Cock Up Your Beaver

When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,
He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown,
But now he has gotten a hat and a feather -
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver! 

Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu' sprush!
We'll over the border and gie them a brush:
There's somebody there we'll teach better behavior -
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!

- Robert Burns

sprush = spruce

There was a fashion in 18th Century Europe  for beaver hats, both the furry variety and felt hats made of beaver fur;  the fur itself made the hats waterproof and long-lasting. The hats would have been extensively used by the armed forces and the purposes of the song above is most likely a call to arms, or a recruiting song. There is a suggestion also that the song may refer to the option taken by many ex-Jacobite soldiers after Culloden to lay down their blue bonnets and take King George II’s crown, joining the army of the British Empire. However, Burns’ added verse spins this interpretation on it’s head.

The beaver hat came in several styles as it was developed over many years and fashions changed. It may be the case that hats could be referred to as ‘beavers’ when there was no beaver fur used in their production. The Glengarry for example was a military hat developed in Scotland as a derivation of the original military beavers.

The first verse of the doggerel was probably apocryphal and Burns tidied it up and added the second. The innuendo of the words would not have been lost on the bard, or on the pub-singers of the traditional verse. It does seem that there must have been a little more background to the narrative, but it’s been lost in the mists of time.

To cock up your beaver in the er, genteel sense also has two meanings: one is to fix your hat jauntily on the head – an expression of anticipation and readiness for battle, perhaps; the other is to adorn the hat with a cock’s feather, a gesture of pride and triumph.

In the BBC’s Robert Burns website, Iain Macdonald explains that the air (and sentiment expressed) is old and traditional, pre-dating the Jacobite uprisings; and points out that the Burns lines are a revision of a fragment found in Herd [?] (ii. 205) in which the last lines read; ‘Cock up your beaver, and cock it nae wrang/ We’ll a’ to England ere it be lang’.