XII. Edom O' Gordon. A SCOTTISH BALLAD. ....................................................
This was printed at Glasgow, by Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1755, 8vo. 12
pages. We are indebted for its publication (with many other valuable things in these
volumes) to Sir David Dalrymple, Bart. who gave it as it was preserved in the
memory of a lady, that is now dead.
The reader will here find it improved, and enlarged with several fine stanzas,
recovered from a fragment of the same ballad, in the Editor's folio MS. It is
remarkable that the latter is intitledCaptain Adam Carre, and is in the English idiom.
But whether the author was English or Scotch, the difference originally was not great.
The English ballads are generally of the north of England, the Scottish are of the south
of Scotland, and of consequence the country of ballad-singers was sometimes subject
to one crown, and sometimes to the other, and most frequently to neither. Most of the
finest old Scotch songs have the scene laid within twenty miles of England, which is
indeed all poetic ground, green hills, remains of woods, clear brooks. The pastoral
scenes remain: of the rude chivalry of former ages happily nothing remains but the
ruins of the castles, where the more daring and successful robbers resided. The house
or castle of the RODES stood about a measured mile south from Duns, in
Berwickshire: some of the ruins of it may be seen to this day. The Gordons were
anciently seated in the same county: the two villages of East and West Gordon lie
about ten miles from the castle of the Rodes.[1] The fact, however, on which the
ballad is founded, happened in the north of Scotland, (See note***at the end of the
ballad) yet it contains but too just a picture of the violences practised in the feudal
times all over Europe.
From the different titles of this ballad, it should seem that the old strolling
bards or minstrels (who gained a livelihood by reciting these poems) made no scruple
of changing the names of the personages they introduced, to humour their hearers. For
instance, if a Gordon's conduct was blame-worthy in the opinion of that age, the
obsequious minstrel would, when among Gordons, change the name to Car, whose
clan or sept lay further west, andvice versa. In the third volume the reader will find a
similar instance. See the song ofGil Morris, wherein the principal character
introduced had different names given him, perhaps for the same cause.
It may be proper to mention, that in the folio manuscript, instead of the "Castle
of the Rodes," it is the "Castle of Brittons-borrow," and also "Diactoars" or
"Draitours-borrow," for it is very obscurely written, and "Capt. Adam Carre" is called
the "Lord of Westertontown." Uniformity required that the additional stanzas supplied
from that copy should be clothed in the Scottish orthography and idiom: this has
therefore been attempted, though perhaps imperfectly.
IT fell about the Martinmas,
Quhen the wind blew shril and cauld,
Said Edom O' Gordon to his men,
"We maun draw till a hauld.
"And quhat a hauld sall we draw till,
My mirry men and me?
We wul gae to the house o' the Rodes,
To see that fair ladìe."