The Scots version (Herd’s) insists on Douglas’s burial “by the bracken bush,” to which Montgomery bids Percy surrender. This is obviously done to hide his body and keep his death secret from both parties, as in Froissart he bids his friends do. The verse of the English (l.) on the fight between Douglas and Percy, is borrowed by, or is borrowed from, the Scottish stanza (ix.) in Herd, where Sir Hugh Montgomery fights Percy.
Then Percy and Montgomery met,
And weel a wot they warna fain;
They swaped swords, and they twa swat,
And ay the blood ran down between.The Persses and the Mongomry met,
as quoted, is already familiar in The Complaynte of Scotland (about 1549), and this line is not in the English ballad. So far it seems as if the English balladist borrowed the scene from a Scots version, and perverted it into a description of a fight, between Percy, who wins, and Douglas—in place of the Scots version, the victory over Percy of Sir Hugh Montgomery.
This transference of incidents in the English and Scottish ballads is a phenomenon which we are to meet again in the ballad of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead. One “maker” or the other has, in old times, pirated and perverted the ballad of another “maker.”
SCOTT’S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED IT
As early as December 1802–January 1803, Scott was “so anxious to have a complete Scottish Otterburn that I will omit the ballad entirely in the first volume (of 1803), hoping to recover it in time for insertion in the third.” [67a]
The letter is undated, but is determined by Scott’s expressed interest “about the Tushielaw lines, which, from what you mention, must be worth recovering.” In a letter (Abbotsford MSS.) from Hogg to Scott (marked in copy, “January 7, 1803”) Hogg encloses “the Tushielaw lines,” which were popular in Ettrick, but were verses of the eighteenth century. They were orally repeated, but literary in origin.
Scott, who wanted “a complete Scottish Otterburn” in winter 1802, did not sit down and make one. He waited till he got a text from Hogg, in 1805, and published an edited version in 1806.
Scott’s published stanza i. is Herd’s stanza i., with slight verbal changes taken from the Hogg MS. text of 1805. (?) Hogg’s MS. and Scott, in stanza ii., give Herd’s lines on the Lindsays and Gordons, adding the Grahams, and, in place of Herd’s
The Earl of Fife,
And Sir Hugh Montgomery upon a grey,