Famous Flower- Sullivan (VT) 1933/1940 Flanders D1, D2
[My abbreviated title, the title is not local. From Ancient Ballads III, 1963; Flanders. Notes by Coffin/Flanders follow. Since both D1 and D2 are from the same informant, I'm combining them here.
R. Matteson 2015]
The Famous Flower of Servingmen
(Child 106)
The tradition of "The Famous Flower of Servingmen" has died out in England. It is still known in the northeastern United States but not to the rest of the country. Its New England survival can probably be laid to its inclusion in The Blackbird Songster (New York, c. 1845) and its circulation about the region in other printed forms, such as the one in The Charms of Melody. All five texts given below and the two in Phillips Barry's British Ballads from Maine, 227 (the entire recovered American canon), are from print or close to it.
On page 280 of British Ballads from Maine one will find a reprint of The Blackbird, songster text, which Barry feels the printer must have taken from oral tradition. It is related to the fragment sent to Percy in 1776 by the Dean of Derry (See Child, II, 429). In it the stepmother rather than the mother is the villain, and most of the analogous stanzas are markedly different in phrasing and even detail. The text Barry got from the Irish woman in Brunswick and the Flanders B-D2 series below are somewhat closer than this to the Derry fragment. Although all of these also blame a step-mother rather than a true mother, Barry's text and Flanders B include the sweet William pseudonym, and Flanders C, D1, and D2 have at least a single exactly corresponding stanza. One is safe in saying that the Derry fragment, the Songster text, and the five pieces recovered from Northeastern oral tradition are of the same general sort. However, Flanders A, the version from print, is close to Child's full text, a seventeenth-century broadside in which the heroine is Elise and not Ellen or Eleanor. The Charms of Melody text is somewhat longer than the Child broadside, thirty-four stanzas against twenty-eight, but the similarities are striking line after line. See also Greig and Keith, 85-86.
D1. Famous Flower of Serving Men. Text copied down by Mrs. Harry Thomas, as sung by her mother, Mrs. Ellen M. Sullivan of Springfield, Vermont. See version D2. M. Olney, Collector; April 8, 1940.
Famous Flower of Serving Men
My father married me to a knight.
My stepmother owed me a woeful spite.
She sent five robbers to me one night
To rob my court and slay my knight.
I cut my hair and changed my name
From Mary Fair unto Lord William,
And horse and saddle I did ride
With a sword and scarf down by my side.
I rode along to the King's hall
And loud for service I did call;
I gave the butler a diamond ring
To take my message to the King.
When the King came down, he made a bower
Saying, "Deck yourself with fragrant flowers,
But first tell me what you can do,
That you may suited be thereto."
"Oh, I can be your stable groom
Or I can be your kitchen cook,
Or I can stand in your lordly hall
To wait on the nobles when they call."
Now the King went out one day to hunt
She got the flute and played a tune
Saying, "I was once at my father's hall
And forty servants was at my call."
Now when the King from hunting came,
"What news, what news," the King did say.
"Good news, good news, kind sir," he said,
"Your serving boy is a lady fair."
"If that be true what you tell me,
Lord of Manor I'll make of thee;
If that be a lie you are telling me,
That tree yonder is your dying tree.
"Come bring me down that suit above
And dress this lady to be my love."
"O no, no, no, kind sir," she said,
"Pay me my wages and let me go."
"Come bring me down that suit of white
And I'll dress that fair maid to be my bride."
"O yes, O yes, kind sir," she said,
"In marriage bonds I do agree."
D2. Famous Flower of Serving Men. Mrs. Ellen M. Sullivan of Springfield, Vermont, sang this fragment to Phillips Barry and H. H. F. H. H. F., Collector; July 7, 1933
My father married me unto a knight;
My stepmother owed me an awful spite.
She sent five robbers to me one night
To rob my court and slay my knight.