KING EDELBRODE
Sent by Motherwell to C. K. Sharpe, with a letter dated October 8, 1825. Also entered in Motherwell’s Note-Book, p. 53 (excepting the second line of the first stanza).
King Edelbrode cam owre the sea,
Fa la lilly
All for to marry a gay ladye.
Fa la lilly.
(Then follows the description of a queen, jimp and sma, not remembered.)
Her lilly hands, sae white and sma,
Fa la lilly
Wi gouden rings were buskit braw.
Fa la lilly
“I cannot get any precise account of its subject, but it related somehow to a most magnificent marriage. The old lady who sung it died some years ago.” (Letter to Sharpe.)
“It may be the same ballad as the scrap I have, with something of a similar chorus.” (Note-Book, where the “chorus” is Fa fa lilly.)
The reference seems to be to ‘The Whummil Bore,’ No 27, I, 255.
C. K. Sharpe’s Letters, ed. Allardyce, II, 106 (1813).
‘O come you from the earth?’ she said,
‘Or come you from the skye?’
‘Oh, I am from yonder churchyard,
Where my crumbling relicks lie.’
Sharpe somewhere asks, Where does this belong?
Possibly in some version of ‘Proud Lady Margaret,’ No 47, II, 425.
MS. of Thomas Wilkie, p. 79, “Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy,” No 73 a, Abbotsford.
The great bull of Bendy-law
Has broken his band and run awa,
And the king and a’ his court
Canna turn that bull about.
“Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy,” No 86 a, Abbotsford, in the handwriting of Thomas Wilkie.
Red-Cap he was there,
And he was there indeed,
And he was standing by,
With a red cap on his head.
“Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy,” No 73 a; MS. of Thomas Wilkie, Abbotsford, derived by Wilkie from his father, “who heard a Lady Brigs sing this when he was a boy.”
He took a sword in every hand
And on the house did venture,
And swore if they wad not gee her up
He would make all their doors play clatter.
Her angry father, when he saw this,
That he would lose his ae daughter,
He swore if he had not been gude at the sword
He durst not come to make his doors clatter.
It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat;
The mither beneath the mools heard that.
sung in Wuthering Heights, ch. 9, has not unnaturally been taken for a relic of a traditional Scottish ballad of a dead mother returning to her abused children. It is, in fact, a stanza (not literally well remembered) from the Danish ballad ‘Moderen under Mulde,’ Grundtvig, II, 470, No 89, B 11, translated by Jamieson, and given in the notes to the fourth canto of Scott’s Lady of the Lake.
The following “fragment,” given in Motherwell’s MS., p. 184, “from Mr William Steele of Greenock, advocate,” I suppose to have been the effort of a self-satisfied amateur, and to have been written as a fragment. The third and fourth stanzas recall the broadside ballad ‘The Lady Isabella’s Tragedy.’
Lady Margaret has bound her silken snood
A little aboon her bree,
Lady Margaret has kilted her grey mantel
A little aboon her knee.
Lady Margaret has left her bonnie bower,
But and her father’s ha,
And with Lord Hugh Montgomerie
Lady Margaret has gane awa.
* * * * * *
‘I have made a bed, Lady Margaret,
Beneath the hawthorn-tree;
It’s lang and it’s deep, and there thou shalt sleep
Till I come back to thee.’
* * * * * *
Then out and spake her father dear,
As he sat down to dine,
‘Gae, page, and tell Lady Margaret to come
And fill for me the wine.
‘Gae, page, and tell Lady Margaret to come
And glad her father’s ee;
The wine that is poured by her fair, fair hand
Is sweetest aye to me.’
Then out and spake the fat earth-worm,
That wons beneath the stane;
‘Yestreen I fed on a rosie cheek
And on a white hause-bane.
‘Yestreen I fed on a rosy cheek
And on a snaw-white bree;
But never again Lady Margaret
Shall fill the wine for thee.”@