Page:One Hundred English Folksongs (1916).djvu/25

Rh No. 13. The Cruel Mother

story, which is not quite clear in this version, is of a woman who contracts an illicit alliance with her father’s clerk, and secretly gives birth to twin babes “down by the green wood side O.” She murders the infants, who afterward appear before her “all dressed in white,” that is, as ghosts. They proclaim their identity by calling her “Mother,” curse her for her cruelty to them, and say that they live in heaven, but that she will suffer in hell for her misdeeds.

The earliest published form of the ballad is in Herd’s Scottish Songs (volume ii, p. 237, ed. 1776). Other Scottish versions are given in Motherwell’s, Kinloch’s, and Buchan’s collections; see also “Lady Anne” in Scott’s Minstrelsy, and “Fine Flowers in the Valley” in Johnson’s Museum (volume iv, ed. 1792). The tune given in the latter, although quite regular in rhythm, is very similar to the air given here.

Kinloch also quotes a tune which, however, has little or nothing in common with the Mixolydian air in the text.

In the Percy Papers there is a version very similar to this one. It begins: There was a duke’s daughter lived in York, All alone and alone a, And she fell in love with her father’s clarke, Down by the green wood side a. Child points out that the ballad has affinities with “The Maid and the Palmer,” and quotes two Danish ballads which are closely allied to the British song.

Four versions with tunes are printed in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume ii, p. 109; volume iii, pp. 70–72), the first one of which was recorded by Miss Esther White, of New Jersey, who writes that “lately she heard it again, sung by a poor ‘mountain-white’ child in the North Carolina Mountains.”

No. 14. The Golden Vanity

versions of this ballad have been published with tunes, for example, the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume i, p. 104; volume ii. p. 244); English County Songs (p. 182); Songs of the West (No. 64, 2d ed.); Tozer’s Sailors’ Songs and Chanties (No. 15); Songs of Sea-Labour (No. 42), etc.

Child (No. 286) reprints a 17th century broadside version, beginning: Sir Walter Raleigh has built a ship In the Netherlands,  And it is called the Sweet Trinity And was taken by the false Gallaly, Sailing in the Lowlands. Mr. Ebsworth, in his introduction to the ballad in the Roxburghe Ballads (volume v, p. 418), points out that the selfishness and ingratitude displayed by Raleigh in the ballad agreed with the current estimate of his character.

The ballad is still freely sung by English folksingers, from whom I have noted down twelve different versions.

No. 15. Lord Thomas of Winesberry

had to omit some of the words which the singer of this version gave me, and to supplement the rest with extracts from the three other variants I have collected. All the tunes that I have noted are of the same straightforward type.

The ballad is very nearly identical with the Scottish ballad of “Lord Thomas of Winesberry,” and that is my excuse for appropriating that title. Scottish versions are printed in Buchan’s Ancient Ballads of the North of Scotland (volume ii, p. 212), and in Kinloch’s Ancient Scottish Ballads (p. 89). Kinloch makes an attempt to connect the subject of the ballad with “the secret expedition of James V to France, in 1536, in search of a wife,” which seems more ingenious than probable. In Buchan’s version Thomas is chamberlain to the daughter of the King of France, who wanted none of her riches, as he had . . . thirty ploughs and three: And four an’ twenty bonny breast mills, All on the water of Dee. Under the heading of “Willie o’ Winsbury,” Child treats the ballad very exhaustively (English and Scottish Ballads, No, 100). He gives a