The Text is a combination of three, but mainly from a text which seems to have been sent to Percy in 1775. The other two are from Scottish tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I have made a few chang...
The Text is another of the lively battle-pieces from the Percy Folio, put into modern spelling, and no other version is known or needed. The battle of Durham, which the minstrel says (27.1, 64.2) was fought on a morning of May,...
The Text is from Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769), which is almost identical with a copy in Johnson's Museum. Another variant, also given in the Museum, was contributed by Burns, who made it shorter and more dramati...
The Text of the ballad is here given from Kinloch's MSS., where it is in the handwriting of John Hill Burton when a youth. The text of the song Waly, waly, I take from Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany. The song and the ballad have...
The Text is from Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia (1609), the only text that has come down to us of a 'three-man's song' which achieved extraordinary popularity during' the seventeenth century.
The Text is modernised from the Percy Folio MS. (c. 1650). At two points, after 8.3 and 18.2, half a page of the MS., or about nine stanzas, is missing--torn out and 'used by maids to light the fire' in Humphry Pitt's house, wh...
The Text given here is comparatively a late one, from the Roxburghe collection (iii. 456). An earlier broadside, in the same and other collections, gives a longer but curiously corrupted version, exhibiting such perversions as ...
The Text is formed by a collation of six broadsides printed between 1672 and 1700: they do not, however, present many variations. Here, if anywhere, one would demand licence to make alterations and improvements. In stanza 12 th...
The Text.--There are two texts available for this ballad, of which the second one, here given, was said to have been taken down from the singing of an old woman by James Telfer of Liddesdale, and was so printed in Richardson's ...
The Text is from Kinloch's MSS., 'from the recitation of T. Kinnear, Stonehaven.' Child remarks of it that 'probably by the fortunate accident of being a fragment' it 'leaves us to put our own construction upon the weird seaman...
There are here put in juxtaposition three versions in ballad-form of the same story, though fragmentary in the two latter cases, not only because each is good, but to show the possibilities of variation in a popular story. Ther...
The Text is given here from Kinloch's MSS. He gives also three other versions and various fragments. The tale is also found amongst the Roxburghe Ballads, as The Beautifull Shepherdesse of Arcadia, in two broadsides printed abo...
The Text is given verbatim et literatim from John Aubrey's MS. of his Remains of Gentilisme & Judaisme (1686-7) in the Lansdowne MSS., No. 231, folio 114 recto and verso. This text has often been printed before, but always with...