APPENDIX
Aytoun, II, 239, says of ‘Richie Storie,’ The words, recast in a romantic form and applied to a more interesting subject, have been set to music by a noble lady, and are now very popular under the title of ‘Huntingtower.’ The history of ‘Huntingtower’ is not so well known as might be expected. I have not been able to ascertain the authorship or the date of its first appearance (which was very probably in society rather than in print). ‘Richie Storie’ is not carried by our texts further back than 1802–3 (B, H). Kinloch published in 1827 a ballad from recitation, ‘The Duke of Athol,’ which is ‘Huntingtower’ passed through the popular mouth; for ‘Huntingtower’ became, and has continued to be, a favorite with the people. Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, I, 166, says that he had often heard ‘The Duke of Athol’ in his early years, and he gives eight stanzas which do not differ remarkably from Kinloch’s ballad.
The marks of the derivation of ‘Huntingtower’ are the terminations of lines 1, 2, 4 of each stanza, and substantial agreements in the last two stanzas with A, B, E, 5, D, F, G, 4, and with B 6, C 7, H, respectively. The name Huntingtower occurs only in B 6 of ‘Richie Storie.’ The author of ‘Huntingtower’ was no doubt possessed of a version of ‘Richie Storie’ which had its own peculiarities.
‘Huntingtower’ is too well known to require citing. It has been often printed; as, for example, in Mr G. F. Graham’s Popular Songs of Scotland, revised by J. Muir Wood, Balmoral Edition, Glasgow, 1887, p. 152; The Songs of Scotland, the words revised by Dr Charles Mackay, p. 5, London, Boosey & Co. (Altered by the Baroness Nairne, and very little left of it, Life and Songs of the Baroness Nairne, edited by the Rev. Charles Rogers, 1872, p. 177.) The pleasing air strongly resembles, says Mr Wood, one in D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy, V, 42, ed. 1719.
‘The Duke of Athol’ may be given for the interest it has as a popular rifacimento.
THE DUKE OF ATHOL
“Taken down from the recitation of an idiot boy in Wishaw;” Kinloch’s Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 170.
1
‘I am gaing awa, Jeanie,
I am gaing awa;
I am gaing ayont the saut seas,
I’m gaing sae far awa.’
2
‘What will ye buy to me, Jamie?
What will ye buy to me?’
‘I’ll buy to you a silken plaid,
And send it wi vanitie.’
3
‘That’s na love at a’, Jamie,
That’s na love at a’;
All I want is love for love,
And that’s the best ava.
4
‘Whan will ye marry me, Jamie?
Whan will ye marry me?
Will ye tak me to your countrie,
Or will ye marry me?’
5
‘How can I marry thee, Jeanie?
How can I marry thee,
Whan I’ve a wife and bairns three?
Twa wad na weill agree.’
6
‘Wae be to your fause tongue, Jamie,
Wae be to your fause tongue;
Ye promised for to marry me,
And has a wife at hame!
7
‘But if your wife wad dee, Jamie,
And sae your bairns three,
Wad ye tak me to your countrie,
Or wad ye marry me?
8
‘But sin they’re all alive, Jamie,
But sin they’re all alive,
We’ll tak a glass in ilka hand,
And drink, Weill may they thrive!’
9
‘If my wife wad dee, Jeanie,
And sae my bairns three,
I wad tak ye to my ain countrie,
And married we wad be.’
10
‘O an your head war sair, Jamie,
O an your head war sair,
I’d tak the napkin frae my neck
And tie doun your yellow hair.’
11
‘I hae na wife at a’, Jeanie,
I hae na wife at a’;
I hae neither wife nor bairns three;
I said it to try thee.’
12
‘Licht are ye to loup, Jamie,
Licht are ye to loup;
Licht are ye to loup the dyke,
Whan I maun wale a slap.’
13
‘Licht am I to loup, Jeanie,
Licht am I to loup;
But the hiest dyke that we come to
I’ll turn and tak you up.
14
‘Blair in Athol is mine, Jeanie,
Blair in Athol is mine;
Bonnie Dunkel is whare I dwell,
And the boats o Garry’s mine.
15
‘Huntingtower is mine, Jeanie,
Huntingtower is mine,
Huntingtower, and bonnie Belford,
And a’ Balquhither’s mine.’
233
ANDREW LAMMIE
A. ‘The Trumpeter of Fyvie,’ Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, I, 126, 1806.
B. ‘Tifty’s Nanny,’ Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, II, 382, from a stall-copy.
C. a. ‘Andrew Lammie,’ Buchan’s Gleanings, p. 98, 1825 ; Laing’s Thistle of Scotland, p. 55, 1823. b. Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, p. 239.
Jamieson, in his preface, 1806, says that this ballad was current in the Border counties within a few years, and that A was taken down by Leyden from the recitation of a young lady who learned it in Teviotdale. Writing to Scott, in November, 1804, of such ballads as he had already prepared for the press, he says, “Trumpeter of Fyvie, from tradition, furnished by Mr Leyden, and collated with a stall-copy” (probably B): Letters addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Abbotsford, I, No. 117.
Buchan, in the notes to his Gleanings, 1825, p. 197, says of C a: “This is one of the greatest favorites of the people in Aberdeenshire that I know. I took it first down from the memory of a very old woman, and afterwards published thirty thousand copies of it. There are two versions, an old and a new; but, although I have both, I prefer this one, the younger of the two, having been composed and acted in the year 1674.” Laing, who reprints A in his Thistle of Scotland, p. 63, calls that the “old way of Andrew Lammie.” Motherwell, 1827, reprints “a stall-copy published at Glasgow several years ago, collated with a recited copy which has furnished one or two verbal improvements:” C b. There are a great many variations from C a, of which precisely one or two are verbal improvements. But Motherwell also gives six stanzas which are not in a. His copy is repeated in The Ballad Minstrelsy of Scotland, Glasgow, 1871, and there the editor says that in a chap-book printed by J. and M. Robertson, Saltmarket, Glasgow, 1808, “Andrew Lammie is given with only a few slight verbal differences between it and the copy here printed.” Such stall-copies as I have seen are late, and are reprints of C a or of C b. Motherwell assures us that the ballad as he has given it “agrees with any recited copy which the Editor has hitherto met with in the West Country.”
A professed edition, “most carefully collated with all previous editions,” was published at Peterhead, 1872: “Mill o Tifty’s Annie, A Buchan Ballad, with Introduction,” etc. This is attributed to the Rev. Dr John Muir of Aberdeen. ‘Mill o Tiftie’s Annie’ in Christie, I, 48 “is epitomized from traditional copies;” that is to say, it is taken from Motherwell, with a trifling change here and there. A copy given in Smith’s New History of Aberdeenshire is compounded of A, B, and a couple of lines from C b.
Annie, daughter to a well-to-do miller, loses her heart to a handsome trumpeter in the service of Lord Fyvie. Her father will not hear of such a match. (Annie has five thousand marks, and the man not a penny, A 11.) The trumpeter is obliged to go to Edinburgh for a time, and Annie appoints him a tryst at a bridge. He will buy her her wedding-gear while he is away, and marry her when he comes back. Annie knows that she shall be dead ere he returns, and bids him an everlasting adieu.[[130]] The trumpeter goes to the top of the castle and blows a blast which is heard at his love’s house. Her father beats her, her mother beats her; her brother beats her and breaks her back. Lord Fyvie is passing on one of these occasions, comes in, and urges Mill of Tiftie to yield to his daughter’s inclinations. The father is immovable; she must marry higher than with a trumpeter. Annie is put to bed, with her face towards Fyvie, and dies of a broken heart and of the cruel treatment which she has undergone.
This is a homely ditty,[[131]] but the gentleness and fidelity of Annie under the brutal behavior of her family are genuinely pathetic, and justify the remarkable popularity which the ballad has enjoyed in the north of Scotland. In those parts the story has been played as well as sung. “The ballad used in former times to be presented in a dramatic shape at rustic meetings in Aberdeenshire,” says Chambers (Scottish Ballads, p. 143); perhaps misinterpreting and expanding the enunciation made by Buchan and in the title of some stall-copies that “this tragedy was acted in the year 1674,” which may rather refer to the date of the story. But however it may have been in former times, two rival companies in Aberdeenshire were performing plays founded on the ballad in 1887–8.[[132]]
“Bonny Andrew Lammie” was a well-known personage at the beginning of the last century, for, as Jamieson has pointed out, he is mentioned in a way that implies this by Allan Ramsay, in the second of his two cantos in continuation of Christ’s Kirk on the Green, written, as Ramsay says, in 1718. (Poems, London, 1731, I, 76, v. 70.)
Mill of Tiftie is, or was, a farm-house on the side of a glen about half a mile northeast of the castle of Fyvie, and in view of its turrets (on one of which there now stands a figure of the Trumpeter sounding towards Tiftie). The mill proper, now a ruin, was in the bottom of the glen, and gave its name to the house. The bridge of Sleugh, otherwise Skeugh, etc., was in the hollow between Tiftie and the castle.[[133]]
Annie was Agnes Smith, Nannie being among her people an affectionate form for Agnes. There is reason to believe that she may have been daughter of a William Smith who is known to have been a brother or near kinsman of the laird of Inveramsay, a person of some local consequence.[[134]] An inscription on her gravestone makes Agnes Smith to have died January 19, 1673.[[135]]
“Some years subsequent to the melancholy fate of poor Tifty’s Nanny,” says Jamieson, II, 387, citing the current tradition of Fyvie, “her sad story being mentioned and the ballad sung in a company in Edinburgh when [Andrew Lammie] was present, he remained silent and motionless, till he was discovered by a groan suddenly bursting from him and several of the buttons flying from his waistcoat.” The peasants of Fyvie, Jamieson continues, “borrowed this striking characteristic of excessive grief” neither from the Laocoön group nor from Shakspere’s King Lear, but from nature. The anecdote, and the comment too, is apt to be repeated by editors of ‘Andrew Lammie.’ That “affecting image of overpowering grief,” as Chambers calls it, the flying off of the buttons (or the bursting of a waistcoat), we have had several times already, though in no ballad (or version) of much note: see II, 118, D 17, 186, C 15, 308, 4; IV, 101, I 15, 185, 11. It must be owned to be a stroke that does not well bear iteration. Mrs. Littlewit in ‘Bartholomew Fair’ has a tedious life with her Puritan, she says: “he breaks his buttons and cracks seams at every saying he sobs out.” Ben Jonson has taken out one of the best things in our tragedy and put it into his comedy.
The air to which this ballad was usually sung, Jamieson informs us, was “of that class which in Teviotdale they term a northern drawl; and a Perthshire set of it, but two notes lower than it is commonly sung, is to be found in Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum [No. 175, p. 183], to the song ‘How long and dreary is the night.’”
C b is translated by Wolff, Hausschatz, p. 199, Halle der Völker, I, 65.