Introduction: North, South, East — and West; The Strangeness of ‘Debateable Lands’

Abstract

The first years of the nineteenth century constituted a period in which many political and cultural borders across the world were being contested and redrawn, particularly within Europe and Europe’s expanding sphere of influence in the Near East. Whilst the contributory factors behind these changes were many, the main reasons for instability were global war, revolution, and modernization of social and economic structures, themselves rooted in developments in science, agriculture, industry and commerce across the eighteenth century. Within Britain, the French Revolution and involvement in the subsequent Napoleonic wars gave rise on the one hand to fears of invasion, and, on the other, to a considerable degree of public anxiety about social unrest within the home nation. At the margins where Europe bordered on the Islamic Near and Middle East, the European ‘superpowers’ of Britain, France, Russia and Austria all used a combination of diplomacy and aggression to establish their interest in the countries along the western frontiers of the declining Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, at home in intellectual circles, approaches to understanding human social history in terms of a series of universally applicable stages, and the new science of political economy, had emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment as areas at the forefront of philosophical and scientific debate. Within such a context of confrontation and public discussion, it is hardly surprising that literary conceptualizations of real and imagined borders of varying kinds, along with speculation premised on the possibilities arising for their confrontation and transgression, became part of the spirit of the age.

There is scarce an old historical song or Ballad wherein a Minstrel or Harper appears, but he is characterized by way of eminence to have been ‘of the North Countreye’: and indeed the prevalence of the Northern dialect in such compositions, shews that this representation is real. On the other hand the scene of the finest Scottish Ballads is laid in the South of Scotland; which should seem to have been peculiarly the nursery of Scottish Minstrels. In the old song of Maggy Lawder, a Piper is asked, by way of distinction, Come ye frae the Border? — The Martial spirit constantly kept up and exercised near the frontier of the two kingdoms, as it furnished continual subjects for their Songs, so it inspired the inhabitants of the adjacent counties on both sides with the powers of poetry. Besides, as our Southern Metropolis must have been ever the scene of novelty and refinement, the northern countries, as being most distant, would preserve their ancient manners longest, and of course the old poetry, in which those manners are peculiarly described.

— Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry¹