The Text.--The earliest complete text, here given, was printed by William Copland between 1548 and 1568: there are extant two printed fragments, one printed by John Byddell in 1536, and the other in a type older than Copland's....
The Text is from a broadside of the seventeenth century from the press of Coles, Vere, Wright, and Clarke, now preserved in the Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian Library.
The Text is from a broadside in the Bagford collection (i. 65); other broadsides, very similar, are to be found in the Pepys, Roxburghe, and other collections. The ballad has often been reprinted; and more than one oral version...
The Text is from the Skene MS., but I have omitted the three final lines, which do not make a complete stanza, and, when compared with Scott's 'Old Lady's' version, are obviously corrupt. The last verse should signify that the ...
The Text is from Lovely Jenny's Garland, as given with emendations by Professor Child. There is also a curiously perverted version in Herd's manuscript, in which the verses require rearrangement before becoming intelligible....
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 taken almost entirely from a copy which was sent in 1780 to Bishop Percy by a Miss Fisher of Carlisle; in the last half of the first stanza her version gives, unintelligibly: ...
The Text.--There is only one text of this ballad, and that was printed by Scott in the Minstrelsy from 'tradition in the West Borders'; he adds that 'some conjectural emendations have been absolutely necessary,' a remark suspic...
The Text is taken from Motherwell's Minstrelsy, a similar version being given in Maidment's North Countrie Garland. A few alterations from the latter version are incorporated. ...
These two ballads must be considered together, as the last six verses (18-23) of The Clerk's Twa Sons, as here given, are a variant of The Wife of Usher's Well.
The Text is taken from Buchan's MSS., the Scots version being rather more condensed than the corresponding English broadside. There is a reference to this ballad in Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (1598); but ea...
The Text is given from Scott's Minstrelsy (1803), vol. iii. pp. 83-4. His introduction states that it was obtained from recitation in the Forest of Ettrick, and that it relates to the execution of a Border freebooter, named Cok...
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...
The Text is from Motherwell's MS. He included it in the Appendix to his Minstrelsy. No other collector or editor notices the ballad--'if it ever were one,' as Child remarks. ...