"The Golden Ball and the Hangman's Tree"
Tristram P. Coffin, D. K. Wilgus, ed., Folklore International, pp. 23-28, 1967.
[a few excerpts]
There is more than a wealth of scholarship on Child 95, "The Maid Freed from the Gallows." Two full-length books, a baker's dozen major articles, and a host of commentaries, notes, and casual remarks head up the impressive bibliography of this incremental song.[1] Known over most of Europe and throughout the British speaking it has analogues and derivatives in tale, drama, game, cante-fable, and play-party
of the misunderstandings, rationalizations, and localizations normal to tradition. It also is evident that the tale has regularly been presented as a cante-fable and therefore has a true affinity to song.[5]
1. (Jacobs-North Britain). A mysterious stranger gives a girl a golden ball. If she loses it, she is to be hung. While playing with it, she does lose it (possibly because she has been bewitched), and she is sentenced to the gallows. At the gallows, her kin refuse her appeals asking them to locate the ball. However, her lover, after horrifying experiences in an evil house into which the ball has rolled, returns the golden ball just in time. They go off to happiness ever after.[6]
2.
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"Father, father, may I have my golden ball?"
"No, you may not have your golden ball."
"But all the other girls and boys have their golden balls."
"Then you may have your golden ball; but if your lose your golden ball, you will hang on yonder rusty gallery."
"Father, father, I have lost my golden ball!"
"Well, then you will hang on yonder rusty gallery."
Fifty years ago, Broadwood and Gilchrist laid out enough evidence from Danish and Scottish song to show that maidens wore gold to symbolize their virginity.[11] The good ladies believed that as the details of the cante-fable plot vanished the story became one of a girl who has lost the symbol of her virginity. The next step, to a tale of a girl who is being hung because she actually has lost the virginity itself, is easy, especially when so many ballads offer this radical punishment for feminine indiscretion. Thus Broadwood and Gilchrist were able to explain why that old symbol for unfortunate love, the prickly bush, enters. When the girl at the gallows sighs,
"If I ever get out of the prickly bush,
I'll never get in no more"
we know what she means. However, convincing as the implications of the Broadwood-Gilchrist thesis are, there is one place the whole idea needs shoring up. The golden object in the tale or cante-fable tradition is clearly not a symbol of virginity, although it is a charm about which the adventures of the maid and her lover center. To say that it becomes a symbol of virginity simply because gold represents purity in other Northern European ballads is perhaps, though not necessarily, unconvincing. At least, the whole thing would be a lot better off if we could strengthen our evidence so that the fusing of the "golden ball" symbol with the "prickly bush" refrain would really make sense. In the winter of 1964, Robert F. Carter, a student in one of my ballad classes, read Phillips Barry's very typical analysis of a "golden ball" text of Child 95 in The Critics and the Ballad.[12] At the same time he had been devoting himself to a selection from Casanova's Memoires in a paperback book, Pornography and the Law. The passage tells how the gracious Casanova made golden balls weighing about two ounces a piece to use for the combined purpose of contraception and payment in his dealings certain courtesans.
"Here," I added, drawing out the three golden balls, "is a surer and a less disagreeable way of securing you from any unpleasant consequences. After 15 years' experience I can assure you that with these golden balls you can give and take without running the least risk. For the future you will have no need of these humiliating sheaths . . . ,"[13] Carter offered me the hypothesis that the that the maid at the gallows had lost her contraceptive when she lost her golden ball and that this accident accounted for her pregnancy and her subsequent trial.
Carter's idea is collegiate, but nonetheless interesting. For although it is quite certain that the girl in the cante-fable has done no such thing (the balls in the four plots listed above could not conceivably have been contraceptives), it is possible that the use of golden balls as contraceptives would explain how the loss of the golden ball in certain texts enabled the idea that the girl had lost her virginity to enter the song The golden ball as contraceptive would harmonize with the golden circlet as a symbol of virginity in Danish and Scottish songs and make the history of the song as I have derived it from Broadwood and Gilchrist much easier to believe.
However, I did not consider the remarks of Casanova as reproduced in a rather sensational paperback to be the kind of evidence to build a scholarly case on. Thus, I wrote Gershon Legman, who is learned in such matters. He gave me no encouragement, replying, Your inquiry is very flattering, and I only wish I could reply with a slew of fascinating details. Unfortunately, I have only what are called "negative findings" to report. I never heard of "golden balls" as
* * *
I absolutely never ran into this.[14] Oddly, the evidence I was after came from another student, Janet Wikler, in a later ballad course. I mentioned Carter's idea in a lecture and a few days later Miss Wikler told me her father, a doctor, was going to write me on the subject. He wrote the following letter. During a recent discussion with my daughter Janet concerning the ballad of "The Maid Freed From the Gallows," or "The Golden Ball," I remarked to her that a golden object inserted into the uterus has at various times been used as a contraceptive device. Janet asked me whether I could name a book or article where such a reference could be found. I have searched the literature and have been unable to locate any. But this is my story: In the past several years plastic contraceptive devices have been coming into increasing favor in this country, and have been hailed as a practical, new method of contraception. These devices consist of small loops or rings
into the uterus for contraceptive purposes. He explained that a foreign body in the uterus prevented conception, but in order to prevent chemical reaction with the body tissues, or irritation which might cause a cancer, it was necessary that the object be of pure gold.[15] A couple of days later Dr. Wikler sent me a
It is also quite certain that the marchen-like trappings were rationalized and localized as the tale moved into the West Indies and the United States, and that in the case of the ballad variants so much of the action was sloughed that the role of
For centuries, people have known that a stone, ring, or other foreign body in utero is likely to prevent conception. Scientists now believe that newly developed biologically inert plastics can do the job more efficiently, with a minimum of risk and and minimum side effects. But exactly how the intrauterine devices work remains a mystery.[16] I believe Dr. Wikler's remarks and reference make it pretty obvious that Casanova knew what he was about, and I am certain that golden balls were used for contraceptive purposes in those places where "The Hangsman's tree" was flourishing in tale, cante-fable and ballad form. It is quite likely, therefore, that the loss of the golden ball, while not a symbol of loss of purity in the tale or cante-fable, appeared to symbolize loss of purity in truncated ballads and that the rationalization which opened the way for the "prickly bush" refrain was caused by the habit of thinking of golden balls as protectors of virginity as the circlet of gold in the hair was the symbol of purity itself.
This loss was then rationalized through what seemed to be the loss of her contraceptive to a loss of her chastity, a crime for which many ballad heroines have suffered and from which one can only be absolved by an honest marriage.