What this means, as I will demonstrate, is that much of the material in MA&M had already been mediated, possibly several times, before it was published in MA&M. Much of the material in the latter half of the book comes directly from Motherwell's own collecting and any mediation appears to be minimal, i.e., small corrections to orthography, and such as dialect being made consistent, which was standard at the time.

There are 65 items in the book of which 21 items come directly from M's own collecting, the great bulk of these collected in Kilbarchan in 1825 from the likes of Mrs Lyle, Laird and Thomson.

As stated the early half of the book is made up of items from other published collections as follows:-
Scott's Minstrelsy, 7
Percy's Reliques, 4
Cromek, 1
Finlay, 2
Jamieson's Popular etc., 3
Herd, 1
Sharpe, 2
Johnson, 2
Ramsay, 1
Maidment, 1

There are also 5 modern imitations in the first half.

Another 7 are collations from several sources (by M)
Broadside , 1
Peter Buchan's Gleanings (mainly from broadsides), 1

And the other 6 are from James Nicol via Peter Buchan.

I intend to look closely at the Nicol contributions and look at Child's opinions on these as well.