E.
22. The reading is perhaps pounds.
72,3. Absurdity could be avoided by exchanging grey mare and steed.
242. by for my.
193
THE DEATH OF PARCY REED
A. ‘A song of Parcy Reed and the Three False Halls,’ the late Robert White’s papers.
B. ‘The Death of Parcy Reed,’ Richardson’s Borderer’s Table Book, 1846, VII, 361; J. H. Dixon, Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England, p. 99, Percy Society, vol. xvii, 1846.
Of B, which purports to have been taken down from an old woman’s singing by James Telfer, Mr Robert White, from whom I received A, said in a letter to Mr J. H. Dixon: “Parcy Reed, as you suspect, is not genuine, for it bears marks of our friend’s improvements. I have a copy of the original somewhere, but may not be able to find it.” And again, Telfer himself, “in a letter to the late Robert Storey, the Northumbrian poet,” wrote, “I will send Mr Dixon the real verses, but it is but a droll of a ballad.” (J. H. Dixon, in Notes and Queries, Fourth Series, I, 108, V, 520.)
Comparison will show that almost the whole of A is preserved in B, and in fairly good form. B has also some stanzas not found in A which may be accepted as traditional. Telfer may have added a dozen of his own, and has retouched others.
Mr White, after remarking that there is no historical evidence to show when the event on which the ballad was founded occurred, informs us that almost every circumstance in the narrative has been transmitted to the present century by local tradition.