Annotation:What high offences has my fair love taken

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WHAT HIGH OFFENCES HAS MY FAIR LOVE TAKEN. English, Air (whole time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. The melody appears in the Skene Manuscript, a mandora manuscript c. 1615, but, according to Samuel Bayard (writing in his article “A Miscellany of Tune Notes”) is not Scottish. Florimond van Duyse, in Het Oude Nederlandsche Lied, II (Amsterdam, 1905), identifes it as a set of a French tune, “Est-ce Mars, le grand dieu des alarmes,” printed in Adruaen Valerius’ Nederlandtsche Gedenck-Clanck (1626). Coming almost full circle, however, the 1943 editor of Valerius maintains that it is the air of an even older English seaman’s song, “The new Sa-hoo.”

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