#A#, #B#, and #C# agree in these points: A bride, not being a maid, looks forward with alarm to her wedding night, and induces her bower-woman to take her place for the nonce. The imposture is detected by the bridegroom, through the agency of magical blankets, sheets, and pillows, #A#; or of blankets, bed, sheet, and sword, #B#; or simply of the Billie Blin, #C#. (The sword is probably an editorial insertion; and Jamieson, Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 343, doubts, but without sufficient reason, the Billie Blin.) The bridegroom has recourse to his mother, who demands an explanation of the bride, and elicits a confession that she had once upon a time encountered a young man in a wood, who subjected her to violence. Before they parted, he gave her certain tokens, which he enjoined her to be very careful of, a lock of his hair, a string of beads, a gold ring, and a knife. #B# omits the knife, and #C# the beads. The mother goes back to her son, and asks what he had done with the tokens she had charged him never to part with. He owns that he had presented them to a lady, one whom he would now give all his possessions to have for his wife. The lady of the greenwood is identified by the tokens. #A#, #C#, and #D# make the mother set a golden chair for the bride, in which none but a maid can sit, #D# [no leal maid will sit till bidden, #C#]. In #D# the chair is declined; in #C#, taken without bidding; in #A# the significance of the chair has been lost. #E#, #F#, #G# employ no kind of test of maidenhood,--the bride frankly avows that she is with child to another man; and #D#, as well as #E#, #F#, #G#, omits the substitution of the chambermaid. The tokens in #D# are a chain, a ring, and three locks of hair; in #E#, gloves and a ring; in #F#, #G#, green gloves, a ring, and three locks [plaits] of hair. Only the ring remains in #H#. "This ballad," says Motherwell (1827), "is very popular, and is known to reciters under a variety of names. I have heard it called Lord Bangwell, Bengwill, Dingwall, Brengwill, etc., and The Seven Sisters, or the Leaves of Lind." He adds: "There is an unedited ballad in Scotland, which is a nearer approximation to the Danish song, inasmuch as the substitution of the maiden sister for the real bride constitutes a prominent feature of the tale."[94] (Minstrelsy, Introduction, lxix^21 and xc.) Scott remarks that Cospatrick[95] "was the designation of the Earl of Dunbar, in the days of Wallace and Bruce." Mr Macmath informs me that it is in use at the present day in the families of the Earl of Home and of Dunbar of Mochrum, Bart, who, among others, claim descent from the ancient earls of Dunbar and March. The story of the ballad might, of course, attach itself to any person prominent in the region where the ballad was known.