"Gude-e'en, gude-e'en, ye heather berries,
As ye grow on yon hill;
If the auld carline and her bags were here,
I wot she would get her fill.
Late, late at night I knit our pokes,
Wi' four-and-twenty knots;
And in the morn, at breakfast-time
I 'll carry the keys o' your locks."
· · · · ·
"But if you are a carl's daughter,
As I take you to be,
Where did you get the gay clothing
In greenwood was on thee?"
"My mother she 's a poor woman,
But she nursed earl's children three,
And I got it from a foster-sister,
To beguile such sparks as thee."'
Of the ballads descriptive of old country sports and merry-making that have come down to us, the most famous are Christ's Kirk on the Green and Peblis to the Play. They lead us back to times when life in Scotland was not such a 'serious' thing as it afterwards became—when, under the patronage of the Court or of the Church, Miracle-plays or Moralities were played on the open sward in such places of resort for gentle and simple as Falkland and Stirling and Peebles and Cupar; and the strain of the more solemn mumming was relieved for the benefit of the common folks, by rough jests, horse-play, and dancing, in which their betters freely joined. No doubt it was a piece of sage church and state policy to keep the minds of the people off the dangerous questions that began to be stirring in them, by aid of these scenes of 'dancing and derray,' and of almost Rabelaisian fits of mirth and laughter, the savour of which remained long after they had been placed under the ban of a sterner ecclesiastical rule.
Leslie in Fife and Leslie in Aberdeen are competitors for having given the inspiration to Christ's Kirk on the Green, to which Allan Ramsay afterwards added a second part in the same vein. But whether these passages of boisterous merriment, in which 'licht-skirtit lasses and girning gossips' play their part happed under the green Lomond or at Dunideer, there can be no question of the national popularity which the piece long enjoyed. Pope declared that a Scot would fight in his day for its superiority over English ballads; and the author of Tullochgorum, in a letter to Robert Burns, tells us that at the age of twelve he had it by heart, and had even tried to turn it into Latin verse. In Peblis to the Play, the fun is not less nimble although it is a whit more restrained; there is an infectious spirit of spring-time and gaiety in the strain that sings of the festal gathering at Beltane, when burgesses and country folks fared forth 'be firth and forest,' all 'graithed full gay' to take part in the sports. 'All the wenches of the west' were up and stirring by cock-crow, selecting, rejecting, or comparing their tippets, hoods, and curches. Not only Peebles, but
'Hop-Kailzie, and Cardronow,
Gaderit out thick-fald,
With "Hey and how rohumbelow"
The young folk were full bald.
The bag-pipe blew, and they out-threw
Out of the townis untald,
Lord, what a shout was them amang
Quhen thai were ower the wald
Their west
Of Peblis to the play!'
From a phrase used by John Major, it has been suggested that James I. of Scots was the writer of this poem; and a note on the Bannatyne MS. of Christ's Kirk attributes that companion poem to the same royal authorship. In spite of the adverse judgment pronounced by Professors Guest and Skeat, it does not seem an inconceivable thing that the monarch who wrote the King's Quair, and whose daughter kissed the lips of Alain Chartier as the reward of France for his sweet singing, should have written these strains descriptive of rural jollity in localities where the court and sovereign are known to have often resorted for hunting and other diversion. The cast and language of the poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in The Justing at the Drum, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the sixteenth century.
A much more taking tradition is that which assigns them to the adventure-loving 'Commons King,' James V. They are thoroughly after the 'humour'—using the word in the Elizabethan as well as in the ordinary sense—of the wandering 'Red Tod'; who has also been held to be the inspirer, if not the author, of those excellent humorous ballads—among the best of their kind to be found in any language—The Gaberlunzie Man and The Jolly Beggar.