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450 HISTORICAL NOTES |
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In Fabyan's Chronicle the same verses are repeated, but they are assigned to the time of David Bruce when he married the English Princess. ' To their more derision, they—the Scots—made divers tniffes, rounds and songs, against the English.'
In Dunbar's poem To the Merchants of Edinburgh, written about the year 1500, a couplet runs :—
'Your common menstrallis hes no tone But Now. the day dazuis, and Into Jone'
The common minstrels in Scotland were the Corporation pipers, maintained at the public expense. They were lodged by the householders in succession, and about the end of the fifteenth century Edinburgh appears to have supported three. Any one who found it inconvenient to billet them in their turn was liable to pay ninepence, 'That is to ilk pyper I'lld at the leist.' A tune was popular in the time, of Gavin Douglas. In the prologue of the 13th book of his translation of Virgil, printed in 1513, these lines occur:—
' Tharto thir byrdis singis in the shawis
As menstralis playing, Thejoly day now dawes.'
In the Fayrfax MSS. (Addl. MS. 5465), a collection of English songs by different composers of the latter part of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries—is a song written in honour of Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VII, entitled, This day dawes, this gentill day] with music for three voices.
One of Alexander Montgomery's poems, Hey now the day dawis, supposed to have been written before 1580, resembles a popular song :— |
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' Hey now the day dawis,
The jolly cock crawis, Now shrouds the shawis,
Through nature anone: |
The thrissel cock cryis, Or lovers quha lyis
Now skaillis the skyis, The nicht is neir gone.' |
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Montgomery's song was probably modelled from an earlier type parodied in the Glide and Godlie Ballads, beginning, 'Hay now the day dawes,' every stanza closing with 'the nicht is neir gone'—the identical line used by Montgomery. The following stanza ridicules the saving efficacy of the bone of St..Giles' arm, once the palladium of the Parish Church of Edinburgh :—
' Ye beguiled us with your hoods, Shawing your relics and your roods, To pluck fra us poor men our goods,
Ye shaw us the heid of St. John With the arme of St. Geill; To rottan banes ye gart us kneill, And savit us frae neck to heill,
The nicht is neir gane.'
Hey now the day dawnes is designated a celebrated old song in The Muses Threnodie, written in the reign of James VI, on the local affairs of Perth.
In The Piper of Kilbarck'an, a humorous poem in Scots metre, the tune is named as one which Habbie Simson played. Robert Semple, the author, lived between 1595 and 1665, and the poem belongs to the first quarter of the seventeenth century. A stanza is:—
'Now who shall play the Day it Daws! Or Hunts up when the cock he craws? Or who can for our Kirktown cause,
Stand us in stead? On bagpipes now no body blaws
Sen Habbie 's dead.' |
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