Note 109 — 305
Reading edition
Mr David MacRitchie, in his very interesting Ancient and Modern Britons, a book full of novel matter and views, accepts the ballad as “partly true,” apparently to the extent “that this ‘outlaw’ was as yet an actual, independent king, and that modern Selkirkshire was not a part of Scotland:” and this whether the king of Scotland was James IV or an earlier monarch, II, 136-139. This is pitting the ballad against history.