contriver of the scheme,
called here Sim o' the Maynes, fled into England from the resentment
of his chief; but experienced there the common fate of a traitor,
being himself executed at Carlisle, about two months after Hobbie's
death. Such is, at least, the tradition of Liddesdale. Sim o' the
Maynes appears among the Armstrongs of Whitauch, in Liddesdale, in the
list of clans so often alluded to.

[Footnote 180: The original editor of the _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_
has noticed the perfidy of this clan in another instance; the delivery
of the banished Earl of Northumberland into the hands of the Scottish
regent, by Hector of Harelaw, an Armstrong, with whom he had taken
refuge.--_Reliques of Ancient Poetry_, Vol. I. p. 283. This Hector of
Harelaw seems to have been an Englishman, or under English assurance;
for he is one of those, against whom bills were exhibited, by the
Scottish commissioners, to the lord-bishop of Carlisle.--_Introduction
to the History of Westmoreland and Cumberland_, p. 81. In the list
of borderers, 1597, Hector of Harelaw, with the Griefs and Cuts of
Harelaw, also figures as an inhabitant of the Debateable Land. It
would appear, from a spirited invective in the Maitland MSS. against
the regent, and those who delivered up the unfortunate earl to
Elizabeth, that Hector had been guilty of this treachery, to
redeem the pledge which had been exacted from him for his peaceable
demeanour. The poet says, that the perfidy of Morton and Lochlevin was
worse than even that of--

--the traitour Eckie of Harelaw,
That says he sould him to redeem his pledge;
Your deed is war, as all the world does know--
You nothing can but covatice alledge.

_Pinkerton's Maitland Poems_, Vol. II. p. 290.

Eckie is the contraction of Hector among the vulgar.

These little memoranda may serve still farther to illustrate the
beautiful ballads, upon that subject, published in the _Reliques_.]

Kershope-burn, where Hobbie met his treacherous companions, falls
into the Liddel, from the English side, at a place called Turnersholm,
where, according to tradition, turneys and games of chivalry were
often solemnized. The Mains was anciently a border-keep, near
Castletoun, on the north side of the Liddel, but is now totally
demolished.

Askerton is an old castle, now ruinous, situated in the wilds of
Cumberland, about seventeen miles north-east of Carlisle, amidst that
mountainous and desolate tract of country, borderin