"Of this," says Motherwell, "many variations exist among reciters," and his remark is borne out by what is here given.
The copy in Cunningham's Songs of Scotland, II, 186, is A retouched, with st. 5 dropped and two stanzas (L) inserted from recitation. The texts of Christie, I, 52, 84, are J abridged and E b. Of J Christie says that he heard in 1848 a version sung by a native of Buchan, Aberdeenshire, who had it through her grandmother and great-grandmother, which differed only in being more condensed and wanting the catastrophe, and in having Badenoch's lady for Bignet's, and Keith-Hall and Gartly for Black Riggs and Kincraigie.
Geordie Gordon, A, of Gight (Gigh), B b, C, D, I, of the Bog o Gight, H, is in prison, on a charge endangering his life. He sends a message to his wife to come to Edinburgh. She rides thither with the utmost haste, and finds Geordie in extremity. She is told that his life may be redeemed by the payment of a large sum of money. She raises a contribution on the spot, pays the ransom, and rides off with her husband.
Kinloch and others incline to take Geordie to be George Gordon, fourth earl of Huntly, who incurred the Queen Regent's displeasure for failing to execute a commission against a Highland robber in 1554. Huntly was committed to Edinburgh Castle, and some of his many enemies urged that he should be banished to France, others that he should be put to death. The Earl of Cassilis, though a foe to Huntly, resisted these measures on grounds of patriotism, and proposed that he should be deprived of certain honors and offices and fined. A fine was exacted, and the places which had been taken from him were restored.[foot-note] With regard to this hypothesis, it may at least be said that, if it should be accepted, the ballad would be quite as faithful to history as many others.
A-B are the purer forms of the ballad; F-J are corrupted by admixture.
Geordie is Geordie Lukely of Stirling in F. In G, he is the Earl of Cassilis, 'of Hye,' as if some singer of the Gordons had turned the tables on Huntly's enemy. In H, Geordie lives at the Bog o Gight, and should be the Earl, or Marquis, of Huntly; but writers of peerages will consult st. 17.
There has been a battle in the North in A-B. Sir Charles Hay[foot-note] has been killed, and Geordie is in custody for this, A, B. Geordie has killed a man and is to die, C; the man is his wife's brother, D. In E, Geordie is a rebel.
F begins with two stanzas from a vulgar last-dying-speech, of which more by and by: otherwise the story is not essentially injured, though the style is lowered. Geordie (in the first two stanzas) has done many an ill deed, but no murder or slaughter; he has stolen fifteen of the king's horse and sold them in Bohemia. Earl Cassilis, likewise, in G, could not keep his hand off horses; he has stolen three geldings out of a park and sold them to Balleny (Balveny). Huntly, if it be he, in H, has only made free with the king's deer. In I, J, Geordie has had an intrigue with Bignet's (Pilbagnet's, Badenoch's) lady, for which the husband has thrown him into prison, and he is to die. But he owns to more than this in J. Beginning with an acknowledgment of one of the king's best steeds stolen and sold in 'Bevany,' upon being pressed, he confesses to a woman abused and five orphan babes killed for their money.
Geordie points his message to his wife in C 2, D 4, by begging her to sew him or bring him his linen shirt (shirts), a good side shirt, which will be the last he shall need, and a lang side sark is equally prominent in the lady's thoughts in I 8.
The lady stops for nothing in her ride to Edinburgh. She will not, and does not, eat or drink all the way, A 4, 5. When she comes to the water-side, finding no boat ready, she swims the Queen's Ferry, B 7, C 5, D 9, J 13, L 1; or pays a boatman prodigally to take her over, H 9, I 9, J 14.
When the lady gaes oer the pier of Leith, comes to Edinburgh, to the West Port, the Canongate, the Parliament Close, the tolbooth-stair, the prison-door, she deals out crowns and ducatoons, makes the handfus o red gold fly, among the numerous poor, and bids them pray for Geordie. She has the prudence, in G 5, to do the same among the nobles many at the tolbooth-gate, that they may plead for Geordie.
The block and axe are in sight, and Geordie, in chains, is coming down the stair, A; the napkin is laid over his face, and the gallows is making ready, B (so F, but put further on), his head is to go, C; the rest of the nobles sit (stand) hat on head, but hat in hand stands Geordie, D, E, H, I, J, L.
The lady makes a plea for her husband's life. She is the mother of many children (the tale ranges from six to eleven) and is going with yet another, B, C, K, N. She would bear them all over again for the life of Geordie, C, D, or see them all streekit before her eyes, B; and for his life she will part with all that she owns, A 10, B 11, 16, D 14.
The king in A is moved by neither of these appeals. The number of her children is so far from affecting him that he orders the heading-man to make haste. But the Gordons collect and pass the word to be ready. There would have been bloody bouks upon the green.[foot-note]
The lady is told that by paying a good round sum, 5,000 (500) pounds, 10,000 (1000) crowns, she can redeem Geordie's life. An aged lord prompts the king to offer these terms in A; in the other versions, they are proposed directly; by the king himself, F, G, I; by the queen, B, I; by the good Argyle, D; by an English lord, H. The bystanders contribute handsomely; she pays the ransom down, and wins the life of Geordie, A-D, G-J.
In E, which is a mere fragment, there is no fine or collection: a bold baron says, such true lovers shall not be parted, and she gets her Geordie forthwith. In F, no contribution is required, because the lady, after scattering the red gold among the poor, is still in a condition to produce the five thousand pound from her own pocket. For this she receives a 'remit,' with which she hies to the gallows and stops the impending execution. In I b, which is defective, the money collected is to pay the jailer's fee. After the discharge has been secured (in two or three copies earlier), Lord Corstorph, B a, the Laird o Logie, B b, an Irish lord, C, H, an English lord, D, the gleid Argyle, I, Lord Montague, J, expresses a wish that Geordie's head were off, because he might have succeeded to the lady. The lady checks this aspiration, sometimes in very abusive language.
The pair now ride off together, and when she is set in her saddle, no bird in bush or on briar ever sang so sweet as she, B, C, E, F, H, I. If we were to trust some of those who recite her story, the lady who has shown so much spirit and devotion was not one of those who blush to find good deeds fame. 'Gar print me ballants that I am a worthy lady,' B 30 makes her say; 'Hae me to some writer's house, that I may write down Gight's lament and how I borrowed Geordie,' I a 25; 'Call for one of the best clerks, that he may write all this I've done for Geordie,' J 36. What she really did say is perhaps faithfully given in D 18: 'Where is there a writer's house, that I may write to the north that I have won the life of Geordie?'
I and J are probably from stall-prints, and it has not been thought necessary to notice some things which may have been put into these to eke them out to a convenient length. J has an entirely spurious supplement. When the pair are riding away, and even as the wife is protesting her affection, Geordie turns round and says, A finger of Bignet's lady's hand is worth a' your fair body. A dispute ensues, and Geordie pulls out a dagger and stabs his lady; he then takes to flight, and never is found. Another set, mentioned by Motherwell, makes Geordie drown his deliverer in the sea, in a fit of jealousy (Minstrelsy, p. lxxvi, 46).
There is an English broadside ballad, on the death of "George Stoole" which seemed to Motherwell "evidently imitated from the Scottish song." This was printed by H. Gosson, whose time is put at 1607-41.[foot-note] This ballad was to be sung "to a delicate Scottish tune;" Georgy comes in as a rhyme at the end of stanzas not seldom; Georgy writes to his lady, bewailing his folly; he never stole no oxe nor cow, nor ever murdered any, but fifty horse he did receive of a merchant's man of Gory, for which he was condemned to die, and did die. These are the data for determining the question of imitation.
There is a later 'Georgy' ballad, of the same general cast, on the life and death of "George of Oxford," a professed and confessed highwayman, a broadside printed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In this, Lady Gray hastens to Newcastle to beg Georgy's life of the judge, and offers gold and land to save him, after the fashion of Lady Ward in 'Hughie Graham;' to no purpose, as in 'Hughie Graham.' This Georgy owns and boasts himself a thief, but with limitations much the same as those which are made a point of by the other; he never stole horse, mare, or cloven-foot, with one exception the king's white steeds, which he sold to Bohemia.
Both of these ballads are given in an appendix.
Whether the writers of these English ballads knew of the Scottish 'Geordie,' I would not undertake to affirm or deny; it is clear that some far-back reciter of the Scottish ballad had knowledge of the later English broadside. The English ballads, however, are mere "goodnigbts." The Scottish ballads have a proper story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and (save one late copy), a good end, and they are most certainly original and substantially independent of the English. The Scottish Geordie is no thief, nor even a Johnie Armstrong. There are certain passages in certain versions which give that impression, it is true, but these are incongruous with the story, and have been adopted from some copy of the broadside, the later rather than the earlier. These are, the first two stanzas of P, utterly out of place, where we have the king's horses stolen and sold in Bohemia, almost exactly as in the ballad of 'George of Oxford,' 15; G 7, where the Earl of Cassilis is made to steal geldings and sell them in Balleny; and J 23, in which the Laird of Gight steals one of the king's steeds (precisely as in 'George of Oxford') and sells it in Bevany. That is to say, we have the very familiar case of the introduction (generally accidental and often infelicitous) of a portion of one ballad into another; which, if accidental in the present instance, would easily be accounted for by a George being the hero in each. Further; the burden of B, embodied in the ballad in two versions, I 27, J 35, has a general resemblance to that of 'George Stoole,' and could hardly have been original with the Scottish ballad. There was probably a 'Geordie Luklie,' a Scottish variety of one of the English broadsides.
G is translated by Gerhard, p. 56; A, in part, by Knortz, Schottische Balladen, p. 101.
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