Edie Ochiltree

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.

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".

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.

[21] William H. Prescott in the North American Review believed that such characters as Edie Ochiltree showed Scott to have a "worldly, good-natured shrewdness" surpassing that of Shakespeare himself.

[26] John Sutherland was unconvinced by Ochiltree's readiness to put the welfare of his betters before his own, and interpreted this as a symptom of Scott's nostalgia for the national solidarity of Britain in the 1790s, when men of all classes felt threatened by Revolutionary France.

[28] The academic Robin Mayhead however disagreed, arguing that The Antiquary does not have the conventions of the realist school; for him Ochiltree functions as an embodiment of dependability, necessary to offset the faults and fallibilities of other characters in the novel.

[30] John Buchan noted that he was depicted with "minute realism" as a typical Scottish beggar, and yet was sometimes able "to speak words which, though wholly in character, are yet part of the world's poetry".

Beers likewise numbered him among Scott's greatest creations, one of those who "brought into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into Scotch human nature".

The gravestone of Andrew Gemmels