"George Collins" in Hampshire
David Atkinson
Shortly after George B. Gardiner published texts of “George Collins” collected in Hampshire (Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1909: 299–302), Barbara M. Cra’ster (1910) argued that the ballad should be considered more or less cognate with the Scottish “Clerk Colvill” (Child 42). Gardiner himself had compared it with “Lady Alice” (Child 85). “George Collins” does, however, include a substantial narrative unit which is not present in the texts of “Lady Alice” printed by Child. This is the opening section, where George Collins walks out on a May morning and meets a fair pretty maid washing her marble stone; she greets him and predicts that his life will not last long, and he embraces and kisses her before returning home. Subsequently, the story is comparable to “Lady Alice.”
In England, this “marble stone” opening is (with one possible exception) restricted to versions of “George Collins” from Hampshire: six in Gardiner’s manuscripts from southern Hampshire, dated 1906–08, and one recorded by Bob Copper farther north in the county in 1955.[1] The possible exception is a version collected later by Mike Yates in Gloucestershire, which roughly accords with the Hampshire versions but may have been influenced by the folk revival. Generally, the revival has meant that the ballad with the marble stone opening is now much more widely sung; Bob Copper himself sings it (When the May Is All in Bloom 1995).
Cra’ster describes the three main incidents of the Hampshire versions of “George Collins” as follows:
1. His meeting with a maiden by a stream, the maiden evidently having a supernatural nature.
2. His return home and death as the result of the meeting.
3. His true-love’s realization of the tragedy through seeing his coffin, and her consequent death. (1910: 106)
These three incidents, she maintains, form exactly the main plot of “Clerk Colvill”— or, more exactly, the “Clerk Colvill” story as reconstructed on the assumption that the anglophone type is cognate with various European ballads. These include Scandinavian types (Jonsson et al. 1978: TSB A 63)—Danish “Elveskud” (Grundtvig et al. 1853–1976: DgF 47), Norwegian “Olav Liljukrans,” Faroese, “Ólavur Riddararós,” Icelandic “Ólafur Liljurós,” Swedish “Herr Olof och älvorna”—as well as the Breton “An Aotrou Nann,” francophone “Le roi Renaud,” and Italian, Spanish, and other ballads. (The main arguments over presumed lines of transmission are summarized in Jonsson 1992.)
Child calls the versions of the anglophone “Clerk Colvill” “deplorably imperfect” and gives the following summary of the ballad type, much of which is actually based on inference from the European texts:
Clerk Colvill, newly married as we may infer, is solemnly entreated by his gay lady never to go near a well-fared may who haunts a certain spring or water. It is clear that before his marriage he had been in the habit of resorting to this mermaid, as she is afterwards called, and equally clear, from the impatient answer which he renders his dame, that he means to visit her again. His coming is hailed with pleasure by the mermaid, who, in the course of their interview, does something which gives him a strange pain in the head, —a pain only increased by a prescription which she pretends will cure it, and, as she then exultingly tells him, sure to grow worse until he is dead. He draws his sword on her, but she merrily springs into the water. He mounts his horse, rides home tristful, alights heavily, and bids his mother make his bed, for all is over with him.
(Child 1882–98, 1: 372)
European ballads also add the eventual discovery by the hero’s wife that her husband is dead and her own resulting death. Cra’ster essentially emphasizes narrative similarities between this composite story and “George Collins,” along with the seemingly similar names Colvill, Colven, and especially Colin (Child 42C), to suggest that the Hampshire “George Collins” preserves an original form from which both “Lady Alice” and the anglophone “Clerk Colvill” derived.
Subsequently, a much longer study of “George Collins” by Samuel Bayard appeared (1945). He noted American versions of the “Lady Alice” story with the “marble stone” opening, usually titled “Johnny Collins.” Arguing that the hero’s death presents a motivation problem in all versions of “Lady Alice,” which is only compounded by the conviction that the maid washing the stone cannot be one and the same as Collins’s true-love, who later sees his coffin approaching, Bayard was driven to concur with Cra’ster’s argument that “Lady Alice” and “Clerk Colvill” are essentially one and the same. He elaborates the “Clerk Colvill” story by drawing on both the anglophone texts of Child 42 and its supposed European counterparts, drawing particular attention to two Italian texts where a knight encounters a washerwoman and embraces her.[2] He then goes on to identify some specific points which reveal greater or lesser similarities between “George Collins” and “Clerk Colvill” and the European ballads:
1. Washing the marble stone in “George Collins” is equated with washing clothes upon a stone in “Clerk Colvill,” as in Child 42 C especially. The Italian texts also describe the woman whom the knight embraces as a washerwoman. (1945: 88–89)
2. The woman’s prediction of the hero’s imminent death in “George Collins” is paralleled in “Clerk Colvill.” The hero of Breton and Scandinavian ballads is offered a choice between a long sickness and a quick death. The tone of this part of “George Collins” is, however, more sorrowful than in the other ballads. (1945: 89) 3. The woman at the beginning of the ballad is associated with water in both “George Collins” and “Clerk Colvill,” especially Child 42 C, as well as the Italian ballad. (1945: 89–91)
4. The hero returns home to die in “George Collins,” “Clerk Colvill,” and the European ballads. The request to his mother to make his bed is paralleled in Scandinavian texts. (1945: 91)
5. The hero’s head is bound up (presumably) to ease his pain in “George Collins,” while the same action seemingly hastens his death in “Clerk Colvill” (Child 42 A, B). (1945: 91–92)
6. There is an attempt to keep the fact of the hero’s death from his truelove in the European ballads, which is not present in “Clerk Colvill,” but which can be compared with the latter part of “George Collins,” when his true love is told that the coffin she sees approaching is that of her former lover. Her own subsequent demise also has parallels in the European ballads. (1945: 92–93)
7. Finally, there is the matter of names, Collins being compared with Colven (42 A), Colvill (42 B), and especially Colin (42 C) in “Clerk Colvill.” (1945: 94)
Bayard concludes that the woman washing the marble stone in “George Collins” is a supernatural being akin to the mermaid of “Clerk Colvill”—Collins’s fairy mistress (1945: 93). This then explains her prediction of Collins’s death, his embracing her after she has foretold his death, and his mortal lover’s subsequent uncertainty as to whose coffin she sees approaching (1945: 93–94). So “Lady Alice” and “Clerk Colvill” are considered as a single type:
All appearances, then, seem to argue not only similarity, but identity for these two pieces. They suggest strongly that Lady Alice must be simply another offshoot of the ancient Clerk Colvill ballad— abbreviated and obscured in most texts, but still having one version (“Johnny Collins”) that tells the entire ballad story, as it is found nowhere else in English folksong.... No two ballads in English are more closely allied. (1945: 100)
Bayard further suggests that the association of the supernatural being in the anglophone ballads with water, unlike the hills or woods of Scandinavian or Breton texts, may have been influenced by Gaelic traditions (1945: 94–100). Accordingly, he rejects the suggestion of Cra’ster (following Child) that the silken “sark,” or shirt, which the mermaid is washing in “Clerk Colvill” signifies a betrothal gift and instead relates it to the characteristic activity of the banshee of Gaelic tradition:
Her station...is generally at fords in the river; the stone on which she folds the shirts of the doomed is in the middle of the water; at times she is seen seated by pool or stream washing the linen of those soon to die, and folding and beating it with her hands on a stone in the middle of the water—at which times she is known as the bean nighe, or washing woman, and her being seen is a sure sign that death is near.[3] (1945: 99)
A Scottish-Irish connection would then account for the presence of “Johnny Collins” in America (1945: 98).
Harbison Parker enthusiastically embraced Bayard’s arguments for allying “George Collins”/“Johnny Collins” with “Clerk Colvill” (1947). He took issue, however, with Bayard’s identifying the “Clerk Colvill” mermaid and the woman washing her marble stone in “George Collins” with a banshee. Instead, he argues that the elf woman of Scandinavian ballads of the “Elveskud” kind was transformed into a mermaid associated particularly with water, as in the Scottish “Clerk Colvill,” in Shetland and Orkney, where elves are much rarer in tradition. He draws comparisons with the Scandinavian ballads to elucidate further a number of the points already raised by Bayard pertaining to both “Clerk Colvill” and “George Collins”:
1. In the Scandinavian ballads, the elf woman offers the hero a silken shirt. This, along with the function of a sark or shirt in other Scottish ballads like “Allison Gross” (Child 35) and “The Elfin Knight” (Child 2), suggests that the laundered sark is indeed connected with betrothal. (1947: 266–70)
2. When the woman summons the hero in “George Collins,” her cries do not express grief, as Bayard believed, but represent a salutation like that of the elf women in the Scandinavian ballads. (1947: 270–73)
3. The woman’s ability to predict the hero’s imminent death in “George Collins” is readily explained if she is equated with the elf woman of the Scandinavian ballads and the mermaid of “Clerk Colvill,” who, themselves, directly bring about his death. (1947: 273)
4. In Faroese ballads, after one of the elf women has given him a poisoned draught, she commands the hero to kiss her. This parallel may explain why the hero of “George Collins” proceeds to kiss the maid even after she has foretold his death. (1947: 273–74)
Parker also cites Grundtvig to support the onomastic transformation of Ólavur, the hero of the Faroese and Icelandic ballads, into (Clerk C)olvill (1947: 281, 283). (He is also responsible for the somewhat far-fetched suggestion that Clerk Colvill has some connection with Harry Colvile, a minister from Orkney who was murdered in Shetland in 1596 [1947: 283–84].)
Cra’ster, Bayard, and Parker effectively equate the Hampshire “George Collins” not just with the Scottish “Clerk Colvill” but with a presumed pan-European ballad type (also Forslin 1962–63; Jonsson 1992). Subsequently, there has been a broad consensus that at the very least “Lady Alice” (including the Hampshire oikotype) and “Clerk Colvill” represent one and the same ballad type. Bronson admitted the plausibility of the argument (1959–72, 2: 392). Coffin certainly accepted it (1977: 86–87). Wilgus admitted a thematic, though not necessarily genetic, link (1970: 169–72). Buchan placed the two ballads in the same “supertype” (1986: 251; 1991a: 145). It has become orthodox to write Child 42/85, and this has the added attraction that it is possible to do so without casting aspersions upon Child himself since the Hampshire “George Collins” was not available to him.
The lone voice of dissent is W. F. H. Nicolaisen, who poses a methodological objection to equating ballads from different times and places on the basis of an onomastic similarity when all that they share otherwise is the odd plot feature (1992). So he concedes that Colven (Child 42A) may readily have given rise to Colvill (42B) on the one hand and Colin (42C) on the other, while the possibility of secondary projection of the final k of Clerk suggests a potential precursor in *Clerk Olven, which could in turn be related to the Olav-type names of Scandinavian ballads (1992: 37). Yet beyond this, “the only feature which all the ballads which are supposed to be associated with Child 42 have in common is the statement that a son goes to his mother to tell her that he is about to die” (1992: 37). Accordingly, he maintains that it is not permissible to speak of “Clerk Colvill,” “Elveskud,” “Ann Aotrou Nann,” and “Le roi Renaud” as all part of a single international ballad type and certainly not to designate it “Clerk Colvill” (1992: 37).[4]
The same principle applies within the anglophone ballad area. Again, there is an undeniable onomastic similarity between George, Johnny, or Giles Collins in versions of “Lady Alice” and Clerk Colin in Child 42C. All the same, a salutary lesson exists in the fact that the heroine of “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight” (Child 4) is called variously (May) Colvin, Colvine, Colven, Colin, Collin, or Colinn, and there is no suggestion of any genetic relationship between that ballad and “Clerk Colvill” (1992: 38). Moreover, even the onomastic evidence for a link between George Collins, as representing a putative “original” form, and the Scottish Clerk Colvill requires an awkward (though not impossible) sequence of change from Collin(s) to Colvin to Colvill(e) (1992: 39). More importantly, however, if “Clerk Colvill” is not considered cognate with various European ballads, then it is not legitimate to combine it with them to construct a hypothetical ballad which then offers points of seeming similarity with “George Collins” (1992: 39–40). In other words, if no special weight is given to the onomastic similarities alone, then “Lady Alice” and “Clerk Colvill” must be compared on their actual shared features, which amount to little more than the statement that a son goes to his mother to tell her that he is about to die. In that case, “Child was undoubtedly right in assigning these two ballads two separate numbers in his type catalogue” (1992: 40).
It is worth examining in a little more detail three of the points where “George Collins” and “Clerk Colvill” have been assumed to tell the same story.
1. Washing her marble stone
The encounter between the male protagonist and the woman who is washing is evidently at least partly amatory in both “Clerk Colvill” and “George Collins.” The mermaid, however, is washing a “sark of silk” (Child 42A, B) or just silk (42C). Only in the last version is she described as washing it upon a stone, and even there it is not specifically marble. In contrast, the maid in “George Collins” is washing not a piece of fabric but the marble stone itself. She might be pictured washing her doorstep or hearthstone. The meeting in “Clerk Colvill” appears to be set somewhere out in the open, by “Clyde’s water” in 42C (see Nicolaisen 1992: 40–41). The meeting in “George Collins” presumably takes place at the maid’s dwelling (she is usually washing her marble stone), even though Collins may have to cross water to reach her. On a denotative level, or as a visual image, the two male-female encounters are potentially very different.
On a connotative level, however, the two scenes do tend to converge. The sark of “Clerk Colvill” may recall those in “The Elfin Knight” and other ballads, where a sark or shirt may function as a love token but also carries allusions to death and the grave (Child 1882–98, 5: 284; Toelken 1995: 115–17). Similarly, the marble stone of “George Collins” alludes to the grave- or tombstone, as it does in rhymes from English and Scottish folktales:[5]
Apple tree, apple tree hide me
In case the old witch will find me
If she do she’ll break my bones
And bury me under the marble stones. (Philip 1992: 67)
Nevertheless, while there is no denying that there is something mysterious or fey about the maid in the Hampshire “George Collins,” there is a world of difference between a “fair pretty maid” and a mermaid. When the hero draws his sword on the female character in “Clerk Colvill,” she turns back into a fish and vanishes. Nicolaisen (1992: 34) concurs with Buchan (1986; 1991a; 1991b: 74–75) that “Clerk Colvill” functions as an explicit (and culture-specific) warning of the dangers of amatory involvement with the supernatural world. It is very difficult to substantiate a similar claim for “George Collins.”
2. A napkin to tie round my head
When George Collins asks a member of his family for a napkin to bind his head, it seems like a homespun attempt to relieve the pain, even though his imminent demise appears inevitable (Buchan 1994: 33). In “Clerk Colvill,” however, it is the mermaid herself who invites Colvill to cut a “gare,” or strip of cloth, from the sark she has been washing. She seems to delight in the increased pain that he suffers after binding the cloth around his head (“merrily laughd the mermaiden” in Child 42A) and predicts that he will endure intensifying pain until he is dead. The cloth itself could be an integral cause of his death.
Both the placing of this incident within the narrative structure, as well as the relationships between the characters involved, are different in the two ballads. Nevertheless, the connotation of imminent death attached to the action is certainly consistent between them. That connotation is perhaps best exemplified by “The Suffolk Miracle” (Child 272), where the action of a woman tying a handkerchief around her lover’s head is explicitly associated with the discovery that he is dead. It is worth noting, too, that “The Suffolk Miracle” has various parallels among folktales, as well as in literary form in Bürger’s Lenore (Child 1882–98, 5: 58–65).
3. Fair Eleanor (Ellender or Helen)
If the maid “washing her marble stone” at the beginning of “George Collins” is considered analogous to the mermaid of “Clerk Colvill,” it is then improbable that she can be the same character as the woman who later sees the coffin approaching. It is certainly the case that the Hampshire versions all describe at the beginning of the ballad “a fair pretty maid” apparently engaged in domestic activity, whereas Fair Eleanor sounds like a grander lady in a hall or a “room so fine,” working her silk or “silver twine.”
On the other hand, on his return home, George Collins requests his mother to bury him under the marble stone against Fair Eleanor’s hall, wall, or home. So the two are connected by their association with the marble stone—“the sign of fair Helen” in one version (Gardiner MS H1193)—and this functions as prima facie evidence that they are one and the same character. In some American versions, their identity is even more explicit:
Johnny Collins rode out to the fields one day,
When the flowers were all in full bloom;
Who did he spy but his own fair Ellen
A-washing a white marble stone. (Davis 1929: 347–48[B])
Even Bayard was sure that some American singers identified the maid washing her marble stone with Collins’s lover who later spies his coffin (1945: 80).[6]
Bayard, however, is insistent that they cannot be one and the same because then the ballad would be “utterly senseless” (and would not be cognate with “Clerk Colvill” in this regard) (1945: 79–81). His primary reason for this conclusion is that the maid foretells Collins’s death, whereas his lover is seemingly uncertain whose coffin she sees. Yet this is merely a matter of interpretation, for she can surely be (fearfully) seeking confirmation of her own presentiment. Only if, as Parker claims on the basis of Scandinavian ballads and “Clerk Colvill,” she directly brings about his death (1947: 273–274), does the identification of maid and true-love appear impossible (and even then not absolutely if a motive of deception can be imputed to her). The idea that a man’s lover should foretell his death and be subsequently proved right gives a chilling turn to a ballad that Child (1882–98, 2: 279) described as a sort of counterpart to “Lord Lovel” (Child 75). The fair maid washing her marble stone can have a sort of second sight without being “evidently of a supernatural nature” (Cra’ster 1910: 106).
As these three cruxes illustrate, the comparative textual study of “George Collins” and “Clerk Colvill” needs to consider the ballads on at least three different levels: 1) a denotative or textual level which considers the art of storytelling in song and also the variations that affect a particular narrative; 2) a metaphorical or figurative level of connotations shared among different texts, which make up an important part of the “grammar” of balladry; and 3) a further level which comprises textual reception and draws on both denotative and connotative levels as well as extratextual factors to produce a “reading” of the text. At the denotative level, it is not so easy to maintain that “George Collins” and “Clerk Colvill” tell the same story, while at the connotative level there is certainly some shared ground. The slender evidence available from singers and others suggests that “George Collins” is considered a distinct entity. Nevertheless, a part of the dynamic of textual reception must recognize the association of the ballads, within both the Child corpus and the body of ballad scholarship that has subsequently grown up around them and has in some degree established forever the idea that there is a connection between the two types.
Notes
1. Gardiner MSS H327, H419, H439, H439a, H658, H1193; Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1909: 299-302; White 1955; Copper 1973: 246-47; Folk Songs of Britain 1968-71, 4; Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 1961: 72-73; Voice of the People 1998, 3; Songs and Southern Breezes 1977. Cf. Child 85A, B, C; 1882-98, 3: 514-15, 515; Haggard 1935: 170-71; Broadwood LEB/4/179-82; R. Hook, broadside printer's catalogue (matched by title only); Sharp 1974, 1: 106-7; Universal Songster [1825-26], 3: 16 (a parody); Yates NSA C796/19 C4 (VWML CD 4). My thanks to Mike Yates for telling me about this last item, which is also included on Up in the North and Down in the South (2001).
2. Under the bridge of Rella (Diamantina) is a washerwoman. A knight passes by. The washerwoman goes into the water; the knight follows and embraces her. He goes home all wet, asks his mother to put him into bed and his horse into the stall; make him some supper and give his horse fodder; dig him a grave and bury his horse, too. He also directs bells to be rung over him and says he and his horse have many knife stabs (1945: 85).
3. Compare the figure encountered in Scottish tradition in Alec Stewart's tale of "The Shepherd and the Wee Woman" (Douglas 1987 70-71.
4. Nicolaisen (1991) has also drawn attention to the more general problems involved in speaking of the "internationality" of ballads. Long-established trade links between Scandinavia and Scotland can perhaps reasonably be thought to have provided a channel for cultural transmission, but it is unknown whether ballads were translated from one language to another, or whether what was transmitted across geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries was instead a combination of narrative outline and certain motifs. Fischer takes a cautious line when discussing "Clerk Colvill" and the Faeroese "Ólavur Riddararós": "the story lines in the Faroese and Scots versions are like enough to allow some comparison to be made in how the two areas deal with a similar theme"(1998: 191). The shared ground among ballads from different regions may more readily occur at the semiotic level outlined in the analysis of Danish ballads by Jacobsen and Leavy (1988). See also de Rhett (1986).
5. For example, "...and that's my story" (1991: booklet, 27-29); Briggs (1970-71: part A Folk Narratives, 1: 270-71, 432-35, 441-42, 473-74); Philip (1992: 63-68, 146). Toelken (1995: 115) notes that the phrase "marble town" is common as a euphemism for the graveyard in the southern United States.
6. On the other hand, an English revival singer told me that he had always thought of the two women as different but did not, therefore, see the first as a water sprite or mermaid.