JOHNNY O’ COCKLEY’S WELL

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:

‘But little knew he that his bloody hounds

Were bound in iron bands’:

and I have therefore substituted lines from a later text. The correction in 20.¹ and 21.¹ is also essential.

The Story will be familiar to many as Johnie of Breadislee, a title given by Sir Walter Scott to his version, the first that was published, in the Minstrelsy (1802). In the present version, however, Johnny certainly belongs to Cockley’s Well, Bradyslee being only the name of his hunting-ground. In other variants, his name is Johnny Cock, Johnny Cox, Johnny o’ Cockis, o’ Cockerslee, of Cockielaw, of Cocklesmuir, or Johnny Brad. The name of the hunting-ground varies also, though not so widely; and, as usual, the several editors of the ballad have carefully noted that its topography (though the nomenclature is corrupted) connects it with this district or that—Percy’s ballad is Northumbrian, Scott’s is of Dumfriesshire.

Percy considered that the mention of wolves (17.¹) was an indication of the antiquity of the ballad; whereupon Child quotes Holinshed (1577) as saying that ‘though the island is void of wolves south of the Tweed, yet the Scots cannot boast the like, since they have grievous wolves.’ Yet how can one reconcile the mention of wolves with the reference to ‘American leather’ (13.³)?

Professor Child calls this a ‘precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad,’ and Professor Gummere points out that ‘it goes with a burden, this sterling old song, and has traces of an incremental repetition that has been reduced to lowest terms by impatient transcribers’ (The Popular Ballad, p. 268). In his Old English Ballads Gummere gives a text very ingeniously compounded of Percy’s and Kinloch’s; and Professor Brandl has attempted to restore the original text.