Mary Hamilton; The Group Authorship of Ballads
by Albert H. Tolman
PMLA, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Jun., 1927), pp. 422-432
XXI. MARY HAMILTON; THE GROUP AUTHORSHIP OF BALLADS
I. THE SOURCE OF "MARY HAMILTON"
THE interesting ballad "Mary Hamilton" appears in Child's collection in 22 full versions and six fragments. The heroine is usually represented to be one of the four Maries attending upon Mary Stuart. Hence it was natural to suppose that a certain known case of child-murder at the court of Queen Mary, ending in the execution of the unhappy mother, was the source of this ballad presenting a similar story. On December 21, 1563, Thomas Randolph, an agent of the English government in Scotland, wrote to Cecil as follows:
The Queen's apothecary got one of her maidens, a French woman, with child. Thinking to have covered his fault with medicine, the child was slain. They are both in prison, and she [i. e., Queen Mary] is so much offended that it is thought they shall both die.
Ten days later, on December 31, Randolph wrote: "The apothecary and the woman he got with child were both hanged this Friday."[1] Sir Walter Scott believed this incident to be the source of the ballad, but comments thus:
It will readily strike the reader that the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition; the French waiting-woman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the Queen's apothecary into Henry Darnley.
Scott did not notice that Darnley first came to Scotland in 1565. In his Ballad Book, 1824, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe pointed out that "during the reign of the Czar Peter [of Russia, in 1719], one of his Empress's attendants, a Miss [Mary] Hamilton, was executed for the murder of a natural child." He added: "I cannot help thinking that the two stories have been confused in the ballad."[2] Later Sharpe became convinced "that the Russian tragedy must be the original,"[3] that is, the real source of the ballad. In 1889, in his introduction to the ballad in Volume III of his collection, Child declared:
This opinion [of Sharpe] is the only tenable one, however surprising it may be or seem that, as late as the eighteenth century, the popular genius, helped by nothing but a name, should have been able so to fashion and color an episode in the history of a distant country as to make it fit very plausibly into the times of Mary Stuart.
Concerning the Russian incident, Child notes that Mary Hamilton was maid-of-honor to the Empress Catharine, that she was remarkably beautiful, and that some accounts represent her as at one time a mistress of Czar Peter. The father of the murdered child was known, but went unpunished. The mother was "executed on March 14, 1719, the Tsar attending. She had attired herself in white silk, with black ribbons, hoping thereby to touch Peter's heart. She fell on her knees and implored a pardon. But a law against the murder of illegitimate children had recently been promulgated afresh and in terms of extreme severity"; and she was duly beheaded.[4]
A few more sentences from Child deserve attention:
It will be observed that this adventure at the Russian court presents every material feature in the Scottish ballad, and even some subordinate ones ..... We have the very name Mary Hamilton ..... The appeal to sailors and travellers in the ballad shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land-not that of her ancestors.
Mary says in the A version:
14 "Here's a health to the jolly sailors,
That sail upon the sea;
Let them never let on to my father and mother
That I cam here to dee.
15 "Oh little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
What lands I was to travel through,
What death I was to dee."
Child says further:
There is no trace of an admixture of the Russian story with that of the French woman and the Queen's apothecary, and no ballad about the French w oman i s known to have existed ..... It is remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.
Andrew Lang published an article in Blackwood's Magazine for September, 1895,[5] in which he opposed Child's conclusion. Though his article appeared in 1895, Lang knows nothing of eight additional versions of the ballad which were collected by Scott and preserved at Abbotsford, and which were printed by Child in 1892 at the close of his volume IV. One of these texts, as we shall see later, is all-important, and gives strong support to the view of Lang.
Lang calls attention to a remark of John Knox concerning the immoralities of the court of Mary Stuart. Knox says:
" 'What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit. .... Here then," says Lang, "is a tale of the Queen's French waiting-woman hanged for murder, and here is proof that there actually were ballads about the Queen's Maries."
Lang shows that popular ballads in the style of "Mary Hamilton" were not being composed after 1719. At that time, also, no poet would have transferred back to the distant reign of Queen Mary a fresh, piquant scandal, about which men would be eager to hear.
But Lang's main and unanswerable proof that the ballad cannot have originated in 1719 is yet to be noted. He holds that the wide diffusion of this song-story and the many different forms of the tale must be the result of "a long period of oral recitation by men or women accustomed to interpolate, alter, and add, in the true old ballad manner"; and he believes that these "numerous, striking, and fundamental" variations could not have been "evolved between 1719 and 1802." Lang here assumes that the traditional history of this ballad was practically complete in 1802, the year when Scott published a fragment of three stanzas.
It is difficult to give an adequate conception of the many forms of the story. Lang has a vivid summary of the numerous mutually contradictory features in the versions known to him. We have in this ballad a striking example of what may be called creative tradition.[6]
Let us note a few of the many differences in the various versions. In eleven of the twenty-two fuller texts, the heroine is called "Mary Hamilton." In five she is plain "Mary." In four she is "Mary mild"; the epithet "mild" is transformed to "Myle" in one version, to "Moil" in another, to "Miles" in a third. In two versions she is called both "Mary Hamilton" and "Mary mild." In one longer text she is "Lady Maisry," and in one she has no name.
In the versions the guilty lover is "the highest Stewart of a'," or "the King," or "the prince." In others he is simply a young man; in two he is "Sweet Willie"; in one text he is a butler; in one an apothecary, "a pottinger"; in eight versions he is not designated in any way. That Mary's kinsfolk would be glad to ransom her is stated in four texts, all Abbotsford copies; that they would avenge her death if they should learn of it is asserted in five versions, all in the Abbotsford collection. In the T version Mary Hamilton says:
12 "Let neither my father nor mother ken,
Nor my bauld brethren three,
For muckle wad be the gude red bluid
That wad be shed for me."
In one text the king offers to forgive Mary, in one the Queen makes the same offer. In both cases the proffered mercy is
scorned. A ballad is very apt to contain portions or touches borrowed from other favorite story-songs. There are several cases in the different texts of "Mary Hamilton" of this ballad-mixture, or ballad-contamination. The most striking example is the fact
that two versions have taken on the close of No. 95 in Child.
"The Maid Freed from the Gallows," thus transforming the story by giving it a happy ending. Version X, from the Abbotsford
collection, is noteworthy. It takes over from No. 95 the appeal of the girl to her true-love, imploring him to rescue her;
but he refuses to intervene, and this appeal becomes only a vivid final touch of suspense. In version D Mary has been told that she is to be wedded in "Edinburgh town," and she cannot understand why all who behold her are weeping.
15 "O what means a' this greeting?
I'm sure it's nae for me;
For I'm come this day to Edinburgh town
Weel wedded for to be."
Professor Louise Pound's conception of the traditional process in the life of a ballad, as expressed in her book, Poetic Origins
and the Ballad, is entirely incidental to her main contentions; but it seems to me inadequate. For her, "the crudity and the
unliterary quality increase with the lapse of time, and by popular preservation." In general she recognizes only "the
degenerative effects of oral preservation."[7] In a later article she is more guarded, but declares: "The typical process, for
the great majority of ballads, is a process of decay."[8]
Such a view does not apply at all to "Mary Hamilton." We have here the operation of a creative tradition. The numerous
texts of this ballad are, it seems to me, a conclusive argument against those who look upon tradition, even under favorable
circumstances, as a corrupting and degrading influence. Although the twenty-two fuller versions of the ballad show many
striking differences, on the whole they are all excellent. But I cannot see why Child designates the occasional touches of
extravagance, platitude, or sentimentality as "spurious passages." We cannot accept the excellent products of the traditional
process, and then call every undesirable expression or feature spurious.
When Child wrote his introduction to the ballad, he declared that no specific reference to the story of Queen Mary's apothecary
and the French woman had been found in any text. But the U version, one of the Abbotsford collection, printed in 1892 at the close of Child's fourth volume, contains this stanza:
13 "My love he was a pottinger,
Mony drink he gae me,
And a' to put back that bonnie babe,
But alas! it wad na do."
This U text, we are told, was "communicated to Scott, January 7, 1804, by Rev. George Paxton, Kilmaurs, near Kilmarnock, Ayrshire (afterwards professor of divinity at Edinburgh); from the mouth of Jean Milne, his 'aged mother, formerly an unwearied singer of Scottish songs'."[9] Rev. Mr. Paxton had seen Scott's fragmentary text of three stanzas, as reprinted in the Edinburgh Review from the first edition of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; but he and his mother knew nothing of the importance of the apothecary, the "pottinger."[10]
The U version shows no unmistakable coloring from the Russian incident. The young woman's name is simply Marie; the queen calls her "my Marie"; her father is "the Duke of York"; her lover is "a young man," "a pottinger." Motherwell and Maidment believed that references in some versions to the drugging of the mother in order to prevent childbirth were derived from the presence and the action of the apothecary in the Scottish story. This drugging is more or less clearly present in four out of Child's original group of texts, and in four of those obtained from Abbotsford. The T version in the Abbotsford group puts the matter thus:
10 "The king he took me on his knee
And he gae three drinks to me,
And a' to put the babie back,
But it wad na gang back for me."
In a note printed after his death, Child[11]accepts as conclusive the argument of Lang that the ballad originated in the Scottish incident. But he does not answer his own earlier pronouncement that parts of the A version and allied forms of the ballad are plainly derived from what occurred in Russia.
Accordingly, his later recantation leaves unexplained the specific evidence adduced in his third volume that the name Mary
Hamilton comes from the Russian incident, also that "the appeal to sailors and travellers in the ballad shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land-not that of her ancestors." Some other features also may well be of Russian origin.
If Child had lived to bring out his final volume he would, no doubt, have put the whole matter right. The truth of the
matter seems to be that some versions of the ballad present an inextricable intermingling of the Scottish occurrence and the
Russian. While there need be no doubt that the Scotch incident was the primary source of all the versions, many of the texts
later became deeply colored by the similar happening at the Russian court. Such versions have plainly a double origin.
II. THE GROUP-AUTHORSHIP OF BALLADS
The dilemma is a very common form of fallacy. I note two ways in which an apparently convincing dilemma may be fallacious. First, the two alternatives between which a person is asked to choose may not exhaust the possibilities of the case: the solution may be found in a third statement, a tertium quid.
Indeed, there may be several possibilities which are not recognized in the two horns of what seems to be a convincing dilemma. A more naive type of fallacy consists in putting forward as a dilemma two views between which there is no logical contradiction. Either half of the dilemma may well be true. Indeed, both propositions may be needed to cover the ground.
It has been recognized, but perhaps not usually or adequately,
that the two important rival views concerning the origin of
ballads, as they are commonly opposed to each other, constitute
a misleading dilemma. The two rival conceptions that do not
necessarily contradict each other are the view that our older
folk-songs were originally composed by individuals, and the
theory that they were the product of group-authorship. It is
possible, yes probable, that songs and ballads have originated
in each of these ways.
Professor Louise Pound, in her Poetic Origins and the Ballad,
shows that among the most primitive peoples we find individual
authorship of songs. She investigates the nature of primitive
folk-song by studying examples of what may be called contemporaneous
antiquity, and cites clear-cut evidence from
certain tribes of North American Indians in favor of individual
authorship. She notes also the corresponding case of the
degraded inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. Professor John
Robert Moore, in a paper, "The Influence of Transmission on
the English Ballads," brings similar testimony about the
428
"MARY HAMILTON" AND GROUP AUTHORSHIP
Melanesians; he cites in particular the Fijians, "scarce fifty
years out of cannibalism."'2 This evidence is so specific, cogent,
and abundant that I for one accept individual authorship as
the usual explanation of the origin of primitive poetry.
Nevertheless, the group-authorship of some songs is entirely
probable. As a matter of fact, indubitable cases come to light;
and there is no real contradiction between these supposedly
hostile theories. Professor Pound herself has called attention
to a case of group-authorship among the Sioux Indians.13
Frances Densmore heard a song at a gathering, and remarked:
"That is different from any Sioux song I have heard, it has so
many peculiarities." The interpreter replied, "That song was
composed recently by several men working together. Each
man suggested something, and they put it all together in the
song." .Miss Densmore adds: "This is the only instance of
cobsperation in the composition of an Indian song that has
been observed.'14
Group-authorship has been thought to be especially difficult
in narrative songs, that is, in ballads proper. Mr. Roland
Palmer Gray, in the Introduction to his Songs and Ballads of
the Maine Lumberjacks'5p rints two texts of the opening ballad,
"The Jam at Gerry's Rock." Concerning this story-song, a
Mr. Reid, brother of a member of the crew referred to in the
song, was asked by Mr. Gray "how this and similar ballads
come to be made. Well, he said, I will tell you. Something
happens. Then, at night, when the fellows are gathered around
the fire, some one, who can sing better than the rest, starts a
song, and the rest chip in. Each adds a little, some make
changes and additions, until the song is made. Probably one
hundred and fifty took part in making that song ..... Mr.
Reid made this statement," says Mr. Gray, "without receiving
from me any hint whatever regarding the theories held of the
origin of the ballad. Five lumberjacks have confirmed his
account of how the popular ballad came to be made, and one
added this interesting and significant fact, namely, that an
12 Mod. Lang. Rev. XI (1916), 391.
13 The Literary Review, Jan. 14, 1923.
14 Northern Ute Music, p. 26. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American
Ethnology, Bulletin 75.
16 Harvard University Press, 1924.
429
ALBERT H. TOLMAN
employer was in the habit of paying more to a lumberjack who
could sing than to the others.
"For those interested in the theories regarding the origin
of popular ballads, and therefore in the value of the evidence
here set forth," continues Mr. Gray, "I may state with repeated
emphasis that, in seeking information from the lumberjacks
and from lumber operators, I in no case disclosed any theory
whatsoever or even asked, 'Did you dance?' or 'Did more than
one person compose these songs?' I asked simply, 'What did
you do?' and 'How did these songs come to be made?' " (p. xvi.)
In the summer of 1923, one of my pupils, Mrs. W. E. R.
Burk, a member of the faculty of the Kirksville (Missouri)
Normal School, told me of a case in which a ballad was composed
by a group of men. She writes as follows:
About 1880, my father [Mr. Philip Allen Randall, now of Fortville,
Indiana] had a sawmill near Limestone, Kentucky, and hired sawmill
hands and ox-drivers or log-haulers. One day he was out with an oxdriver,
to whom he told one of his tall tales with a very serious face for
the benefit of a little boy who was tagging along. He had nothing to do
with the "poetry" or music; neither he nor I have any of that kind of
ability. Because neither can carry a tune, I cannot send you the music.
Here is the prose narrative as nearly as I can remember his telling it.
My father was walking with the man and boy, and asked, "Did you
ever hear about that matched yoke we had, Joe and Jerry?"
"No."
"We had two oxen, Joe and Jerry, that the boys turned into a ravine
every night, so that they could graze. The men blocked the mouth of
the ravine, but the sides were too steep for the cattle to climb. One
morning when the driver called, he could not find the oxen. He called
and hunted and finally heard Jerry's bell. But the queer part of it
was that the bell was in a tree. When he came to this tree, there sat a
mosquito picking his teeth with Jerry's horn, and ringing Jerry's bell
to call up Joe."
This tale amused the men so much that one night one of the men
sang a version of the song I sent you. My father said that it took well,
and, joking and laughing, the men added some and revised some. He
was sitting in the room reading, and jotted the song down in the final
form agreed upon by the men. He doesn't know whether the first man
had written the first version down or not, but the others just improvised
words to fit the first one's tune. One man .... contributed [who]
could neither read nor write. About three men did most of the work,
although there were several more there.
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"MARY HAMILTON" AND GROUP AUTHORSHIP
Mrs. Burk sent me the following text of the song as it was
finally agreed upon:
We was loggin' in Kentucky
With Jerry and Joe,
Draggin' up the timber
An makin' things go.
Jerry and Joe
Was oxen white,
Pastured in a gulch
Every summer night.
One mornin' early
Bob went to get the yoke,
But he couldn't find 'em,
No matter where he'd look.
He called out the loggers,
Off-bear and sawyer, too,
For, without the oxen,
He didn't know what to do,
They hunted and they hunted;
They looked high and low;
But all they could find
Was the ox named Joe.
But at last they heard a bell
Way up in a tree,
An' there they saw a skeeter
As big as could be.
They saw he'd eaten Jerry
Early that morn;
He was pickin' his teeth
With Jerry's horn.
But still he was hungry;
The boys say so;
He was ringin' Jerry's bell
To call up Joe.
Mrs. Burk tells me that the men were especially fond of
singing this song of their own composition, and for a long time
it remained a favorite.
431
ALBERT II. TOLMAN
This song is not offered as a production of marked literary
quality, but as a plain example of a narrative song originating
in group-authorship.
Shall we accept the Scotch or the Russian origin of the ballad
"Mary Hamilton"? The dilemma, as thus stated, is fallacious.
Some versions are plainly a mixture of elements derived from
both sources. Shall we accept the individual authorship of
ballads, or the authorship by groups? This dilemma also is
fallacious. Professors Gummere and Kittredge have set forth
very attractively a theory of the group-authorship of the songs
of primitive communities; but they support the more extreme
conception expressed in the phrases "communal authorship"
and "communal composition."16 Since recent examples of the
group-composition of ballads have been noted, we may well
believe that this method of composition was practised at times
in the more remote past.
ALBERT H. TOLMAN
16 F. B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, Boston, 1907, and elsewhere; G. L.
Kittredge, Introduction to the Cambridge edition of Child's collection, 1904.
1 ChildT, heE nglisha ndS cottisPh opulaBr alladsV, , 298.
2 A Ballad Book etc. Reprinted from the original edition of 1824, Edinburgh,
1883; Child, III, 382.
3. Child, III, 382.
4 Child, III, 383.
5 "The Mystery of 'The Queen's Marie,' " pp. 381-390.
6 See the admirable article by Professor Gordon Hall Gerould on "The Making of Ballads," Modern Philology, August, 1923, 15-28.
7. 1921, pp. 116, 198.
8. "The Term: 'Communal,"' P.M.L.A., XXXIX (1924), 451.
9 Child, IV, 509.
10. C hild, IV, 507n .
11. V, 298-299.