A. ‘The Trumpeter of Fyvie,’ Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, I, 126, 1806.
B. ‘Tifty’s Nanny,’ Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, II, 382, from a stall-copy.
C. a. ‘Andrew Lammie,’ Buchan’s Gleanings, p. 98, 1825 ; Laing’s Thistle of Scotland, p. 55, 1823. b. Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, p. 239.
Jamieson, in his preface, 1806, says that this ballad was current in the Border counties within a few years, and that A was taken down by Leyden from the recitation of a young lady who learned it in Teviotdale. Writing to Scott, in November, 1804, of such ballads as he had already prepared for the press, he says, “Trumpeter of Fyvie, from tradition, furnished by Mr Leyden, and collated with a stall-copy” (probably B): Letters addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Abbotsford, I, No. 117.
Buchan, in the notes to his Gleanings, 1825, p. 197, says of C a: “This is one of the greatest favorites of the people in Aberdeenshire that I know. I took it first down from the memory of a very old woman, and afterwards published thirty thousand copies of it. There are two versions, an old and a new; but, although I have both, I prefer this one, the younger of the two, having been composed and acted in the year 1674.” Laing, who reprints A in his Thistle of Scotland, p. 63, calls that the “old way of Andrew Lammie.” Motherwell, 1827, reprints “a stall-copy published at Glasgow several years ago, collated with a recited copy which has furnished one or two verbal improvements:” C b. There are a great many variations from C a, of which precisely one or two are verbal improvements. But Motherwell also gives six stanzas which are not in a. His copy is repeated in The Ballad Minstrelsy of Scotland, Glasgow, 1871, and there the editor says that in a chap-book printed by J. and M. Robertson, Saltmarket, Glasgow, 1808, “Andrew Lammie is given with only a few slight verbal differences between it and the copy here printed.” Such stall-copies as I have seen are late, and are reprints of C a or of C b. Motherwell assures us that the ballad as he has given it “agrees with any recited copy which the Editor has hitherto met with in the West Country.”
A professed edition, “most carefully collated with all previous editions,” was published at Peterhead, 1872: “Mill o Tifty’s Annie, A Buchan Ballad, with Introduction,” etc. This is attributed to the Rev. Dr John Muir of Aberdeen. ‘Mill o Tiftie’s Annie’ in Christie, I, 48 “is epitomized from traditional copies;” that is to say, it is taken from Motherwell, with a trifling change here and there. A copy given in Smith’s New History of Aberdeenshire is compounded of A, B, and a couple of lines from C b.
Annie, daughter to a well-to-do miller, loses her heart to a handsome trumpeter in the service of Lord Fyvie. Her father will not hear of such a match. (Annie has five thousand marks, and the man not a penny, A 11.) The trumpeter is obliged to go to Edinburgh for a time, and Annie appoints him a tryst at a bridge. He will buy her her wedding-gear while he is away, and marry her when he comes back. Annie knows that she shall be dead ere he returns, and bids him an everlasting adieu.[[130]] The trumpeter goes to the top of the castle and blows a blast which is heard at his love’s house. Her father beats her, her mother beats her; her brother beats her and breaks her back. Lord Fyvie is passing on one of these occasions, comes in, and urges Mill of Tiftie to yield to his daughter’s inclinations. The father is immovable; she must marry higher than with a trumpeter. Annie is put to bed, with her face towards Fyvie, and dies of a broken heart and of the cruel treatment which she has undergone.
This is a homely ditty,[[131]] but the gentleness and fidelity of Annie under the brutal behavior of her family are genuinely pathetic, and justify the remarkable popularity which the ballad has enjoyed in the north of Scotland. In those parts the story has been played as well as sung. “The ballad used in former times to be presented in a dramatic shape at rustic meetings in Aberdeenshire,” says Chambers (Scottish Ballads, p. 143); perhaps misinterpreting and expanding the enunciation made by Buchan and in the title of some stall-copies that “this tragedy was acted in the year 1674,” which may rather refer to the date of the story. But however it may have been in former times, two rival companies in Aberdeenshire were performing plays founded on the ballad in 1887–8.[[132]]
“Bonny Andrew Lammie” was a well-known personage at the beginning of the last century, for, as Jamieson has pointed out, he is mentioned in a way that implies this by Allan Ramsay, in the second of his two cantos in continuation of Christ’s Kirk on the Green, written, as Ramsay says, in 1718. (Poems, London, 1731, I, 76, v. 70.)
Mill of Tiftie is, or was, a farm-house on the side of a glen about half a mile northeast of the castle of Fyvie, and in view of its turrets (on one of which there now stands a figure of the Trumpeter sounding towards Tiftie). The mill proper, now a ruin, was in the bottom of the glen, and gave its name to the house. The bridge of Sleugh, otherwise Skeugh, etc., was in the hollow between Tiftie and the castle.[[133]]