A squib on the birth of the Chevalier St. George, beginning
Bessy Bell and Mary Grey, Those famous bonny lasses,
shows that this little ballad, or song, was very well known in the last years of the seventeenth century.[foot-note] The first stanza was made by Ramsay the beginning of a song of his own, and stands thus in Ramsay's Poems, Edinburgh, 1721, p. 80:[foot-note]
O Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, They are twa bonny lasses; They biggd a bower on yon Burn-brae, And theekd it oer wi rashes.
Cunningham, Songs of Scotland, III, 60, gives, as recited to him by Sir Walter Scott, four stanzas which are simply a with 'Lyndoch brae' substituted in the third for Sharpe's 'Stronach haugh.' 'Dranoch haugh,' nearly as in b, is, as will presently appear, the right reading. Sharpe's third stanza, with the absurd variation of royal kin, occurs in a letter of his of the date November 25, 1811 (Letters, ed. Allardyce, I, 504), and is printed in the Musical Museum, IV, *203, ed. 1853.
In the course of a series of letters concerning the ballad in The Scotsman (newspaper), August 30 to September 8, 1886, several verses are cited with trivial variations from the texts here given.
'Bessy Bell' was made into this nursery-song in England (Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England, 1874, p. 246, No 484):
Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, They were two bonny lasses; They built their house upon the lea, And covered it with rashes.
Bessy kept the garden-gate, And Mary kept the pantry; Bessy always had to wait, While Mary lived in plenty.
The most important document relating to Bessy Bell and Mary Gray is a letter written June 21, 1781, by Major Barry, then proprietor of Lednock, and printed in the Transactions of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, II, 108, 1822.[foot-note]
"When I came first to Lednock," says Major Barry, "I was shewn in a part of my ground (called the Dranoch-haugh) an heap of stones almost covered with briers, thorns and fern, which they assured me was the burial place of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray.
"The tradition of the country relating to these ladys is, that Mary Gray's father was laird of Lednock and Bessie Bell's of Kinvaid, a place in this neighbourhood; that they were both very handsome, and an intimate friend ship subsisted between them; that while Miss Bell was on a visit to Miss Gray, the plague broke out, in the year 1666; in order to avoid which they built themselves a bower about three quarters of a mile west from Lednock House, in a very retired and romantic place called Burn-braes, on the side of Brauchieburn. Here they lived for some time; but the plague raging with great fury, they caught the infection, it is said, from a young gentle man who was in love with them both. He used to bring them their provision. They died in this bower, and were buried in the Dranoch-haugh, at the foot of a brae of the same name, and near to the bank of the river Almond. The burial-place lies about half a mile west from the present house of Lednock.[foot-note]
"I have removed all the rubbish from this little spot of classic ground, inclosed it with a wall, planted it round with flowering shrubs, made up the grave double, and fixed a stone in the wall, on which is engraved the names of Bessie Bell and Mary [Gray]."
The estate passed by purchase to Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, who replaced the wall, which had become dilapi dated in the course of half a century, with a stone parapet and iron railing, and covered the grave with a slab inscribed, "They lived, they loved, they died." This slab is now hidden under a cairn of stones raised by successive pilgrims.
Major Barry's date of 1666 should be put back twenty years. Perth and the neighborhood (Lednock is seven miles distant) were fearfully ravaged by the plague in 1645 and a year or two following. Three thousand people are said to have perished. Scotland escaped the pestilence of 1665-6.[foot-note]
The young gentleman who is said to have brought food to Bessy and Mary is sometimes described as the lover of both, sometimes as the lover of one of the pair. Pennant says that the ballad was "composed by a lover deeply stricken with the charms of both." In the course of tradition, the lover is said to have perished with the young women, which we might expect to happen if he brought the contagion to the bower. But this lover, who ought to have had his place in the song, appears only in tradition, and his reality may be called in question. It is not rational that the young women should seclude themselves to avoid the pest and then take the risk of the visits of a person from the seat of the in fection.[foot-note] To be sure it may be doubted, notwithstanding the tenor of the ballad, whether the retirement of these young ladies was voluntary, or at least whether they had not taken the plague before they removed to their bower. In that case the risk would have been for the lover, and would have been no more than he might naturally assume.[foot-note]
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