Edie Ochiltree

Edie Ochiltree
Edie Ochiltree in an 1844 graphite drawing by Mary E. Sealy
First appearance	The Antiquary (1816)
Created by	Walter Scott
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Beggar
Title	Royal Bedesman
Religion	Presbyterian
Nationality	Scottish

Edie Ochiltree is a character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary, a licensed beggar of the legally protected class known as Blue-gowns or bedesmen, who follows a regular beat around the fictional Scottish town of Fairport. Scott based his character on Andrew Gemmels, a real beggar he had known in his childhood. Along with Jonathan Oldbuck, the novel’s title-character, Ochiltree is widely seen as one of Scott's finest creations.

Jonathan Oldbuck, the antiquary of the novel's title, says that Ochiltree “has been soldier, ballad-singer, travelling tinker, and is now a beggar…a sort of privileged nuisance – one of the last specimens of the old-fashioned Scottish mendicant, who kept his rounds within a particular space, and was the news-carrier, the minstrel, and sometimes the historian of the district”. Ochiltree's great love and knowledge of the old ballads and traditions echoes Oldbuck’s more scholarly antiquarian lore. They have a mutual respect and liking for each other, and between them they solve the other characters' problems and bring the novel to a happy resolution, but on the way they sometimes clash comically, Oldbuck's antiquarian fantasy and self-delusion being punctured by Ochiltree's realism and good sense. Both characters are presented as being sticklers for exactness, Ochiltree being remarkable for the accuracy of the local news he brings and for his insistence on old traditions being remembered correctly. In the first half of the novel the two are differentiated by Ochiltree's greater practical effectiveness in the help he brings to others. He could be described as a Cynic in the tradition of Diogenes, and he is at odds with modern commercial society in his traditional reliance on the support of the community at large rather than on any single patron. His overall function in the Fairport community is to bind it together.

The writer W. S. Crockett considered Edie Ochiltree to be more firmly based on a real-life model than any other of Scott's characters, Jonathan Oldbuck alone excepted. His original was one Andrew Gemmels, a beggar whom Scott, then a boy in Kelso, had often met. Gemmels came from the parish of Old Cumnock in Ayrshire, and he was, like Ochiltree, an army veteran who had fought at the battle of Fontenoy. Scott described him in his introduction to the 1829 edition of The Antiquary as “a remarkably fine old figure, very tall, and maintaining a soldierlike or military manner and address. His features were intelligent, with a powerful expression of sarcasm…It was some fear of Andrew's satire, as much as a feeling of kindness or charity, which secured him the general good reception which he enjoyed everywhere.” He prospered better than most beggars, and died, by his own reckoning, at the age of 105, leaving a small fortune to a nephew.