Editorial note — THE GIPSIES. [Footnote 174]

[Footnote 181: This gipsy battle is alluded to by Sir Walter Scott, in a postscript to a letter to Captain Adam Ferguson, 16th April, 1819. "By the by, old Kennedy, the tinker, swam for his life at Jedburgh, and was only, by the sophisticated and timed evidence of a seceding doctor, who differed from all his brethren, saved from a well-deserved gibbet. He goes to botanize for fourteen years. Pray tell this to the Duke, (of Buccleuch,) for he was an old soldier of the duke and the duke's old soldier. Six of his brethren were, I am told, in the court, and kith and kin without end. I am sorry so many of the clan are left. The cause of the quarrel with the murdered man was an old feud between two gipsy clans, the Kennedys and Irvings, which, about forty years since gave rise to a desperate quarrel and battle at Hawick-green, in which the grandfather of both Kennedy and the man whom he murdered were engaged."--Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott. Alexander Kennedy was tried for murdering Irving at Yarrows-ford. This gipsy fray at Hawick is known among the English gipsies as "the Battle of the Bridge."--Ed. ]