Strange Survivals

Take again the ballad of “The Elfin Knight” or “The Wind hath blown my Plaid away.” This is found in Scotland, but also as a broadside in the Pepysian collection; it was the subject within the memory of man of a sort of play in farmhouses in Cornwall; it is found in a more or less fragmentary condition all over England. The same ballad is found in German, in Danish, in Wend – and the story in Tyrol, in Siberia, and Thibet.

Buchan, in his “Ballads of the North of Scotland,” gives the ballad of “King Malcolm and Sir Colvin,” but it is based on a story told by Gervase of Tilbury, in his Otia Imperialia, and the scene is laid by him on the Gogmagog Hills in Cambridgeshire. He wrote in the 12th century, and his story is clearly taken from a ballad. So also Buchan’s “Leesome Brand” is found in Danish and Swedish. And “The Cruel Sister” is discovered in Sweden and the Faroe Isles. At an early period there was a common body of ballad, where originated no one can say; the same themes were sung all over the North of Europe, and the same words, varied slightly, were sung from the Tweed to the Tamar, in the marches of Wales and in Ireland.

The greatest possible debt of gratitude is due to the Scots for having preserved these ballads when displaced and forgotten elsewhere, and it speaks volumes for the purity of Scottish taste that it appreciated what was good and beautiful, when English taste was vitiated and followed the fashion to prefer the artificial and ornate to the simple and natural expression of poetic fancy.

It has been said that about the period of James I., the fashion set in for re-writing the old ballads in the style then affected.

There is a curious illustration of this accessible.

A ballad still sung by the English peasants, and found in an imperfect condition in Catnach’s broadsides, is “Henry Martyn.” It is couched in true ballad metre, and runs thus —

“In merry Scotland, in merry Scotland
There lived brothers three,
They all did cast lots which of them should go
A robbing upon the salt sea.

“The lot it fell upon Henry Martyn,
The youngest of the three,
That he should go rob on the salt, salt sea,
To maintain his brothers and he.

“He had not a-sailed a long winter’s night,
Nor yet a short winter’s day,
Before he espied a gay merchant ship
Come sailing along that way.

“Oh when that she came to Henry Martyn,
Oh prithee, now let me go!
Oh no! oh no! but that will I not,
I never that will do.

“Stand off! stand off! said he, God wot,
And you shall not pass by me.
For I am a robber upon the salt seas,
To maintain my brothers and me.

“How far? how far? cries Henry Martyn,
How far do you make it? says he,
For I am a robber upon the salt seas,
To maintain my brothers and me.

“They merrily fought for three long hours,
They fought for hours full three.
At last a deep wound got Henry Martyn,
And down by the mast fell he.

“’Twas a broadside to a broadside then,
And a rain and a hail of blows.
But the salt, salt sea ran in, ran in;
To the bottom then she goes.

“Bad news! bad news for old England;
Bad news has come to the town,
For a rich merchant vessel is cast away,
And all her brave seamen drown.

“Bad news! bad news through London street,
Bad news has come to the King,
For all the brave lives of his mariners lost,
That sunk in the watery main.”

Now there is sad confusion here. The ballad as it now exists is a mere fragment. Clearly the “bad news” belongs to an earlier portion of the ballad, and it induces the King to send against the pirate and to sink his vessel. This “Henry Martyn” is, in fact, Andrew Barton. In 1476, a Portuguese squadron seized a richly laden vessel, commanded by John Barton, in consequence of which letters of reprisal were granted to Andrew, Robert, and John Barton, sons of John, and these were renewed in 1506. The King of Portugal remonstrated against reprisals for so old an offence, but he had put himself in the wrong four years before, by refusing to deal with a herald sent by the Scottish King for the arrangement of the matter in dispute. Hall, in his Chronicle, says: “In June, 1511, the King (Henry VIII.) being at Leicester, tidings were brought him that Andrew Barton, a Scottish man, and a pirate of the sea, did rob every nation, and so stopped the King’s streams that no merchants almost could pass, and when he took the Englishmen’s goods, he said they were Portingale’s goods, and thus he haunted and robbed at every haven’s mouth. The King, moved greatly with this crafty pirate, sent Sir Edward Howard, Lord Admiral of England, and Lord Thomas Howard, son and heir to the Earl of Surrey, in all haste to the sea, which hastily made ready two ships, and without any more abode, took the sea, and by chance of weather, were severed. The Lord Howard lying in the Downs, perceived when Andrew blew his whistle to encourage the men, yet, for all that, the Lord Howard and his men, by clean strength, entered the main deck; then the Englishmen entered on all sides, and the Scots fought sore on the hatches, but, in conclusion, Andrew was taken, which was so sore wounded that he died there; then all the remainder of the Scots were taken with their ship, called the Lion.”

Buchanan, about twenty years after Hall —i. e., in 1582 – also tells the story. Barton he calls Breton with further details. He says that Andrew Breton, though several times wounded, and with one leg broken by a cannon ball, seized a drum and beat a charge to inspirit his men to fight, until breath and life failed.

Now a ballad relative to Sir Andrew Barton has been given by Percy; it is found among the Douce, the Pepysian, the Roxburghe, the Bagford, and the Wood collection of old English ballads. In the Percy MS. the ballad consists of eighty-two stanzas, but there is something lost between the thirty-fifth and the next. It begins: —

“As itt beffell in Midsummer-time
When birds sing sweetlye on every tree,
Our noble king, King Henry the Eighth,
Over the river Thames past he.”

Another version is in the black letter collection. It begins: —

“When Flora, with her fragrant flowers,
Bedeckt the earth so firm and gay,
And Neptune, with his dainty showers,
Came to present the month of May,

“King Henry would a progress ride;
Over the river Thames past he,
Upon a mountain top also
Did walk, some pleasure for to see.”

The first is a recomposition of the earlier ballad in the reign of James I. It makes a historical blunder. It supposes that Lord Charles Howard, who was not born till twenty-five years after the death of Andrew Barton, was sent against the pirate. The memory of the admiral who served against the Armada had eclipsed the fame of the earlier high admiral. The fact of this historic error existing in the ballad marks it as a late composition.

The second ballad is a still later recast, probably of the reign of Charles II. These two later versions would be all that we have, had not the popular memory held to the earliest and original ballad – because associated with a remarkably fine melody. Unhappily, it has retained but a few of the stanzas.

The Robin Hood ballads most fortunately escaped remodelling, and they retain the fresh character of the ancient ballad.

Ravenscroft preserved some ballads in his “Deuteromelia,” 1609. One begins: —

“Yonder comes a courteous knight
Lustily raking over the lay.
He was full ’ware of a bonny lasse,
As she came wandering over the way.
Then she sang, downe a down a down,
Hey down derry.”