Oops! I forgot to mention that little gender switch thing. In Fair Margaret Sweet William, it's the woman who dies of love-sickness first - because she has lost him to another. In Lady Alice, he is presented to her already deceased. These are superficial details, especially when there is no real plot. For both Fair Margaret & Sweet William and Lady Alice, either he dies or she dies and then the other dies of love sickness and plants grow afterward. It's all the same thing. If you want a real story with action and so forth, you'll have look to the Scots.

So these two are one complete ballad in a sense. Child claimed Lord Lovel and Lady Alice were counterparts. Nope. It's these two met and recognized the other and fell in love. Then everybody dies of love-sickness etc. and then this happened:

85[C.8]        Giles Collin was laid in the lower chancel,
        Lady Alice all in the higher;
        There grew up a rose from Lady Alice's breast,
        And from Giles Collin's a brier.

85[C.9]        And they grew, and they grew, to the very church-top,
        Until they could grow no higher,
        And twisted and twined in a true-lover's knot,
        Which made all the parish admire.   

It appears that Lady Alice started out with one type of ending where a plant, a rose or a lily, springs from his grave in the "East" and touches her breast at her grave in the "West". This is more of an outcome of a classic Medieval romance. The love knot is actually a twist on that theme. Therefore, the rose-brier motif is most likely not indigenous to "Lady Alice" even though we might get some versions in which it is attached. It seems to have come by the "high chancel/lower/rose/brier" sequence by way of Fair Margaret and Sweet William.

The other thing about Lady Alice, what I meant by it being further on in the story, what makes 84A looks like a fragment of some sort, like it skipped by the plot and went straight to the ending, is that 84B and 84C, say that he went to visit his mum with a head injury and that, apparently since he died a short time later, his mother was unable to help him. In 84A, she is merely presented with a dead knight. There's looks to be almost an attempt to add some sort of a plot. But if you want a real story, you'll have to look at the Scottish ballad Lord Thomas and Fair Annett.

Ok, even though posterity chose the rose-brier motif for the finale for all ten of these ballads, It wasn't always that way. I say the Scots preferred either no plant motif ending at all or their own ending which I would call the birk-brier motif, and which I think is lovely in itself, however, since it is derived from the rose and brier, it's not indigenous. The Scots did not get up one morning and decide they needed to change what already existed in, say, Lord Thomas and Fair Annett, but rather when they saw the rose-brier popping up all over the place, they said, "We can come up with one to suit us better!"

And ae they grew, and ae they threw,
Until the twa did meet,
That ilka ane micht plainly see
They were true lovers sweet

I don't believe there should be any book where you classify Scottish and English ballads, put them together in the same book. There is a definite relationship between Lord Thomas & Fair Annett and Fair Margaret & Sweet William, sure, but the Scots liked to spin things their own way. I'm going to let them. And I stand by what I have said in the past about it probably being some sort of Protestant retort- or not. But it's clear that it's a derivative and that all we need to worry about here.

Anyway, let's put the Scottish ballads in their own book. That would be Lord Thomas and Fair Annett, Lass of Roch Royal, Prince Robert & Fair Janet, all those with a Scottish birk-brier motif. That leaves Fair Margaret & Sweet William, Lord Lovel, and Earl Bran (which I accidentally forgot about before). But anyway, we're down to three.