16. They drank thair wine, they did not spare, Even in the good lord's sight; Now he is o'er the floods so gray, And Lord Maxwell has ta'en his goodnight.
[Annotations: 3.2: 'feed,' feud. 3.4: 'dead,' death. 8.2: 'shank,' point of a hill. 9.3: 'bangisters,' roisterers, freebooters. 14.1: 'But if,' unless.]
+The Text+ is from a manuscript at Balliol College, Oxford, No. 354, already referred to in the First Series (p. 80) as supplying a text of _The Nut-brown Maid_. The manuscript, which is of the early part of the sixteenth century, has been edited by Ewald Flügel in _Anglia_, vol. xxvi., where the present ballad appears on pp. 278-9. I have only modernised the spelling, and broken up the lines, as the ballad is written in two long lines and a short one to each stanza.
No other text is known to me. The volume of _Anglia_ containing the ballad was not published till 1903, some five years after Professor Child's death; and I believe he would have included it in his collection had he known of it.
+The Story+ narrates the subjugation of a proud lady who scorns all her wooers, by a juggler who assumes the guise of a knight. On the morrow the lady discovers her paramour to be a churl, and he is led away to execution, but escapes by juggling himself into a meal-bag: the dust falls in the lady's eye.
It would doubtless require a skilled folk-lorist to supply full critical notes and parallels; but I subjoin such details as I have been able to collect.
In _The Beggar Laddie_ (Child, No. 280, v. 116) a pretended beggar or shepherd-boy induces a lassie to follow him, 'because he was a bonny laddie.' They come to his father's (or brother's) hall; he knocks, four-and-twenty gentlemen welcome him in, and as many gay ladies attend the lassie, who is thenceforward a knight's or squire's lady.
In _The Jolly Beggar_ (Child, No. 279, v. 109), which, with the similar Scottish poem _The Gaberlunzie Man_, is attributed without authority to James V. of Scotland, a beggar takes up his quarters in a house, and will only lie behind the hall-door, or by the fire. The lassie rises to bar the door, and is seized by the beggar. He asks if there are dogs in the town, as they would steal all his 'meal-pocks.' She throws the meal-pocks over the wall, saying, 'The deil go with your meal-pocks, my maidenhead, and a'.' The beggar reveals himself as a braw gentleman.