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James Hogg was born in 1770 at Ettrick Hall, at the top of the Ettrick Valley. The second of four sons of an impoverished farmer, he left school after six months’ formal education. Aged seven, he began to work on the lowest rung of the farming ladder – as a cowherd. But he had learned, at his mother’s knee, the great oral tradition of ballads and folklore of the Borders. James Hogg taught himself to read and write, and to play the fiddle, and entered the skilled profession of shepherding. He began making songs and verses for local gatherings. The other young people of the valleys called him “Jamie the Poeter”. His career had begun.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, Hogg was working as a shepherd on the farm on Blackhouse in Yarrow for the Laidlaw family, who opened their hearts and library to the young shepherd poet. It was at this time that Walter Scott, the newly appointed sheriff of Selkirk, was roaming the Border Valleys in pursuit of the disappearing ballads of the Borders. Through the Laidlaws, he met James Hogg and his mother who had a rich store of the ballads. The two young men were almost exact contemporaries. They began a friendship that was to last, despite many tensions, throughout their lives.
The work for which James Hogg is best known is the “Confessions of a Justified Sinner”.
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