The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 4 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 4 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
The lover is Lochinvar in #E#, #F#, #G#, #I#, #K#, #L# (note); Lamington
in #D#, #H#, #J#; Lauderdale in #A#, #C#; he has no name in #B#. The
bridegroom is Lochinvar in #D#, #H#; Lamington in #B#, Lymington, #K#;
Lauderdale in #F#, #G#; Lochinton #A#, Lamendall #E#, Limberdale #I#
(obvious mixtures of the preceding); Faughanwood in #C#; in #J# he has
no name. The bridegroom should be an Englishman, but Lochinvar,
Lamington, and Lauderdale are all south-Scottish names. #B# puts a Scot
from the North Country in place of the titular Englishman of the other
copies, but this Norland man is laird of Lamington.
The place of the fight is Cadan bank and Cadan brae, #C#, #D#; Cowden
bank (banks) and Cowden brae (braes), #A#, #H#, #J#, the variation being
perhaps due to the very familiar Cowdenknows; Callien, Caylin, Caley
bank (buss) and brae, in #E#, #I#, #F#; Foudlin dyke and Foudlin stane
in #K#. No place is named in #B#, #G#[120]. In #I#, the lass lives in
Bordershellin.
A copy from the recitation of a young Irishwoman living in Taunton,
Massachusetts (learned from print, I suppose, and in parts imperfectly
remembered), puts the scene of the story at Edenborough town. A squire
of high degree had courted a comely country girl. When her father came
to hear of this, he was an angry man, and “requested of his daughter
dear to suit his company,” or to match within her degree. The only son
of a farmer in the east had courted this girl until he thought he had
won her, and had got the consent of her father and mother. The girl
writes the squire a letter to tell him that she is to be married to the
farmer’s son. He writes in answer that she must dress in green at her
wedding (a color which no Scots girl would wear, for ill luck), and he
will wear a suit of the same, and wed her ‘in spite of all that’s
there.’ He mounts eight squire-men on milk-white steeds, and rides ‘to
the wedding-house, with the company dressed in green.’ (See the note to
#L#.)
‘O welcome you, fair welcome!
And where have you spent all day?
Or did you see those gentlemen
That rode along this way?’
He looked at her and scoffed at her,
He smiled and this did say,
‘They might have been some fairy troops,
That rode along this way.’
She fills him a glass of new port wine, which he drinks to all the
company, saying, Happy is the man that is called the groom, but another
may love her as well as he and take her from his side.
Up spoke the intended groom,
And an angry man was he,
Saying, If it is to fight that you came here,
I am the man for thee.
‘It is not to fight that I came here,
But friendship for to show;
So give me one kiss from your lovely bride,
And away from you I’ll go.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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