At that period the
tongue of the libeller was not tied by fear of the law; for the man
insulted or libelled there existed no means of redress other than that
of shedding, or trying to shed, his insulter's blood. It was a rough and
ready mode of obtaining justice; and if it had its manifest
disadvantages, it was at least not wholly unsuited to the rough and
ready times.
But cases, unhappily, were not unknown in which one or other of the
tipsy combatants--in his sober moments possibly an honourable and
kindly-natured man--thrust suddenly and without warning, giving his
opponent small time to draw, or even, perhaps, to rise from his chair, a
course of action which, even under the easy moral code of those days,
was accounted as murder.
Such a case occurred at Jedburgh in the year 1726. Sir Gilbert Eliott of
Stobs and Colonel Stewart of Stewartfield (now called Hartrigge) were
the principals in the affair.
Sir Gilbert (father of the General Eliott afterwards so famed for his
defence of Gibraltar in the great siege of 1779-83) was a man who had
spent some part of his youth in London, a place then, as ever, little
calculated to repress leanings towards conviviality in young men
possessing the command of money. Probably the habits there contracted
were emphasized later, when ebbing fortune consigned him for good to
what no doubt then seemed to him the deadly dull life of a dull
country-side.
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