C. ‘Rob Roy MacGregor,’ Motherwell’s MS., p. 93.
D. ‘Rob Roy,’ “Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy,” No 147, Abbotsford.
E. ‘Rob Roy,’ Pitcairn’s MSS, III, 41.
F. ‘Rob Roy,’ Campbell MSS, II, 229.
G. ‘Rob Roy,’ Cromek’s Select Scotish Songs, 1810, II, 199.
H. Sir Walter Scott’s Introduction to “Rob Roy,” Appendix, No V.
I. ‘Rob Roy,’ Campbell’s MSS, II, 58.
J. ‘Rob Oig,’ A Garland of Old Historical Ballads, p. 10, Aungervyle Society, 1881.
K. ‘Rob Roy,’ Laing’s Thistle of Scotland, p. 93.
The hero of this ballad was the youngest of the five sons of the Rob Roy who has been immortalized by Sir Walter Scott, and was known as Robert Oig, young, or junior. When a mere boy (only twelve years old, it is said) he shot a man mortally whom he considered to have intruded on his mother’s land, and for not appearing to underlie the law for this murder he was outlawed in 1736. He had fled to the continent, and there he enlisted in the British army, and was wounded and made prisoner at Fontenoy in 1745. He was exchanged, returned to Scotland and obtained a discharge from service, and, though still under ban, was able to effect a marriage with a woman of respectable family. She lived but a few years, and after her death, whether spontaneously or under the influence of his brother James, a man of extraordinary hardihood, Rob Oig formed a plan of bettering his own fortune, and incidentally that of his kin, by a marriage of the Sabine fashion with a woman of means. The person selected was Jean Key, who had been two months the widow of John Wright. She was but nineteen years of age, and was living with her mother at Edinbelly, in Stirlingshire, and her property is said to have been, not the twenty thousand pounds of some of the ballads, but some sixteen or eighteen thousand marks.