his namesake, Scott of Satchells puts it, the noble freebooter was degraded to be a common thief. But even the Reformation and the Union did not wipe out original sin or alter human nature. The kingdoms might have outwardly composed their quarrels; but private feuds remained, and even the Martyrs and the Covenanters had their relapses, and loved and sang and slew under the impulse of earthly passion. _The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow_--perhaps the most moving and most famous of the Scottish ballads--is supposed to have sprung, in its present shape at least, out of a tragic passage that occurred by that stream of sorrow so late as 1616.