“While thou shalt bear a charmèd life,
And hold that life of me,
’Gainst lance and arrow, sword and knife,
I shall thy warrant be.
“Nor forgèd steel nor hempen band
Shall e’er thy limbs confine;
Till threefold ropes of sifted sand
Around thy body twine.”
And when the evil lord was taken, and by the aid of Michael Scott’s book,“True Thomas,” shaped the ropes “sae curiously,” we are told, that—
Redcap sly unseen was by,
And the ropes would neither twist nor turn.
It was, however, beyond Redcap’s power to save his lord from his final doom, and, as the spae-book directed, Lord Soulis was boiled to death in a brazen cauldron on the Nine-stane Rig.
I find this goblin referred to in an old proverb given in the Denham Tracts: “He caps Bogie, Bogie capt Redcap, and Redcap capt Old Nick,” corresponding with the Lancashire saying, “He caps Wryneck, and Wryneck caps the Dule,” i.e. the Devil. And Sir Walter Scott says of him: “Redcap is a popular appellation of that class of spirits which haunt old castles. Every ruined tower in the South of Scotland is supposed to have an inhabitant of this species.”[1]
Mr. Wilkie has recorded the following lines, which he calls “a common song about Redcap”:—
Now Redcap he was there,
And he was there indeed;
And grimly he girned and glowed,
Wi’ his red cowl on his head.
Then Redcap gave a yell,
It was a yell indeed;
That the flesh neath my oxter grew cauld,
It grew as cauld as lead.
- ↑ Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. iv. p. 243.
