'Brown Robin' was No 7 in William Tytler's Brown Manuscript The first stanza is cited by Anderson, Nichols's Literary Illustrations, VII, 177, and there were twenty-one stanzas, as in A a. A b may have been a copy of the Tytler-Brown version. It does not seem to have been tampered with so much as other ballads in the same manuscript. The story undoubtedly stops at the right point in A, with the escape of the two lovers to the wood. The sequel in C is not at all beyond the inventive ability of Buchan's blind beggar, and some other blind beggar may have contrived the cane and the whale, the shooting and the hanging, in B.
Brown Robin is lover or husband of May Margerie, or May a Roe = Lillie Flower, in 'Jellon Grame,' No 90, B 14, C 7, and again of White Lilly in 'Rose the Red and White Lilly,' No 103, A 7 ff.
We have money given over the wall by an eloping lady, as in B 4, 5, C 5, also in 'Willie o Douglas Dale,' No 101, C 4, 5.
A 1, nearly, is stanza 5 in Jamieson's 'Glenkindie;' see p. 141 of this volume, note to B.
C is translated by Gerhard, p. 175.
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