The poetical works of Sir Walter Scott ... Notes & life of the author.

NOTES TO CANTO SECOND,
and were, at -the abbess's prayer, -not only beheaded, but patrfied,
are still found about the rocks, and are termed by Protestant fossilists
JdnanonitaB.
The other miracle-is thus mentioned by Camden:-" It is also ascribed
to the power of her sanctity, that these wild geese, which in the winter fly
in great flocks to the lakes and rivers unfrozen in the southern parts, to
the great amazement of every one, fall down suddenly upon the ground,
when they are in their flight over certain neighbouring fields hereabouts;
a relation I should not have made, if I had not received -it from several
credible men. But those who are less inclined to heed superstition, attribute it to some occult quality in the ground, and to somewhat of antipathy between it and the geese, such as they say is between wolves and
scvlla-roots: for that such hidden tendencies and aversions, as we call
sympathies and antipathies, are implanted in many things by provident
nature for the preservation of them, is a thing so evident that every body
grants it." The geese, it is almost unnecessary to add, have now forgot
their obeisance to St. Hilda, or their antipathy to the soil, and fly over
Whitby with as little difficulty as anywhere else.
NOTE VIII.
His body's resting place, of old,
How oft their patron changed, they told.
St. Cuthbert was, in the choice of his sepulchre, one of the most mutable and unreasonable saints in the Calendar. He died A.D. 686, in a
hermitage upon the Farne Islands, having resigned the bishopric of Lin.
disfarne, or Holy Island, about two years before. His oooy, after being
Carrioed about from place to place, was ultimately brought to a place
named Wardlaw, or Wardilaw. Here the saint chose his place of resi.
dence; and all who have seen Durham, must admit, that if difficult in his
choice, he evinced taste in at length fixing it. It is said that the Nor.
thumbrian catholics still keep secret the precise spot of the saint's-sepulture, which is only entrusted to three persons at a time. When one dies,
the survivors associate to them, in his room, a person judged fit to be the
depositary of so valuable a secret.
NOTE IX.
Even Scotland's dauntless king and heir, &c.,
Before his standard fled,
Every one has heard, that when David I., with h s son Henry, invaded
Northumberland in 1136, the English host marched against them under
the holy banner of St. Cuthbert; to the efficacy of which was imputed
the great victory which they obtained in the bloody battle of Northaller.
ton or Cuton-moor. The conquerors were at least as much indebted ta
the jealousy and intractability of the different tribes who composed David's
army, among whom, as mentioned in the text, were the Galwegians, the
Britons of Strath-Clyde, the men of Teviotdale and Lothian, with many
Norman and German warriors, who asserted the cause of the Empress
Maud.
NOTE X.'Twas he, to vindicate his reign,
Edged Alfred's faulchion on the Dane,
And turn'd the Conqueror back again.
Cuthbert hadl no great reason to spare the Danes, when opportunity
offered. Accordingly, I find, in Simeon of Durham, that the Saint ap.
peared in a vision to Alfred, when lurking in the marshes of Glastonbury,
and promised him assistance and victory overhis heathen enemies; a con.
solation which, as was reasonable, Alfred, after the victory of Ashendown,
rewarded, by a royal offering at the shrine of the Saint. As to William
the Conqueror, the terror spread before his army, when he marched to
punish the revolt of the Northumbrians, in 1096, had forced the monks to
fly once more to Holy Island with the body of the Saint. It was, how.
ever, replaced before William left the North, and, to balance accounts,
the Conqueror having intimated an indiscreet curiosity to view the
Saint's body, he was, while in the act of commanding the shrine to be