" The language, except for a few technical
terms, is modern, but what else could it be if handed down orally? The
language of undoubted ballads is often more modern than that which was
spoken in my boyhood in Ettrick Forest. As Sir Walter Scott remarked,
a poem of 1570-1580, which he quotes from the Maitland MSS., "would run
as smoothly, and appear as modern, as any verse in the ballad (with a
few exceptions) if divested of its antique spelling."
We now turn to the historical characters in the ballad.
Sir Richard Maitland of Lauder, or Thirlestane, says Scott, was already
in his lands, and making donations to the Church in 1249. If, in 1296,
forty-seven years later, he held his castle against Edward I., as in
the ballad, he must have been a man of, say, seventy-five. By about
1574 his descendant, Sir Richard Maitland, was consoled for his family
misfortunes (his famous son, Lethington, having died after the long
siege of Edinburgh Castle, which he and Kirkcaldy of Grange held for
Queen Mary), by a poet who reminded him that his ancestor, in the
thirteenth century, lost all his sons--"peerless pearls"--save one,
"Burdallane.
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