LAIDLAW, Margaret, m. Hogg, born Ettrick 1730, died Ettrick 1813. Tradition-bearer. Daughter of Bessie Scott, and William Laidlaw, tenant farmer.

Margaret Laidlaw is remembered through the writing of her son, James Hogg (1770—1835). She was the eldest daughter of William Laidlaw (‘Will o’ Phaup’), an authority on traditional culture (as was her brother William), who was the tenant of Old Upper Phawhope, in Ettrick. In 1765, she married Robert Hogg (c. 1729—92), the tenant farmer of Ettrick House and Ettrick Hall, and they had four sons.

Her most famous appearance is in James Hogg's Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (1834), as a commentator on Scott's editing of her songs in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802—3): ‘they war made for singing, an’ no for reading; and they're nouther right spelled nor right setten down’ (Bold 2000, pp.116—17). Scott wrote that Margaret Laidlaw, ‘sings, or rather chants … with great animation’ (ibid., p.122). James Hogg was surprised at the extent of his mother's repertoire, leading Elaine Petrie to argue that her passive repertoire was activated by the Minstrelsy collection (Petrie 1983, pp.34—8).

James Hogg's brother William, in the New Monthly Magazine of 1836, says their mother was a skilled narrator of ‘tales and songs of spectres, ghosts, fairies, brownies, voices, &c. These had been both seen and heard in her time in the Glen of Phaup’. She was a deeply religious woman, and made sure her children knew their psalms.

There are tantalising glimpses of Margaret Laidlaw in James Hogg's work, in the spirited mother of ‘The Marvellous Doctor’ in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 21 (1827) and the reductive Scots-speaker of ‘The Love Adventures of George Cochrane’ in Winter Evening Tales (1820) vol. 1. She instructed him to set ‘Athol Cummers’ in Songs (1831): ‘O man, it's a shame to hear sic a good tune an’ nae words till't. Gae away ben the house, like a good lad, and mak’ me a verse till't’ (p. 191). In 1813, Hogg described his mother as ‘the best friend that ever I had’ (Miller 2003, p. 15) and his affection is reflected in ‘A Last Adieu’, in Blackwood's 1 (1817). Margaret Laidlaw was a profound influence on the writer of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).