A few copies of A were printed about 1845 by a Northumbrian gentleman for private distribution. One of these came into Whitelaw's hands, another into Dixon's. Dixon made some changes in reprinting. Bell, Ancient Poems, etc., p. 75, 1857, and Bruce and Stokoe, Northumbrian Minstrelsy, p. 82, 1882, repeat Dixon. This last remarks that "this old and very humorous ballad has long been a favorite on both sides of the Border." James Telfer, writing to Sir W. Scott, May 12, 1824 [Letters, XIII, No 73], says: "I have an humorous ballad sung by a few of the old people on this side of the Border. It is entitled The Keach in the Creel. It begins thus:
Buchan notes, I, 319, that Motherwell had sent him a ballad "somewhat similar in incident," taken down from the recitation of an old woman in or near Paisley.
This was perhaps a copy of which the first stanza is entered in MotherwelPs Note-Book, p. 55:
Or the ballad called 'Ricadoo' in the Appendix to Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. xxiii, No 29, where this first stanza is given:
Though occurring only in a late Scottish ballad, the story is somewhat old. In Gasté, Chansons normandes du XVe siècle, Manuscript de Vire, No 19, p. 15, a gentleman of Orleans causes his servants to let him down a chimney in a basket, and conceals himself under a lady's bed. She, made aware of his presence, sends her husband off to the barn, where, she says, he will find the curé, who has made love to her. On returning, the husband gets his feet into the basket, and the servants without draw the basket up. The man cries out to his wife that the devil is making away with him.
Again, in a fabliau considerably older: 'Du chevalier à la corbeille,' Manuscript of the end, of the fourteenth century, F. Michel, Gautier d'Aupais, Le chevalier à la Corbeille, Fabliaux du XIIIe siècle, p. 35; Montaiglon et Raynaud, Recueil général des Fabliaux, etc., II, 183. A gentleman makes appointment to visit a lady one night when her husband is away. An old woman, the husband's mother, sleeps in a bed beside the lady's, and keeps strict watch over her. The gentleman's squires hoist him in a basket over the wall of the house, so that he obtains entrance into the hall, whence he passes into the lady's chamber. The old woman observes a disturbance, and gets up, pretending that she is going to the kitchen. In the hall she goes astray and falls into the basket. The squires, noticing a movement of the cords, pull at the basket. The old woman is 'towed' up and down, and knocked about, much as in the ballad. She thinks that devils have carried her off. Finally the squires let the cords go, and the basket comes flat to the ground.
The story is also told in Henri Estienne's Apologie pour Hérodote, 1566; here, of a girl and her lover, and it is the girl's father that gets his feet into the basket. Ed. Ristelhuber, 1879, I, 282 f.
No one looks for decorum in pieces of this description, but a passage in this ballad, which need not be particularized, is brutal and shameless almost beyond example.
C is translated by Gerhard, p. 192.
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