A. ‘Ther was a wife in yon toun,’ “Old Lady’s Collection,” No. 36.
B.a. ‘The Jolly Beggar,’ Herd, The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 46; ed. 1776, II, 26.
b. ‘The Jolly Beggars,’ Curious Tracts, Scotland, British Museum, 1078. m. 24. No 30 (a collection made by James Mitchell at Aberdeen in 1828).
c. ‘The Jolly Beggar-Man,’ Macmath MS., p. 103, a fragment. d. The same, a fragment.
I have not found this piece in any printed collection older than Herd, 1769, but it is cited in the second edition of Percy’s Reliques, 1767, II, 59 (preface to ‘The Gaberlunyie-Man’) and was known before that to Horace Walpole, who, as Percy remarks, confounds it with ‘The Gaberlunyie-Man,’ or gives it that title: Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, II, 202 f., second edition, 1759 (not mentioned in the first edition). It was probably in circulation as a flying-sheet.[93]
We are regularly informed by editors that tradition imputes the authorship of both ‘The Jolly Beggar’ and ‘The Gaberlunyie-Man’ to James Fifth of Scotland. ‘The Gaberlunyie-Man’ was, so far as can be ascertained, first printed in the Tea-Table Miscellany (in 1724), and I am not aware that it is mentioned anywhere before that date. Ramsay speaks of it as an old piece, but says nothing about the authorship. The tradition as to James Fifth is, perhaps, not much older than the publication in either case, and has no more plausibility than it has authority.
The copies in Pinkerton’s Select Scotish Ballads, II, 35, 1783, Johnson’s Museum, p. 274, No 266, 1790, Ritson’s Scotish Songs, I, 168, 1794, etc., are all from Herd’s second edition, 1776. In this we have, instead of the Fa la la burden, the following, presumably later (see Herd’s MSS, I, 5):
And we’ll gang nae mair a roving,
Sae late into the night,
And we’ll gang nae mair a roving, boys,