[A]. a. 'Gil Brenton,' Jamieson Brown MS., fol. 34. b. 'Chil Brenton,' William Tytler Brown MS., No 3.
[B]. 'Cospatrick,' Scott's Minstrelsy, II, 117 (1802).
[C]. 'We were sisters, we were seven,' Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, p. 207.
[D]. 'Lord Dingwall,' Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 204.
[E]. Elizabeth Cochrane's song-book, No 112.
[F]. a. 'Lord Brangwill,' Motherwell's MSS, p. 219. b. 'Lord Bengwill,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xvi.
[G]. 'Bothwell,' Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, p. 244.
[H]. Kinloch MSS, V, 335.
Eight copies of this ballad are extant, four of them hitherto unpublished. A a, No 16 in the Jamieson-Brown MS., is one of twenty ballads written down from the recitation of Mrs. Brown of Falkland, by her nephew, Robert Scott, in 1783, or shortly before. From these twenty thirteen were selected, and, having first been revised by Mrs. Brown, were sent, with two others, to William Tytler in the year just mentioned. William Tytler's MS. has disappeared, but a list of the ballads which it contained, with the first stanza of each, is given by Dr Anderson, in Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, VII, 176. B is the 'Cospatrick' of the Border Minstrelsy, described by Scott as taken down from the recitation of a lady (known to be Miss Christian Rutherford, his mother's sister) "with some stanzas transferred from Herd's copy, and some readings adopted from a copy in Mrs Brown's manuscript under the title of Child Brenton," that is, from A b. C purports to be one of a considerable number of pieces, "copied from the recital of a peasant-woman of Galloway, upwards of ninety years of age." Though overlaid with verses of Cunningham's making (of which forty or fifty may be excided in one mass) and though retouched almost everywhere, both the groundwork of the story and some genuine lines remain unimpaired. The omission of most of the passage referred to, and the restoration of the stanza form, will give us, perhaps, a thing of shreds and patches, but still a ballad as near to genuine as some in Percy's Reliques or even Scott's Minstrelsy. D and F are (the former presumably, the second certainly) from recitation of the first quarter of this century. E is one of the few ballads in Elizabeth Cochrane's song-book, and probably of the first half of the last century. G, the earliest printed form of the ballad, appeared in Herd's first collection, in the year 1769. H was taken down from recitation by the late Dr Hill Burton in his youth.
A, B, and C agree in these points: A bride, not being a maid, looks forward with alarm to her wedding night, and induces her bower-woman to take her place for the nonce. The imposture is detected by the bridegroom, through the agency of magical blankets, sheets, and pillows, A; or of blankets, bed, sheet, and sword, B; or simply of the Billie Blin, C. (The sword is probably an editorial insertion; and Jamieson, Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 343, doubts, but without sufficient reason, the Billie Blin.) The bridegroom has recourse to his mother, who demands an explanation of the bride, and elicits a confession that she had once upon a time encountered a young man in a wood, who subjected her to violence. Before they parted, he gave her certain tokens, which he enjoined her to be very careful of, a lock of his hair, a string of beads, a gold ring, and a knife. B omits the knife, and C the beads. The mother goes back to her son, and asks what he had done with the tokens she had charged him never to part with. He owns that he had presented them to a lady, one whom he would now give all his possessions to have for his wife. The lady of the greenwood is identified by the tokens.