[J]. Dr Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, 'Adversaria,' p. 85.
[K]. Communicated by Mr David Loudon.
[L]. The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1839.
[M]. 'Young Bondwell,' Buchan's MSS, I, 18. J. H. Dixon, Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 1.
[N]. 'Susan Py, or Young Bichen's Garland.' a. Falkirk, printed by T. Johnston, 1815. b. Stirling, M. Randall.
A, B, D, F, and the fragment G now appear for the first time in print, and the same is true of I, J, K, which are of less account. C a is here given according to the manuscript, without Jamieson's "collations." Of E and C b Jamieson says: This ballad and that which succeeds it are given from copies taken from Mrs Brown's recitation,[403] collated with two other copies procured from Scotland; one in MS.; another, very good, one printed for the stalls; a third, in the possession of the late Reverend Jonathan Boucher, of Epsom, taken from recitation in the north of England; and a fourth, about one third as long as the others, which the editor picked off an old wall in Piccadilly. L, the only English copy, was derived from the singing of a London vagrant. It is, says Dixon, the common English broadsheet "turned into the dialect of Cockaigne."[404] M was probably a broadside or stall copy, and is certainly of that quality, but preserves a very ancient traditional feature.
D and M, besides the name Linne, have in common a repetition of the song, a trait which we also find in one version of 'The Heir of Linne;'[405] see Dixon's Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 30, stanzas 2-6, Percy Society, vol. XVII.
In Bell's Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, p. 68, it is remarked that L, "the only ancient form in which the ballad has existed in print," is one of the publications mentioned in one of Thackeray's catalogues of broadsides. The 'Bateman,' in Thackeray's list, is the title of an entirely different ballad, 'A Warning for Maidens, or Young Bateman,' reprinted from the Roxburghe collection by W. Chappell, III, 193.
"Young Beichan" is a favorite ballad, and most deservedly. There are beautiful repetitions of the story in the ballads of other nations, and it has secondary affinities with the extensive cycle of '[Hind Horn],' the parts of the principal actors in the one being inverted in the other.
The hero's name is mostly Beichan, with slight modifications like Bekie, C, Bicham, A, Brechin, B; in L, Bateman; in M, Bondwell. The heroine is Susan Pye in ten of the fourteen versions; Isbel in C; Essels, evidently a variety of Isbel, in M, which has peculiar relations with C; Sophia in K, L.