C is reprinted by Finlay, I, 103. It is made the basis of a long ballad by Jamieson, II, 166, and serves as a thread for Cunningham's 'Gude Wallace,' Scottish Songs, I, 262.[foot-note] F is repeated by Motherwell, Minstrelsy, p. 364, and by Aytoun, I, 54. A copy in the Laing Manuscripts, University of Edinburgh, Div. II, 358, is C.
Blind Harry's Wallace (of about 1460, earlier than 1488) is clearly the source of this ballad. A-P are derived from vv 1080-1119 of the Fifth Book. Here Wallace, on his way to a hostelry with a comrade, met a woman, who counselled them to pass by, if Scots, for southrons were there, drinking and talking of Wallace; twenty are there, making great din, but no man of fence. "Wallace went in and bad Benedicite." The captain said, Thou art a Scot, the devil thy nation quell. Wallace drew, and ran the captain through; "fifteen he straik and fifteen has he slayn;" his comrade killed the other five.
The story of A-B is sufficiently represented by that of A. Wallace comes upon a woman washing, and asks her for tidings. There are fifteen Englishmen at the hostelry seeking Wallace. Had he money he would go thither. She tells him out twenty shillings (for which he takes off both hat and hood, and thanks her reverently). He bows himself over a staff and enters the hostelry, saying, Good ben be here (in C, he bad Benedicite, in the words of Blind Harry). The captain asks the crooked carl where he was born, and the carl answers that he is a Scot. The captain offers the carl twenty shillings for a sight of Wallace. The carl wants no better bode, or offer,[foot-note] He strikes the captain such a blow over the jaws that he will never eat more, and sticks the rest. Then he bids the goodwife get him food, for he has eaten nothing for two days. Ere the meal is ready, fifteen other Englishmen light at the door. These he soon disposes of, sticking five, trampling five in the gutter, and hanging five in the wood.
F makes Wallace change clothes with a beggar, and ask charity at the inn. He kills his thirty men between eight and four, and then returning to the North-Inch (a common lying along the Tay, near Perth) finds the maid who was washing her lilie hands in st. 3 still "washing tenderlie." He pulls out twenty of the fifty pounds which he got from the captain, and hands them over to the maid for the good luck of her half-crown.
G has the change of clothes with the beggar, found in F, and prefixes to the story of the other versions another adventure of Wallace, taken from the Fourth Book of Blind Harry, vv 704-87. Wallace's enemies have seen him leaving his mistress's house. They seize her, threaten to burn her unless she 'tells,' and promise to marry her to a knight if she will help to bring the rebel down. Wallace returns, and she seeks to detain him, but he says he must go back to his men. Hereupon she falls to weeping, and ends with confessing her treason. He asks her if she repents; she says that to mend the miss she would burn on a hill, and is forgiven. Wallace puts on her gown and curches, hiding his sword under his weed, tells the armed men who are watching for him that Wallace is locked in, and makes good speed out of the gate. Two men follow him, for he seems to be a stalwart quean; Wallace turns on them and kills them. This is Blind Harry's story, and it will be observed to be followed closely in the ballad, with the addition of a pitcher in each hand to complete the female disguise, and two more southrons to follow and be killed. The first half of this version is plainly a late piece of work, very possibly of this century, much later than the other, which itself need not be very old. But the portions of Blind Harry's poem out of which these ballads were made were perhaps themselves composed from older ballads, and the restitution of the lyrical form may have given us something not altogether unlike what was sung in the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth, century. The fragment H is, as far as it goes, a repetition of G.
Bower (1444-49) says that after the battle of Roslyn, 1298, Wallace took ship and went to France, distinguishing himself by his valor against pirates on the sea and against the English on the continent, as ballads both in France and Scotland testify.[foot-note] A fragment of a ballad relating to Wallace is preserved in Constable's Manuscript Cantus: Leyden's Complaynt of Scotland, p. 226.
C is translated by Arndt, Blütenlese, p. 198; P by Knortz, Schottische Balladen, p. 69, No 22.
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