[1068] “They’ll tear all my meal bags, and do me great harm.” In rural districts of Scotland as late as a century ago beggars carried under each arm a wallet in which they collected the doles of the farmers’ wives. The expected gratuity, which was rarely withheld, was a “gowpen,” or double handful of oatmeal.
[1069] sorrow.
[1070] a silver coin worth 13⅓ d. Stg.
[1071] wet-nurse wage.
[1072] rags.
[1073] such.
[1074] The Bannatyne MS. furnished the greater part of the contents of that effective but unreliable publication, Ramsay’s Evergreen, in 1724, and a further selection from its pages, under the title of Ancient Scottish Poems, was printed by Lord Hailes in 1770. In 1829 the Bannatyne Club published the Memorials of George Bannatyne, by Sir Walter Scott, containing all the ascertained facts of the collector’s life; and this and the complete contents of the famous MS. were finally printed together by the Hunterian Club, 1878–1886.
[1075] An entry in the Chartulary of Dryburgh bears that this ancestor, also a Sir Richard Maitland, disponed certain of his lands to that abbey in 1249.
[1076] During the reign of Robert III., in the year 1400, according to Wyntoun, Sir Robert Maitland took the castle of Dunbar by strategy from his mother’s brother, the Earl of March.
[1077] The letter of James VI. dated 1st July, 1584, respecting Maitland’s retirement from the bench, states that the latter had served the king’s “grandsire, goodsire, goodame, mother, and himself.”