Excerpt
Notes on Midland County Minstrelsy.
It has often occurred to me that the old country folk-songs are as worthy of a niche in your mausoleum as the more prosy lore to which you allot a separate division. Why does not some one write a Minstrelsy of the Midland Counties? There is ample material to work upon, and not yet spoiled by dry-as-dust-ism. It would be vain, perhaps, to emulate the achievements of the Scottish antiquary; but surely something might be done better than the county Garlands, which, with a few honorable exceptions, are sad abortions, mere channels for rhyme-struck editors. There is one peculiarity of the midland songs and ballads which I do not remember to have seen noticed, viz. their singular affinity to those of Scotland, as exhibited in the collections of Scott and Motherwell. I have repeatedly noticed this, even so far south as Gloucestershire. Of the old Staffordshire ballad which appeared in your columns some months ago, I remember to have heard two distinct versions in Warwickshire, all approaching more or less to the Scottish type:
"Hame came our gude man at e'en."
Now whence this curious similarity in the vernacular ideology of districts so remote? Are all the versions from one original, distributed by the wandering minstrels, and in course of time adapted to new localities and dialects? and, if so, whence came the original, from England or Scotland? Here is a nut for Dr. Rimbault, or some of your other correspondents learned in popular poetry. Another instance also occurs to me. Most of your readers are doubtless familiar with the pretty little ballad of "Lady Anne" in the Border Minstrelsy, which relates so plaintively the murder of the two innocent babes, and the ghostly retribution to the guilty mother. Other versions are given by Kinloch in his Ancient Scottish Ballads, and by Buchan in the Songs of the North, the former laying the scene in London:
"There lived a ladye in London,
All alone and alonie,
She's gane wi' bairn to the clerk's son,
Down by the green-wood side sae bonny."
And the latter across the Atlantic:
"The minister's daughter of New York,
Hey with the rose and the Lindie, O,
Has fa'en in love wi' her father's clerk,
A' by the green burn sidie, O."
A Warwickshire version, on the contrary, places the scene on our own "native leas:"
"There was a lady lived on lea,
All alone, alone O,
Down the greenwood side went she,
Down the greenwood side, O.
"She set her foot all on a thorn,
Down the greenwood side, O,
There she had two babies born,
All alone, alone O.
"O she had nothing to lap them in,
All alone, alone O,
But a white appurn and that was thin,
Down the greenwood side, O," &c.
Here there are no less than four versions of the same ballad, each differing materially from the other, but all bearing unmistakeable marks of a common origin. It would be interesting to know the process by which this was managed.
Footnote 1:In one of the Scottish ballads the same idea is more prettily expressed "leaned until a brier."
COMET SUPERSTITIONS IN 1853....