I agree that Robin was a hard man to tell things to ~~ he tended to want to know best. But I too had much conversation with him. He often sang at the Troubadour which was close to where I lived; and on nights he couldn't be fashed to make his way home to his distant suburb, or had missed the last bus or tube, he would come & crash out on my bedroom floor: so you can imagine that many a crack we would have had. I merely reiterate that what he thought he was singing was "lour unfair", which he thought meant "unfair battle". And as he was a Scot and I wasn't...

& it still seems to me that a fair is an odd place to be killed at. I bow to your etymological knowledge; but can make nor head nor tail as to why a man who had gone to a fair should be killed by enemies who outnumbered him so much that he couldna fight or flee. What 'historical event', as you call it above, is referred to here? As Megan says, rumbles and busted heads might occur on such occasions: but fatalities wherein
"They crowded in sae thick on him,
sae thick on him, sae thick on him,
They crowded in sae thick on him,
He couldna fight not flee" ~~

Why, whatever could the polis have been doing?

In what way am I "reading too much into the song"? Are you a Dickens reader? One of my things, I fear, is that like Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, I am one who "wants to know, you know". Sorry if it's a bore.

~M~