Prentice Boy Harry Fore (MO) c1870 Belden A
[From Ballads and Songs, Belden 1940. His notes follow. Belden gives info about the Bloody Miller but not the 1744 info given by Cox. Belden also fails to mention The Cruel Miller.
R. Matteson 2016]
The Oxford Girl
The story of the girl murdered by the man who has seduced her takes many forms in street balladry, as it has done, no doubt, in our social history. The earliest that I have come upon is that in the Pepys collection, The Bloody Miller (Rollins III 118-22), a piece of ballad journalism on the murder of Anne Nicols on the 10th of February, 1684[1]. The murderer here is a miller, but the place is Hocstow near Shrewsbury, not Oxford or Wexford, and there is no fence stake and no drowning. Bleeding figures, but it is at the trial, not on his return from the murder. The nearer antecedent of the American ballad is the English broadside of The Berkshire Tragedy, or, The Wittam Miller, found in the Douce and Roxburge collections (Roaburghe Ballads VIII 629-31, where Ebsworth says it is originally of date circa 1700') and printed in the nineteenth century by Pitts, Such, Catnach, Birt, and no doubt by others. Here the scene is at Wittam near Oxford (sometimes Wexford, and in one print preserved in the British Museum it is at Maidstone in Kent), the man is a miller or a miller's apprentice, the girl is beaten with a stick pulled from a hedge and then thrown in the water to drown, and the man explains (either to his master or his mother or his servant) the blood on his clothes as due to nose-bleed. These features persist, for the most part, in the versions from tradition listed below and also (with a change of place-name) in the early nineteenth century Boston broadside of The Lexington Miller (for which see JAFL XLII 249-50). For distinct American pieces on the same theme see Oma Wise and. Florella, later in the present volume.
The Oxford Girl, under various names, has been reported. from tradition in Norfolk (JFSS VII 23), Dorset (JFSS VII 44-5), Newfoundland (BSSN 119), Nova Scotia (BSSNS 293-4), Vermont (VFSB 88-90), Virginia (SharpK T 409, SCSM 161-2), West Virginia (FSS 311-3), Kentucky (SharpK, 407-9), Tennessee (JAFL, XLV 725-30, FSSH 214-9), North Carolina (JAFL XIII 247-8, 290, Xiivi 29-30, SCSM 160-1, 162-4, FSSH 219), Mississippi (JAFL, Xxxix 725-9, FSM 141-3), Illinois (TSSI 150), and. Texas (PFLST VI 212-4). probably derived from this, tho lacking the special features listed above as diagnostic, are two texts, one (The Old, Shawnee) from Nebraska and the other (On the Banks of the Old Pedee) from Wyoming, in ABS 108-9.
A. [Prentice Boy] No title given. From a manuscript collection lent me in 1904 by Harry Fore of the University of Missouri. Compiled in Gentry County, apparently in ihe 70s.
When I was a little 'prentice boy
About sixteen years of age,
My father bound me to a miller
That I might learn the trade.
I fell in love with an Irish girl
With a dark and rolling eye,
And she said she would marry me
If I would not her deny.
My father he persuaded me
To take her for a wife;
And the devil he persuaded me
To take away her life.
I went to her father's house
At nine o'clock that night;
And but little did this damsel know
That I owed her any spite.
I asked her to take a walk with me
Across the fields so gay
That we might take a pleasant chat
And set the wedding day.
We had not gone but a little ways-
Turned her round and round,
Pulled up a fence stake
And straightway knock[ed] her down.
Upon her bended knees
For mercy she did cry,
Saying, 'Dear, don't murder me,
For I'm not fit to die.'
But I caught her by her yellow hair
And turned her round and round
And pulled her to the miller's pond
And plunged her in to drownd.
When I got back to the miller's house,
About ten o'clock last night,
And but little did this miller know
What I had been about.
He look[ed] at me quite earnestly,
Saying, ''What bloodied up your clothes?'
I only made him this reply:
'It was bleeding at the nose.'
About five days and afterwards
This damsel she was found
Floating by her sister['s] house
That lived in Oxford town.
Now all ye young ladies
Take warning by me
And never trust a young man
To any high degree.