English & Other 181. Bonny Earl of Murray
CONTENTS:
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Scottish Song in the James Madison Carpenter Collection
by Ian A. Olson
Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4, Special Issue on the James Madison CarpenterCollection (1998), pp. 421-433
There are two ballad versions (Child 181A and 181B) surrounding the dreadful murder of the second, ('Bonny') Earl of Moray in 1592. The commonly sung A version gives no details of the murder as such but historians have so far agreed that the Earl was cut down after fleeing from a house besieged and set on fire by his enemy the Earl of Huntly. When I examined the forensic evidence of the wounds portrayed i n a detailed c ontemporary death portrait o f Moray it turned out to support the neglected B version of the ballad, in which the Bonny Earl is described as having been treacherously murdered in his bed. But, from the unique version, 'The Bonny Earlo f Murry',g iven by one of Carpenter'sin formants,i t would appeart hat Child's A and B versions are in fact but part of one longer ballad, thus emphasizing the 'ahistorical' story it tells. A close re-examination of the 'contemporary' historical accounts shows that they were mostly written long after the event, by people who had a vested interest in blackening the name of Moray's supposed murderer, the Earl of Huntly, and that in reality there are no first-hand eye-witness accounts. Thus these important clues from the Carpenter Collection not only advance ballad scholarship but face historians with the need to re-examine the entire event and its significance in Scottish history.