A King in Galloway: How Crockett Made a Tradition His Own

In November 1894, under public accusation of plagiarism, S.R. Crockett argued that drawing on Scottish folk tradition was what all writers did — Scott included. Four years later, in December 1898, he made that argument again in fiction. ‘The Goodman of Ballangiech,’ published in The Lady’s Realm and never thereafter collected, is what that argument looks like when exercised at full creative strength.

This article examines what Crockett actually did with the Ballangiech tradition: how he relocated a story belonging to Stirlingshire and the Trossachs to the Galloway uplands, grounding it in the specific historical ecology of 1531 and the aftermath of Johnnie Armstrong’s hanging at Carlanrig; how he transformed Scott’s vague domestic alias into the comic figure of “James Jamieson, the King’s poulterer”; how he introduced a villain drawn from inside the court rather than from the hills; and how he created Elspeth Kennedy — a character with no equivalent in either of Scott’s versions — whose domestic Scots voice holds the story’s heroic and comic registers in sustained, confident balance.

The story is now available in the S.R. Crockett Online Museum.

An article from the Reading Room of the S.R. Crockett Online Museum.