Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/276

 254

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—

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.”

Mr. Wilkie has recorded the following lines, which he calls “a common song about Redcap”:—