Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/112

92 the following information regarding the ceremony:—The fishermen on returning from the North Sea fishing, money being plentiful, paraded the town with the Burry-man, but not with any idea of taking coin from anyone. Mr. Hutton admitted that money had been taken for a long time, and we may notice here that the burr-bearer did not himself receive the gratuities, but they were handed to a lad who went with him in character of fiscal. The reason for this arrangement is possibly the same as given by Mr. Hutton for the two supporters of his arms, that he should not knock the burrs off their woollen foundation, apparently a jersey frock, a pair of drawers, and a nightcap with two holes cut in it for him to look through. Mr. Hutton would not say positively that it was necessary to choose a fisherman as Burry-man, but was quite clear that it was a fisherman's ceremony.

Being deaf, I failed to pick up the chant, described as a "shout" in Miss Dickson's paper, by which the householders were summoned to the door, but it was a recognised formula, and, as I understood, repeated annually. Where the previous notice says "the representation of the burgh by the burryman would amount to a whimsical practical pun" the Scottish Antiquary says, alluding to Malcolm Canmore's supposed erection of the town into a burgh of regality, "the representation of the burgh by the burryman would amount to a whimsical practical king." There having been sometimes two Burry-men is at least not antagonistic to the suggestion of the existence of privileged and non-privileged navigators. "The Burry-man starts from the bell stane, that is, the Town Hall," said one of my informants. Was this bell used to summon the ferry-man in the more remote past?

There is not the remotest suggestion of "riding the marches," or "walking the bounds" in the modern ceremony. There is a "fisherman's walk" at Cockenzie, further down the Forth, which may commemorate a connection with the Earls-Ferry on the opposite side of the Firth, of which a traditional origin, connected with the escape of Macduff, Earl of Fife (Thane), from Macbeth, is to be found in Wyntoun's Chronicle, Bk. vi., chap. 8.