But if this be false, thou little tiny page,
As false it well may be,
Then with a cudgel of four foot long
I'll beat thee from head to toe.
Jamieson says, in a prefatory note to F, that he had heard 'Little Musgrave' repeated, with very little variation, both in Morayshire and the southern counties of Scotland. All the Scottish versions are late, and to all seeming derived, indirectly or immediately, from print.[137] As a recompense we have a fine ballad upon the same theme, '[The Bonny Birdy],' which is not represented in England.
In the English broadside and most of the northern versions the lovers try a bribe, a threat, or both, to make the page keep counsel. In some of these Musgrave, when detected, ejaculates a craven imprecation of woe to the fair woman that lies in his arms asleep, G 23, H 16, I 14, J 20, L 37. In I the men are brothers; in E, F Musgrave has a wife of his own; in C, G Lord Barnard kills himself; in E he is hanged! None of these divergences from the story as we have it in A are improvements, but it is an improvement that the lady should die by stroke of steel as in C, E, H, J, K, L, in exchange for the barbarity of A. The penance in L is a natural and common way of ending such a tragedy. The collecting of the lady's heart's blood in a basin of pure silver, G 28-30, is probably borrowed from 'Lammikin,' where this trait is very effective.
The heathen child, B 131, is a child unchristened. An unbaptized child seems still to be called so in Norway, and so is a woman between childbirth and churching. In modern Icelandic usage a boy or girl before confirmation is called heathen, from confusion between baptism and confirmation: Ivar Aasen, at the word heiden; Vigfusson, at the word heiðinn.[138]
K 12,
O he's taen out a lang, lang brand,
And stripped it athwart the straw,
explains a corruption in E 182, where the manuscript reads, He's struck her in the straw, and another in J 9. The sword is wiped or whetted on straw in '[Clerk Saunders],' A 15, C 13, D 8, G 17; 'Willie and Lady Maisry,' B 19; ['Lord Thomas and Fair Annet,' B] 36; 'Lady Diamond,' Buchan, II, 206, st. 8. Child Maurice dries his sword on the grass, John Steward dries his on his sleeve, A 27, 28; Glasgerion dries his sword on his sleeve, A 22; Horn wipes his sword on his arm, King Horn, ed. Wissmann, 622 f.
A
a. Wit Restord, 1658, in the reprint 'Facetiæ,' London, 1817, I, 293. b. Wit and Drollery, 1682, p. 81.
1 As it fell one holy-day,
Hay downe
As many be in the yeare,
When young men and maids together did goe,
Their mattins and masse to heare,