'Allison Gross', No.35 in F. J.Child's famous collection of ballads, was taken from the Jamieson-Brown collection and first printed in the Jamieson Popular Ballads. Mrs Brown was an old lady, the widow of a minister, who had a remarkable repertoire of popular ballads, particularly of ballads on supernatural themes, many of which we owe to her alone. This is a tale of witchcraft and of the fairy rade.

Allison Gross, 'the ugliest witch i the north country', allured the hero into her bower and made violent love to him, offering him various rich gifts if he would be her true love. He repulsed her advances uncompromisingly:

'Awa, awa, ye ugly witch,

Haud far awa, an lat me be;

I never will be your lemman sae true,

An I wish I were out o your company.'

At the third refusal she blew on a grass-green horn, struck him with a silver wand and spun round three times muttering ill words, so that his strength failed and he fell senseless on the ground:

She's turnd me into an ugly worm,

And gard me toddle about the tree.

His only solace was from his sister Maisry, who came every Saturday night to wash and comb his locks. One night the Fairy Rade of the Seelie Court passed by and disenchanted him:

But as it fell out on last Hallow-even,

When the seely court was ridin by,

The queen lighted down on a gowany bank,

Nae far frae the tree where I wont to lye.

She took me up in her milk-white han,

An she's stroakd me three times oer her knee;

She chang'd me again to my ain proper shape,

An I nae mair maun toddle about the tree.

Child's ballad No.36, 'The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea', is very similar to this, but has two transformations by a wicked stepmother, the knight into a 'laily worm' and Maisry into a 'machrel of the sea'. It was taken down from recitation in the north of Scotland about 1802, and bears some resemblance also to 'The Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heughs', which was added as an appendix to ballad No.34, 'Kemp Owyne'. It is a literary version of a Northumberland tradition. Further reference will be found to it in dragons.

[Motifs: D683.2; D700; G269.4; G275.8.2]