First taken into a collection by Kinloch, 1827, who remarks that the ballad had been printed as a broadside in the North, and was extremely popular. B, the oldest version that has been recovered, was written down in 1802-3. There are verbal agreements between B, especially, and a fragment in Herd's Manuscripts (I, 55, II, 187, Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, II, 6), and there has been borrowing from one side or the other. Herd's fragment belongs to a ballad of a shepherd's daughter and an earl which is preserved in two copies in Motherwell's Manuscript (I, 37, 252). No 397 of The Musical Museum, communicated to Johnson, says Stenhouse, by Burns, [1792,] and probably in a large measure his work, begins with stanzas which may have been suggested by the ballad before us or by the other. See an appendix.
The copy in Christie, I, 24, was epitomized from A b, with some alterations. That in The Deeside Guide, 1889, p. 17, is Aytoun's, compounded of A b and D a.
Alexander Irvine, the young laird of Drum, says Spalding, was married to the lady Mary Gordon on December 7, 1643: Memorials of the Trubles in Scotland, etc., II, 296. Lady Mary Gordon was fourth daughter to George the second Marquis of Huntly, and niece to the Marquis of Argyll. The Laird of Drum suffered extremely in his worldly fortunes through his fidelity to the cause of the Stuarts. This would have been a natural reason for his declining a peerage offered him at the Restoration, and for his marrying, the second time, to win and not to spend. He took for his second wife Margaret Coutts (A 9), "a woman of inferior birth and manners, which step gave great offence to his relations." (Kinloch.) He died in 1687. After the death of Irvine of Drum, Margaret Coutts married Irvine of Cults. She died in 1710, at the age of only forty-five.[foot-note]
Drum is ten miles west of Aberdeen.[foot-note] For the commonplace in A a 3, B 8, C 5, etc., see II, 181 b.
Knortz, Lieder und Romanzen Alt-Englands, No 29, p. 105, translates Allingham's ballad.
This page most recently updated on 23-Apr-2011, 06:51:30. Return to main index
