And your head shall be deck’d with the eastern wind,
And the cold rain on your breast.’
JOHN O’ THE SIDE
‘He is weil kend, Johne of the Syde,
A greater theif did never ryde.’
Sir Richard Maitland.
The Text is from the Percy Folio, but is given in modernised spelling. It lacks the beginning, probably, and one line in st. 3, which can be easily guessed; but as a whole it is an infinitely fresher and better ballad than that inserted in the Minstrelsy of Sir Walter Scott.
The Story is akin to that of Kinmont Willie ([p. 49]). John of the Side (on the river Liddel, nearly opposite Mangerton) first appears about 1550 in a list of freebooters against whom complaints were laid before the Bishop of Carlisle. He was, it seems, another of the Armstrong family.
Hobby Noble has a ballad[5] to himself (as the hero of the present ballad deserves), in which mention is made of Peter of Whitfield. This is doubtless the person mentioned in the first line of John o’ the Side as having been killed presumably by John himself.