Ok, I do have problems with the dryness of some academics, the need to be always right with some. I think Abbey adds a little sway to the Aural/anecdotal/here say evidence. I find it astonishing that any study on folklore, on the oral traditions, dismisses or at best does not consider with any real conviction anything that is not printed. As to where I lie in all this, In the first place I wanted the lyrics to a song that I was told may have Jacobite connections, I really don't know. To put my historians head on, I find it unusual for any serious study of , say, the song in this thread not to include all the evidence, given the subject is the forensic/ archaeological study of something passed on orally for a few hundred years. To say one doesn't agree and present one's arguments is acceptable but to say that one is right and then ram it down someones throat is not. I don't have the time to read all the secondary material available ( if one follows the logic that in an oral tradition all sources are secondary sources, unless that is - Joe Bloggs, the song writer is still alive!) What I can say is that on the evidence presented so far it may or may not be a Jacobite song.
Essay for tomorrow: "What might have been the fate of any one admitting to being a Jacobite in England in 1689 - 1745" discuss