The Medieval British Ballads Their Age, Origins and Authenticity
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1 The Medieval British Ballads Their Age, Origins and Authenticity By Garry Victor Hill 2 3 The Medieval British Ballads: Their Age, Origins and Authenticity By Garry Victor Hill Frisky Press Armidale Australia 2015 4 Contents Dedication: Page 5 Copyright: Page 6 Acknowledgements: Page 7 Author’s Note: Page 8 Introduction: Page 9 Part One: Problems with Sources and Methods Page 9 Part Two: The Origins of the Ballads Page 22 Part Three: Depictions of the world of Medieval Music Page 33 Part Four: The Ballad and the End of Medieval Society Page 40 Part Five: The Songs Page 56 Part Six The Robin Hood Ballads Page 233 Afterword: Page 306 About the Author Page 307 5 Dedication To the balladeers who inspired: Joan Baez Rusty MacKenzie Harry Belafonte Jacki MacShee Theo Bikel Ewan McColl Eric Bogle Loreena McKennitt Arthur Bower Jane Modrick Isla Cameron Margret Monks Alex Campbell Derek Moule Ian Campbell David Nolan Judy Collins Pentangle Sandy Denny Maddy Prior Cara Dillon Jean Redpath Donovan John Renborn Judith Durham Jean Ritchie Marianne Faithful Kate Rusby Fairport Convention The Seekers Athol De Fugard Pete Seeger Arlo Guthrie Gary Shearston Woody Guthrie Steeleye Span Emmylou Harris Bill Staines Tim Hart Martha Tilston Faye Held Ian and Sylvia Tyson Mike Heron Robin Williamson Alex Hood and Peter, Paul and Mary Burl Ives Roger Illott and Penny Davies 6 Copyright © The text written by the author may be quoted from for purposes of study or review if proper acknowledgement is made. For the whole book storage in electronic systems or bound printed out copies for library research is also allowed. Communication on this would be appreciated. Selling copies becomes another matter and is not allowed. The author has taken pictures from the internet by the requested method of giving requested feedback, asking permission for use and only then copying. Major sources are the Popular Domain, the Gutenberg Project, Wikipedia and Wikimedia. If anyone finds that a picture they hold copyright to has been put on the internet without their knowledge, contact the author and it will be removed or personal acknowledgement will be given in wording of the owner’s choice. The author cannot give copyright permission on illustrations. When artists are traceable they are credited. With the reproduced lyrics in Part Four, these are either in the public domain or probably so, but to be doubly safe they are taken from the Gutenberg Project e-book reprints, which gives reproduction permissions. The author does not hold copyright to any lyrics. As the book relies heavily on Gutenberg reproductions their rules apply. No copy of this work is to be sold or have Guttenberg texts or passages removed. People wishing to use their texts should read their rules for usage. Acknowledgements Gratitude goes to The Guttenberg Project and for the following for both lyrics from texts and for information: Francis Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. (Eight Volumes) Andrew Lang, A Collection of Ballads. Robert Bell, Ancient Poems Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England Kenneth Sisam, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Frank Sidgwick, Popular ballads of the Olden Time. (Four Volumes) George Wharton Edwards, A Book of Old English Ballads. John W. Hales and Patrick Furnivall, Editors Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript of Ballads and Romances. (Three volumes) 7 Author’s Note Scholars and professional balladeers with decades of time spent on balladry will probably find little, if anything, that is new here. Others will find that this work serves as more than a basic introduction. The Medieval British Ballads: Their Age, Origins and Authenticity comes out of an attempt to avoid over simplifying, but not to assume highly specialised knowledge. For that reason some reproduced ballads have had confusing additions such as line and page numbers within the text removed. Annotations have also usually been kept. Others have often been moved to the side to make the text clearer. Spaces were frequently added between words. One ballad has been left without changes to give an idea of what the others were like. Those who wish to see the ballads as originally presented may find them in The Guttenberg Project reproductions under their titles or with several others in the full Child Collection. No words or punctuation have been added or deleted. Capitals have been added to proper nouns and the personal pronoun. The grammatically incorrect use of capitals in the middle of sentences has been kept. These may have been used to indicate a pause, or so the singer could give emphasis, catch their breath or put in a musical break. Whatever the reason, they stay. No source notes are given for song introductions in the Guttenberg or Child collections. The collector or editor’s name and the song title refer to their introductions in their collections unless stated otherwise. To repeatedly give such sources would be cluttering the text with prolix references. Another change from standard practice is the use of abreviations in source notes. Academics know that ed means editor, rpt. reprint rev. means revised and so on but do non-academics? Do English as a second language students? I prefer clarity to economy here. * 8 Introduction How did the Ballads originate and how old are they? Are the English, Scottish and Ulster ballads with their medieval themes, true relics from the Middle Ages which reflect that era and give us an insight into it, or are they much later concoctions, showing how people perceived the Middle Ages centuries later? Before assessing and presenting the works, considering the many problems that surround dating and tracing the apparently Medieval ballads’ origins becomes necessary. 9 Part One Problems with Sources and Methodology 10 It is an axiom of folk music collectors, folklorists and historians that a song can only be considered to be definitely as old as its publication date or the first verified and dated writing down or taping in full. There are good reasons for this: deliberately faked medieval folk songs exist and genuine mistakes frequently occur. One such genuine and traceable mistake that reveals how this can happen concerns the Paul Bunyan folk songs. A collector working well into the twentieth-century was assured by Canadian workers that their songs of Paul Bunyan had their origins in the loggers’ camps of the early nineteenth century. The reality was that their parents and grandparents had heard these songs about Paul Bunyan on radio advertisements in the 1930s and incorrectly assumed that they were authentically old folk songs, not new jingles. The whole Paul Bunyan legend may be totally pseudo-frontier blarney or what seems more likely, originates in the highly developed legend of a visually striking French Canadian lumberjack involved in a rebellion of the 1830s.1 These cultural developments concerning Paul Bunyan were greatly developed and then marketed in the second decade of the twentieth century by the Red River Lumber Company as an advertising gimmick: they rapidly became a prosperous industry.2 The broadside balladeers played a similar role to the radio broadcasters centuries later. From the early sixteenth century until they were replaced by newspapers and sheet music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they created, collected and distributed songs. These were printed on a large sheet, often with illustrations.3 They were also often folded into quarters and soon became known as cheap books, abbreviated into chapbooks.4 They were sold at taverns, in the streets and at fairs where their sellers often sang them, at special events and on market days. The deeds of those facing execution frequently became topic matter: ballad sheets may have even been sold at public executions. These hangings and sometimes beheadings were as much a public 1 Wayne Chamberain, “The True Story of the Paul Bunyan Legend.’ A Blog. Posted 2008. 2 Laura Gibbs, ‘American Legends’ wwwlyricsmythfolklorenet3043myth/folklore. Posted October 9th 2004. 3 Anon, The Contemporary Short History of Broadside Ballads. www.contemplator com/history broadside; Eric Nebeker, “The Heyday of the Broadside Ballad’http://ebba.english .ucsb.edu/page/heyday-of the-broadside-ballad 4 Ibid. 11 entertainment as an obvious warning and also an attempt by authorities to public reinforce the power of the law.5 The prevalence of outlaws, pirates and rebels in ballads suggests that executions were a futile deterrent, even if violent death for lawbreakers was a favourite ballad theme. A broadside ballad page. Public Domain Other popular themes were lost loves, fortunes of war, returning lovers, the pains of exile, ghosts and the supernatural. Assorted aspects of the Medieval world were favourite themes, but the topic matter alone did not define what a ballad was. It was during the heyday of the broadsheets from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, that what a ballad was gained its definition. Ballads were songs that told a clear, comprehensive and dramatic story with a strong narrative line based on characters. Ballads went beyond brief love lyrics subservient to melodies, descriptions, laments, dirges, elegies, paeans, serenades or expressions of emotions. Most ballads condense action, setting, motivation 5 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868.London; Collins-Harvill, 1987. pp31-36. 12 and outcome by the use of vivid phrases. Although it was not mandatory, most had the form of a quatrain with three or four stresses to a line. While not all ballad quatrains contained rhymes, lines usually ended with rhyming patterns, either to the next line or the one after. Sometimes lines ended with assonance, not rhymes. In the second half of the twentieth century the term ballad became misused for songs that described or emoted rather than told a story.