170.
Thus endeth the lives of these good yemen;
God send them eternall blysse,
And all that with hand-bowe shoteth,
That of heven they may never mysse!
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.