A. Skene MS., p. 20.
B. ‘Laird o Leys,’ Kinloch’s Ballad Book, p. 74.
C. ‘The Baron o Leys,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 144.
‘The Baron o Leys,’ in The New Deeside Guide by James Brown [==Joseph Robertson], Aberdeen [1832], p. 15, and The Deeside Guide, Aberdeen, 1889, p. 23, is C. C 4–11 seems to be an interpolation by a later hand.
“Part of this ballad,” says Buchan, II, 322, “by ballad-mongers has been confused with the ballad of ‘The Earl of Aboyne’ [No 240, A b], called in some instances ‘The Ranting Laddie.’” Laing, Thistle of Scotland, p. 11, appears to have confounded it with ‘The Earl of Aboyne’ proper. He gives this stanza:
‘Some ca me that and some ca me this,
And The Baron o Leys they ca me,
But when I am on bonny Deeside
They ca me The Rantin Laddie.’
Herd’s MSS, I, 233, II, fol. 71, give the two following stanzas under the title ‘The Linkin Ladie:’