Several accounts put the abduction at the time when the Earl of Cassilis was attending the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. This was in September, 1643. It is now known that Lady Cassilis died in December, 1642. What is much more important, it is known from two letters written by the earl immediately after her death that nothing could have occurred of a nature to alienate his affection, for in the one he speaks of her as a “dear friend” and “beloved yoke-fellow,” and in the other as his “dear bed-fellow.”[[49]]
“Seldom, when stripped of extraneous matter, has tradition been better supported than it has been in the case of Johnie Faa and the Countess of Cassilis:” Maidment, Scotish Ballads, 1868, II, 184. In a sense not intended, this is quite true; most of the traditions which have grown out of ballads have as slight a foundation as this. The connection of the ballad with the Cassilis family (as Mr Macmath has suggested to me) may possibly have arisen from the first line of some copy reading, ‘The gypsies came to the castle-gate.’ As F 13 has perverted Earl of Cassilis to Earl of Castle, so Castle may have been corrupted into Cassilis.[[50]]
Knortz, Schottische Balladen, p. 28, translates freely eight stanzas from Aytoun.
A
Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany, vol. iv, 1740. Here from the London edition of 1763, p. 427.
1
The gypsies came to our good lord’s gate,
And wow but they sang sweetly!
They sang sae sweet and sae very compleat