40. 'She eat wi' him, drank wi' him, welcom'd him in, Was kind to the man that had slain her baronne.'
41. Up spake the son on the nourice's knee, 'Gin I live to be a man, revenged I'll be.'
42. Ther's dool i' the kitchin, and mirth i' the ha', The Baronne o' Braikley is dead and awa'.
[Annotations: 1.2: 'yett,' gate. 5.2: 'spulyie,' spoil. 7.1: 'widifu's,' gallows-birds (lit. 'halter-fulls'). 8.1: 'rievers,' robbers; 'ketterin' = cateran, marauder freebooter. 14.2: 'rocks,' distaffs.]
+The Text+ is from Motherwell's MS., a copy from tradition in Renfrewshire in 1825. The ballad exists both in English and Scottish, and though the English ballad is probably derived from the Scottish, it was the first in print. It is also called _Johnnie Faa_. Motherwell, in printing an elaborated version of the following text (_Minstrelsy_, 1827, p. 360), called it _Gypsie Davy_.
+The Story.+--Singers--presumably gipsies--entice Lady Cassillis down to hear them, and cast glamour on her. She follows their chief, Gipsy Davy, but finds (stt. 5 and 6) that the conditions are changed. Her lord misses her, seeks her 'thro' nations many,' and finds her drinking with the gipsy chief. He asks her to return home with him. At this point the present version becomes difficult, and the bearing of st. 12 is not apparent. We may gather that the lady returned home with her husband, as he proceeded to hang sixteen of the gipsies.
This version calls the lady 'Jeanie Faw,' but the majority call the gipsy chief Johnnie Faa, which is a well-known name amongst gipsies, and occurs as early as 1540 as the name of the 'lord and earl of Little Egypt.' Gipsies being expelled from Scotland by Act of Parliament in 1609, a Captain Johnnë Faa and seven others were hanged in 1624 for disobeying the ordinance, and this execution is sufficient to account for the introduction of the name into a ballad of this kind.
The ballad has no certain connection with the Cassillis family, and it has been suggested that the word is simply a corruption of 'castle,' the original beginning of the ballad being
If this be so, the present form of the ballad illustrates admirably two methods of corruption by tradition.
1. There cam singers to Earl Cassillis' gates, And oh, but they sang bonnie! They sang sae sweet and sae complete, Till down cam the earl's lady.