He never went home again.
DICK O’ THE COW
The Text is a combination of three, but mainly from a text which seems to have been sent to Percy in 1775. The other two are from Scottish tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I have made a few changes in spelling only. The ballad was certainly known before the end of the sixteenth century, as Thomas Nashe refers to it in 1596:—‘Dick of the Cow, that mad Demilance Northren Borderer, who plaid his prizes with the Lord Iockey so brauely’ (Nashe’s Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, iii. p. 5). Dick at the Caw occurs in a list of ‘penny merriments’ printed for, and sold by, Philip Brooksby, about 1685.
The Story is yet another of the Border ballads of the Armstrongs and Liddesdale, and tells itself in an admirable way.
The ‘Cow,’ of course, cannot refer to cattle, as the word would be ‘Kye’: possibly it means ‘broom,’ or the hut in which he lived. See Murray’s Dictionary, and cp. 9.3
‘Billie’ means ‘brother’; hence the quaint ‘billie Willie.’ It is the same word as ‘bully,’ used of Bottom the Weaver, which also occurs in the ballad of Bewick and Grahame, 5.2 (see [p. 102] of this volume).
DICK O’ THE COW
1.