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FEB l-^ 1992

INTEfi^t»^^R^ LOAN

0139(1/91)

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Songs & Ballads The baest

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VOICE . JIDD . PlHDOBOliTE

By TtJB r^ev. Ij. BLeeiTtaooD SljePPH^D, m.H.

fiDctbuen & Co., 36, esses street, toi.c.

DEDICATED TO

D. RADFORD, Esq., J. P.,

Of Mount Tavy, Tavistock,

at whose hospitable table the idea of

making this collection was

first mooted.

CONTENTS.

o««

I.	By Chance It Was.		XXVI.
II.	The Hunting of Arscott	of	XXVII.
	Tetcott.		XXVIII.
III.	Upon a Sunday Morning.		XXIX.
IV.	The Trees they are	So	XXX.
	High.		XXXI.
V.	Parson Hogg.		XXXII.
VI.	Cold Blows the Wind.		XXXIII.
VII.	My Garden Grew Plenty Thyme.	OF	XXXIV.
VIII.	Roving Jack, the Journeyman.	XXXV.
IX.	Brixham Town.		XXXVI.
X.	Green Broom.		XXXVII.
XI.	As Johnny Walked Out.		XXXVIII.
	{For Four Voices.)		>»
XII.	The Miller and His Sons.		XXXIX.
XIII.	Ormond the Brave.		XL.
XIV.	Fathom the Bowl.		XLI.
XV.	Sweet Nightingale.		XLII.
XVI.	Widdecombe Fair.		XLIII.
XVII.	The Imprisoned Lady.		XLIV.
	{For Four Voices.)		XLV.
XVIII.	The Silly Old Man.		XL VI.
XIX.	The Seasons.
XX.	The Chimney Sweep.		XLVII.
XXI.	The Saucy Sailor.		XLVIII.
XXII.	Blue Muslin.		XLIX.
XXIII.	The Squire and the Fair Maid.	M
XXIV.	Hal-an-Tow, the Helston	L.
	Furry Dance.
XXV.	Blow Away, ye Morn	ing	LI.
	Breezes.		LII.

A Hearty Good Fellow. The Bonny Bunch of Roses. The Last of the Singers. The Tythe Pig. My Lady's Coach. Jan's Courtship. The Drowned Lover. Childe, the Hunter. The Cottage Thatch'd with Straw.

Cicely Sweet. {Duet.)

A Sweet Pretty Maiden.

The Green Cockade.

The Sailor's Farewell. Ditto. {As Duet and Chorus.)

A Maiden Sat a Weeping.

The Bonny Blue Kerchief.

An Evening so Clear.

The Warson Hunt.

The Green Bushes.

The Broken Token.

The Rout is Out.

Why Should we be Dul- lards Sad ?

May Day Carol.

Nancy.

Lullabye. {With Violin Accompaniment.)

The Gipsy Countess, in Two Parts.

The Grey Mare.

The Wreck off Scilly.

CONTENTS

(Continued.)

LIII.	Henry Martin. [	LXXXIII.
LIV.	Plymouth Sound.	LXXXIV.
LV.	Farewell to Kingsbridge.	LXXXV.
LVI.	Furze Bloom.	LXXXVI.
LVII.	The Oxen Ploughing.	LXXXVII.
LVIII.	Something Lacking.	LXXXVIII.
LIX.	The Simple Ploughbov.
LX.	The Wrestling Match.	LXXXIX.
LXI. LXII. LXIII. LXIV. LXV. LXVI. LXVII.	The Painful Plough. Broadbury Gibbet. The Orchestra. The Golden Vanity. The Bold Dragoon. Trinity Sunday. The Blue Flame.	XC. XCI. XCII. XCIII. XCIV. XCV.
LXVIII.	Strawberry Fair.	XCVI.
LXIX.	The Country Farmer's Son.	XCVII.
LXX.	The Hostess' Daughter.	XCVIII.
LXXI.	The Jolly Gosshawk.	XCIX.
LXXII.	Fair Girl, Mind This.
LXXIII.	On a May Morning so Early.	c.
LXXIV.	The Spotted Cow.	CI.
LXXV.	Cupid the Ploughboy.	GIL
LXXVI	Come, my Lads, Let us be Jolly.	cm.
LXXVII LXXVIII	Poor Old Horse. The Dilly Song.	CIV.
	[For Three Voices.)	cv.
LXX IX	The Mallard.	CVI.
	{Duet and Clwnis.)	evil.
LXXX	. Constant Johnny. [Duet.)	CVIII.
LXXXI	. The Duke's Hunt.	CIX.
LXXXII	. The Bell Ringing.	ex.

A Nutting We Will Go.

Down by a River Side.

The Barley Rakings.

Deep in Love.

The Rambling Sailor.

A Single and a Markied Life.

Midsummer Carol.

{For Four Voice-:.)

The Blackbird.

The Green Bed.

The Loyal Lover.

The Streams of Nantsian.

The Drunken Maidens.

Tobacco is an Indian Weed. {Canon.)

Fair Susan Slumbered.

The False Lover.

Barley Straw.

Death and the Lady.

{Solo, or Quartette.)

Adam and Eve.

I Rode my Little Horse.

The Saucy Ploughboy.

I'll Build Myself a Gallant Ship.

{For Four Voices.)

The Everlasting Circle.

All in a Garden. , Hunting the Hare. . Dead Maid's Land. , Shower and Sunshine. . Haymaking Song. . Bibberly Town.

PREFACE.

HEREVER Celtic blood flows, there it carries with it a love of music and musical creativeness. Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Brittany, have their national melodies. It seemed to me incredible that the West of England — the old Kingdom of Damnonia — Devon and Cornwall, where the Celtic element is so strong, should be void of Folk-Music. When I was a boy I was wont to ride round and on Dartmoor, and put i p at little village taverns. There — should I be on a pay- day— I was sure to hear one or two men sing, and sing on hour after hour, one song following another with little intermission. But then I paid no particular attention to these songs.

In iS83 it occurred to me that it would be well to make a collection — at all events to examine into the literary and musical value of these songs, and their melodies. I could not find that any one had taken the pains to gather in this field. The only Cornish songs generally known were the " Helston Furry Dance," which is claimed by Cornishmen as an ancient British melody, but which is a hornpipe in common measure, not older than the middle of last century; and " Trelawny," which is a ballad reconstructed by the late Rev. R. Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstowe, the tune of which is merely " Le Petit Tambour," and therefore not Cornish at all. Through local papers I appealed to the public in the West for traditional songs and airs. I received in return a score of versions of one, " The Widdecombe Fair." However, 1 heard from the late C. Spence Bate, Esq., of The Rock, South Brent, that there were two notable old men singers in that place ; and I also knew of one in my own neighbourhood. Tlie latter, James Parsons, a day labourer, well known in public-houses as a " song-man," was the son of a still more famous song-man, now dead, who went by the nick-name of " The Singing- Machine." I sent for him, a man of about 74 years, and, after a little urginr, persuaded him to sing. From him I procured about five-and-twenty ballads and songs, some of a very early and archaic character, certainly not later than the reign of Henry VII., which he had acquired from his father.

Accompanied by F. W. Bussell, Esq., Fellow of Brazenose College, Oxford, an accomplished musician, I then visited South Brent, and we enjoyed the hospitality of Mr. Spence Bate. Then, on that occasion, we obtained some more songs. A second visit to Soutli Brent, with the Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard, resulted in almost exhausting that neighbourhood, from which we derived about fifty. The chief singers there were an old miller and a crippled labourer, who broke stones on the road.

At Belstone, as I learned from J. D. Prickman, Esq., of Okehampton, lived an old yeoman, with stalwart sons, all notable singers. Mr. Sheppard and I met this old man. Belstone is a small village under the rocks of Belstone Tor, on the edge of Dartmoor, a wild and lonesome spot. From this yeoman we acquired more songs.

The Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard and I next penetrated to the very heart of Dartmoor, and saw Jonas Coaker, an old blind man, of 8g years, very infirm, and only able to leave his bed for a few hours in the day. He is, however, endowed with a remarkable memory. From him, and helped by Mr. J. Webb, captain of a tin mine, hard by, who could recall and very sweetly sing the old melodies, we gleaned several important and interesting songs, with their traditional airs.

Further stores were yielded by a singing blacksmith, John Woodrich, at Wollacott Moor, in the parish of Thrushleton ; also by Roger Luxton, of HaKvell, N. Devon, aged 76 ; James Oliver, tanner, Launceston, aged 71, a native of St. Kewe, Cornwall ; William Rice, labourer, Lamer'.o 1, aged 75; John Rickards, of Lamerton ; John Masters, of Bradstone, aged 83 ; William Friend, labourer, Lydford, aged 6?. ; Edmund Fry

Vlll.

thatcher, a native of Levant, Cornwall ; Will and Roger Hucrgins, Lydford ; John Woolrich, labourer, Broadwoodwidgcr ; Matthew Baker, a poor cripple, aged 72, Lew Down ; some songs taken down from moor-men on Dartmoor in or about 1SG8 were sent me by W. Crossing, Esq., of South Brent ; others from Chagford, Menheniot, and Liskeard, and more recently from Mawgan in Pyder, and Padstow.

I find that in addition to one large common store of songs and ballads, each place visited and explored yields up two or three which are, so to speak, particular to each village, or musical centre. 1 have no hesitation in saying that several hundreds of ballads and songs, with their melodies, may by this means be collected, of which perhaps a third are very good, a third good, and the remainder indifferent.

The singers are nearly all old, illiterate, — their lives not worth five 3'ears' purchase, and when they die the traditions will be lost, for the present generation will have nothing to say to these songs, — especially such as are in minor keys, and supplant them with the vulgarest Music Hall performances. The melodies are in many instances more precious than the words. Ballads that were printed in London, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, became common property throughout England, but then, here in the West, these ballads imported from elsewhere, were set to tunes already traditional. The words were less frequently of home growth than the airs. For instance, the 17th century song, " I sowed the seeds of Love," I found was known by James Parsons, but not to the tune to which wedded elsewhere, and to which the verses are said to have been written. " The Outlandish Knight," again, is sung to an entirely indepenent tune. On the other hand, " Cuper's Garden," a song of the beginning of last centurj', was sung to me to the same tune, slightly varied only, as that given by Chappell. In a good number of cases I have found that the illiterate men sing a less corrupt form of a ballad that such as appears on broadsides. The younger men always sing from the broadside copies.

The minstrels were put down by Act of Parliament in 1597, and most, if not all early ballad tunes belong to a period still earlier. There was a recandescence — excuse the word — of ballad music in the reign of Charles II., but the character of the tunes of that period is distinct. We have been able to recover several early ballad tunes, some in their most archaic form, which consisted of four lines in CM. only, but others altered and extended, for in process of time singers added four more lines, which are a slight variation of the theme. We have preserved these additions, as they do not interfere with the original melody.

In the reign of Charles II. appeared Tom D'Urfey, a native of Exeter, who compiled six volumes of songs, with, their airs; to two of the volumes all the words are his own, but the tunes he took whence he could, and unquestionably he utilized for his purpose melodies he had heard in his native county, and which, through the press, he gave to become the common property of all Englishmen. Nay, further, some of them crossed the border and were appropriated as Scotch songs. A fashion had set in for Scotch songs, and several demonstrably English airs were set by D'Urfey and his imitators to quasi Scotch words. Then came Allan Ramsay and Burns, who dis- carded the ridiculous imitation Scotch dialect of these English composers, and set these same tunes to real Scottish words, and so these melodies came to be claimed as belonging to the land beyond the Tweed. One instance of the manner in which English tunes were appropriated may be given. James Johnson, of Edinburgh, published his collection of what he considered to be native songs of Scotland at the end of last centur}', yet, within the first twenty-four songs of his first volume were compositions by Purcell, Arne, Hook, Berg, and BattishiU Scottish compilers had the notion that all Scotch songs were without certain intervals, and they did not at all scruple to adapt English tunes and give them a Scotch flavour by altering such notes as contravened this imaginary canon. When we come to consider the dates of the melodies collected, we find that they vary very considerably, and the affixing of a date can only be tentative. Tunes may be roughly classed by the instruments by which they were intended to be accompanied, or on which they were to be played. The earliest melodies were composed to the harp, the lute, and the bagpipe. Then came the fiddle, and finally the hornpipe. All CM. hornpipe tunes belong to the i8th century. The triple time tunes are somewhat earlier. Chaucer speaks of the hornpipe as a Cornish instrument. A good many of the words in the old songs have lost their meaning to the singers, and a correct version is only to be obtained by comparing several obtained in

IX.

different quarters. I was much puzzled when I took down " Cuper's Garden " by the lines —

•' The third she was the virgin, And she was lorrioware ; "

but when I looked at the printed song, I found that the original stood thus: —

" The third she was a virgin,

And she tLie laurel wore."

One must not be surprised to find "Tragedy" turned into " dragotee," "galore" into " glorore," and " Tlie Outlandish Knight" converted into "The Outlandish Cat," and " The Bay of Biscay " into " The Bag of Biscuits." We have endeavoured to trace the tunes in the six volumes of D'Urfey, in " The Musical Miscellany " (1731), in six volumes, "Apollo's Cabinet" (1757), and in several of the editions as " The Complete Dancing Master." Tliere were eighteen of these between 1650 and 1728. We searched also such ballad-operas as we could obtain, but without much success. Chappell's " Popular Music of the Olden Time " has also been of great assistance. Some of the airs are later, and these, it is possible, may have been printed ; if so, it is without our knowledge. Our object is, as far as possible, with only a rare exception or two, to confine ourselves to printing such as we believed to be unpublished, and all we give, with such exceptions as shall be notified, are taken down from oral recitation.

In some instances the ballads reveal a rudeness of manner and morals that make it impossible for me to publish the words exactly. We have endeavoured to obtain three or four versions of the same ballads and tunes, and are by this means enabled to arrive at what we believe to be the most correct form of both. But as to the antiquary everything is important exactly as obtained, uncleansed from rust and unpolished, it is the intention of Mr, Sheppard and myself to deposit a couple of copies of the songs and ballads, with their music exactly as taken down, one in the library of the Exeter, the other in that of the Plymouth Institution, for reference.

As already said, in five years' time all will be gone ; and this is the supreme moment at which such a collection can be made. Our traditional music lies in superimposed beds. Among the yeomen and farmer class, a few, chiefly hunting songs remain, such as " Arscott of Tetcott," and such as "The Widdecombe Fair." They know notliing of those in the social bed below, wliich is the most auriferous, and the old song-men who sang for their " entertainment " in taverns do not know the songs sung at the firesides of the yeomen.

It has been asked by not a few — How is it that these songs are so unprovincial ? For one reason : Because they are an heirloom of the past, from a class of musicians far higher in station and culture than those who now possess the treasure. In many cases, probably, our West of England song-men are lineal descendants of the old minstrels or gleemen put down by Act of Parliament in 1597, and forbidden to go about from place to place. In the next place, all such broad dialect songs as have come to us, prove to be modern compositions by educated writers, who have amused themselves in writing dialect songs, as Lord Tennyson wrote his " Northern Farmer," and as many Scottish poets have written provincial dialect songs. The songs and ballads were, of course, recited and sung to me in broad Devonshire or Cornish, but this was not of the essence of the songs, and I have not thought it necessary to reproduce the dialect. It can always be added, by anyone familiar with it.

When the minstrels were forbidden to journej' from place to place, by the Act of 1597, they settled down in country places, married, took to some trade, or became workers on the land, and supplemented their wages from what they could pick up at Whitsunales, May-games, Sheep-shearings, Harvest Homes, Christmas Feasts, Wakes, and Weddings. They handed on their stock-in-trade of old ballads and songs to their sons, and thus it came about that certain families were professional village musicians from generation to generation. In process of time they dropped out of their collection some of the ruder melodies and ballads, and adopted such as had come into fashion ; thus there was a continuous accretion on one side, and loss on the other. Ncvertlieless,

a considerable reskluum of early music has remained. We have given samples of all kinds. In some cases — but not many — the niclodies mny have been composed by the song-men themselves, or, what is more likely, they have taken known melodies and altered them according to their own provincial musical ideas. An example or two of these will be given.

I have said that I think that some of the melodies may have been composed by the song-men themselves, but, I contend, only some, an infinitesimally small number, and such are musically worthless, and I doubt if one of these is included in this collection. It must be borne in mind that folk-music is nowhere spontaneous and autochthonous. It is always a reminiscence, a heritage from a cultured past. Tiie yokel is as incapable of creating a beautiful melody as he is of producing a piece of beautiful sculpture, or of composing a genuine poem.

M. Loquin, in a series of articles on the Folk-music of France, in " Melusine," 1S88-9, points out that nearly all Gallic folk-melodies are derived from the early masters of music in France, Lully, Lambert, Campra, Gilliers, &c. They have not all been traced, but they are almost all traceable. In England the opera never influenced folk-music as it did in France ; the reverse took place, the folk-music drove out at one time tlie Italian opera, and Ballad operas were all the vogue, the old folk- melodies being united to new words. But it does not follow that these folk melodies were the spontaneous productions of the people. On the contrary, they were heirlooms preserved by the people, the creation of skilled musicians in the past. I have stated that the minstrels were put down by Act of Parliament in 1597. Still more severe Acls were passed against them in the Third Parliament of Oliver Cromwell. The result was that the minstrels settled down in the country and followed trades, supplementing their earnings from their trade by what they made at village festivals. So also the cultured musicians attached to cathedrals and theatres were dispersed by the Puritans at the time of the Commonwealth, and they also settled down in the country places, where they taught village choirs, or else went abroad. Thus we have music of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. 's reigns, and we have music of the time of James I. and Charles I., sung by our villagers, — none of it their own production, all inherited from the minstrels and the Caroline musicians. In the Hanoverian period there were musical men under- standing counterpoint throughout the land, a school of them in Cornwall and Devon. Their old, somewhat elaborate church music remains in IMS. in many an old church chest, and Mr. Heath, of Redruth, has recently published some of their carols.

Now, our folk-music, and not ours only but that of Scotland and Ireland, of France and Germany, and Italy as well, is a veritable morraine of rolled and ground fragments from musical strata far away. It contains melodies of all centuries down to the present, all thrown together into one confused heap.

Of French folk-music M. Loquin says: "To the question, Have all popular melodies an artistic origin? I would not answer with an unqualified Yes; that would be going a little too far, but I do say that we have no reason to assert that a melody is original because we have so far failed to track it. Some day or other it is almost certain to turn up in some unengraved ballet music, or — such as the malice des clioses — in a collection every one has in hand, one turned over by cverj* writer on music, and yet for some reason or other it has not been recognised there. What I do assert is that nearly all the popular melodies have a perfectly well established musical urban origin. That I can affirm wath confidence, for I have the evidence in both hands. But that is not all. Of such tunes as have been composed by village singers, very few they are, — what are they, in fact ? Naught but a jumble of phrases caught from pre-existing songs, reminiscences badly fused together of songs sung in the towns at one time and then forgotten. So true is it that everything here below has its origin, which origin is not always easy to find."

Now, if this be so — and that it may be so is quite possible — it may be asked, what is the good of collecting folk-melodies ? and secondly, what riglit have you to claim those you have collected as belonging to the Celtic parts of Devon and of Cornwall? I will answer bolh questions at once.

zi.

Directly the Exe is crossed we come into a different musical deposit. I do not say different in kind, for music was the same everj'where in certain epochs, and where certain instruments were in use. For instance, a harp tune was of the same character in Ireland, in Wales, in Cornwall, in Scotland, and in France; and a bagpipe tune or a hornpipe tune had the same character everywhere. But what I find is that songs and ballads sung to their traditional melodies in Somersetshire, in Sussex, in Yorkshire, and Northumberland, are sung to quite independent airs on Dartmoor and in Cornwall. How is this ? Because the same process went on in the West as in Scotland.

The Celtic tongue retrograded and finally expired in Cornwall. Then English ballads and songs found their way into Cornwall, as they found their way into Scotland and Ireland, and were set to already familiar melodies thenceforth dis- sociated from their no longer understood words. Take an instance. There is in Welsh a song on the pleasures of the bottle, " Glan meddwdod mwyn." New precisely the same melody was sung in Cornwall, almost certainly to words of a like nature. When the Cornish tongue ceased to be spoken, then this melody was applied to a broadside drinking song, " Fathom the Bowl." But " Fathom the Bowl" has, everywhere else, its own traditional air.

Another well-known song is "Tobacco is an Indian weed," another is "Joan's Ale is New," both w'edded one would have supposed indissolubly to their traditional airs known everywhere else in England. But not so in Cornwall and on Dartmoor ; there these words are set to quite independent melodies — melodies that probably had accompanied words in the old Cornish tongue in former limes. To descend later. Broadside ballads, and songs in " Warblers," and " Apollo's Cabinets," &c., got down into the West, unassociated with music. Then, again, the local composers went to work and set them to tunes of their own creation. Thus, " Sweet Night- ingale " was a song by Bickerstaff, to which Dr. Arne wrote music in 1761, and it was sung in an opera in London. The words got into a song-book, " The Syren," which found its way into Cornwall. Some village musician — no bumpkin at the plough tail — set it, and it was sung by the miners in their adits and the labourers in tlie fields to the locally produced air, not to that by Dr. Arne.

Consequently, I am able to answer both questions at once. I hold that these melodies are of West of England origin in a majority of cases, and that they are worth collecting, because they are the remains of a school of cultured musicians that has passed away unheard of out of their own counties.

Now for another point.

Were any of the melodies sung in the West borrow^ed, as were many of the words ? Certainly they w'ere. All people borrow. The Irish have borrowed. The Scotch have " lifted " English folk-tunes by the scores. The Flemmings, the Germans, the French have all borrowed of the English. Horace Walpole heard " Buttered Pease," and " Cold and Raw," and other country dances played at the palace of the Grand Duke of Tuscan}' in 1740. Quite recently (iSgo) a volume of English music in IMS. has turned up in the library of Trent. The song, " Shall Trelawney die ? " is sung to " Le petit Tambour," a French melody. I have heard an old ballad sung in Devon to the Scotch " Auld lang syne." The Irish sing "The wearing of the Green" to an old English melody. They, on one side, and the Scotch on the other, have appropriated the ancient English melody of " Paul's Steeple," found in Playford's ''Dancing Master," in 1650, and have converted it in the one case into " Cruiskeen Lawn," in the other into "John Anderson, my Jo." There has been give and take on all sides : with regard to old English airs mostly take. How many of the melodies we have collected in the West can be determined as borrowed we are unable to saj'. Mr. Sheppard has not had the time, nor have I the ability to follow the track of melodies through the vast collections of past days. All we pretend to do is to give up wh.at we have gathered.

One w'ord further as to our method.

We have taken down all the variants of the same air we have come across, and have given that form of tk.e air which seemed to us most genuine. In some cases where we could obtain no variants, we have printed what we received, as received

Xll.

from the only singer we fuund wlio knew that air. The necessity for having several variants arises from this fact. When a party of singers are together, or when one man sings a succession of ballads, the memory becomes troubled ; the first two or three melodies are given correctly, but after that, the airs become deflected and influenced by the airs last sung. At Two Bridges one old singer, G. Kerswell, after giving us " The Bell-ringer," sang us half-a-dozen otlu r ballads, but the melody of the bells went through them all and vitiated them all so as to render them worthless. On another occasion, we took down four or five airs all beginning alike, because one singer impressed this beginning on the minds of the others. At another time, when this impression was worn off, they would sing truly enough, and then the beginnings would be different. To obtain the music we have gathered is not so easy a matter as might be supposed ; and I venture to think that only a native of the West, one thoroughly understanding the people, their ways, their prejudices, the turns and twists of their minds, could do it. Tlie aged men from whom the collection has been made have been laughed down, and silenced for thirty or forty years. The generation that has grown up since those singing days heartily despise this old world music. One day Mr. Bussell and I had been sitting in a little thatched cottage listening to two aged song-men, one nearly blind, the other childish with age, and had reverently and lovingly noted down their ballads and melodies. Then we went into a farm-house, and there asked our direction across the moors; we told the farmer and his wife what we had been doing. They laughed till tlie tears ran down their cheeks at the bare idea of anything worth having being obtained from old Gerard and Stoneman. " Ah ! " said the farmer's son, "Come in. I'll sing you a song, a first-rate one, 'What a shocking bad hat.' That is something worth your having." We have driven and walked in storms of rain and wind over Dartmoor, and have sat with hands that shivered with cold on a moorstone taking down ballads from some old shepherd or an aged crone. But we have also gathered the hearty moor-men about a great fire, and after a good supper have spent with them very merry evenings. I venture to believe that the warm shake of the hand and the cheery smile that welcome us wherever we go, are evidence that we have reached the hearts of these old and failing men — and have kindled in them again a spark of pride in their old world loved music that has been disparaged, jeered at, by the board-school bred new generation, and so have enabled them proudly to raise their old grey heads again, in the thought that they have been the means of transmitting to the new age a whole body of precious melody, that but for them would have been absolutely and irretrievably lost. I am glad also to be able to say that I have been able, through profits realised by concerts of this West of England music, to help some of these poor old fellows when suffering from accidents and the infirmities of extreme old age. In conclusion, I must express my thanks to Mr. F. W. Bussell for his unflagging good humour and readiness to go with me anywhere and in any weather after a song-man. I am unable myself to note a melody if I have not an instrument, and most of these airs must be gleaned in the cottages, often miles away from any piano.

Mr. W. Crossing, of South Brent, and Mr. T. S. Cayzer have given us melodies collected on the moor twenty and thirty years ago. Those noted down by Mr. Sheppard are so described in the text. Our budget must not be supposed to be exhausted ; something like 300 airs have been collected. W'hat we have done is to give samples of the various sorts, with not too large a preponderance of the earliest and most ancient melodies, which, though to us of the highest interest, would not perhaps meet with general appreciation. We have found it more difficult to decide what to omit, than what to include.

I. " By Chance it was." Music and words dictated by James Parsons, hedger, Lew Down. Learned from his father, "The Singing Machine," a very famous song-man, who, when turned on could go on and never stop — so it was reported. His son says that his father certainly knew 200 ballads and songs. Some of the best and earliest melodies have been derived by us from Parsons.

This song is to be found (as far as the words go) in a collection of early ballad books in the British Museum, entitled " The Court of Apollo." It consists of six verses, the first three of which are almost word for word the same. The

Xlll.

others vary somewhat. In " The Songster's Favourite," another and later collec- tion, the same song occurs. It is in three verses only and in a very corrupt form.

A second version of the melody was obtained from Bruce Tyndall, Esq., of Exmouth, who learned it from a Devonshire cook in 1839 or 1840. The melody was slightly modernised.

II. "The Hunting of Arscott of Tetcott." This song, once vastly popular in North Devon, and at all hunting dinners, is now nearly forgotten. The words have been published in "John Arscott of Tetcott," Luke, Plymouth. A great many variations of the words are found. An early copy was supplied me by R. Kelly, Esq., of Kelly. Another by a gentleman, now dead, in his grand- mother's handwriting, with explanatory notes. In the first edition I stated that as it was impossible to reconcile the date, 1752, with any John Arscott, I thought the date must be 1652, and the song refer to the then squire of Tetcott, John Arscott, buried in 170S. But in one of the versions I have received the date is not 52, but 72, and that will answer for John Arscott, who died in 1788, the last of his race.

The "Sons of the Blue," it is supposed, were Sir John Molesworth, William Morshead, of Blisland, and Bradden Clode, of Skisdom, — so the annotations to the printed version by Luke, of Plymouth. But neither Sir J. Molesworth nor Mr. Morshead were, as it happens, naval men, so that the identification is not satis- factory. Now, if the date be 1652, it is right as far as Sir J. Molesworth of that time is concerned, for he was Vice-Admiral of Cornwall, and Pencarrow is the Molesworth place. John Arscott is still believed to hunt the country, and there are men alive who declare they have heard his horn, and seen him and his hounds go by in the park at Tetcott.

The author of the song is said to have been one Dogget, who used to run after Arscott's fox hounds on foot. If so, then he probably followed the habit of all rural bards of using for his purpose an earlier ballad, and spoiling and vulgar- ising it ; such poets are incapable of originating anything. I think this because along with much wretched stuff there are traces of something better, and smacking of an earlier period. As Dogget's doggerel has been printed, and I have taken down from ten to twelve versions all widely differing, I have not considered it worth preserving except only where there are pre-Doggetian verses, incorporated by him into his copy ; and I have ventured to recast the conclusion. The tune vas obtained through the assistance of Mr. J. Richards, schoolmaster at Tetcott. The same tune is found in Wales to the words " Difurwch gwyr Dyfl " (E. Jones' Musical Relicks of the W^elsh Bards, 1794, I., p. 129).

It — or rather half of the tune — was introduced by D'Urfey into his " Pills to purge Malancholy," to the words " Dear Catholic Brother " (Ed. 1719-20, Vol. VI., p. 277). From D'Urfey it passed into the "Musical Miscellany" (1731, Vol. VI., p. 171), to the words " Come, take up your Burden, ye Dogs, and away." D'Urfey was a Devonshire Man, and he probably picked up the tune when a boy in the West, and used as much of it as he wanted to set to his song. The air is much older than the age of D'Urfey ; it probably belongs to an early stock common to the Celts of Wales and Cornwall. A very fine variant from J. Benney, Menheniot.

And sing Fol-de-rol,

III. " Upon a Sunday Morning." The melody taken down from old Robert Hard, a crippled stone-breaker, at South Brent. He sang to the air the words of Charles Swan,

' 'Twas on a Sunday morning, before the bells did pcnl, A note came throujjh the window, witb Cupid on the seal," &;,

XIV.

Tliese words were set to music by Francis Mori, in 1853. The character of Mori's melody is distinct from that of old Hard, the opening strains alone being alike in both. In tlic; first edition we printed Swan's words, not knowing whose they were. Hard obtained them indirectly from a broadside by Catnach, of Seven Dials. Having since discovered their origin, I have written fresh words to Hard's melody.

IV. "The Trees they are so high." Words and air taken in 1888 from James Parsons and Matllicw BaJcer, a cripple on Lew Down. The same ballad to the same melody obtained in 1891 from Richard Broad, aged 71, at Ilerodsfoot, near S. Keyne, Cornwall. Some verses completing the ballad we have, since the publication of the first edition, obtained from Roger Hanaford, of Lower Widdicombe, but his melody was not the same; it was less archaic. There are several versions of this ballad ; some very fragmentary, by Catnach and other broad- side printers — a very fairly complete one printed in Aberdeen at the end of last century or beginning of this.

Johnson, in his "Museum" professed to give a Scottish version:

" O Lady Mary Ann looks owre the Castle wa' She saw three bonny boys playing at the ba' The youngest he was the flower among them a' ;

My bonny laddie's young, but he's growing yet."

But of this version, only three of the verses are genuine, and they are inverted; the rest are a modern composition.

A much more genuine Scottish form is in Maidment's " North Country Garland " (Edinburgh, 1824) ; but it is an adaptation to the story of a young Lair of Craigstoun. It begins :

" Father, said she, you have done me wrong. For ye have married me on a childe young man, And my bonny love is long Agrowing, growing, deary,

Growing, growing, said the bonny maid."

But by far the truest form is that in an Aberdeen broadside ; it will be found in the British Museum, under Ballads (1750 — 1840), Scottish, (Press mark, 1 871 /.). The Scottish version has verses not in the English, and the English has a verse or two that are not in the Scottish.

I have also received an Irish version as sung in Co. Clare by a old lady some years ago; it is in six verses, but that about the "Trees so High" is lacking. The rhyme is more correct than any of the other printed versions ; the lines are in triplets that rhyme. One verse runs :

" O Father dear Father, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll send him off to College for another year or two And we'll tie round his college cap a ribbon of the blue. To let the maidens know he is married."

In one of the versions I have taken down (Hannaford's), there were traces of the triplet, very distinct, and the tune is akin to the Irish melody sent me from Clare.

Again, another version of this ballad I obtained from William Aggett, a paralysed labourer of 70 years, at Chagford, to an entirely different melody. Apparently, there exist two distinct variants of this ballad, each to its peculiar melody.

For broadside version, see Ballads collected by Crampton, B.M. (1162, h.), Vol. VII. ; it is No. 63 of Such's Broadsides.

In most versions, the age of the boy when married is 13, and he is a father at 14. I advanced his age a little, in deference to the opinion of those who like to sing the song in a drawing-room or at a public concert.

The Scotch have two airs, one in Johnson's Museum, the other in " The British Minstrel," Glasgow, 1844, Vol. II., p. 36, entirely distinct from ours.

V. "Parson Hogg." This was sung by my great uncle, Thomas Snow, Esq., of Franklyn House, near Exeter, when I was a child. It was given me by my cousin, Edmund Snow ; it was also a song sung in old days by the Winchester boys. Another version I obtained from Mr. H. Whitfeld, Brushmaker, Market

XV.

Alley, Plymouth. Tie words are to be found, not quite the same, but substantially so, in "Tlie New Cabinet of Love," a collection of songs sung at Vauxhall, Ranelagh, &c., n.d., but about 1810, as " Doctor Mack." Broadside versions exist by Catnach, of Seven Dials, and Bachelor, of Hackney Road, also as " Doctor Mack." Also in " The Universal Songster," n.d. II., p. 34S. In Oliver's " Comic Songs," circ. 1815, it is " Parson Ogg, the Cornish Vicar."

VI. "Cold blows the Wind." The words originally reached us as taken down by Mrs. Gibbons, daughter of the late Sir W. L. Trelawney, Bart., from an old woman, Elizabeth Doidge, who was, sixty years ago, in the service of her father. The Doidge family belongs to the neighbourhood of Brentnor. She sang it to the air given subsequently, No. 33, to " Childe the Hunier." Another person who sang this song was J. Woodnch, blacksmith, Wollacot Moor, Thrus- tleton, to the melody here given. We obtained the same melody from Mr. H. Westaway, a yeoman at Belstone. At Huckaby Bridge, on Dartmoor, we got the same melody from Mary Satcherly, an old woman, who sang it to the ballad of " Lord Thomas and the Fair Eleanor," to which, according to Chappell, it properly belongs ("Pop. Music of the Olden Times," I., p. 145). It is the air "Who list to lead a Soldier's Life." In Peek's Edward I., 1593, is the direction " Enter a harper, and sing to the tune of 'Who list to lead a soldier's life,'" &c. In Delaney's "Strange Histories," 1607, is a song on the life and death of Richard III., to be sung to this melody. Ophelia's song, " Good Morrow, 'tis St. Valentine's Day," is only a different version of the same.

I ventured to add the last verse, as the original tune taken down from Westaway by Mr. Sheppard was in the major, and it was thought advisable to have two verses in that key. For much information relative to this ballad, I must refer the reader to Professor Child's " British Ballads," now in process of publication in America, where it is treated of exhaustively.

Also, to complete the story of the ballad, I have added verses 6, 8, and 10 from a West of England folk-tale, which probably is this ballad turned into prose.

VII. "In my Garden grew plenty of Thyme." Taken down from James Parsons. After the second verse he broke away to " I sowed the seeds of love," a well-known folk s ng composed about 1670 by Mrs. Fleetwood Habergam to the air of " Come, open the door, Sweet Betty," and to that melody it is usually sung. Parsons's tune was distinct.

Three verses, a fragment, as sung anciently in Scotland, in " Albyn's Anthology," 1816, I., p. 40. Mr. Kidson, "Traditional Tunes," 1891, p. 69, gives five stanzas. From Joseph Dyer, an old labourer at S. Mawgan-in-Pyder, I took down six. None of these versions agree except in the initial verse, which is the second in Mr. Kid- son's Yorkshire version, and the last verse of Dyer's agrees with the last of Mr. Kidson's. But Dyer had a stanza found in no other : —

" O ! and I was a damsel so fair,

But fairer I wished to appear, So I washed me in milk, and I dressed me in silk,

And put the sweet Thyme in my hair."

He, like Parsons, imported portions of "The Seeds of Love" into this song. Dyer's melody was practically the same as that of Parsons, but the third line was different, and he sang in common time. So doubtful am I what were the original words of this song, that I have thought it advisable to add fresh verses after the first two taken from Parsons. For the Scottish air see "Albyn's Anthology ;" for the Yorkshire air, Mr. Kidson's " Traditional Tunes ;" for the Northumbrian, see " Northumbrian Minstrelsy," 1882, p. go. All these airs differ from ours.

In the "Westminster Drolleries," 1671, is a song: —

" Heartseas, an herb that somehow hath bin seen In my love's garden plot to flourish green, Is dead, and withered with a kind of woe, And bitter Rue in place thereof did grow."

Then follows a similar play on Thyme. My impression is that Mrs. Habergam s was a re-writing of an earlier ballad.

XVI.

VIII. " Roving Jack." Taken, words and melody, from James Parsons ; again to the same air from Wm. Aggett, an old crippled labourer at Chagford. An inferior version of the words on Catnach's broadsides. Aggett followed the broadside. In Catnach the town is Carlow. Ballads, B.M. (1162, h.) Vol. VII. Another, printed in Edinburgh. Ballads (1750— 1840) B.M. (1871. f.).

IX. " Brixham Town." Words taken down from Jonas Coaker, of Post Bridge, on Dartmoor, aged 85, and blind. The melody was sung to us by Mr. John Webb, captain of a tin mine hard by, and was noted by Mr. Slieppard. Another version, to the same melody, was obtained where the town was North Tawton. Again, another version of the words was given me by the Hon. and Rev. A. F. Northcote, who took it down in 1877 from an itinerant pedlar of 90 years at Buckingham.

There is an additional verse in the latter edition,

" Now there be creatures three, As you may plainly see. With music can't agree.

Upon this earth. The swine, the fool, the ass, And so we let it pass. And sing, O Lord, thy praise. Whilst we have breath."

The words and tune alike belong to the 17th century. The words were clearly composed at the time of the Puritan regime, 1640 — 1661.

X. "Green Broom." Words and melody taken down from John Woodricln blacksmith ; he learned both from his grandmother when he was a child. The Hon. and Rev. J. S. Northcote sent me another version taken down from an old woman at Upton Pyne. Another again from Mr. James Ellis, of Chaddlehanger, near Tavistock, another from Bruce Tyndall, Esq., of Exmouth, as taken from a Devonshire cook, in 1839 or 1840. This, the same melody as that from Upton Pyne. Woodrich's tune is the brightest, but the other the oldest. D'Urfey, in his "Pills to Purge Melancholy," Ed. 1720, Vol. VI., p. 100, gives this ballad in 14 verses, with a different conclusion. All the versions except Woodrich's begin " There was an old man who lived in the West." Broadside versions by Disley and Such (No. 65); see also "The Broom-man's Garland," in LXXXII. old ballads collected by J. Bell, B.M. (11621, c. 2). Bell was librarian to the Society of Antiquaries, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1810-20. See also "Northumbrian Minstrelsy,' where the air is different, and words also.

XI. "As Johnny walked out." Words and melody from James Parsons. The original words in six verses ; these I have compressed for the convenience of modern singers. The words with verbal differences are found in a good many early collections, set about 1750, to an air by "Mr. Dunn." It was first published to Dunn's tune in " Six English Songs and Dialogues as they are performed at the Public Gardens," n.d., but circ. 1750. Then in "The London Magazine" for September, 1754; in "Apollo's Cabinet," Liverpool, 1757, p. 250; in " Clio and Enterpe," Lond., 1758, vol. I., p. 34. But our melody, of which we have taken down some four or live versions, and one was taken down by Mr. T. S. Cayzer, at Post Bridge, in 1849, is quite different from Dunn's air.

XII. The Miller and his Sons. Taken down, words and music, from Helmore, miller. South Brent. The words occur in the " Roxburgh Collection," III., p. 681. It is included in Bell's " Songs of the English Peasantry," p. 194, and in the " Northumbrian Minstrelsy," Newcastle, 1S82. In the North of England it is sung to the melody of "The Oxfordshire Tragedy," Chappell, p. igi. Our air bears no resemblance to this,

XIII. Ormond the Brave. Thisvery interesting ballad was taken down, words by myself and melody by Mr. Sheppard, from J. Peake, Tanner, Liskeard; it was a song sung by his father, about 60 years ago. It refers to Ormond's landing in Devon in 1714. Ormond fled to France in the first days of July, " a duke without a duchy," as Lord Oxford termed him, when it was manifest that the country was resolved on having the Hanoverian Elector as King, and unwilling to summon the Chevalier of S.

XVll.

George to the throne. In the end of October the Duke of Orniond landed in Devon at the head of a few men, hoping that the West would rise in the Jacobite cause, but as not a single adherent joined his standard, he returned to France. This song is particularly curious as it is a Jacobite ballad proclamation, in which Ormond, who was a poor creature, is glorified as though a hero. From the same singer we derived another ballad relative to Ormond, recounting his exploits at Vigo in 1703. The melody is certainly not later than the words, and is probably older considerably. In our first editions we gave here a composition by Mr. Sheppard and myself. This we have withdrawn now for a genuine West country ballad.

XIV. Fathom the Bowl. Taken down, words and air, by the Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard, from Robert Hard, of South Brent. Another version from H. Whitfeld, Plymouth, who said it had been sung by his grandfather. In "Notes and Queries," 3rd s., XII., p. 245, inquiry was made relative to this song, but elicited no reply. Broadside editions exist by Catnach, Pitts, and Such. This melody is also found in Wales, sung to " Glan Meddwdod Mwyn," and it has the character of a harp air. Jones, " Bardic Relicks," 1794, I., p. 149. In other parts of England this song is sung to an entirely different melody. Broadwood and Lucas, " Sussex Songs," 1S90, No. 20.

XV. Sweet Nightingale. In "Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England, by Robert Bell." London, 1857, the author says, " This curijus ditty, which may be confidently assigned to the 17th century .... we first heard in Germany, at Marienberg on the Moselle. The singers were four Cornish miners, who were at that time, 1854, employed at some lead mines near the town of Zell. The leader, or Captain, John Stjcker, said that the song was an established favourite with the miners of Cornwall and Devonshire, and was always sung on the pay-days and at the wakes ; and that his grand- father, who died thirty years before, at the age of a hundred years, used to sing the rong, and say that it was very old. The tune is plaintive and original." Unfortunately, Mr. Bell does not give the tune. The melody was first sent me by E. F. Stevens, Esq., of Terrace, St. Ives, who wrote that the melody "had run in his head any time these eight and thirty years." I have since had it from a good many old men in Cornwall, always to the same air. They say it is a duet, and has therefore been so set. Mr. Bell has taken liberties with the words ; the original I did not recover till the first edition was out. I have traced the song to Bickerstaff 's " Thomas and Sally," 1760, a ballad opera, the music by Dr. Arne. The Cornish melody is, however, quite distinct from that by Arne. The melody is not later than the middle of last century.

XVI. Widdecombe Fair. At present the best known and most popular of Devonshire songs. The original Uncle "Tom Cobleigh " lived in a house near Yeoford Junction. The names in the chorus all belonged to Sticklepath. The tune and words first came to me from W. F. Collier, Esq., of Woodtown, Horrabridge. Other versions, slightly varying, then poured in. A slight variant has been published by Mr. W. Davies, of Kingsbridge. There is one more verse in the original, which I have been forced to omit from lack of room. I obtained on Dartmoor the same song to a different air, an old dance tune.

XVII. The Imprisoned Lady. W^ords and melody from James Parsons. The fullest broadside version, but very corrupt, is one published at Aberdeen. Ballads, B. M. (1871, f., p. 61), another, shorter, by \\Mliams, of Portsea. In both great confusion has been made by some ignorant poetaster in enlarging and altering, so that in many of the verses the rhymes have been lost. This is how the Aberdeen broadside begins : —

" You maidens pretty In country and city With pity hear

My mournful tale ; A maid confounded In sorrow drownded And deeply wounded

With grief and pain,**

XVlll.

In the third line the " pity " has got misplaced, and " sad complain " has beer) turned into "mournful tale" to the loss of rhyme. Verse four has fared even worse, it runs, literally :—

" My hardened parents Gave special order That I should be

Close confined be, (sic.) Within my chamber Far from all ranger Or lest that I

Should my darling sec."

A parody of it was written by Ashley, of Bath, and sung in " Bombastes Furioso," Rhodes' burlesque, in 1810 (performed at the Haymarket, August 7), to the Irish tune of " Paddy O'Carrol." This appears also in " The London Warbler," 3 Vols., n.d., but about 1826, 1., p. 80.

" My love is so pretty, so gay and so witty, All in town, court, and city, to her must give place, My Lord of the woolsack, his coachman did pull-back To have a look, full smack, at her pretty face," &c.

The metre was a favourite one in former times. Songs in that metre were composed in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Others are found in Allan Ramsay's " Tea Table Miscellany," 1724; and in D'Urfey, 1719. Indeed Chaucer's " Virelai " lacks but a syllable to be in it. A favourite old English ballad, "Ye Beaux of Pleasure" was in the same metre; the melody was taken into several of the ballad-operas, as "The Lover's Opera," 1729, "The Footman," 1732, "The Jovial Crew," 1 731, etc.

Words and melody are probably of the Elizabethan age.

XVIII. The Silly Old Man. A ballad that was sung by the late Rev. E. Luscombe, some five and forty years ago. He was then curate of Bickleigh, and by ancestry belonged to a good old Devonshire family, and he was particularly fond of ancient West of England songs, which he sang in the truest Devonshire brogue. I have had it from one of his old pupils, W. Weekes, Esq., of Willestrew, Lamerton. Another version from old Suey Stephens, a char-woman at Stowford. Another, as sung in 1848, by Dr. Reed, of Tiverton. Mrs. Mason, in her " Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs," 1877, gives a slight variant, also from Devonshire.

The ballad is found printed in Dixon's " Songs of the English Peasantry," published for the Percy Society in 1846, and taken down by him from oral recitation in Yorkshire in 1845. It exists in a chap-book under the title " The Crafty Farmer," published in 1796. In Yorkshire the song goes by the name of "Saddle to Rags;" there, and elsewhere in the North of England, it is sung to the tune of " The Rant," or " Give ear to my frolicsome Ditty," an air better known as "How happy could I be with Either." It has been published as a Scottish song in Maidment's " Scottish Ballads and Songs," Edinburgh, 1859. The tune to which this song is sung in Devonshire is quite distinct and independent. The words may also be found in "A Pedlar's Pack of Ballads and Songs," Edinburgh, 1849, p. 126, in 20 stanzas. The West of England version differs somewhat from that current in Yorkshire. The tune is very fresh and spirited. There are broadside editions by Birt, of Seven Dials, &c.

XIX. The Seasons. Still a popular song among the labouring class. Three versions of the air and words were taken down, one at South Brent, one at Belstone, and one at Post Bridge. The words slightly vary, and are crude. The air is clearly an old dance tune. The version we preferred was that given by J. Potter, of Post Bridge, taken down by Mr. Sheppard.

XX. The Chimney Sweep. Taken down from J. Helmore, South Brent. Wc have been quite unable to trace this song. It belongs to the end of last century or beginning of this.

XIX.

XXI. The Saucy Sailor. Words and melody taken from James Parsons. A broadside with a different ending was printed by Disley, Pitts, Such, and Hodges, also by Pratt, of Birmingham; the metre also is not quite the same, and the air to which sung in other parts of England, I am informed by Dr. A. W. Barrett, is distinct from ours. This will be found in F. Tozer's " Forty Sailors' Songs," Boosey & Co., No. 33. Parson's air bears a strong likeness to "When in Death I shall Calm Reckxe ""in Moore's " Irish Melodies." He gives the tune as " unknown" as to its origin, i'nd as not having any Irish words fitted to it. It is probably an English air carrii. d to Ireland, or one merely appropriated by Moore, as he did others that took K'ls fancy, viz., "The Girl I Left Behind Me," "My Lodging is on the Cold Ground," " Bobbing Joan," " Alley Croker," " The Black Joke," &c.

XXII. Blue Muslin. Taken down, words and melody, from John Woodrich, blacksmith. A quaint song of an ir'dividual character. This is thought to require great skill in singing owing to the reversal of the stanzas, and is taken as a test whether a singer is sober or not. When he fails to give the order correctly, he is regarded as having had just one drop too much. Muslin had been introduced into England in 1670, and cork in 1690. Both are spoken of as novelities, and muslin is sung to the old form of the word, mous-el-ine.

Miss F. Crossing sent me another version taken down from an old woman in South Devon, in or about 1S50.

1. " My man John, wliat can the matter be ? " " I love a lady, and she won't love me."

" Peace, sir, peace, and don't despair, The lady you love will be your only care :

And it must be gold to win her."^

2. " Madam, will you accept of this pretty golden ball, To walk all in the garden, or in my lady's hall ? " " Sir, I'll accept of no pretty golden ball

To walk all in the garden, or in my lady's hall. Nor will I walk, nor will I talk with you."

Chorus : " My man John," &c., as verse i.

3. " Madam, will you accept of a petticoat of red. With six golden flounces around it out-spread ? " " Sir I'll accept of no petticoat," &c.

4. " Madam, will you accept of the keys of my heart. That we may join together, and never, never part ? ' "Sir, I'll not accept of the keys," &c.

5. " Madam, will you accept of the keys of my chest,

To get at all my money, and to buy what you think best?"

" Sir, I will accept of tlie keys of your chest.

To get at all your monej', and to buy what I think best ;

And I'll walk, and I'll talk with you."

"My man John, here's a bag of gold for you.

For that which you have told me, has come true,

And 'twas gold, 'twas gold, that did win her."

Another version comes from Yorkshire. See Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes, (4th Ed., 1846). Another to a different air from Cheshire. Another again in Mason's "Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs." Metzler, 1877, p. 27. Melody quite different.

XXIII. The Squire and the Fair Maid. Taken down, words and music, from J. Hoskin, labourer. South Brent, also from James Parsons, John Woodrich, in fragments, very full from John Masters, Bradstone, an old man of So. Another very full from H. Smith, Post Bridge, Dartmoor. A form of the same, the same theme, in Johnson's Museum, 1787-1803, Vol. IV., p. 410. The same toned down in Lyle's Ballads, 1827, "I am too young." He says, "This ballad in its original dress at one time from my recollection was not only extremely popular, but a great lavourite amongst the young peasantry in the West of Scotland. To suit the times, however, we have been necessitated to throw out the intermediate stanzas,

XX.

as their freedom would not bear transcription; whilst the second and third have been slightly altered from the recited copy."

Allan Cunningham took the song from Johnson's Museum and rewrote it in his second volume.

It has been necessary to somewliat tone down a couple of tlie stanzas for the same reason as that given by Mr. Lyle.

The Scottish ballad begins : —

"As I went out one May morning,

A May morning it happened to be, Then I was aware of a weel fa'rd lass,

Come linking o'er the lea to me. She had a voice that was more clear

Than any damsel's under the sun, I ask'd at her if she'd marry me ?

But her answer it was, I am too young," &c.

I have not been able to find it in any collection of broadsides, and tlie two versions are almost certainly variants of some early English ballad that found its way on one side into Scotland, and on the other into Celtic Cornwall and Devon. The Scottish air is quite different from ours, which is an early ballad tune.

XXIV. The Helston Furry Dance. On May 8th, annually, a festival is held at Helston, in Cornwall, to celebrate the incoming of spring. Very early in the morning a party of youths and maidens goes into the country, and returns dancing through tlie streets to a quaint tune, peculiar to the day, called the " Furry Dance." At eight o'clock the " Hal-an-tow " is sung by a party of from twenty to thirty men and boys who come into the town bearing green branches, with flowers in their hats, preceded by a single drum, on which a boy beats the Furry Dance. They perambulate the town for many hours, stopping at intervals at some of the principal houses.

At one o'clock a large party of ladies and gentlemen, in summer attire, — the ladies decorated with garlands of flowers, the gentlemen with nosegays and flowers in their hats, assemble at the Town Hall, and proceed to dance after the band, playing the traditional air. They first trip in couples, hand in hand, during the first part of the tune, forming a string of from thirty to forty couples, or per- haps more ; at the second part of the tune the first gentleman turns with both hands, the lady behind him, and her partner turns in like manner with the first lady ; then each gentleman turns his own partner, and then they trip on as before. The other couples, of course, pair and turn in the same way, and at the same time.

The dancing is not confined to the streets, the house doors are thrown open' and the train of dancers enter by the front, dance through the house, and out at the back, through the garden, and back again. It is considered a slight to omit a house. Finally the train enters the Assembly Room and there resolves itself into an ordinary waltz.

As soon as the first party is finished another goes through the same evolu- tions, and then another, and so on ; and it is not till late at night that the town returns to its peaceful propriety.

There is a general holiday in the town on Flora Day, and so strictly was this formerly adhered to, that anyone found working on that day, was compelled to jump across Pengella, a wide stream that discharges its waters into Loo Pool. As this feat was almost impracticable, it involved a sousing. The festival has by no means ceased to be observed, it has rather, of late years, been revived in energetic observance.*

The " Helston Furry Dance " is a relic of part of the Old English May Games. These originally comprised four entirely distinct parts, ist. The election and pro- cession of the King and Queen of the May, who were called the Summer King and Queen. 2nd. The Morris Dance, performed by men disguised, with swords in their hands. 3rd. The " Hobby Horse." 4th. The " Robin Hood."

• See Forfar. The Helstone Furry Day, Helston, 1803.

XXI.

The first began with the dispersing of the young of both sexes over the country and through the woods collecting iiowers. Chaucer, in his " Court of Love," says that early on May Day, " Forth goeth all the court, both most and least, to fetch the flowers afresh." In the reign of Henry VIII. the heads of the Corporation of London went to tlie high grounds of Kent to gather the may, the King and his Queen, Catherine of Arragon, coming from their palace at Greenwich, to meet them on Shooter's Hill. This was called the Bringing Home the May. Then came the decorating of the houses. Herrick describes this as performed in Devon.

" Come, and coming mark.

How each field turns a street, and each street a parkj

Made green and trimmed with trees; see how

Devotion gives each house a bough

Or branch ; each porch, each door, ere this

An ark, a tabernacle is

Made up of white-thorn neatly interwove."

Then ensued the election and coronation of the King and Queen. This Spenser describes in the Shepherd's Calendar.

" I saw a skole of shepherds outgo

With singing, and shouting, and jolly cheer;

Before them yode a lusty tabrere.

That to the many a horn-pipe play'd.

Where to they danced each one with his maid.

Then to the greenwood they spreden them all,

To fetchen home May with their musical :

And home they bring him in a royal throne

Crowned as king ; and his queen attone

Was lady Flora, on whom did attend

A fair flock of fairies and a fresh bend

Of lively nymphs — O that I were there

To helpen the ladies their May-bush to bear."

Tlie dance to the May-pole and round it then ensued.

2nd. The Morris dance was a masque. With this we need not now con- cern ourselves. 3rd. The Hobby Horse was a feature also introduced, and almost certainly was a relic of Odin and his horse Sleipnir. 4th. The Rubin Hood Games was a play fully described in Strutt's novel " Queen Hoo Hall," it has been mixed up with rapier dancing and the gambols of the Hobby Horse, and is still performed in various places at Christmas.

In the Helston performance we have a fragment only of the original series of pageants ; the bringing home of the May and the dance, and the song about Robin Hood. At Padstow, the Hobby-horse still figures. The two earliest extant representations of the Old English ]\Iay games are found in a Flemish print, given by Douce in his " Illustrations of Shakespeare," and in Tollett's celebrated painted window, described in Johnson and Steven's " Shakespeare." The " Helston Furry Dance" tune was first printed in Davies Gilbert's Christmas Carols, and Ed., 1823. His form is purer than ours, which is as now sung.

XXV. " Biovi^ away, ye Mountain Breezes." Taken down, words and music, from R. Hard ; melody noted down by Mr. Sheppard. This very curious song is sung as a duet; that is to say, the first voice taunts the other, and the second replies to the taunt, then both unite in the chorus. We have omitted the retort, which is simply an application of the same words to the first singer. It is certainly a very early composition. One passage in it occurs also in " The Kniglit and the Shepherd's Daughter," in Percy's Relicks, Child's British Ballads, &c.

" Would I had drunk the water cleare

When I had diuuk the wine. Rather than any shepherd's brat

Should be a lady of mine, Would I had dnmke tl'.e puddle foula

When I did drink the ale," &.c.

XXil.

The chorus, or burden, "Blow away, &c.," occurs also in the ballad of "The Baffled Knight," in Percy. Bell gives a Northumbrian version of this ballad of the Baffled Knight. Air in " Northumbrian Minstrelsy." I obtained a very full one of 15 verses,— some in no other copy I have seen, from James Olver. The chorus to each verse was ; —

" O 1 Blow the winds of the morning, 0 1 Blow the winds, heigh-ho ! And clear away the morning dew, Blow the winds, heigh-ho 1 "

XXVI. The Hearty Good Fellow. Taken down, words and music, from Robert Hard, South Brent. Although in the Roxburgh Ballads there is a whole class given up to " Hearty Good Fellows," this ballad does not occur among them. I have, however, a broadside by Pitts, of last century, with it, entitled " Adventures of a Penny." The first verse runs :—

" Long time I've travelled the north country Seeking for good company. Good company I always could find. But none was pleasing to my mind,

Sing whack fal de ral, &c., I had one penny."

The rest is very much the same as our version.

XXVn. The Bonny Bunch of Roses. Of this we have taken down a great number of versions. The melody is everywhere the same, with insignificant variations, and a very fresh and charming air it is. In most of the versions the youth is Napoleon Bonaparte, and wonderful it is to see how the metre is disregarded in order to lug in this name. That history does not agree with what is said in the song matters as little as the discrepancy of the metre. The song is unmistakeably an anti-Jacobite production, adapted at the beginning of this century to Napoleon, when an additional verse was added relative to Moscow. In this later form it issued from Catnach's press, and from him it was copied by Harkness, of Preston ; Paul, of Spitalfields ; Pitts, of Seven Dials ; Williams, of Portsea, &c. In the broadsides of Williams, and of Hodges it is said, "To the tune of The Bunch of Roses, O I " indicating an earlier form of the song. This was a favourite fo'castle song some 40 or 50 years ago.

XXVIII. The Old Singing Man. The melody taken down from William Huggins, mason, of Lydford, wlio died in the Cottage Hospital at Tavistock, in March, i8Sg. He had been zealously engaged that winter going about among his ancient musical friends collecting old songs for me. The words he gave were — " The little Girl down the Lane," and were of no merit, and much more motlern than the air to which he sang them. I have therefore discarded them, and written fresh words, and dedicate them to the memory of poor old Will.

XXIX. The Tythe Pig. Words and air taken down from R. Hard, South Brent. It is also well known to the old miller, J. Helmore. The song appears as a broadside, printed by Disley, Jackson, of Birmingham ; Harkness, of Preston ; Ross, of Newcastle ; Catnach, and others. There are 10 verses in the original. I have cut them down to seven. To what air sung elsewhere I do not know.

XXX. My Ladye's Coach. This was sung fifty years ago by Anne Bickle, ot Bratton Clovelly. The tune, to other vi'ords, also by James Parsons. A second melody to it, obtained at South Brent, we give as No. 70, " Broadbury Gibbet." My Ladye is, no doubt, Death personified, the Hela of Norse mythology ; but locally supposed to be Lady Howard, daughter and heiress of Sir John Fitz, of Fitzford, Devon, b. 1596, who is supposed to travel nightly from Okehampton Castle to Fitzford Gate, Tavistock, in a coach of bones preceded by a phantom dog. I have added verses 4, 5, and part of 6 ; there were, however, originally many more, but I have not been able to recover them.

XXXI. Jan's Courtship. Words and air from Mr. R. Rowe, Longabrook, Milton Abbott. Another set, words and air, but slightly varied, from W. Crossing, Esq.,

South Brent ; another, practically identical, from Mr. Chowen, of Burnville, Brentor ; as " Poor Bob," it occurs in " The Universal Songster," n.d., but about 1830. To what tune I have not ascertained. Other tunes to the same words have been sent me. In the Roxburgh Ballads, VI., 216-7, 's what is probabl)' the earliest form. " Come hither, my dutiful son, and take good counsel of me." This was sung to the air " Grim King of the Ghosts." Another variant probably is referred to in "Beggars' Opera," Act iii., sc. 8. "Now, Roger, I'll tell thee, because thou'rt my son; " but the melody is not the same as ours. Our air is rugged and early.

XXXII. The Drowned Lover. Taken down, words and melody, from James Parsons, air noted down by Rev. H. Fl. Sheppard.

This is a very early song. It first appears as " Captain Digby's Farewell," Roxburgh Ballads, IV., p. 393, printed in 1671. In Playford's "Choice Ayres," 1675, I., p. 10, it was set to music by Mr. Robert Smith. Then it came to be applied to the death of the Earl of Sandwich, after the action in Sole Bay, 1673. ^ black letter ballad, date circ. 1675, is headed "To the tune of the Earl of Sandwich's Farewell." The original song consisted of three verses only ; it became gradually enlarged and somewhat altered, and finally Sam Cowell composed a burlesque song on the same lines, a parody of the original, which has more or less served to corrupt the versions of the old song, since printed on broadsides by Catnach, of Seven Dials, Harkness, of Preston, and others.

The black letter ballad of 1673 begins : —

"One morning I walked by myself on the shoar When the Tempest did cry and the waves they did roar Yet the noise of the Winds and the Waters was drowud By the pitiful cry, and the sorrowful Sound, Of Ah ! Ah ! Ah ! My Love's dead. There is not a bell. But a Triton's shell. To ring, to ring, to ring my Love's Knell."

" Colonel Digby's Lament " begins as follows : —

" I'll go to my Love, where he lies in the Deep,

And in my Embrace, my dearest shall sleep.

When we wake, the kind Dolphins together shall throng,

And in chariots of shells shall draw us along.

Ah 1 Ah ! My love is dead.

There was not a bell, But a Triton's shell To ring, to ring out his knell."

The next verse resembles our third. A second version of the melody, but slightly varied from that we give, from old Parsons, was sent me by Mr. H. Whitfeld, of Plymouth, as sung by his father. Our melody is entirely different from that given by Playford, and is probably the older air, which Playford hoped to displace by the more elaborate composition of ]\Ir. R. Smith. What makes this probable is that it is sung to the same air, slightly varied, in Ireland.

XXXIII. Childe the Hunter. Words taken from Jonas Coaker, of Post Bridge, aged 82, and blind. He died in the spring of 1890. I am glad to be able to say that through some profits obtained by concerts of these West of England songs, I was able to send the poor old fellow some money, that eased his last days. He had used up the material of this ballad, incorporating it into a "poem" he had composed on Dartmoor, and vastly preferred his own work to what was traditional ; but that was natural. The melody given is that to which the Misses Phillips, who were born and reared at Shaw, on Dartmoor, informed me they had heard it sung fifty years ago. It is the air we give an account of as having been received from Mrs. Gibbons to " Cold blows the wind," No. 6. It is unquestionably an early harp tune, not later than the reign of Henry VII. For the story of Childe of Plymstock, sec Murray's " Handbook of Devon," Ed. 1S87, p. 208 ; more fully and critically, W. Crossing's " Ancient Crosses of Dartmoor," 1SS7, p. 51.

XXIV.

XXXIV. The Cottage Thatched with Straw. Taken, words and melody, from John Watts, quanyman, Alder, Thi ushletoii. This is one of the best known, and next to " Widdeconibe Fair," most favourite songs of the Devon peasantry. Sung also by one or two old men at Looe, Cornwall. So far we have not been able to trace either words or melody, though neither can be earlier than the beginning of this century.

XXXV. Cicely Sweet. Words and air from J. S. Ilurrell, Esq., Kingsbridge. who had learned both 50 years ago from Mr. A. lialoran, a Devonshire schoolmaster. It has been published already, as " Sylvia Sweet," in Dale's " Collection," circ. 1790, with two additional verses. Two verses are given by Halliwell as a traditional nursery rhyme, in his Nursery Rhymes, 4th Ed., 1846, p. 223.

XXXVI. " A Sweet Pretty Maiden." Melody taken down from James Parsons by Mr. Sheppard. The words of his ballad were very interesting and poetical, the story similar to that of the Scottish ballad " Our young lady's a hunting gone," in Johnson's " Musical Museum," 1787, V., p. 437. Unfortunately, it deals with a topic not advisable to be sung about in the drawing-room. We have, therefore, set to it another song, on the same theme as "Oh for a Husband" in D'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy," Ed. 1719, p. 56.

XXXVII. The Green Cockade. Words and melody from Edmund Fry, thatcher, Lydford, but a native of Lezant, Cornwall. The words of this ballad are sometimes mixed up with those of another that begins " It was one summer morning, as I went o'er the grass," printed as broadside by Keys, of Devonport, and given by Bell in his " Ballads of the English Peasantry," p. 230.

In the "Duke of Gordon's Garland," in a collection of Stray Garlands, B.M* (11621, a. 6) is an Irish form of the ballad. It is there " The Blue Cockade."

" So now my love you've changed From the Orange to the Blue."

XXXVIII. The Sailor's Farewell. Words and music taken from J. Ilelmore, South Brent. A broadside version by Williams, of Portsea. We have given first the traditional song to its air unaltered, and then an arrangement as a sceiia, as we obtained it from another singer in dialogue form.

This song in full, but m bad metre and rhyme, will be found in a broadside by Wright, of Birmingham, entitled " Lovely Nancy," date circ. 1830.

" Adieu, my lovely Nancy, ten thousand times adieu, I'm going to cross the ocean to seek for somethiag new Come, change your ring, my dear, with me. As that will be a token when I am on the sea.

" When I am on the sea, my love, you know not where I am, But letters I will write to you all from a foreign land, With the secrets of my mind, my dear, and the best of my good will, And let my body be where it may, my heart is with you still," &c., &Ct

This is in a collection of Ballads printed in Birmingham B.M. (1876, e., 2).

XXXIX. The Forsaken Maiden. Words and melody from James Parsons, r,oted by Mr. Sheppard. In our opinion, a very delicately beautiful song; tune probably of i6th century. Again heard at Chagford.

XL. The Blue Kerchief. Words and air from John Woodrich, blacksmith.

The words have appeared with slight variations on broadsides, in ten verses —

Catnach, Such, Ross, of Newcastle, &c. Catnach published a parody on it, " The

Bonny Blue Jacket." In Dr. Barrett's " English Folk Songs," the air is set to " Paul Jones."

XXV.

XLI. "An Evening so Clear." Music from poor Will Huggins. His word? were ;—

" One evening so clear, in the meadows did pass, Her eye full of tear, a beautiful lass. The age she did bear, it was scarcely sixteen, She around her did wear, a girdle of green. Her lips as the rubies, and sparkled her ej'es, As diamonds precious, or stars in the skies. The meadows along, she sang as a dove, And all her sad song, was concerning her love."

The ballad was long and uninteresting. Moreover, it is found " As down in the Meadows I chanced to pass, &c.," in the "Musical Miscellany," 1729, I. 62, and Allan Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," 1724, and in "The Merry Musician," II., 129. It goes by the name of " Susan's Complaint," see Chappell, p. 648. Our air is quite distinct, and as " Susan's Complaint " is a melody associated for near two hundred years with these words, I have thought it best to write a fresh copy of verses to go to Will Huggins' tune. " Susan's Complaint " may also be found in a Collection of Garlands in the British Museum, press mark, 11,621, c. 4, Vol. II., No. 74. Curiously enough, Huggins' version was more correct in rhyme; also from J. Peakc, List card.

XLII. The Warson Hunt. Words and melody taken down from James Parsons, Edmund Fry, Richard Home, a miller, and others. A song well- known in the neighbourhood of Lew Trenchard. Of Squire Arthur Kelly, of Kelly, whose hounds were in this memorable run, an epigram was made by a carpenter in Milton Abbott, on the death of the squire in 1S23.

'' Here lies my old Tom Cat, I tell'y, He died, same day as did Squire Kelly. One hunted hares, the t'other rats; Squires they must die as well as cats."

XLIII. The Green Bushes. Words and melody taken down from Robert Hard, South Brent. Again to another air from James Parsons. Mr. Crossing sent me the same words to the same air as sung by Parsons, heard by him on Dartmoor, from a labouring man, in i86g.

In Buckstone's play of " The Green Bushes," 1S45, Nelly O'Neil sings snatches of this song, one verse " I'll buy you fine petticoats, &c.," in Act I., and that and the following verse in Act III. Nowhere is the complete ballad given. That, however, owing to the popularity of the drama, was published soon after as a "popular Irish ballad sung by Mrs. FitzWilliam, in the drama of 'Green Bushes.' " Later, it was attributed to the husband of that lady, Mr. E. F. FitzWilliam ; but it was not published as by him in his lifetime. That Buckstone believed it to be an Irish melody is likely enough, but a good many of the so- called Irish melodies, to English words, are English that have been carried to Ireland by the soldiers quartered there. Thus, the old EngHsh " Packington's Pound" has been converted into "The wearing of the Green," and called an Irish air. The words are substantially old, in this form are a softening down of an earlier ballad which has its analogue in Scotland, " My daddie is a cankered carle," each verse of which ends : —

•' For he's low down, he's in the broom That's waiting on me."

This is in Grier's Musical Cyclopedia, Glasgow, 1S35. The English form is •' Whitsun Monday," an early copy of which is to be found in one of the collections in the British Museum, date about 1760. Each verse ends: —

" And 'tis low down in the broom She's waiting there for me."

and the last verse ends : —

" My dear, said she. So farewell to the bonny broom,"

XXVI.

This is an undesirable form of the ballad. Broadsides by Such and Disley, the latter different from Buckstone's. In a collection of early ballad books in the British Museum is "The Lady's Evening Book of Pleasure," printed in Cow Lane, n.d., but about 1760. This contains a ballad that begins thus: —

" As I was a walking one morning in May, I hoard a young damsel to sigh and to say. My love is gone from me, and showed me foul play, It was down in the meadow, among the green hay."

Again, another — a north country form very distinct —is found in Broadside Ballads.

As I walked through the meads, one morning in May, Delighted to see the young lambkins at play. Among the Green Bushes I met a sweet maid, I saluted (her) kindly, and to her I said, —

I'll give you fine jewels, and I'll give you fine rings Witti diamonds so costly, and many fine things With gowns and silk petticoats flounced to the knee, " I'll leave father and mother to marry with thee.

" My father's a shepherd, he keeps sheep on yon(der) hill,

And you may go to him and ask his good will ; "

In truth I will, lassie, I'll go instantly.

All among those Green Bushes my Jenny meets me.

Good morning, old man, you are tending your flock. Will you give me a ewe-lamb to breed me a stock ? "Indeed will I, laddie, there up on the lea." And among the Green Bushes my Jenny meets me.

" O ! " says the father, " you have me beguiled,

For little I thought it was my dear child;

But, since it is so, even so let it be."

And among the Green Bushes my Jenny meets me.

To church then they went, without any delay. Unto her fond lover she would not say Nay, And he oftentimes sings as she sits on his knee Among the Green Bushes my Jenny meets (met) me I

This was published by Hodges, of Seven Dials. Ballads, B.M. (1875, b. 19).

Dr. Joyce, in his "Ancient Irish Music," 1873, gives the genuine Irish air to the " Green Bushes," as sung by the peasantry, not the same.

As I do not think the "Green Bushes" can be by Buckstone, nor the melody Irish, I have admitted it into this collection.

XLIV. The Broken Token. Words and melody from Robert Hard, South Brent ; noted by Kev. H. Fl. Sheppard from his singing. Broadside variant by Such, as "The Brisk Young Sailor," or as "Fair Plioebe," as "The Dark-eyed Sailor," by Wheeler, of Manchester, and as " The Sailor's Return," by Catnach.

Dibdin composed a song on the same theme, and called it " The Broken Gold." The Catnach ballad, to an entirely distinct air, I obtained from Harry Smith at Two Bridges. The broadsides are very rude and corrupt.

The same air was noted down by Mr. S. Reay, about 1830-5, from a ballad singer in the market, at Durham. He has most kindly sent it me. The differences are slight. The air is known throughout Cornwall.

XLV. "The Rout is Out." Words and melody taken down from John Woodrich.

I have a broadside by Bloomer, of Birmingham, circ. 1780, entitled " Lancashire Lads," that is certainly a rude version of the same original. Instead of his dressing her in "velvet red, and wrangling her hair in blue," he " is clothed in scarlet and turned up with blue." The air cannot have been the same. There is no chorus of " Adieu my boys, &c."

xxvu.

XLVI. "Why should we be dullards sad?" Words and air from Edmund Fry, Will Huggins, and James Olver, of Launceston, who learned it in 1828, when apprenticed to a tanner at Liskeard, from one George Brooks, the foreman in the tanyard, a native of Grampouiid, in Cornwall. In 1760, or there- about, Isaac Bickerstaff wrote a song to this melody for one of his ballad operas. It is found as a copper-plate engraved sheet song, "The Social Powers," about 1765; then in "Calliope," Lond., 17SS, p. 278.

XLVII. May Day Carol. Melody noted down a good many years ago by J. S. Cayzer, Esq.; was sung, till of late years, in my neighbourhood, where a bunch of flowers at the end of a stick is carried about by children. The history of this carol is curious. It was customary in England, as it is still in Tyrol and in Swabia, for a lover on May morning to take a green bough to the house of the beloved. If she opens the door and takes it in, it is a token of acceptance. At the Puritan epoch, this custom was altered, and the song was converted into a carol with a good deal of pious sentiment added on, and it was given to children to sing. Thus the original significance was completely lost. See " Notes and Queries," 3rd Series, IX., p. 380; also Hone's "Every Day Book," I., p. 567; Chambers' " Book of Days," I., p. 578. Herrick refers to the custom of youths bringing their May bushes to the maids of their choice, when he says :

" A deale of youth ere this is come Back, and with white thorn laden home. Some have dispatched their cakes and creanii Before that we have left to dream."

In "The Bath Musical Garland," n.d., but about 1745 (B.M. 1162, c. i., No. 29), is a " Pleasant Dialogue betwixt two lovers, in which the lady presents a bunch of May and some Thyme to her discontented lover." He says:

" Your riddle I can Read

This Iilay was took in Time,

Grant that in Time I May

Gain your Love and sweet contentment.'

The melody is a very early one, and is much like that of the carol :

" The moon shines bright, the stars give light A Uttle before the day,"

still sung in Cornwall, and known also in Sussex. Broadwood and Lucas, " Sussex Songs," i8go.

XLVIII. Nancy. Taken down from William Friend, of Lydford, James Parsons, and Robert Hard. All had the same melody somewhat varied. As taken from their sinj/ing, it had an archaic character:

Mr. Sheppard, who did not take down the tune, considers this form to be due to the way in which the men sang the air, and he has restored it to what he conceives to be the correct form. The words occur in a collection of forty early ballad books in the British Museum, in Book 11., "The Lover's Jubilee," date end of 17th or beginning of the i8th century.

XLIX. Lullaby. Noted by me from recollection as sung by a nurse, Anne Bickle, of Bratton Clovelly, about 50 years ago. The tune known also to James Olver, of Launceston. The words I have recomposed to the best of my ability —

XXVIU.

partly from recollection. " Hush-a-by baby on the tree top " was also sung to this tune. The air cannot be older than the end of last century. We have treated it in modern fashion.

L. The Gipsy Countess. The melody of the first part from James Parsons, as well as the words, the second melody from John Woodrich. Three more verses in the original I have been unable to admit for lack of room.

The Scottish ballad of "Johnny Faa " first appeared in Allan Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany,' 1724, from which it was taken into Herd's and Pinkerton's Col- lections, Johnson's Museum, and Ritson's Scottish Songs. All these turn on a story — utterly unhistorical — that Lady Jean Hamilton, married to the grim Covenanter, John, Earl of Cassilis, fell in love with, and eloped with. Sir John Faa, of Dunbar, who came to her castle disguised as a gipsy along with some others. She was pursued, and Faa and his companions where hung. I venture to suggest that the Jacobites took an earlier ballad of a gipsy girl married to an Earl, and adapted it to serve as a libel on Lady Cassilis, who was the mother of Bishop Burnet's wife. Such things were done— ballads were utilised for political purposes, and D'Urfey did the same. If this be so, then the existence of the earlier part of the ballad, and the variation in our second part of "Johnny Faa" is explained. Versions also from Peter Cherton, shoemaker, Oakford, near Tiverton ; William Setter and George Kerswell, Two Bridges, Dartmoor. But some of these are taken from the broadsides which are reproductions of "Johnny Faa." Mr. Robert Browning composed on this theme his poem " The Flight of the Duchess," having heard a beggar woman sing the ballad. Mrs. Gibbons tells me that as she re- members tlie ballad as sung by her nurse sixty years ago, it was the story of the girl going back to her brothers. For a very full account of the "Johnny Faa" ballad see Child's " English and Scottish Ballads," No. 200. He is of opinion that the English ballad of the gipsies who carried off the lady is derived from the Scottish. I have no doubt that our broadside versions are so, but in my opinion— whatever it be worth — the Scottish are a re-shaping for political purposes of an earlier ballad, of which our Devonshire Gipsy Countess is a no doubt corrupted version. In Parsons' ballad there was no division into parts. We have separated the parts so as to give both melodies.

LI. The Grey Mare. The melody and a fragment of the song taken down by Mr. ShepparJ trom J. Hoskin, South Brent. Again from Jas. Olver. Neither knew the song in its complete form, only a verse or a few lines here and there. I have, therefore, had to reconstruct it. A broadside version by Such to a metre that will not fit the air as sung in the West. See Kidson, Trad. Tunes, p. 78.

LII. The Wreck off Scilly. Words and Melody from James Parsons. It properly consists of seven verses. Broadside by Catnach, which ends: —

•' 'Tis Polly love you must lament For the loss of your sweetheart, 'Tis the raging seas, the stormy winds, Caused you and me to part."

But this seems nonsense. The singer does come home, and is not lost. I have ventured to give a different conclusion to the song, having been told by a friend that he heard this ballad sung in Cornwall by a mendicant sailor. The air belongs to the Dibdin era.

LI II. Henry Martyn. Words and melody from Roger Luxton, Halwell. This air noted down by Mr. Sheppard. Again from Matthew Baker, a cripple on Lew Down. Again from J. Masters, Bradstone. Again from a shepherd on Dartmoor. The versions of words somewhat varied, but the melody was always the same. In one the ship had the Lifeguards on Ijoard, in another the King's Mariners. In one Henry Martyn received his death wound, in another it is the King's ship which is sunk by the Pirate. Professor Child, editing " The British Ballads," informs me that he has heard a version sung in the U.S.A. by an immigrant, and he called the pirate Andrew Bawbee. The real name was Andrew Barton. In 1476, a Portuguese squadron seized a richly-laden ship

XXIX.

commanded by John Barton, in consequence of which letters of reprisal were granted by James IV. to the three sons, Andrew, Robert, and John, and these were renewed in 1506. Hall, in his chronicle under 151 1, says that the king (Henry VHI.) being in Leicester, tidings reached him that Andrew Barton so stopped the king's ports, that the merchant vessels could not pass out, and he seized their goods pretending that they were Portuguese. Sir Edward Howard, Lord High Admiral, and Sir Thomas Howard were sent against him. Their two ships were separated, but a fight ensued in which Andrew was wounded, and his vessel, the Lion, was taken. He died of his wounds. Buchanan, twenty years later, tells the story also.

There is a long ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, in Percy and elsewhere, quite different. That in Percy is the ballad as recompcsed in the reign of James L, when there was a perfect rage for re-writing the old historical ballads. Un- happily, as these new compositions were printed, and the old were not, they have been preserved to the loss of the far finer early ballads. There the Scotch have the advantage of us. What the original form of this ballad was it is hard to say, as it has become sadly altered in process of handing down through three hundred and fifty years. It does not appear in print, that I am aware of, before 1820-30, on a broadside, and that is in a very corrupt form. It is easy to see how Andrew pronounced Andree Barton, yet altered into Henry Martyn. The air is probably of Henry VIII. 's reign. See in reference to Sir Andrew Barton, Child's "English and Scottish Ballads." New Ed., No. 167.

LIV. Plymouth Sound. Melody taken down from Roger Luxton, to a song of this name. The original words were not only very poor, but somewhat coarse. There are three songs that go by the title of " Plymouth Sound." Broadsides by Keys of Devonport and Such. The air cannot be earlier than the beginning of this century.

LV. Farewell to Kingsbridge. Taken down, words and air from Roger Huggins, mason, Lydford, who learned them in 1S68, from a man called Kelly, in Tavistock. There are old men in Kingsbridge who can recall when soldiers were stationed there. The song belongs to the year 1778-80. It exists as a broadside by Such, but without naming Kingsbridge, so that probably it was a song of the time adaptable to other places as well. A form of the same ballad, beginning " Honour calls to arms, boys," refers to fighting the French in North America, circ. 1759, published in broadside by Hodges.

LVI. Furze Bloom. Taken down from Roger Luxton, 01 Halwell. The original words of " Gosport Beach" were worthless. Moreover, " Gosport Beach" has its own traditional melody to it elsewhere. I have therefore written fresli words to it, embodying the folk saying in Devon and Cornwall —

" When the Furze is out of bloom, Tlieu Love is out of tune."

LVII. The Oxen Ploughing. This song was well known throughout Devon and Cornwall seventy years ago. It went out of use along with the oxen at the plough. We found every old singing man had heard it in his boyhood, but none could recall more than snatches of the tune and a few of the words. We were for three years on its traces, always disappointed. Those who recalled the strains did not agree as to its metre, and with the metre the strain varied. Then we heard that there was an old man at Liskeard who could sing the song through. Mr. Sheppard and I hastened thither, to find that he had been speechless for three days and that his death was hourly expected. By great good luck, however, we found a labouring man, Joseph Dyer, at S. Mawgan-in-Pyder who could sing the song through. We gladly throw out a joint production of Mr. Sheppard and myself that occupied this place in the first edition, to replace it with this genuine old-folk song.

LVIII. Something Lacking. From Thomas Dark, labourer, Holcombe Burnell, age 74. This was most difficult to note, owing to the old fellow changing his key when asked to re-sing it for purpose of notation. I am not satisfied that it is right now.

LIX. The Simple Ploughboy. This charming ballad was taken down, words and air, from J. Masters, of Bradstone. Mr. Sheppard noted the melody. The broad- side versions that were published by Fortey, Hodges, Taylor of Spitalfields, Ringham

XXX,

of Lincoln, and Pratt of Birmingham, are all very corrupt. The version of old pilasters is given exactly as he sung it, and it is but one instance out of several of the superiority of the ballads as handed down traditionally in the country, to those picked up by the ballad-mongers employed in towns by the broadside publishers.

LX. The Wrestling Match. Words and air taken down from James Olver of Launceston, Tanner. He said that when he was a boy this was wont to be sung at wrestling matches at Liskeard. Such matches took place every week day evening, from Lady-Day to Michaelmas, in a field, strewn with tan, outside the town.

LXI. The Painful Plough. Words and melody from Roger Huggins, mason, Lydford. The air noted down by Mr. Sheppard. It is in reality a much longer song, and consists of 9 or 10 stanzas. Under the title of the " Ploughman's Glory," it runs to 25 verses. Bell gives nine verses in his " Ballads of the English Peasantry." It is found on broadsides. In the original it consists of a contention between the ploughman and the gardener as to which exercises the noblest profession. Our melody, as I am informed by Dr. W. A. Barrett, is not the same as that to which "The Painful Plough" is sung in the j\lidlands and South-East of England. The earliest copy of the words I know is in a volume of Garlands in the British Museum (1078, p, 16). There it occurs as "The Plowman's Glory" in "The Irish Girl's Garland," Hull, "Printed and sold in the Butchery" and consists of 25 stanzas. Date, I suppose, about 1779. One verse runs: —

" Three mighty powers in Europe Against us do advance. Led by the crafty notions of That restless Fox of France."

And one concludes with, " Long life to our King, and confusion to his foes by George's sword."

This is, I suspect, a re-writing of " The Farmer's Glory," an earlier song found in "Bonny Jockey's Garland," in a collection made by J. Bell; all printed by J. White, who died 1769, and T. Saint, who died 1788. Here are two verses: —

" The Parson he doth con his lesson And prays for all his congregation, But ttie Devil may take both me and you, If he was not upheld by the Plow.

" So to conclude and end my ditty. No tradesman that's in town or citj', But what will say these hnes be true. So let us sing to speed the Plow."

As in the same garland is one on Pamela, the date is probably about 1740-5.

UXLII. " Broadbury Gibbet." This tune was an alternative to that already given (No. 30) for " My Lady's Coach," and was taken down at South Brent by Mr. Sheppard. As the melody was weird and gruesome, and we had no other old ballad that seemed appropriate, I wrote a fresh set of words. The gibbet on Broad- bury was standing in 1814, and the beam is still in existence in a barn near the spot. One man was hung on it in chains for an atrocious murder committed on two sisters. His name was Wellon. He was a stranger passing by the house in which the sisters Rundle lived. He asked for bread and was given it. He returned later to the house, murdered them, and robbed them of £s- He then walked to Ashburton, where over his cups he told of the murder committed at Bratton, before the news had arrived there, and this led to his arrest.

■ XLIII. The Orchestra. The melody taken down from John Woodrich, of Thrushleton. The words began : —

" I went unto my true love's house

At eight o'clock at night. And little did my true love know, I owed her a despite."

It then went on to describe a singularly brutal murder. The words exist in a broadside by Catnach and Such, "The Cruel Miller." The earliest form, however,

XXXI.

is in a broadsheet by Pitts, of Seven Dials, " The Berkshire Tragedy, or the Wittam Miller," and this is in 22 verses. It begins : —

" Young men and maidens give ear Unto what I shall relate, O mark you well, and you shall hear

Of my unhappy fate. Near famous Oxford town,

I first did draw my breath, &c."

As the tune clearly did not belong to these words I ventured to write fresh words, and Mr. Bussell has somewhat developed the original melody which was limited to four lines.

LXIV. The Golden Vanity. Taken down words and air from James Olver, of Launceston. Melody noted down by Mr. Bussell. This ballad was printed as " Sir Walter Raleigh sailing in the Lowlands, showing how the famous ship called the Sweet Trinity was taken by a false galley ; and how it was recovered by the craft of a little sea-boy, who sunk the galley," by Coles, Wright, Vere, and Gilbertson (1648—80). In this it is said to be sung "to the tune of the Lowlands of Holland," and in it there is no ingratitude shown to the poor sea-boy. In this version there are fourteen verses. It begins: —

" 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."

It has been reprinted in Ashton : "A century of Ballads," p. 201. Under the form of " The Goulden Vanity," it is given with an air (of no value, and quite unlike ours), in Mrs. Gordon's Memoirs of Christopher North, 1862, ii., p. 317, as sung at a convivial meeting at Lord Robertson's by Mr. P. Fraser, of Edinburgh, before Mr. J. C. Lockhart and Professor Wilson. This begins : —

" There was a gallant ship, And a gallant ship was she,

Sik iddle dee, and the Lowlands low. And she was called the Goulden Vanitie,

As she sailed to the Lowlands low."

This also is in fourteen verses. The broadside version printed by Such, and Pitts, of Seven Dials, begins : —

" I have a ship in the North Countrie, And she goes by the name of the Golden Vanity ; I'm afraid she will be taken by some Turkish gallee, As she sails on the Lowlands low."

This is in seven verses, and very imperfect. Verse two contains five lines, verse three only three, verses four and si.x have four lines, verses five and seven have three lines. Consequently it would not be possible to " put a tune to it." Giver's melody is a very fine and striking one. It was adopted with some modernisa- tion that spoiled it by Clifton, in the early part of this century, for his iong of " The Oyster Girl." " Sir Walter Raleigh," says Mr. Ebbsworth, in his introduction to this ballad in the Roxburgh Ballads (V., p. 418), "never secured the popularity, the natural affection which was frankly given to Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. Raleigh was deemed arrogant, selfish, with the airs of an upstart, insolent to superiors, unconciliating with equals, and heartlessly indifferent to those in a lower position. The subject of the following ballad is fictitious — sheer invention, of course. The selfishness and ingratitude displayed by Raleigh agreed with the current estimate. He certainly had a daughter." The tune to which " The Golden Trinity " was set in the broadsides was " The Sailing in the Lowlands," and must therefore be an older air than the ballad. We obtained the same ballad at Chagford as " The Yellow Golden Tree." Our air is not earlier than the end of last centurj'. To a different tune it was a favourite fo'castle song forty or fifty years ago. We have beard this ballad to the tune we give at Mawgan-in-Pyder,

xxxu.

LXV. The Bold Dragoon. Words and melody taken down by W. Crossing, Esq., of South Brent, many years ago, from a labouring man on Dartmoor, now dead. The words were very corrupt. 1 have taken down a fuller version from a man at H\ickaby Bridge, Dartmoor, and have discovered an early version, "The Jolly Trooper," in " The Lover's Garland," n.d., but of the begmning or middle of last century. It begins : —

" There was a Trooper in the West And with riding he was weary ; He knocked at, he rapped at. And he asked for his kiud deary.

• •••«•

She took the horse by the bridle rein,

And led him to the stable. She gave him corn and hay to eat.

As much as he was able," &c.

As in the original, in singing, the last two lines were repeated, and the story was very lengthy, I have condensed it, by making each stanza of six lines instead of four. Moreover, as the original was too coarse to be presentable, I have recast it. There is naught about a cliimpanzee in the old ballad. The press mark in the British Museum is 11,621, c. 5.

LXVI. Trinity Sunday. Melody noted down by T. S. Cayzer, Esq., in 1849, at Post Bridge, from a moor man ; the original words were unsuitable, a broad- side ballad of a murder.

This is certainly a fine old dance tune.

To convert it into a three-stanza song instead of six stanzas, a slight liberty has been taken with the tune; the music has been expanded after line four, by the addition of five and six; the original air ends at "all the year."

In connection with this charmingly fresh air, I will give Mr. Cayzer's account of taking it down in 1849, which he has kindly extracted for me from his diary: — "This air, together with 'As Johnny walked out' (No. 11), I got from Dart- moor; nor shall I soon forget the occasion. The scene was a lonely one (I think Two Bridges, but it may have been Post Bridge). It had been raining all day. There was not a book in the house, nor musical instrument of any kind, except two hungry pigs and a baby that was being weaned. Towards nightfall there dropped in several miners and shepherds, and I well remember how the appearance of these Gentiles cheered us. We soon got up a glorious fire — such a fire as peat only can make, and drew the benches and settles round. By the friendly aid of sundry quarts of cyder I, before long, gained the confi- dence of the whole circle, and got a song from each in turn ; and noted down two that were quite new to me : no easy matter, considering that they were performed in a strange mixture of double bass and falsetto. The action with which they accompanied the singing was extremely appropriate. They always sing standing."

Many a similar evening have Mr. Sheppard, Mr. Bussell, and I spent in like manner over the peat fire with the burly, red-faced moor men and shepherds, standing to sing their quaint old songs, and very happy evenings they have been.

LXVII. The Blue Flame. Melody taken down by Mr. W. Crossing, from an old moor man, to " Rosemary Lane." Roger Luxton and James Parsons also sang " Rosemary Lane " to the same air. The words are objectionable. Moreover, in other parts of England, this broadside song is always sung to one particular air. We therefore thought it well to put to our melody entirely fresh words.

It is, or was, a common belief in the West of England, that a soul after death appears as a blue flame ; and that a flame comes from the churchyard to the house of one doomed to die, and hovers on the doorstep till the death-doomed expires, •when the soul of the deceased is seen returning with the other flame, also as a flame, to the churchyard,

XXXlll.

LXVIII. Strawberry Fair. Melody taken down from Jas. Masters, of Bradstone, by Mr. Sheppard. The ballad is a recast of " Kytt hath lost her key," given by Dr. Rimbault in his " Little Book of Songs and Ballads gathered from Ancient Music Books," 1851, p. 49; but this was a parody in 1561 of "Kit hath lost her keye (cow)." The song was certainly early, but unsuitable ; and I have been constrained to re-write it. The old air was used, in or about 1835, by Beuler, a comic song writer, for his " The Devil and the Hackney Coachman,"

" Ben was a Hackney Coachman rare, Jarvey ! Jarvey ! — Here I am, your honour."

Beuler composed the words of a good number of songs, and set nearly all tc old airs. Thus he wrote " The Steam Coach " to " Bonnets of Blue," " Don Giovanni " to the air of "Billy Taylor," "the Sentimer,tal Costermonger " to "Fly from the World," "Honesty is the best Policy" to the old melody of " The Good Dajs of Adam and Eve," " Ireland's the nation of Civilization " to the tune of " Paddy O'Carrol," and " The Nervous Family " to " We're a Nodding."

The same thing was done by Hudson, and a score of comic song writers. They took good old tunes and set them to vulgar words, which were, in some cases, no doubt an improvement, for vulgar words are better than those which are obscene. That " Strawberry Fair " is a genuine old melody I have no doubt. The ballad is sung everywhere in Cornwall and Devon to the same melody. The words are certainly not later than the age of Charles 11., and are probably older. They turn on a double entindre which is quite lost — and fortunately so — to half the old fellows who sing the song. It seems to me impossible to believe that the air should have become dissociated from Beuler's words and attached to very early words of the peculiar metre required. I have never found a singer who had any knowledge of " The Devil and the Hackney Coachman," but all have heard " Strawberry Fair," and some men of 70-80 say they learned it of their fathers. The earliest date of Jacob Beuler's song is 1834, and if what the old singers tell me is true, ther certainly Beuler adopted a tune taken from a folk ballad, and did not contribute a tune to folk melody.

LXIX. The Country Farmer's Son. Taken down by Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard from John Woolrich (not Woodrich), labourer, Broadwood Widger. The original ballad, " The Constant Farmer's Son," is found in a broadside by Ross, of Newcastle. It is a good, robust tune of the end of last century.

LXX. The Hostess' Daughter. Taken down by Mr. Sheppard from J. Masters, of Bradstone. The frankness and rudeness of the original words demanded modification before the song was fitted for the drawing room.

LXXI. The Jolly Goss-hawk. Melody taken down by Mr. Sheppard from H. Westaway, yeoman, of Belstone. The tune is set to a nonsense counting-song for children, and is then called "The Nawden Song." This begins: —

" I went to my ladye the first of May A Jolly goss hawk and his wings were grey. Come let us see who'll win this fair ladye — you or me."

To the 2nd of May is a " two-twitty bird," then "a dushy cock," a "four- legged pig," "five steers," "six boars," " seven cows calving," " eight bulls roaring," " nine cocks crowing," " ten carpenters yawing," " eleven shepherds sawing," "twelve old women scolding." A Scottish version in Chambers' " Popular Rhymes of Scotland," 1842, as "The Yule Days." A Northumbrian version, "The XII. days of Christmas," with air, not like ours, in "Northumbrian Minstrelsy."

xxxiv.

A version of this is the " Gousper ou ar Ranad " (the Frogs' Vespers) sung by the peasants of Brittany. " Cliansons Populaires de la Basse Bretagne," par Luzel, iSgo, p. 94. Tlie West of England song has got mixed up with the " Goss Hawk," another song. The same melody did for bolli, but one was a nursery song and the other was not. A rather corrupt form of the " Goss Hawk " is to be found in " The Fond Mother's Garland," in a collection of early Garlands in the B. Museum (11,621, c. 5).

LXXn. " Fair Girl Mind This ! " Taken, words and melody, from James Parsons. He learned this from his father 70 years ago. His father once sar.g it at a tavern in Plymouth, whither he had driven some cattle for the farmer for whom he worked. Next morning the landlady came to him and said, " Zing me thicky (that) zong again, now do'y, and you shall pay naught for your bed and board." So old Parsons sang the song. " Zing it me again," said the landlady. When he had so done she said, " There now, take what you can carry away in eaten' and drinken,' and welcome, and mind this, never you come to Plymouth again without coming here, and never you come here wi'out zinging thicky zong to me — as long as I be alive."

I have discovered this song in " The Contented Wife's Garland," date about 1730. It is in a collection of early garlands that belonged to Mr. Halliwell, and \vas acquired in 1832 by the British Museum. It is there as sung by the wife, not tlie man, and instead of coffee she gets him chocolate. The order of the verses is different, but the number is the same. It begins with our second verse, and the moral which in Parson's version comes first, is thrown in the Garland to the end. The melody is probably the original ; it fits the words admirably.

LXXIII. On a May Morning so Early. This melody belongs to the song or ballad " I'm Seventeen on Sunday," which is known elsewhere than in Devon and Cornwall. The air was taken down by Mr. Sheppard, from Roger Huggins, at Lydford. Taken down again by Mr. Bussell, from William Bickle, of Bridestowe. Bickle sang it to the broadside ballad, " Seventeen on Sunday," but Huggins' words, as far as they went, were earlier and better. The original ballad was altered by Burns to the " Wakeriffe Mammy," which he re-wrote for Johnson's Museum, IV., p. 410 ; and Allan Cunningham arranged a song on this topic, as the original was objectionable. Lyle gives it in his " Ballads," 1827, saying: "This ballad, in its original dress at one time, from my recollection, was not only extremely popular, but a great favourite among the young peasantry of the West of Scotland. To suit the times, however, we have been necessitated to throw out the intermediate stanzas, as their freedom would not bear transcription, whilst the 2nd and 3rd have been slightly altered from the recited copy." An Irish version (re-written) to the Irish air, in Joyce: "Ancient Irish Music," 1S73, No. 17. He says: "I cannot tell when I learned the air and words of this song, for I have known them as long as my memory can reach back. For several reasons [the original words] could not be presented to the reader." It was not possible for us either to give the ballad in its original form. Mr. Sheppard re-wrote it.

LXXIV. The Spotted Cow. Words and air from James Parsons, J. Helmore, H. Smith, and from John Woodrich, Thrushleton, noted down by Mr. Sheppard. The earliest version of the words is found in a Garland of last century, printed by Angus, of Newcastle. Brit. Mus. Garlands (11,621, c. 4), Vol. II., No. 53. There are several later broadside versions by Disley, Such, Dodds, of Newcastle, Keys, of Devonport, &c. As sung, it consists of four lines, and the two last are repeated. To avoid monotony, and to curtail the ballad, I have made each stanza to consist of six lines. The air to which sung everywhere in Devon is different. Dr. W. A. Barrett informs me, from that to which sung elsewhere. About 1760, Dr. Berg set the same song to a recast in Scotch form of the words, so as to transform it into a Scottish song : " As Jamie gang'd blithe his way, along the Banks of Tweed," &c., and so it was sung at Ranelagh. " The Bulfinch," n.d., P- 159-

XXXV.

LXXV. Cupid, the Plough Boy. Words and music taken down from J. Watts, Alder quarry, Thrushlcton. He sang of " Cubick, the Plougli-boy," and made Cubick marry the damsel in the end. Broadside versions, very corrupt, by Catnach, Fortey, &c. The earliest copy is " Cupid, the Pretty Plough-boy," a new song;" no date or place, but about the latter half of last century in the B.M. (1S75, b. 19). This ballad is, I believe, a mere recomposition of " Cupid's Triumph," a black letter ballad, circ. 1670, Roxburgh Ballads, IV., p. 13 ; but this is a sequel to another piece, "Cupid's Courtesy." The air was a Saraband. Perhaps that given by Chappell, p. 497. Barrett's " English Folk Songs," No. 16,

TXXVL "Come my Lads, let us be Jolly." Words and melody from Tames Olver, of Launceston, and Kdmund Fry, of Lydford. Olver acquired it at Liskeanl, in 1828, along with " Why should we be dullards sad ? " from G. Brooks, of Grampound. Fry had the melody incomplete. Olver knew the whole of it. Barrett's " English Folk Songs," No. 6, as "Sheep-sheering Song;" we have never so heard it used. W'e have heard it sung also by a hind, J. Hockin, Menheniot, Cornwall, with no reference to a sheep-sheering. We have taken down a notable variant from Samuel Gilbert, Landlord of the Falcon, aged 81, at Mawgan-iii-Pyder In that the chorus runs : —

" Let union be with all its fun. And we will join all hearts in one. And we'll go through as we've begun, Since it 'j our holiday."

In this also no reference to a sheep-.' .leering. Also the air of this chorus differed from ours, as well as from that given by Dr. Barrett. Mr. Gilljert's ran tlius: —

Let urion be, with all its fun, Since it is our hoi • i- day.

The verse was the same as our chorus, in common time.

LXXVII. Poor old Horse. Words and melody taken from Matthew Baker Lew Down, the melody noted by Mr. Sheppard. This song is given in Bell's " Ballads of the English Peasantry," p. 184, as sung by the mummers in the neighbourhood of Richmond, Yorkshire. He says : " The rustic actor who sings the song is dressed as an old horse, and at the end of every verse the jaws are snapped in chorus. It is a very old composition, and is now (circ. 1864) printed for the first time." This is not so — it exists as a broadside, printed by Hodges, of Seven Dials, and by Such. Our tune, which has not any merit, is not the same as that to which it is sung in the Midlands and Sussex. I differ from Mr. Bell as to the age of the song. I do not fancy it older than the latter half of last century. The Midland air and form of the song in Mason's " Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs," 1877.

LXXVIII. The Dilly Song. A great number of versions of this song have been taken down, and a good many were sent to the pages of the Weiteyn Morning News, in 1888, from various parts of Cornwall and Devon. This is known through- out Cornwall, and is, indeed, still sung in the cliapels. When a party of amateurs performed some of these "Songs of the West" in Cornwall, 1S90, the Dilly Song always provoked laughter among the good folk at the back of the halls; this puzzled the performers, till they enquired into the reason of the lau;_;hter, and learned that folk laughed because it was their familiar chapel hymn. In the text I have given the version of the words with least of the religious element in them. Here are some of the other versions.

2. Is God's own Son, or Christ's natures, but, in a Horrabridge version two are the strangers o'er the wide world rangers : another, " the lily white maids " not "babes."

3. The strangers are probably the Three Wise Men. In a Cornish version " Three is all eternity." In another, " Three is the Thrivcrs."

XXXVl.

4. " The Gospel Preachers ; " at S. Austell, " The Evangelists."

5. " Five is the Ferryman in the Boat " ; at Horrabridge, " The Dillybird ; " another, " The Nimble Waiters."

6. " The Cherubim Watchers," " The Crucifix," " The Cherry-bird Waiters." In an American version " The Ploughboys under the Bowl," " The Cheerful Waiters."

7. "The Crown of Heaven," see Rev. i., 16, but more likely the Pleiades, "The Seven Stars in the Sky."

8. "The Great Archangel," "The Archangels ;" at Horrabridge, "Eight is the daybreak."

9. "Nine are the Nine Delights," i.e., the Joys of Mary. "The Moonshine, bright and fine," " The Pale Moonshine." " The nine that so bright do shine."

10. " The Commandments." " Begin again."

11. "The Eleven Disciples." "They who go to Heaven."

There are very similar verses in German and Flemish. The Flemish version in Coussemaker : " Chants populaires des Flamands," with three variants of the air, which is a corruption of " Adeste fideles." The Scottish version in Chambers " Popular Rhymes of Scotland," 1842, p. 50. Dilly, as applied to the song, the hour, the bird, is probably the Festal Song, &c. (Welsh dillyn, pretty, gay, pi. dillynion, fineries, jewels.)

Sir Arthur Sullivan has introduced a song of the same character into his "Yeoman of the Guard," but the melody is not quite the same as ours.

The air to which the Dilly Song is sung in Somersetshire is similar to ours, and is, in fact, an artistic canon.

This song is very familiar throughout Brittany, as "Gousperou Kerne," Les Vfepres de Cornouaille.

" Dis moi ce que c'est qu'un ? Un Dieu, sans plus, qui est au ciel. Qu'est-ce que c'est que deux? Deux testaments.

Les trois Personnes de la Trinite, Quatre evangelistes," &c.

" Chansons populaires de la Bretagne," par Luzel, 1890, p. 88. Also M. Villemarque gives two rude melodies (Barz-Breiz, 1846, Nos. I. & VHI.) to which it is sung by the Bretons. There was a Mediaeval Latin form of the song which began " Unus est Deus." A Hebrew form as one for instructing children in truths, is printed in Mendez : "Service for the First Night of the Passover," London, 1862. It begins: "Who knoweth one? one is God who is over heaven and earth." The numbers go up to thirteen.

" Thirteen divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments, nine months preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision, seven days of the week, six books of the Mischna, fine books of the law, four matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the Covenant, but one is God alone, &c.

A Moravian form in Wenzig : Slawischer Miirchenschatz, 1857, p. 295.

LXXIX. The Mallard. A country dance tune, so called because of some silly words that go to it relative to the gobbling up of a Mallard. They begin :—

" Oh what have I ate, and what have I ate ? I have eaten the toe of a Mallard,

Toe and toe, nevins and all, And I have been to biliary allerj'. And so good meat was the Mallard."

I have written fresh words to the tune, which is an excellent example 01 an early dance tune, as the words do not belong properly to the tune. We have had the same sung in Dartmoor, and in Cornwall to entirely different melodies. It was taken from J. Masters, of Bradstone. This also is a song, like the last, and hke

xxxvii.

The Everlasting Circle (No. 104), and like the Nawden Song (No. 71), common to the Cornish and the peasants of Brittany. The Breton version is " Dispennais ar Voualc'h " (Depecer le merle), given in " Chants Populaires de la Basse Bretagne," par Luzel, p. 80.

LXXX. Constant Johnny. Words and melody taken down from Roger Luxtsn, of Halwell, the melody noted by Mr. Sheppard. It has heja arranged by Mr. Sheppard as perhaps originally set, in duet form, such lovers' duets being a common feature in folk song. Ravenscroft gives one in broad Devonshire in his " Brief Discourse," 1614, entitled "Hodge Trellindle and his Zweethart Malkyn." Our duet seems to be based on " Doubtful Robin or Constant Nanny," printed as a "new ballad," in or about 1680, in black letter; it is given in the 4th Vol. of the Roxburgh Ballads. The tune to that is " Would you be a Man of Fashion," or " The Doubting Virgin."

LXXXI. The Duke's Hunt. Words and melody taken down from James Olver, Launceston. I have heard another version at Stoke Gabriel, near Dartmouth; another at S. Mary Tavy, another at Menheniot. This is a mere cento from a long bLilad, entitled " The Fox Chase," narrating a hunt by Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in the reign of James I. Reprinted in Hindley's " Roxburgh Ballads," I., p. 453. It was originally printed by W. Oury, circ. 1650, but probably there was an earlier edition, not now extant. The air, noted down by Mr. Bussell, is very bright and pleasant. None is indicated in the heading of the ballad in 1650, which is merely headed, "To an excellent tune, much in request." It consists of eijhteen verses. The dogs in this early and original version are Dido, Spanker, Ruler, Bonny Lass, Caper, Countess, Comely, Famous, Thumper, and Cryer. In it the dog who never looks behind him is Ruler.

The ballad begins: —

" All in a morning fair.

As I rode to take the air, I heard some to halloo most clearly;

I drew myself near

To listen who they were. That were going a hunting so early.

I saw there were some gentlemen.

Who belonged to the Duke of Buckingham," 6k.,

This hunting ballad also occurs in " A Collection of Forty Early Ballad and Song Books," in the British Museum, in the 20th book of that collection. " The Vauxhall Concert," with a print of William and Mary on the title page. Also on a broadside "Dido and Spandigo." Ballads collected by Crampton, B.M. (11,621 h.). Vol. VIII.

LXXXII. The Bell Ringing. Words and air from William George Kerswell, a moorland farmer, an old man, near Two Bridges, in the heart of Dartmoor. Broadwood Widger, Ashwater, and North Lew are small villages situated near Broadbury Down, the highest land between Dartmoor and the Atlantic. When sung by the old farmer over a great fire in the kitchen, his clear, robust voice imitating the bells, produced an indescribable charm.

LXXXIII. A Nutting we will Go. Taken down from J. Garrard, aged 68, and nearly blind, a labouring man, illiterate, Cullyton, near Chagford. He knew, however, only the melody of the chorus, the complete tune was taken down by Mr. Sheppard, from Robert Hard, labourer. South Brent, who sang to it a ballad called "Jack of all Trades." The same tune to tlie " nutting " song at Menhenoit. The same also by James Parsons. Bunting, in his " Irish Melodies," 1840, gives the same tune to a fragment of the same words, and says he took it down in 1792 from Duncan, a harper. Duncan remembered half or a good portion of a tune he had heard, perhaps from English soldiers, and eked it out with some other tune. Then came S. Lover, and he took this air from Bunting, and wrote " The Lowbacked Car " to it. But the original melody is found, not only in Cornwall and Devon, but also in the North, and Mr. Kidson gives it in his "Trad. Tunes" as "With Henry Hunt we'll go," a song sung in Manchester in connection with the arrest of Hunt in 1819. The

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air was then adapted to this song from " The Battle of Waterloo." When we find the same words to the same air in Ireland and in Cornwall, and in the North of England as well, we may well believe that our tunc belonged originally to •' A Nutting we wiU Go." It is probable', therefore, that the air we give is more genuine than " The Low- backed Car " which has become popular, and its inartistic quality and incongruities have been forgiven. There is a broadside version, " The Nut Girl," printed by Fortey, Ryle, &c. See Ballads collected by Crampton, B.M. (11,621, h.), Vol. I., and (1S75, b. 19); but these are both without the chorus. The printed broadside has lost somewhat. For instance, Gerrard's

has become

" His voice rang out so clear and stout It made the horse-bells ring,"

" His voice was so melodious It made the valleys ring."

Cut the broadside is longer, it consists of fourteen verses. Neither can be given untoned down, to make the song tolerable for polite ears. A still earlier broadside version, by Pitts, with chorus.

LXXXIV. Down by a River-side. Taken down by Mr. Shcppard from the singing of Jas. Townsend, Holne. It was a song of his grandfather's, who was parish clerk at Holne for fifty years, and died in 1883, over eighty years old.

LXXXV. The Barley Rakings. Taken down from Roger Hannaford, of Lower Widdecombe, Dartmoor, by Mr. Sheppard. The words exist in broadside versions, by Such, Bingham, of Lincoln, Robertson, of Wigton, &c. Such's version consist of six verses, the others of four. Hannaford's verses, 2 and 3, were unlike those of Bingham and Robertson, but resembled 3 and 4 of Such. He had not 2 and 6 of Such, and his lines and rhymes were not identical with the London version. Moreover, he had a curious line in verse 2 : " They had a mind to style and play " (the Anglo-Saxon styllan, to leap or dance), not found in the printed copies. As none of these versions would be tolerable in the drawing-room, Mr. Sheppard has modified the words considerably. The melody to which " Barley Rakings" is sung in other parts of England is wholly different, ours is probably an early dance tune.

LXXXVI. Deep in Love. This very curious song was obtained by the late Rev. S. M. Walker, of Saint Enoder, Cornwall, from an old man in his parish. Miss Octavia L. Hoare sent it me as preserved by Mr. Walker. Wc have obtained the same song from Mary Sacherley, aged 75, perfectly illiterate, at Huckaby Bridge, Dartmoor. Mary Sacherley is daughter of an old singing moor man, \\\\o was a cripple, on Dartmoor. She possesses the unique distinction of having a house that was built and inhabited in one day. The circumstances are these : Her husband's father had collected granite boulders to erect a cottage on a bit of land that he deemed waste, but a farmer interfered as he began to build. He accordingly had all the stones rolled down hill to a spot by the road side, heaped one on another in rude walls, rough beams thrown across, and covered with turf, and went into the house the same night. In that house his grandchildren are now living.

Two of the stanzas, 3 and 5, are found in the Scotch song, " Wally, Wally, up the bank," "Orpheus Calsdonicus," 1733, No. 34; stanzas 4 and 5 in the song in •'The Scott's I^Iusical Museum," 17S7 — 1803, VI., p. 582 ; Herd's "Scottish Songs," 3rd ed., 1791, I., p. 140; part of last stanza is like our conclusion. In "The Wandering Lover's Garland," circ. 1730, are two of the verses worked into an independent ballad, showing that the original is earlier. Again taken down from W. Nichols, of Whitchurch, near Tavistock, it was a song of his grandmother's, who sixty years ago was hostess of the village inn.

LXXXVII. The Rambling Sailor. Taken down by Mr. Sheppard from Roger Hannaford, South Widdecombe. A hornpipe tune. There are several broadside versions of this. Originally the song was " The Rambling Soldier," and so appears about the middle or latter end of last century. Then some

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poetaster of Catnarli's re-wrote it as " The Rambling Sailor," dcstroj'ing all the wit and point of the original; which wit and point, by the way, were characteristic of the age ; but as in the West it is set to a hornpipe, we have retained the song as one of a sailor, only modifying the words where objectionable. The "Rambling Soldier," the early copy I have seen, is in the possession of Dr. Barrett ; a later copy, circ. 1820, by Whiting, of Birmingham. Ballads, B.M. (1C76, e. 2). The " Rambling Sailor," by Disley, circ. 1830 ; Ballads collected by Cramplon, B.M. (11,621, h.), Vol. VIII.

LXXXVIII. A Single and a Married Life. Taken down from Henry Bickic, of Bridestowe, This belongs to the class of diaiogae Ballads, of which the best known is " The Husbandman and the Serving Man." We have not been able to trace this anywhere so far. But that is no reason why we should not yet light on it soinewhere-

LXXXIX. Midsummer Carol. Taken down from Will. Aggett, an old crippled labourer, very illiterate, at Changford ; melody noted by Mr. Bussell. A very early and curious melody of the same date as that to the " May Day Carol," No. 47 ; and the words belong to a similar custom. This has not been moralised as has been the " May Day Carol," by the Puritans.

XC. The Blackbird. The melody taken down twice by Mr. Sheppard, first from James Parsons, secondly from Roger Hannaford. From Parsons we got but one verse, that with which we begin ; but from Hannaford we recovered the entire ballad, that begins thus : —

I. " Three pretty maidens a-niilking did go. Three pretty maids a-niilking did go, When the wind it did blow high. And the wind it did blow low, And it tossed their milking pails to and fro.

Then she met with a man that she did know, O she met with a man that she did know, And she asked have you skill ? And she ask'd have you the will ? To catch me a small bird or two."

Then comes the verse on the blackbird ; and two additional verses, not desirable. The same ballad in Lyle's Collection, 1827, " from recollection ; air plaintive and pastoral." It is a curious song, as one docs not well see what connexion the first verse with the three milkmaids has with the rest, which concerns only one. This is one of the many old English songs which have found their way into Scotland on one side, and into Cornwall on the other. A broadside version of this ballad in nine stanzas, printed by Williamson, of Newcastle. In this, the last verse begins:

" So here's a health to the bird in the bush, Likewise to the linnet and the thrush," &c.

In order to preserve the charming old air it was necessary to write another ballad, preserving only one verse of the original.

XCI. The Green Bed. Taken down from J. Masters, Bradstone, melody noted by Mr. Sheppard. The same melody set to the " Outlandish Knight," sung by Richard Gregory at Two Bridges, Dartmoor ; he imported into the air a phrase from the " British Grenadier." The " Green Bed " exists as a broadside in six double verses. Mr. Sheppard has re-written the ballad, as the original was poor, condensing the story into somewhat shorter space. The air somewhat resembles " The girl I left behind me."

XCII. The Loyal Lover. Taken down from Mary Sacherley, Huckaby Bridge, and Anne Roberts, Scobbetor, Widdecombe. Mr. Bussell had infinite labour with this air, which we had first from Mary Sacherley, an old illiterate woman, born and bred on the moor, and daughter of a very famous old song-man. She sang it to an interminable ballad, " The Lady and the Apprentice," and never sang two verses alike. Four or five variations were taken from her lips, with mucli trouble, as she sang quickly, and could not be checked to suit the requirements of the notator. However, we got the same melody afterwards from Mrs. Anne Roberts,

xl.

now in Widdccoine, but formerly of Post Bridge in the heart of tlie moor ; she sang with perfect precision and always the same.

The words exist in part in "Colin and Phccbe's Garland" (B.M., 11,621, c. 5), but this has only two verses.

XCIII. The Streams of Nantsian. Taken down from Mathew Baker, a cripple, aged 72, who can neither read nor write, Lew Trenchard. Music noted down by Mr. Siieppard. Again from James Olver, Laimceston, and from Matthew Ford, shoemaker, Menheniot, practically the same melody. This song is " The Streams of lovely Nancy," of the broadsides. It was printed about 1830 by Keys of Devonport, with four verses, of which verse three had naught to do with the song. And in many broadside versions the short original, consisting of four verses only, is swelled out with scraps from other ballads, perfectl}' recognisable, and merely put in by the printer to fill up the available space. The Nancy of the broadsides is Nant — (something or other). Nant or Nan is firstly a falling stream, and then secondly a valley or glen. Nankivell is the Horse-vale, Nanteglos the church-dale, Nanvean is the small vale; there are hundreds of dales and streams with names beginning Nan or Nant, in Cornwall. Devon is Dyfneint, the Deep Vales.

XCIV. The Drunken Maidens. Taken down from Edmund Fry, Lydford. Melody noted by Mr. Bussell. This is an old ballad ; it is found in " Charming Phillis' Garland," circ. 1710. A Breton version, given by Luzel, " Merc'hed Caudan."

XCV. Tobacco is an Indian Weed. This is an old and famous song, originally written, it is conjectured, by George Withers, as Mr. Collier found a copy of it in a MS. of the date of James I. with his initials to it. Previous to this discovery, it was attributed to Ralph Erskine, who died in 1752. It is found in " Merry Drollery Complete," 1670, and on a broadside dated 1672. We give the tune to which it is sung traditionally all round Dartmoor and in Cornwall, and Mr. Sheppard has arranged it in canon form; but it is entirely distinct from that to which it is sung elsewhere, as printed by Chappell, II., 564, which is the air given by D'Urfey in his "Pills to purge Melancholy," 1719.

XCVI. Fair Susan Slumbered. Music taken down from George Cole, quarryman, aged 76, Rundlcstone, Dartmoor. The music was noted by Mr. Sheppard. The words were too utterly worthless to be given here, and Mr. Sheppard has written a fresh copy of verses to the melody. The original words are found in "The Vocal Library," London, 1822; No. 1,421, "As a fair maid walked."

XCVII. The False Lover. Words and music taken down from old Mary Sacherley by Mr. Sheppard. Such, among his broadsides, has two versions of it. The earliest begins " I courted a bonny lass on a rainy day," and is in 7 stanzas. It is No. 49. The other. No. 592, is a modern re-writing of the old theme.

XCVIII. Barley Strav/, Taken down from the singing of Mr. G. H. Hurell, the blind organist at Chagford, as he heard it sung by a carpenter, William Beare, some fifteen years ago. The words were very vulgar, and consequently Mr. Sheppard has re-written the song. The air is of a robust character, and was better than the words, The air was used by A. S. Rich, without some of the most characteristic passages, for Hunneman's comic " Old King Cole," pub. circ. 1830.

XCIX. Death and the Lady. Taken down from Roger Hannaford, South Widdecombe. Melody noted by Mr. Sheppard. The words were also sent by Captain Hale Monro, of Ingesdon House, Newton Abbot, as sung by an old man there. This is quite different from the " Dialogue of Death and the Lady," found in black letter broadsides, and given by Bell in his " Songs of the English Peasantry," p. 32. The tune to this latter is given by Cliappell, I., 167. In Carey's "Musical Century," 1738, is given the air of "Death and the Lady," and as "an old tune." But this melody and ours have nothing in common.

C. Adam and Eve, This charming old song is a favourite with the peasantry throughout England, and is sung in Yorkshire and in Sussex, in Gloucester and the Midlands, to the same melody. Taken down by Mr. Sheppard from John Rickards, Lamerton. The words are printed in Bell's " Songs of the English Peasantry," p. 231. He says, " We have had considerable trouble in procuring a copy of the old song, which used, in former days, to be very popular with aged

xli.

people resident in the North of England. It has been long out of print, and handed down traditionally. By the kindness, however, of Mr. S. Swindells, printer, Manchester, we have bevn favoured with an ancient printed copy." In the original the song consists of lo verses. The earliest copy of it I know is in " The Lady's Evening Book of Pleasure," printed in Cow Lane, London, about 1740. It will be found in a collection of early Garlands and Ballad Books in the Brit. Mus., made by Mr. J. Bell about 1812, and called by him "The Eleemosynary Emporium." This air is first found in " Vocal Music, or the Songster's Companion," 2nd ed., 1772, to the song, " Farewell, ye green fields and sweet groves," p. 92. Then it was taken into "The Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb," as the air to "In hurry post-haste for a license," and was attributed to Dr. Arne. In " Die Familie Mendelsohn," Vol. 2, is a scrap by Felix Mendelsohn, dated Leipzig i6th August, 1840, which is identical with the first four bars of this melody.

CI. I Rode my Little Horse. Taken down from Edmund Fry, of Lydford, but the tune was faulty. We afterwards obtained it complete and correct from John Bennett, a labourer, aged 67, at Chagford. This ballad runs on the same lines as "Jolly Roger Twangdillo," by D'Urfey. Can it not be, substantially, the original, which he re-wrote in or about 1700?

CII. The Saucy Ploughboy. Melody taken down from Will. Setter, labourer, Two Bridges, Dartmoor. The words he sang to this tune began : —

" As I went down to Salisbury,

'Twas on a market day. By chance I met a fair pretty maid,

By chance all on the way. Her business it to market was.

With butter, eggs, and whey. So we both jog on together, my boys,

With Dcrry-down weeday."

But, for very sufficient reasons, we could not employ the words.

CIII. I'll build myself a gallant Ship. In our first edition we gave the Devon- shire form of " The Lowlands ot Holland," setting it to a second melody we had taken down for " The Bold Dragoon." But the accent not agreeing satisfactorily with that of the music, I have been compelled to -very slightly alter the words so as to agree with the music.

The air was taken down by Mr. Bussell from Richard Cleave, at " The Forest Inn," Huckaby Bridge. Never shall I forget the occasion. Mr. 'Bussell and I drove across Dartmoor in winter in a furious gale of rain and wind, to Huckaby Bridge, in quest of an old man we had heard of there as a singer. We found the fellow, but he yielded nothing, and our long journey would have been fruit- less had we not caught Richard Cleave and obtained from him this air which cost me a bronchitis attack, that held me a prisoner for six weeks.

CIV. The Everlasting Circle. A widely-known song in Devon. A version taken down from J. Woodrich, another from Will. Setter, Two Bridges; but the best from " Old Capul," i.e., William Nankivell, an aged quarryman, who for years lived under Roos Tor, on the River Walla above Merrivale Bridge, absolutely illiterate, but with a memory laden with old songs. This same song is sung by the Breton peasants. It is called in Brittany " Ar pare caer " (The fair field). Luzel : " Chans, pop. de la Basse Bretagne," 66. In the variants we have taken down, the latter part differs. That of Nankivell, is : —

" And out of the baby there grew a fine lawyer, &i. ,"

" And then from the lawyer there came a fine parson, &c."

"And out of the parson there sprang a black devil."

Music noted down by Mr. Bussell. A copy of it in broadside. "The Tree in the Wood," printed by Pitts, of Seven Dials, in my possession. This begins : —

" There was a tree grew in a wood, A dainty curious tree. For the tree was in the wood, And the wood was down in the valleys low."

xlii.

Another Devon version with air in Mason's " Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs," 1S77. M. Kidson tells me he has heard the sonfr sung at Oxford to " Le Petit Tambour," with an ending tacked on from " Rule Uritannia."

CV. All in a Garden. Taken down from Harry Smith, Two Bridges, Dart- moor. Melody noted by Mr. Sheppard. The words follow so closely on " The Broken Token" (No. 44), that we have thought it advisable to give the melody a fresh copy of verses. The original began, "As Polly walked into her garden."

CVI. Hunting the Hare. An old country dance, taken down from " Old Capul." The melody noted by Mr. Bussell. Date of the air the begining of the 17th century.

CVII. Dead Maid's Land. Taken down from Joseph Paddon, Holcombe Burnell, but he sang the words to the air we have used to No. 108. The first three verses were "I Sowed the Seeds"; then he branched off into what I give. Compare with this the Scottish ballad, "The Gardener," in Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," Pt. VII., No. 219, but the ballad has an entirely different ending. We have set therefore to it an air taken down from Anne Roberts, of Scobbctor, Widdecombe-in-the-Moor. In the major this is a massive li3'mn-tune.

CVI 1 1. "Shower and Sunshine." Air taken down from Joseph Paddon, Holcombe Burnell, N. Devon. New words; the original hear a certain resemblance to " I Sowed the Seeds of Love," and yet differ considerably from it. The melody is the old English air " I Sowed the Seeds of Love," in Chappell, IL, 522, and is interesting as a local variant. A Scottish variant is given by Alexander Campbell, in "Albyn's Anthology," 1816, I., p. 40. The Irish in Joyce's " Ancient Irish Music," No. 74.

CIX. Haymaking Song. This quaint old carol-like song was ta^c^n down first from J. Woodrich. The song was his father's ; Woodrich learned it of him about 1850, and he says it was his father's favourite song. We then got it again from J. Parsons. The air belongs to the same date as the May Day Carol. Wood- rich could not recall the first stanza, and knew only one or two complete, the rest in fragmentary state. Not till after I had recomposed the fragments did I detect the ballad in "West Country Garlands," cir. 1760 (B.M., 11,621, b. 11), and among the broadsheets of Pitts, about the end of last century. It begins " In the merry month of June." But this is the title of a well-known old English ballad air, different from ours. Moreover, Woodrich's air did not fit the printed words, and I did not like to alter the latter to fit his melody, as the printed ballad went to the air of its initial words. " In the merry month of June" will be found in "The Beggar's Wedding," 1729, air 22.

ex. Bibberly Town. Melody taken down from John Bennett, Chagford, labourer, aged 68. Dr. Barrett, to whom I showed the air, believed it to be a variant of " Moll in the Wad," to which, about 1S28, Mr. H. Williams set his song of " Sarah Syke," beginning : —

"To me, said Mother, t'other day,

Why Giles you seem to pine away," &c.

Mr. Sheppard and I have compared the tunes, but fail to trace the likeness, as far as we can judge, they are both ^ time, ind there the resemblance begins and ends. The words, as sung, were vulgar, the point being that the tinker kisses all tlie girls he meets and they pay him with " guineas of gold " for his kisses, and he drinks the guineas away in the tavern. Mr. Sheppard has written fresh words to the ballad. The " Bibberly Town " is, on the broad- side copies, "Beverley Town." As we have altered the words, we have thought it well not to take tlie title, " Beverley Town," that belongs to the original ballad as in print. When we have re-written a ballad, it has been to rescue the melody from being lost. Many an old melody, associated with undesirable words, was saved by Burns, Ramsay, Cunningham, &c., from disappearance by their writing good words to the old tunes. The grossness of the words to which it was

xliii.

associated drove it into the background — drove it out of memory altogetlier among decent people. We Iiave not had among us such kings and queens of song writing as Burns, Ramsay, Hogg, Tannaliill, Baronness Nairne, Lady Anne Barnard, &c., to give the old airs a new spell of life by associating tnem to imperishable words. We have not re-written words unless there were good cause. Many an old ballad is coarse, and many a broadside ballad is common- place. Songs that were thought witty in the Elizabethan and Caroline epochs, are no longer sufferable ; and broadside ballads are in many cases vulgarised versions of earlier ballads lost in their original forms. Two courses lay open to us. One is that adopted by Dr. Barrett and Mr. Kidson, to print the words exactly as given on the broadsides, with asterisks for the undesirable stanzas. There is a good deal to be said for this course.

On the other hand, there is that adopted by the Scottish and Irish collectors, to re- write and modify where objectionable or commonplace. This has been the course we have adopted. It seemed to me a pity to consign the lovely old melodies to the antiquarian's library, by publishing them with words which were quite fatal to the success of the songs in the drawing-room or the concert-hall. And be it observed some of the best airs wers linked to the worst words, not always gross, but utterly commonplace. We resolved, where the old words were good, or tolerable, to retain them intact. When bad, to re-write, adhering as closely as possible to the original. Where the songs were mere broadside ballads we have had no scruple in doing this, for we give reference to the pressmark in the British Museum, where the broadside may be found, or give the number of ]\Ir. Such's series, so that anyone interested may purchase it for a halfpenny. When, however, the ballad or song seemed to be traditional, and not taken from a broadside, then we have printed it as truly as we could, and if we have supplied a hiatus, we frankly say so.

No two singers give the same ballad exactly alike, the variations are sometimes so great that we suspect they are reproductions by local poets of the old themes. A striking instance of this is " The Masterpiece of Love Songs," that was printed about 1670 ; and has been reproduced by Mr. Ashton, in his " Century of Ballads." I have taken down one form of this, tolerably like the earliest printed form. It exists as a modern broadside in another. Mr. R. N. Worth has sent me another taken down from an old man of 87 quite different, and I have had a fourth also different from another singer.

No topic is more dear to the bucolic mind than that of the young lady who follows her lover to sea, or in the ranks, in male costume. The earliest form of the first of these is perhaps " The Simple Ploughboy," No. 49. The same story has been re-written and re-written again and again, and reappears in a score of forms, the last of which is tlie fo'castle song of " In Causand Bay Lying."

In conclusion, I may say, in the words of an old song in D'Urfey's •'Pills," and in "The Aviary," circ. 1730: —

" Come buy my (old) Ballad

I have in my Wallet. But 'twill not I fear please every Pallate.

Then mark what ensu'th,

I swear by my youth, Til at every Line in my Ballads is Truth: A Ballad of Wit, a brave Ballad of Worth, 'Tis newly printed, and newly come forth."

S. BARING-GOULD.

Lew Trenchard, N. Devon, yuly, 1891.

xliv.

ON THE MELODIES OF SONGS OF THE WEST.

By H. FLEETWOOD SHEPPARD.

Of the hundred and ten melodies in this volume, about a dozen are found to have been already published. A few more may yet be identified with ti;nes known elsewhere, but the bulk can fairly claim to be regarded as traditional tunes of the West of England, and specially of Devonshire.

No account can be given of the origin of folk-songs in England or abroad. It has no history. We know that in Greece the reapers and the sowers, the weavers and herdsmen, the millers and wool-carders, had their distinctive songs; that Britain was a song-loving country before the time of Bede; that in the 13th and 14th centuries the troubadours in France, and the minnesingers in Germany, greatly promoted the spread of song; that Scandinavia has an extensive ballad literature unexplored; that we owe to the Celtic race the preservation of the song- relics of Bards, Scalds, and Minstrels, and that the legitimate successors of these have been the ballad-singers of the last three centuries : all this we know, but of the earliest history of the people's music we know nothing. Only it is certain that, whilst music was being painfully developed as an art, or elaborated as a science, the uneducated of all countries were carolling their songs as freely as the birds ; and that their traditional melodies are regarded by authorities, almost without exception, as the productions of untaught composers, singing, as it were, by inspiration.

Why should not this be so? Melody is not a progressive art, nor is any scientific knowledge of music necessary for the production of tunes both striking and touching. We see this in the early hymn-tunes of the Church, which, notwith- standing their strange form, are often full of beauty and expression, and instinct with that devotional feeling which no scientific knowledge can give. Yet these old tunes are no remains of any cultivated musical age : they are simply the inartistic efforts of devout minds to express religious emotions in song.

The same thing happens elsewhere. In many an ancient village churcn we find attempts at architectural ornament, in which some native genius has striven to embody his idea of the beautiful. Rude though the work may be, it yet reveals the artistic mind. Artistic knowledge may be lacking, but the feeling is there, and asserts itself. So in painting. If the dawning genius of Opie and Reynolds had unhappily been neglected, it would have asserted itself, and served art after its own fashion. Or, in music, if little John Davy, who, at six years old, purloined the friendly smith's horseshoes to make a peal of bells, had never been apprenticed to " Mr. Jackson of Exeter," his gift of melody would not have withered away ; he would still have invented charming tunes, picking them out on his horseshoes, or warbling them without premeditation. So it may have been with tunes in this book. I see no reason for doubting that they are, in the main, native productions, or that in other parts of the country may be made similar collections of what are really the true folk-songs of England.

Many no doubt think otherwise. M. Loquin, for instance, maintains that in France there are no such things as folk-songs originating with the people ; but that what are so-called are invariably relics of an age of musical culture. It may be so in France. The songs of Adam de la Hale, or de Machault, or Depres can hardly ever have been popular, but we may seek for inspiration lower down. The Ballard family, who held the sole patent for printing music in France from 1550 to the Revolution, published hundreds of Cliaiisous pour boire tt pour danscr, and these may have leavened the popular music just as Playford's

xlv.

Dancing Master leavened it in England, as Chappell abundantly shows. But the compositions of our own cultured song-writers had no such influence. You may turn over the pages of scores of collections of songs, printed in the last century, without finding any trace of such tunes as we have brought together in the following pages. These have a strong local flavour and a natural simplicity which are wholly wanting in the printed collections. M. de Coussemaker observes the same thing in the folk-songs of Flanders. He says " Our Flemish melodies are none the less freely original ; that is to say, native to the country and the offspring of spontaneous inspiration." Nor can one look into the folk-songs of other countries, Sweden for example, without perceiving that their structure, rudeness, anil tonality betray no signs of a cultivated musical origin. What musical culture within reach of the people was there before the thirteenth century ? And yet there is a great mass of rehgious music far older than that. Whence came the earlier Church hymns ? Many of them were no doubt spontaneous inspirations, and why should it not have been the same with secular melodies, and in a later age ?

In these Songs of the West there are specimens of tunes composed by the men who sang them.* They are not the most original certainly, but what one man does indifferently another with greater but equally untrained gifts may do well. All originality is not equal. To say that ploughmen could not originate melodies is a mere assumption. Ploughmen have produced poetry, why not music ? Burns was a ploughman, Clare a farm lad, Bloomfield a shoemaker, Tannahill a weaver; they cultivated their gifts, but the gift was there. People do not postpone using their gifts until they have cultivated them any more than they postpone using their legs until they have learned to walk. I know a sweet singer who composed songs before she had learned a note of music. At seven years old a book of children's poems was put into her hands and she immediately began to sing them, making her own melodies as she went along. I took down one of these tunes, fresh from her childish inspiration, and here it is, as pretty a little child's song as one need wibh for.

See, see how the i - ces are melt - ing a - way, The riv - er has burst from its chain ; The woods and the

hedg-es with ver-dure look gay, j\nd dui- sles en- am - el the plain!

It is quite conceivable that some of our West Country airs may have had a similar though not so juvenile an origin. But there is no longer the same call for the exercise of the faculty. The article is evolved by machinery, turned out by the thousand, and the world, rural as well as urban, is deluged with songs good, bad and very indifferent. No real folk-songs have been produced in the present century. The popular ditties of the day are imposed upon the people, but do not spring from them. The ballad maker's, no less than the ballad singer's, occupation is gone ; and in a very short time the ballads themselves will be gone also.

The dates of these songs can no more be decided than can their origin. They defy chronology. Old tunes are not always quaint, nor graceful ones always new. Here is a tune which we might set down as a dance-tune of the iSth century:

^

r*N '\v JlJ-J'^lJ-;jl;.j..!L!.:|l-J ^\^ ll\JJJV^

• We met with one Dartmoor minstrel who sang to us a composition of his own, both words and music ; unhappily we could make nor head nor tail of either. As a rule authorship is not

confessed unless the production be approved.

xlvi.

whereas it is really a hymn • tunc of 500 years earlier, extant in a i3lh century MS. Assertion, therefore, is hazardous; but we may classify the songs in the different styles to which they apparently belong. We have heard them of all styles. Songs with an archaic ring in them, of the ancient church modes, and as old as the Wars of the Roses, or older (4, 47, 53, 73) ; common-metre ballad tunes of the i6th century (33, loS) ; songs of the Elizabethan era, with a quasi-madrigalian flavour about them (28, 78) ; songs of a didactic turn, of the early Stuart times (8g, 107) ; Puritan songs of the Commonwealth (g) ; jovial songs of the roystering Restoration days (5, 26, 68) ; tripping tunes, such as might have come out of Playford's Dancing Master (59, 79) ; hunting and hornpipe tunes of the last century (91, 106) ; songs of seafaring and shipwreck (38, 48, 52) ; songs of country life (83, 86, 98) ; of ploughing and reaping (61, 69) ; of haytime and harvest (19, 109) ; of wrestling and bell-ringing (60, 82) ; of humour, satire, sentiment, drinking, dancing, poaching, and love-making : all sorts and conditions of songs (except religious songs, which did not survive the Reformation) had their place in the memories of our old singers. And so had many more which had no pretence of being traditional : songs of the Hook, Reeve, and Dibdin school ; of the Volunteer epoch ; of Bishop and Braham's day ; of the London streets fifty years ago ; mock- rustic and dialect songs, down to songs of the present music-hall and Christy Minstrel type; all were offered as genuine wares for our acceptance, demanding some discretion, lest, instead of preserving local and traditional melodies, we should be merely reproducing music of widely different origin, written to sell, and imported in the way of trade. For no reliance was to be placed on the statements of the singers. The song which an old man of four-score firmly believed that he learned at his mother's knee in his early childhood, proved to be the composition of a well-known London writer thirty years later ; and the genuine Devonshire ballad, vouched for as the production of a talented friend forty years ago, was found to be one of Dibdin's, sixty years earlier ; and so we came, by degrees, to recognise the professional type, and to learn that songs with too much regularity in the tune, and too much point in the words, were never the genuine ditties of Arcadia.

The Devonshire songs, with all their merits, do not present any strongly- marked melodic peculiarities or features. Less harsh than the northern, less bold than the Welsh tunes, their affinity is rather with those of Ireland ; but their character is that of Englisli music, though with a grace and softness which indicates their Celtic vein. Such songs as 31 or no should, perhaps, be transferred to Somersetshire ; their roughness is foreign to the more western county, whereas such tunes as 39, 70, 84, 93, 96, seem plainly native to it.

As a characteristic song "The Bell Ringing" (82) may be cited. There is an indolent easy grace about this tune which is quite in keeping with the words and charmingly suggestive. The sunny valleys, the breezy downs, the sweet bell- music swelling and sinking on the soft autumn air, the old folk creeping out of their chimney-nooks to listen, and all employment in the little town suspended in the popular excitement at the contest for the hat laced with gold ; all this, told in a few words and illustrated by a few notes, quite calls up a picture of Devonshire life, and stamps the song as genuine. The narrator is unhappily slightly intoxicated, but no one thinks the worse of him : stern morality on that or any other score will in vain be looked for in Songs of the West. This very easy morality is perhaps one reason why the younger generation of singers takes no care, nor shows any readiness to hand down the songs which delighted our forefathers. Public opinion will not now tolerate the coarse humour, and coarser seiitinient of the 17th and i8th centuries; and, although we may lament the loss of the tunes, the singers who eschew these songs are more to be praised for their good ethical sense than blamed for their bad musical taste.

Gold-laced hats went out of fashion a full hundred years ago. After that date folk-songs cease to be traditional, and lose their interest. The influx of London publications muddied the stream, and to find it pure we must remount higher up. But very old songs can hardly be expected to have a local or even national character. Whether we take those of Sweden or Portugal, Flanders or Ireland (before Moore tampered with them) we find them all associated with the Church modes. The ancient scales may be so frequently discovered in the following

xlvii.

songs, that it will be as well to point out enough. On the pianoforte, from D to D the Dorian mode ; E to E that of the G to G of the Mixolydian. Others there Their peculiarity is, that in each scale th so that no two scales are precisely alike, 47, 73 ; the Phrygian in 4, 67 ; the Lydian very common, although we have given no down on Dartmoor. It will be observed key of G, it has t}F all through.

how they may be recognised. It is easy

, using only the white notes, is the scale ot

Phrygian ; F to F of the Lydian ; and

are, but these suffice for the purpose.

e serni-tones occur m different positions,

The Dorian mode may be traced in

does not appear, but the Mixolydian is

example of it. But here is one taken

that although apparently in the modern

Song in the Mixolydian Mode.

J , 1-^ , ^~

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In Worcester-shire Town a young dam . sel did dwell, For wit and for beau - ty none could her ex- eel; His

bride for lo be a young man court • ed her, And he by his trade was a ship's car • pen • ter.

If the last line be played with Fj{ instead of F5, it will at once be evident that the tune does not belong to our key of G major, but that the flat seventh is intentional. So again in the following tune in the same mode : —

I was brought up at Ex - e - ter, The place right well know I — Brought up of hon - est pa - rents, And

reared right ten - der • !y, Till 1 be - came a rov • ing blade, Which proved my des - ti - ny.

This use of the minor seventh, awkward as it may seem to us, finds favour everywhere with rural singers. The late Sir G. Macfarren laid it down * that " the demand of the natural ear is for a semi-tone between the leading note and the tonic, instead of the gross rough major second that lies between the yth and 8th degrees of some of the Church modes ; " and further, " that in melodies preserved by oral tradition, this note is always altered from what we find in early written copies ; " i.e., altered from a tone to a semi-tone. With all respect to so great an authority, experience teaches just the opposite : that it is the tendency of untaught singers to change the semitone into a whole tone. I believe that the natural uneducated ear prefers the " gross rough major second." There is an instance of it in the West Riding people. The hymn "Christians Awake" (H. A. M. 6i) may almost be called their national hymn. All Christmas-tide it is sung in every church, chapel, or rneeting-house, and in every home in everj' village. It is played by every itinerant fcand, and sung by every company of carollers or mummers. At line 4, bar 2 of this tune occurs an Att leading to the chord of B minor ; and wherever this hymn is sung without accompaniment, the gross major second is always substituted for the semi-tone. I have noticed it for over thirty years, and the use is becoming traditional. That the effect of this interval is not always disagreeable will be evident to all who sing Molloy's pretty song, " The Clang of the Wooden Shoon."

Other peculiarities connected with the Church modes, such as tunes beginning in one key and ending in another; in major and relative minor (51); or vice versa (gg) ; modulation into unrelated keys (2, 53) ; endings on the dominant, or 4th or 2nd of the scale (102), are often regarded as mistakes of the singers, whereas they are often marks of antiquity, and found in the folk-songs of all nations. But variations of tunes are frequently due to the errors of singers, and possibly to their vanity. There is a curious instance in the well-known song " I sowed the seeds of Love." The

• Lectures on Harmony, 1877, p. 40.

xlviii.

Midland county form of the melody is given in ChappcU ; the Northern form in Northumbrian Minstrelsy ; and the Western form in the present volume (108). The tliree versions are here contrasted : the Devonshire form being reduced to common time for the sake of comparison, and the extension of bar 10 {vUe song 108) being restricted to the flourish which no doubt it originally wao.

The identity of the tune is clear enough, but the variations could hardly be greater. In No. 2, phrase i begins in a different key ; in No. 3 it ends in a different key. No. i repeats phrase 4 ; No 2 expands it ; No. 3 omits it. In No. I the leading note is avoided ; in No. 2 it appears as an embellish- ment ; in No. 3 it is changed to the gross major second.

Different forms of a tune seldom vary so much as this, but they do vary everywhere. Dr. Petrie states in his "Ancient Irish Airs" tliat in collecting them he hardly ever found two copies of the same tune precisely alike.

It has not been thought necessary, because these songs were sung by simple folk, to make the accompaniments as simple as possible. Some require to be, and have been so treated ; others seem to demand a more elaborate arrangement. When the minstrel of old days sang a ballad like "Chevy Chase" of nearly seventy verses, an occasional chord to sustain the voice was all that was needed. The interest of the hearers lay in the story, not in the music. But when there is no story to tell, or when it has to be told in three verses, and becomes tedious after four, more prominence may well be given to the music. Songs so widely differing as " Brixliam Town" (9), "Sweet Nightingale" (15), "The Rout is out" (45), "The Gipsy Countess" (50), "Henry Martyn ' (53), "The Blue Flame" (67), The Rambling Sailor" (87), and " Bibberley Town" (no), surely require very different treatment to biing out the poetical character in the melody, and to impart seme interest to the accompaniment. I am sure that this is also the opinion of Mr. Bussell, whose valuable help and great kindness I gratefully acknowledge, and to whose excellent taste and musician-like writing the following pages bear too infrequent testimony. The melodies are preserved as faithfully as lay in our power, and that is the chief thing. They are far too good to be iDSt, and our desire has been to present them in a form acceptable to the musical public, and in which they may hold their own in the great competition for public fa\our. Should they fail to do this, they have yet another leg to stand upon ; and put in their plea for preservation as being not ephemeral productions (of whatever merit) ; but melodies which may honestly lay claim to a place in a national collection of the genuine songs of the English people.

H, F. S.

Thurnscoe Rectory, July, 1891.

.V<^ [

BY CHANCE IT WAS

0-\Hi) -^muiiifily .: uifh ixpressiun-

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B\ eh;iiiii' it Mas I met mv love, It did nu' much snr-

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The birds they sa no; riuht glo - riorisly And plea-saiit was the

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jyoi. "BY CHANCE IT WAS."

B> fhancp it was I mt-t m\ lo^c,

It did iiR' niiifli surprise, Down by a shad\ iu\rtK' ;i,ro>i\

Jnst as the sim did rise. The birds thcv sang; iig,ht glorionslv.

And pleasant was the air; And there was none, save shi' aud I Amon^ the Flowers fair. 2 III dewy S'"^ss and green we vialk'd, She timid was aud coy; "Hum ean'st thou i-hoose but pity nne, My pretty pearl, my joy? How comes it that thuii stroH'st this

Sweet maiden, tell ine true. Before hri<i;ht Phuei.us' glittering ray Has supped the morning dew?" 3 "I go to tend the floeks I io\e The ewes aud tender la;ubs. That pasture b\ the m\rtle grove,

'rh\t gamlioi by their dams; There I eiijo_\ a pure content

At dawning of the day." Then, hand in hand, \\e lovers went To see the flock at pli\. 4 And as Ml- wended doMu the read.

I said to her, "Sweet Maid, Three years I in iii\ place abode And three more must be staved. The three that I am bound so fast,

() fairest wait for me. And when the wear\ _\ears are past, I'hen married we will bel'

Ma\

Three \ears are long, three times too long,

'I'<io lenijthv the delay'.' 0 then I answered iu m\ song.

"Hope wastes them quick awa\. Where love is fervent, fain and fast,

.Vnd knoweth not decay. There nimbly fleet the seasons past

Accounted as one day:'

P « *. Hi. t '

,y92.

THE HUNTING OF ARSCOTT OF TETCOTT.

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of No-vem-ber, III tni' \o;ir iif-ty-two;Tliivi' jol - ly fox-huut-ers all Soiisof (lioRliie.^. o'er from Peudtrrow.not foariii<; a \\A coat, 'lo havx' soiin' di -ver - sioii with Ai-s.-ottofTod-olt.

fol- de-ri)l, liil- de -rill, Jul - de - rol Jul Sins, f"' "^^ ■""' '"' ^^ '^''' '"' '''= ■""' '"'■

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fol-de-rol, lol-tle-rol, lol- de-rol, lol; Sinj^, fol-de-rol, lol-de-rol, lol-de-roj, lol; Came

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o'er from PeDcarrow not f(?ariiiif a wet coat. To have some di - ver-siou with Arscott ofTetrott

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,\y 2. THE HUNTING OF ARSCOTT OF TETCOTT.

(1652) 1 Ii] tlu' niuiith uC Novembi'f, ill tin- u-ai- riltv-twu, Thive jolly Fox-hniiters, all Hoiisol' the Blue, C.irne o'er frum Peuearrov.uot fi'aritij;uwe( cu.it , 1^0 have some (li\ersioi) ^\ith Ai'si-ntf un'tt'dtt.

Siii<;-, Fol da rol de rol, lol rie rol iol

Sill" , Ful fie rol de rol, lol de rul lol fol lul . Came o'er Crom Pencarrow, not f" uriuj; a «et eoat , To ha\e Some diversion Mith Aiseott of Tetfott.

2

The daylight Mas rLm iiiii<i, rij;ht radi ui( flio morn, Wheu Arseott of Teteott he Minded his horn; He hleM siieh a flonrish, so loud in the h ill, The rafters resounded, and danrcd to thr c.ill. Siii^, Fol derol de rol, &e: 3 In til'' kill-hen the servants, in kennrl the hoiinrls, lu the stahle the horses were ronsed by thi' sounds, On Black-Cap in saddle sat Arsi-ott ,"To day I will shou \ou <^ood sport, lids. Hark! I'oIIom, away ?" Sin'^, Fol de rol de lol, &e: * 4 :;■,; 5

They tried in the eoppiee.Croin Beeket to Thorn, i '■H:irk,\'iiliMn!'s lid Arscott,"Thebest ol'^ioodhminds.'

There were Rin}i;wood and Rallv.aud Prineess and Seorn H^■iiih,^enlls.''■he shoiited,"Hi.\\ nimbly she Iwnndsf

Theu out bounded Reynard, away they all went, With the wind in their tails, od a beautiful scent

Sing, Fol de Pol de rol , &f: 6 They hunted o'er I.iUon*, oVr field and on moor. And never a hound, man or horse would *jivetfer. Sly Heyuard kept distance fm- iuan\ a mile. And no one dismounted for <j,ate or for stile.

Sing, Fol de ml de rol, tc:

H

Thro' Whitstoneand Ponnilstoi'k.St Gennys they rui As a fireball, red, in the sea set the sun. Theu ont on Penkeuner — a leap, and they go, Full five hundred feet to the orean below. Sing, Fol de rol de ro|,&c:

And nothii.g re-echoes so sweet in the valley, As the music of Rattler, of Phil-pot, and Rally;' Sin^, Foi de rol de rol, &cr 7 "How firdovoii mikeit?"said Simon, the Son "The day th.it's deidining m ill shortly lie done'.'^ire "Wii'll fulluu till Doom's U ly," 4110th Arscott.-Be- Tlie\ hear tile Atlantic with menacing roar. Sing, Fill de rol de rol, &c; 9 Wlien the full moon is shining aselear as theday. John Arscott still hnnteth the country, tlv) say; ^ou may slv him mi Bl:irk-C'ip,and hear,in full i-ry The pack from Peiicarrow to Dazardgoby- Sin<4, Fol de rol de rol,&c:

10

When the tempest is howling, his lnoii ym may hear, And the ba\ of his hounds in their headlong career; Fur Arscott of Teteott loves hunting so well, That he breaks for the pastime from Heaven — or Hell. Sing, Fol de rol de rol, &e:

In sinfjinK. the'^e verse- m.ty be umittfd, fi)r shurlness.

P t .V. l.Thil.'

Upon a Sunday iyiorning.

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Up - 00 a Snuday morning, when Spring was iu its prime, A-

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-lonjj the Chnich line tripping, I lieird the church hells ehime;

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JV'?-^. UPON A SUNDAY MORNING.

Upon a Sunday morning, whf?n Spring was in its prime. Along the Church-lane tripping, I hnar-i the Church-bells chime,

And there encountered Reuben, astride upon tli" »*ile. He blocked the way, so saucy, upon his lips a smile.

2.

Upon a Sunday morning, ther" came a ru'sh of bells. The wind was music-laden, in changeful falls and swells;

Hh would not let me over, he held, he male me stay. And promise I wouii meet him again at close of day.

Upon a Sunday evning, the ringers m th- tower. Were practising their changes, they rang for full an hour,"

And Keub'-n by me walking, would never let me go, Until a Yes 1 answered, he would not take a No.

4.

Again a Sunday morning, and Reuben stands by me. Not now in lane, but chancel, where all the folks may see.

A gold-'n ring h** offers, as to his side i cling, 0 happy Sunday morning, for us the Church-bells ring.

p. f W. I3«.1J

JSr9 4.

THE TREES THEY ARE SO HIGH

#--112 Plaintively. . ^

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leaves they are so green The day is past and gone, sweetheart That yon and I have

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Yon and I mnst bide a

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.r?4. THE TREES THEY ARE SO HIGH,

All till- trees the\ are so hi^h,

IMie li';i\es thev ;»re so y;i\en, Tile fl;i\ is |i:ist ;ind ^oiie, sweet-heart, Th;it \iiii ;iii(l I have seen. It is i-(iM w iiiti'i-'s iii^ht, YoM aiul I Millet liide aluue:

WliiUt iin |'ivlt\ lid is _\oiing And is "^i'"\w'ii!^.

2 In :i garden as I \> ilked,

I heard them lui^h anrl call; There were foiir and tN\eiit\ pla\injl' there, Tle\ |)la\ed with bat and hall () tile rain on the roof. Here and I must make my moan: M hilst iiu |jrett\ lad is \oiiiijj AnrI is iji'ou in<r.

3

I listened in the garden, I looked o'er the wall: Amidst fi\e and twenty gallants there My lu^e exceeded all.

O the wind .lu the thatch. Here ,arid I alone mnst weep- Whilst my pretty lad is young; And is growing;.

4 () father, father dcr

(ireit w riiiiii' tn mc is done,

'I'liat I shi/iild m irried he this dav.

IJel'ore the set el still.

At the hnffle of the g.ile.

Here I toss and can not sleep:

Whilst my pi-etty I. id is young

And is growing.

INIy dan<,:hter, dairijhter dear.

If better he, mure fit, I'll send him to the c-mirt awhile. To point his pretty w it.

Bnt the snow , snoM flakes fall, () and I am chill as dead:

M^'hilst mv pretty lad is yonng AikI is "ii-owing.

" To let the li.vely ladies kio>\v

They ma\ imt touch and taste, I'll liiiifl a Iniueh of rihlions red About his little waist.

Bnt the raven hoirselv croaks, And I shi\er in my bed;

Whilst m\ pretty lad is yonng And is growing.

7 I married was, alas, A I,idy high to be, lu foiirt and stall and stately hall. And bower of tapestry

Bnt the bell did onl\ kncll. And I •.hnddered ,is one cold: "U'heu I wed the pretty lad Not done grow ing.

8 At seventeen he wedded was,

A fither at eighteen, Atnineteou his face was white as milk. And then his gra\e \>as green.

And the daisies \\i're outspi'ead. And bnttercnps of gold.

O'er m\ pi'ettx lad so young

Now eeasefl growing.

mtv bt- oiniirfd in niiifjin^.

P 4W. I.KH-;

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PARSON HORG.

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• •- SS. Boldly

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uow maintaiu The bnrdcii of my song Sirf A sin-gle life per-forie he led Of

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con-sti-tn - tion strong Sir Sing tal - Iv ho! sins: t;il-lv ho.' sing tal - 1> hoi why

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11 JV.Q .5 . P A R S 0 N HOGG.

1

Miss l*;ii;>iiii H'i<4<i- sliLill rj(i\> inaintaiu,

Tin' biii(K'ii ul iiM SIIIIU-, Sir, A siii^li' life, pct-roi-cc he lud, or coiisliditidii .tr'oiiji, Sir.

Sill- tail\-lio.' siii-,t.tll\4io.'

Siii<i, ( ;iil\ -ho.' wh\ zorinds sir. Hi' inoniils his inne.ti) hiiiil the hire Siujj' talls-hii.' 'he huiimls, Sir . 2 AimI eM'r\ (l,i\ he i;oes to AI:tss, He I'ii-st fli.iws uii the bout, Sir, 'rh:it shoiilfl the be.i^les i-him-e to jjiss, He iiiit;li( join in pursuit , Sii-.'

Sill'.i, t;lll\-ho! vie.

3

Th;it P;irsoii littli lovedi (iraver,

Ami Pdter. iii'^lit aiifl morn, Sir, F'or hell anil book,h,iih little care

Hilt (le;irl\ lo\es the lioin. .Sii-. Sins till\-hu.' icr . 4 S. Stephen's l)i\,this holy man

He went a pair to ued. Sir, When ,is the St'i-\ ice he be'^an

Puss li\ th • ('hiircli-\.inl sped. Sir.

Siiiu- tall\-l'o! !<cr. o He shut his book, come on he s.iid, 111 pi IV and bless no more. Sir, He <|ie\\ his surplice o'er his he, id And started for the door, Sir Sinu; fall)- ho! Act-. 6 In piil|)it P.irsoti Ho^o v:,j; sti'ony;. He pre.iched withoiit i book. Sir, And to the point, and never loiiy;, .Viid this the text he took. Sir,

"() talI\-hof 0 tall\-ho.'

Dearl\ beloved — zounds. Sir I mount m\ mare to hunt the hare. Singing t ill\-ho.' the ho,inids. Sir?"

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XOLD BLOWS THE WIND SWEET-HEART"

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.Y96. "COLD BLOWS THE WIND, sweet-heart:

"Cold hlows tlu' wind (ifiii'^ht, SMei't-hcait ,

Cold are the drops ol'raiu; Tile very first love tlmt evn- I hid , In green-wood he was bliiii. 2 I'll do as ranch for m\ trae-love

As any fair maiden may; I'll sit and monrn npon his j^iave A twelvemonth and a day." 3 A twelvemonth and a day beinj^ np,

The ghost began to speak; "Why sit you here by my grave-side From dusk till da\\ning break?" 4 "() think upon the garden, love, Where yon and I did walk. The fairest f|o\^eI• that blossomed (here Is withered on its stalk" 5 "What is it that yon want of me,

And will not let me sleep? Vonr salteD teai's they triekK' down My Minding sheet to steep'.'

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"Now I have monrued upon his gravi A twelvemonth and a day . I'll set my sail before the wind To Haft me far away.

"Oh I «ill now redei'm the pK-dge The pledge that onee I gave. A kiss from fjfC th\ lily white lips Is all of yon I erave" 7 "Cold are m\ lips in deaf li, sweet-heart.

My breath is earthv strong. If von do toneh m\ clay-eold lips. Vonr time will not be long!' 8 Then through the monld he heaved his head,

And through the herbage green. There fell a frosted bramble leaf, It came their lips between. 9 "Now if yon were not trne in word.

As now I know yoa be, I'd tear vou as the withered leaves. Are torn from off the tree. 10 "And well for yon that bramble-leaf

Betwixt our lips was flnng. The living to the livin'j- hold. Dead to the dead belong."

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"I'll set my sail before ih^' wind. Ere comi's the break of day, 111 seek another lover new. And change my roundelay."

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14

FLOWERS AND WEEDS

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M91. FLOWERS AND WEEDS.

Ill m\ j^.irdeii fi^rew plot:tv of 'l'li\iiu\

It uuiilfl fluiirish b\ iii^ht and li\ ii.i\. O'er the M.ill c.uno a I;uI. he to„k jII thi( I Ind , And stole m\ tliyiiu- ;i«.iy. 2 My garden uitli heartsease uas lii-i^ht.

The pMis\ so pie'd and so '^av .■ One bli|j|)ed through the Ji ate, and alas? cruel fate, M\ heartsease took awa\. 3 My ^ATih'W Ji'rev* self-heal and halm.

And speedwell tliats' liini' Inr an himr, Theu Mossdiiis a^^ain, () j^rieMxis n\\ piiu! I'm phindered of eaeh flu\ier. 4 There liidus in iii\ {garden the rue.

And Lo\e-lii>s- a- bleedinj; diuops (liere. The h\ssop and m\rrh,the teazle' and burr, In place of iihissoms fair. 5 The willow with br.mclu's that weep,

The thorn and the c\ press tree, O why were the seeds of dolorons weeds, 'I'has scattered there by thee?

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THE ROVING JOURNEYMAN.

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li^htlj sat him down. With his kit np-on his shonlffiT And a grafting knife in

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JV^S. THE ROVING JOU R NEYIVI AN

\'(iiiii<; J;ii'k Hl' «as a j(){irn>'\ iiiui 'I'liut roM'il from town to tipwn, Aud mIumi hi''(l doiK' a jiili <ii ^^'iik,

He lij;Iill\ s.;it him ilnw n . With his kit npon his shonldir, and

A si;rartin" knife in himl, He ro\ed the coiintr\ rotind ahunt, A rneiT) juMrnr\-man. 2 And when he came In Exeter. The maidens le iped for joy; Said one and all, liofh short and tall.

Here comes a ijaliant hoy The lady dropt her ueedle, and

The maid her I'ryinu-paii Each plainly told her mnther that She loved the joiirnry-man. 3 He had not been in Exeter.

The da\s were barely tliree. Before the \1a\oi-, his s^veet daiij;hter.

She loved him di'sperately ; She bifl him to her mothers house,

She toiik him l)\ the hand. Said siie,"M\ deari-st mother, see I luve tile journey -III in? " 4 Now iMit on thee, thon silly maid!

Sueli folly speak no more. How iMirst thon love a ro\iuu; man. Thon ue'er hast seen before? ' "() mother sweet, 1 do entreat, I love him all I can; Aronnd the eoiinlr\ '^ilad I'll ro\e "With this \oiin'.; journey man. o He need no more fo trndfie afoot.

He'll travel coach and pair; My x\ealth with me — or po\erty With him. content I'll share'.' Now fill the horn with liarleyi'orn.

And flowing fill the cau: Here let ns toast the Mayor's danghter And the rovinji jonrueyraau.

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18

B R I X HA M TOWN

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J>r9 9. BRIXHAMTOWN

1

All ye that lov,- to h^-ar Music pertormed in air. Fray list'^n. and giv*:? ear,

To what I shall perpend . Concerning music, who'd, — -If rightly understood — "Not tind 'twould do him good

To hearken and attend. 2 In Brixham town so rare For singing sweet and fair, Few can with us compare,

We bear a-vay the bell. Extolled up and down By men of high renown. We go from toivn to town;

And none can us excel). 3 There's a man in Brixhain town Of office, and in ayttu. Strove to put singing down.

Which most of men idore. For House of God unmeet , The voice and orpan sweet.' Wh«!n pious men do meet,

To praise their God before. 4 Go question Holy writ, .4nd you will find in it. That seemly 'tis and fit.

To praise and hymn the Lord . On cymbal and on lute, On organ and on flute, With voices sweet, that suit,

All in a fair concord .

In Samuel you may read How one was troubled. Was troubled indeed.

Who crown and sceptre bore; An evil spirit lay On his mind both night and day. That would not go away.

And vexi' ) him very sore. H Then up and uttered one. Said, ".Jesse hath a son, Of singers next to none ;

David his name they say " "So Send for David, fleet- To make me music sweet. That the spirit may retreat,

A nd go fro n me away :' 7 Now when that Divid, hi Kin« Saul had coine to see. And played merrily-

Upon his strinf^ed harp. Th-; Devil in all speed. With music ill agreed. From Saul the Kint;, he fleed.

Impatient to depart 8 So now, my friends, adieu! I hope that all of you Will pull most strong and true.

In strain to serve the Lord. God prosper us, that we. Like anjels .niy a»ree. In sinking merrily

In tune and in accord.

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20

BROOM GREEN BROOM

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X?10. GREEN BROOM

1

ThriT WIS ;ill old III. Ill liu'd iiiit ill the winid.

His h'.ulr Was ;i-<-ii tt i ii'^ nj' liiimni. ^rcii] BriMini;

Ho li 1(1 liiit olK' sun withmit tliiilt, wil limit ^'jod, Wliu lay ill his l)ud till tw. is nnmi, liii^lif noon.

2 Tlu; old mill auoke, one mornin<; nid sjiokc.

Hi' sv\oic hi' would fire the room, tint room,

ir his John would not riso and open his eyes,

And awav to the wiiod to cut Broom, u;-i"i'iMi Broom.

3

So Johnny arose, and he slipju'd uii his clolhes,

And a\\a\ to the wood to cut Bi'oom ^rei'ii F?rnom, He sh.i r])''ned his knives, for once he contrives

I o cut a ^reat liniidle of B moiii , '^i-eeii Broom.

4 When Johnny passed under a l.idy's line house- Passed undei- a lady's fine room, fine room. She ealle(l to he|- maid, "(to fetch me," she said.

"(ro letch me the hoy th.it sells Broom, ;:;reeu Broom

5

When Johnny came into the l.uU's fine house,

And stooi] in the lad\'s fine room, fine icMim,- 'Yoiin<4 Johnny," she said, "Will yon iiive np \oiir trade. And marry i lad\ in hioijm , full Moom?"

H Johnny 'i»vi' his consent, and to church they both went.

And he wedded the lad\ in bloom, full bloom. At market ami fair, all folks do declare.

There is none like the Boy that sold Broom, green Broom.

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X9 II

AS JOHNNY WALKED OUT

, Fur 4 VtJi'ces.

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^Pii AS JOHNNY WALKED OUT.

Ab Johiiii\ wilki'd 'till iiiii' day

It \\M^ i Sinn incr liiur'ii , Himsi'lf hv hiid beiieitli tin- sh;idi'

All of .1 twisti'd thorn , AihI .is he tluTi' l;i\ lazily

A shi'jili 'iflobs puss'd liy And'tvMiS) d<iwii in \"iiiK'l' \ ;ilK'\ . luvc ,

WlnM-f til' M.itci- glidrtli b\ . 2 '() hi\>' \oti seen d ()i-i'tt\ I'Wi-

Tlhit hitii a tiMidcr l.imli, A stiM\i'd fium tlir miliard jllidc

Tilat little Hin- iiid (I nil '{" "() pri'ttv uKiiil ill' iiisMiMi'd ,

'l'hi'\ [),ibsi'il as luTi' 1 111'!" Aiid'tw.is (liiwri ill \uihK'r \ ;ill('\ , love,

WluTr tlu' water ^.lidetli I)}-

SliL' waiidt'iiMl u'er the cuiiiitrv wide

Till" shoe)) she ettiild imi ("ind; And miiiv tiiiub she did upbraid

VtJiiMij J'lhiinv iu her iiiiud. She Noiiirht in le ii\ forest j^reeu

She siiii^ht tlhm low and hij;h, And 'twas down in Mjnder valle\,lo\e,

Where the water "lideth li\ .

"Oh sill\ maid," yiiui',^ Johnny said

"Alone wh\ did ym seek?" Her heart ^^as full of aii',;fr, a iid

The flush \\as in her cheek Where one alone a\aileth nut.

There Iwo \iiiir sliee|i in i\ ^pie, Aiui'tis low 11 111 \iinder \ a lle\ , loX e,

Where (he .^aler •illdelh h\ '.'

Then lo?tlie\ both foi-'^ot their ini'st Thev fniiiid what iieitlier suN;;ht,

Two liiiiiiii hearts lon^ ki'jit apart Tir^elliel- iiiiv. Were brought .

He found the words he joie^ had lacked.

He round and held her e\e : And't\\as do\wi in \ under \ alle\ , l<ive ,

Where the-'water ^lideth by. -"■6 Now married vi're this lo\i;iu; pair.

And joined iii hol\ band, No more th('\ jjo a seekiiej; sheep.

Together hand in hand. Aioiind her feet |)la\ ehildren sweet.

Beneath the snmnier skv And tis down in \onder \alley. love.

Where the water -^lideth b\ .

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TIi*'st- \ersrs iii^v br 'iiiiitled in -^inf^int;

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24

THE lYI ILLERS' LAST WILL.

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.yofg. THE IVIILLERS LAST WILL

TliiMi' wus ;» tiiillcr, ;is \iiii nIi.iII hear,

Loujj; time he li\i'i| in De-Mnishirc

Hi> A* as took sick iiid fliMfll\ ill.

And had iicitiim- to »i-itc his \^ill.

So hi' i-iiil'd ri)J his eldest sun,

S;iid hi' INI V y.l'iss is ^ilmiist run.

If I to thi'c iiu mill sliill ;ii\e,

TrII iiu' ^^\\ it tnll thmril t;ikc to li\e?" ^

"Father," Slid lic."lVl\ ti.imo is Jick,

From r\i'r\ Imshri I'll take a peck .

Fioiii every S''i*>t that I do j^rind.

That I miN thus good living I'iud!'

'"I'li'Mi art a lool'.' the old man said,

"Thoii hast not half acqnired thy ti-ade.

M\ mill to thee I ne'er Mill f^ivi'

For h\ such toll no mau can live:' 3

Then he eall'd up his second son,

S;iid he, "Mv Jilass is almost run.

Ill til thee m\ mill shall make.

Tell me what toll to li\e thoult take?"

"Father \oii kuow my name is Raljth,

From e\i'r\ bushel 111 take a half From i.:\cr\ ^rist th.it I do ^rind.

That I may thus a living find I' 4

"Thon art a fool" tlie old man said :

"Thou hast not half aoinired thy trade. My mill to thee I will not give, F'-r hy siicii toll 00 man may live" Then he call'd np his yoiin'j;est son, Says he, IVly glass is almost run If I In thee my mill shall m.ike Tell me uhit toll, to li\i', thi.il'lt like?" 5

"Father I am voiir yonngest hoy. In taking toll is all my joy. Before I uoiild good living lack, I'd take the \>hole — fors»eir the sack" "Thou art the boy," the old man said. "For thon hast fnll acquired the trade. The mill is thine," (he old mau cried.