A Scottish border ballad of raw, unsentimental grief. A widow recounts in plain language how her husband was betrayed and killed by the king's men, how her servants fled, and how she alone sewed his shroud, watched his body through the night, carried him on her back, dug his grave, and buried him. The ballad ends with a vow never to love again, sealed with a lock of his yellow hair.

Dating from the sixteenth century, the ballad belongs to the Scottish border tradition, where the lawlessness of the frontier produced a literature of sudden violence and its aftermath. What sets this ballad apart is its voice: there is no heroic combat, no revenge, no supernatural consolation — only a woman doing the physical work of mourning entirely alone.

The text presented here appears in Hamilton Wright Mabie's A Book of Old English Ballads (1903).

MY love he built me a bonny bower,
And clad it a' wi' a lilye flower,
A brawer bower ye ne'er did see,
Than my true love he built for me.

There came a man, by middle day,
He spied his sport and went away,
And brought the king that very night,
Who brake my bower, and slew my knight.

He slew my knight, to me so dear;
He slew my knight, and poined his gear;
My servants all for life did flee,
And left me in extremitie.
I sewed his sheet, making my mane;
I watched the corpse, myself alane;
I watched his body, night and day;
No living creature came that way.

I took his body on my back,
And whiles I gaed, and whiles I sat,
I digged a grave, and laid him in,
And happed him with the sod so green.

But think na ye my heart was sair,
When I laid the moul' on his yellow hair;
Think na ye my heart was wae,
When I turned about, away to gae?

Nae living man I'll love again,
Since that my lovely knight is slain;
Wi' ae lock of his yellow hair
I'll chain my heart for evermair.

Colophon

From A Book of Old English Ballads, edited by Hamilton Wright Mabie, with illustrations by George Wharton Edwards (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903).

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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