Note 157 — BALLAD IN THE ANCIENT SCOTCH DIALECT, AULD WILLIE’S FAREWELL, A Free-Booter, taken in a Border Battle, and condemned to be Executed.[157]

In those days of continual civil war amongst the separate clans, each party hanged their prisoners. This Ballad was sent to Mr Scott, editor of The Border Minstrelsy, who inserted it in the third volume of that popular work. In his letter to the author, he observed, that the stoutest antiquarian in Scotland could not, after perusing Auld Willie’s Farewell, suspect that the writer had the misfortune to have been born south of the Tweed.