'Ihonne Ermistrangis dance' is mentioned in The Complaynt of (Scotland, 1549 (ed. Murray, p. 66). The ballad is known in two forms, — one represented by A and B, the other by C. It was an early favorite of Goldsmith's: "The music of the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-Night, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen" (Essays, 1765, p. 14).
The Armstrongs were people of consideration in Liddesdale from the end, or perhaps from the middle, of the fourteenth century, and hy the sixteenth had become the most important sept, as to numbers, in that region, not only extending themselves over a large part of the Debateable Land, but spreading also into Eskdale, Ewesdale, Wauchopedale, and Annandale The Earl of Northumberland, in 1528, puts the power of the Armstrongs, with their adherents, above three thousand horsemen. Mangerton, in Liddesdale, on the east bank of the Liddel, a little north of its junction with the Kersope, was the seat of the chief. John Armstrong, known later as Gilnockie, a brother of Thomas, laird of Mangerton, is first heard of in 1525. Removing from Liddesdale early in the century, as it is thought, he settled on the church lands of Canonby, and at a place called The Hollows, on the west side of the Esk, built a tower, which still remains. The Armstrongs, if nominally Scots, were so far from being "in due obeysaunce" that, at a conference of commissioners of both realms in November of the year 1528, the representatives of the Scottish king could not undertake to oblige them to make a redress for injuries done the English, though a peace depended upon this condition. Both the English and the Scottish border suffered from their forays. Other measures having failed, King James V, in 1530, took the pacifying of his borders into his own hand, and for this purpose levied an army of from eight to twelve thousand men. Among the reivers who suffered death was John Armstrong of Gilnockie, the hero of the present ballad. It appears from various accounts that his capture was not effected by honorable means. There is no record of a trial, and the execution was probably as summary as the arrest was perfidious.
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