modern (Scott?) who was deliberately "faking" the English version.
There is no reason why tradition should NOT have retained historical
incidents in the Scottish form; it is a mere assumption that a modern
borrowed and travestied these incidents from Percy's Reliques. We
possess Hogg's UNEDITED original of Scott's version of 1806 (an
original MS. never hinted at by Colonel Elliot), and it retains clear
traces of being contaminated with a version of The Huntiss of Chevet,
popular in 1459, as we read in The Complaynte of Scotland of that date.
There is also an old English version of The Hunting of the Cheviot
(1550 or later, Bodleian Library). The UNEDITED text of Scott's
Otterburne then contained traces of The Huntiss of Chevet; the two were
mixed in popular memory. In short, Scott's text, manipulated slightly
by him in a way which I shall describe, was A THING SURVIVING IN
POPULAR MEMORY: how confusedly will be explained.

The differences between the English version of 1550 and the Scots
(collected for Scott by Hogg), are of old standing. I am not sure that
there was not, before 1550, a Scottish ballad, which the English
ballad-monger of that date annexed and altered. The English version of
1550 is not "popular"; it is the work of a humble literary man.

The English is a very long ballad, in seventy quatrains; it greatly
exaggerates the number of the Scots engaged (40,000), and it is the
work of a professional author who uses the stereotyped prosaic stopgaps
of the cheap hack -


I tell you withouten dread,