Prickly Bush: Notes on Children's Game-Songs 1915
Prickly Bush (Notes on Children's Game-Songs) 1915
by A. G. Gilchrist and Lucy E. Broadwood
Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Vol. 5, No. 19 (Jun., 1915), pp. 221-239
C.-THE PRICKLY BUSH (THE MAID FREED FROM THE GALLOWS), and its connection with the story of THE GOLDEN BALL.
THE PRICK'TY BUSH.
[THE MAID FREED FROM THE GALLOWS.]
FIRST VERSION.
SUNG BY MR. G. WIRRALL,
Noted b y H. E. D. Hammond. AT MARLBOROUGH, WILTS., FEB., 1908.
1. "Oh, dear John, stand hero Stand here by me for a
while, For I think I see my own dear fa - ther cormin g
O ver the yon - der stile. Oh, fa - ther, have you brought an - y
gold ? Or have you brought an - y fee ? For to
save my bo - dy from the cold clay ground, And my neck from the gal - lows tree."
' No I've not brought an - y gold, Nor I've not brought an fee,
To save your bo - dy from the cold clay ground And your
REFRAIN.
neck from the gal - lows tree." Oh, the prick' ty bush! It
pricked my heart full sore; And if ev - er I get out of the
prick' - ty bush I'll ne - ver get in an . y more!
The remainder of the verses follow the same pattern, substituting "mother" for "father," "sister" for "mother," etc., through a list of relatives till the "sweetheart" appears, who has brought gold and fee to save her body from the cold clay ground and her neck from the gallows-tree. "Fee" here probably means cattle (A.S. feoh)-equivalent to payment in kind. "John" is perhaps a corruption of the "judge" of other versions.-A. G. G.
THE PRICKLY BUSH.
[THE MAID FREED FROM THE GALLOWS.]
SECOND VERSION.
SUNG BY MR. H. WAY,
Noted by H. E. D. Hammond. AT BRIDPORT, DORSET, MAY, 1906.
0 hang - man, hold thy hana..... etc.
Cho. Oh, the prick - ly bush.. ..... That pricks my heart most sore.. ..... If
ev- er I get out of the prick ly bush I'll nev - er get in no more.
"O hangman, hold thy hand,
And hold it for a while,
I think I see my own dear mother
Coming over yonder stile!
Oh! have you brought me gold?
Or can you set me free?
Or be you come to see me hanged
All on the gallows-tree?"
"Oh, I a'n't brought you gold,
Nor I can't set you free,
But I am come to see you hanged
All on the gallows-tree."
Chorus: Oh! the Prickly Bush
That pricks my heart most sore!
If ever I get out of the Prickly Bush
I'll never get in no more!
[The verses run thus, until she has seen her father, brother and sister likewise arrive, and then:]
"O hangman, hold thy hand,
And hold it for a while;
I think I see my own sweetheart
Coming over yonder stile!
Oh! have you brought me gold?
Or can you set me free?
Or be you come to see me hanged
All on the gallows-tree? "
"Oh! I have brought you gold,
And I can set you free,
And I'm not come to see you hanged
All on the gallows-tree!"
Chorus: Oh! the Prickly Bush, etc., etc.
Various versions of this ballad-which usually opens "Hold up thy hand, most righteous Judge" or "0 hangman, hold thy hand awhile"- are printed in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads under the heading of "The Maid freed from the Gallows." The ballad has also been carried to America, where it is known as "The Hangman's Tree." See also "The Prickly Bush" of English County Songs, where the situation of the lovers is reversed-- probably through a misconception of the "sweetheart's" sex, to which the dialogue itself gives no clue. The above interesting variants of "The Prickly Bush" have been chosen to illustrate the connection between this ballad and the English folk-tale and folk-drama of "The Golden Ball," in which the gallows-scene and dialogue-verses occur. In the English cante-fable- for so it appears to have been- of "The Golden Ball," a mysterious stranger gives a maiden a golden ball. (Sometimes she is one of two, or three, sisters, each of whom receives one). If she lost it, she was to be hung. While playing with the ball she loses it (in a way which suggests that it has been bewitched), and the gallows-scene ensues, her kindred refusing her appeals to them to find the ball. Her lover, who undergoes a terrifying experience in recovering the ball from the house of ill omen into which it had rolled, returns just in time to restore it to her, and takes her away with him to happiness. (See Jacobs' More English Fairy Tales - his version being taken from Henderson's Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties.)
The story is plainly allegorical, the golden ball-in other versions a gold key[1]- signifying the maiden's honour, which when lost can only be restored by one person -her lover. Gold seems from early times to have been the symbol of integrity. A circlet of gold-like the silken snood of the Scottish maiden-appears in Danish ballads as the virgin's insignia. "The crown of gold was an ornament which only maiden ladies were entitled to wear, and the loss of it prevented their being received in society " (see Prior's Ancient Danish Ballads, Vol. iii, p. I47). So, too, in the Scottish ballad of "Tamlane":
O, I forbid you, maidens a'
That wear gowd in your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.
It should be noted that the girl's family all stand aside from her in her disgrace. She appeals first to her mother:
"O mother, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?"
But her mother and all the rest of her kin "have come to see her hanged, and hanged she shall be." And her appeal is in vain till the lover appears with the golden ball. In a curious American-negro variant of this English folk-tale, bearing considerable traces of rhymed verse, (see Old Rabbit the Voodoo, 1893, by Miss M. A. Owen), the magical character of ball and giver is preserved. The ball is given to the child of a negro on the day of her birth by a "conjur-man" (magician) disguised as a beggar. He hangs it round the infant's neck, and she must never break the string, for the ball has had the magical effect of turning her into a beautiful white girl. Her mother dies, a step-mother cuts the string and steals the ball, and the girl not only changes into a negress but is accused of having murdered the missing white girl and so is brought to the gallows. She cries:
"O daddy, fine dat gol'en ball,
Ur yo' see me hang 'pun de gallus-tree!"
But "he go by," and so with all the rest, includinig her "beau." The beggarman now reappears; presents the golden ball to the maiden, upon which her beauty and whiteness are restored; he tells his tale, convicts the thief, who is summarily hanged instead, and leads the girl away. Her friends try to make it up with her and call her back, but the beggarman, now transformed into a beautiful youth, carries her off into a hill, which opens to receive, and closes behind, them. This is a particularly interesting variant, as suggesting that in an early form of the story a fairy lover as in "Tam Lane"--may have been the secret cause of her trouble. As to the punishment of her crime, both in the old romances and old ballads the penalty for a maiden's incontinence was death by burning, and in both Scottish and Danish ballads it is frequently the girl's relatives who enforce it. In the Danish ballad of Medelwold and Sidselille the guilty pair are both threatened with execution by the girl's royal mother:
Then high on gallows hang shall he,
And blaze below the pile for thee!
The gallows may conceivably have been substituted by balladists for the pyre, as the girl's punishment, about the period when in real history burning began to be reserved for those arch-criminals-witches and heretics. The third form in which the "Golden Ball" story is found is as folk-drama. A few years ago, I noted down from old Mrs. Thompson, a cottager at Churchtown, the old part of Southport, a description of "The Golden Ball" as acted by herself when a young girl, with her companions, in her uncle's cart-house, and also by grown-up people in the schoolroom at Blowick-- another outlying part of Southport-- when she was about eleven. She had forgotten how the ball was lost and also how the sweetheart recovered it (perhaps neither was explained in the play) but said that the girl had been lent the ball to play with, and if she lost it "she had to be hung." She loses it and tells her mother:
"O mother, mother, I have lost the golden ball!
The mother replies sternly:
"Thou wilt have to be hung."
A trial scene follows, with judge and jury, and the girl is condemned. I noted the next portion verbatim:
"Then come the time o' hangin'-the gallus-tee it was called. Next was the time came:
'Hangman, hangman, stop the rope,
I see my mother comin'!
Mother, mother, 'ave you brought my golden ball?
Or 'ave you come to see me hanged
Upon the gallus-tee ?'"
[The usual formula follows till the sweetheart appears and replies:]
I have brought thy golden ball,
But I have not come to see thee hanged
Upon the gallus-tee.'
Then he pizents 'er with the ball, an' hugs 'er and takes 'er away."
Mrs. Thompson graphically described the "gallus-tee" and the dress of the girl. "She looks for all the world like the girl in 'The Sign of the Cross,' with a bit of a thing round 'er shoulders, to be old-fashioned, and she clasps 'er 'ands and looks up so pitiful, first at the gallus and then at 'er family. An' they all look so scornful and bitter at 'er--except the sweetheart." This performance was got up by the villagers themselves, and had evidently made a great impression on her, it being "so sad that it made her cry." Child connects the English ballad of "The Maid freed from the Gallows" with various north- and south-European forms of a "ransom" ballad in which a maiden has been carried off by corsairs, or sold into slavery. Her kindred are too mean or cold-hearted to pay the price of her ransom, but the lover or husband reckons no sacrifice too great to redeem her. The motif of this story appears to be that the ties of kinship are as nothing compared with the bond between lovers. Child considers the English versions of "O' hangman, hold thy hand awhile" to be "defective and distorted" forms of this story, presumably because (1) no explanation is given of the girl's plight; (2) she figures as a criminal instead of an innocent person; (3) her kindred display, in place of mere coldness of heart or avarice, positive hatred and spite against her. But if one accepts the symbolic character of the golden ball, and assumes the folk-tale to be not of later date than the ballad, the English ballad is seen no longer as a distortion of the captured maiden story but to have an independent motif as a tale of a love-disaster much akin to the Scottish "Lady Maisry," though with a happier ending. The "prick'ty bush" of the chorus (which may have been borrowed from an earlier song) throws further light upon this, as the prickly bush is familiar in English and Scottish ballads as the symbol of unhappy love:
I thrust my hand into the bush,
Thinking a sweet rose there to find;
I pricked my fingers to the bone,
And left the sweetest rose behind.
See "The Prickly Rose" in Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs; and compare also the stealing of the "Sprig of Thyme" with the loss of the golden ball. Compare the "Prickly Bush" refrain also with the "Bonny Broom" lament:
Oh, the broom, the bonny, bonny broom,
The broom it makes full sore.
One may guess that a song-title preserved in The Complaynt ot Scotland, "The Brier it binds so soir," also indicates a ballad on the same theme. There may possibly also be in the "prickly bush" some memory-from Scottish ballads-of the fire kindled with "thistle and thorn" or "fern and whin" as fitting for the "bold bonfire" prepared for other unfortunate damsels in the same extremity as the loser of the golden ball. There is a children's game which, in Jacobs' and (I gather) also Child's opinion, represents the debris of this ballad. This game of "Mary Brown," or "Arise, daughter," contains a similar dialogue-formula, in which there is, so to speak, a procession of relatives, culminating in the sweetheart. "Mary Brown" begins
"Rise up, rise up, poor Mary Brown,
To see your [father] going through the town."
But Mary will only rise to see her sweetheart going through the town. This seems to be only a softened version of an older formula:
Rise, daughter, rise and stand upon your feet,
To see your dear [father] lie dead in yon field.
A Westmorland version is as follows:
ARISE, DAUGHTER ELLEN. Noted by A. G. Gilchrist. KESWICK, CUMBERLAND.
CHORUS.
"Arise, daughter Ellen, and stand up-on your feet
To see your dear mother lie dead in yon field."
"Oh no, I won't rise and stand up-on my [or at your feet.] feet
To see my dear mother lie dead in yon field."
The formula is repeated for the other relatives in the same way, but, when it comes to the sweetheart, daughter Ellen replies:
"Oh yes, I will rise and stand upon my feet
To see my dear sweetheart lie dead in yon field!"
-the proper action-not always preserved-being that daughter Ellen breaks frantically through the ring which surrounds her, to reach her lover. The resemblance of this game to "The Maid freed from the Gallows " lies only, I think, in the formula. There is a Swedish ring-game, "Fair Gundela," given in Halliwell's Popular Rhymes, 1849, which seems more nearly akin and which brings out the motif of the English game more clearly:
Fair Gundela sits within a circle of dancers imitating the action of rowing.
The Ring: " Why row ye so, why row ye so, Fair Gundela ?"
Gundela: "Sure I may row, ay sure I may row,
While groweth the grass all summer through."
The Ring: "But now I've speired that your father's dead, Fair Gundela."
Gundela: "What matters my father, my mother lives still- Ah, thank heaven for that! "
The Ring:" But now I've speired that your mother's dead."
Gundela: "What matters my mother, my brother lives still," etc.
The same formula continues till the ring has speired that her sweetheart is dead, whereupon Gundela casts her veil over her face and sinks down overwhelmed with grief:
Gundela: "Say, can it be true which ye now tell to me-_
That my sweetheart's no more? Ah, God pity me!"
The Ring: " But now I've speired that your father lives still, Fair Gundela."
Gundela: " What matters my father! My sweetheart's no more !"
The Ring: " But now I've speired that your mother lives still."
Gundela: " What matters my mother! My sweetheart's no more !"
And so on till Gundela is told that her sweetheart lives still:
Gundela: "Say, can it be true which ye tell to me now- That my sweetheart lives still? Thank God, thank God for that!"
The veil is cast away, the circle broken, and the drama concludes with merriment and noise.
The motif of this Swedish game and "Rise, daughter," alike, is the same as that which finds artless expression in "Logie o' Buchan":
"Though I lo'e them as weel as a dochter should do
They are no half so dear to me, Jamie, as you! "
But I cannot see any further connection between these ring-games and the ballads of a ransoming sweetheart than the showing-up of the difference between family affection and the lover's devotion. Finally, Newell is, I think, wrong in connecting the "Lazy Mary" of New York children's play with "Mary Brown" (see his Games and Songs of American Children). The "Lazy Mary" who;will not get up for breakfast, dinner, or supper, till for supper she is offered "a nice young man with rosy cheeks" should rather be compared with the "Shepherd, come home to your break-fast" dialogue collected in Dorset by Mr. Hammond (see Journal, Vol. iii, p. 122).
"Lazy Mary" seems to be a relic of this song (or game, as it may once have been) with the sexes reversed for little girls' play.- A. G. G.
There is a "Prickly Bush" tune in Journal of the Irish Folk-Song Society, Vol. xiii, a variant of "Love's young Dream." It is interesting to see that the first tune of the two taken from the late Mr. Hammond's manuscript collection has a distinct connection with certain airs sung to "The Sprig of Thyme" or "The Seeds of Love," the words of which are clearly symbolical. This strengthens Miss Gilchrist's theory (which is equally mine) that "The Prickly Bush" is allegorical. The second of Mr. Hammond's tunes is a variant of "The Briery Bush" in Folk-Songs from Somerset (5th series), where there are annotations on the song. There is a poor tune to "The Maid freed from the Gallows" in Child's Ballads, sung in North Carolina. There is a Westphalian ballad, with a good tune to it, in Der Zupfgeigenhansl (F. Hofmeister, Leipzig, 19I2). This begins "O Schipmann, 0 Schipmann." Some enemy beseeches the skipper to upset his boat and drown the dark-brown maiden on board. The girl protests that her father will not let her drown, and she calls upon him to sell his red coat and save her young life. The father refuses and shouts "Let the dark-brown maiden sink to the bottom, 0 skipper!" The girl in vain calls upon her brother to sell his bright sword on her behalf, for he makes the same answer. She then calls to her sweetheart to sell himself to the skipper as steersman. He consents, crying "Let the dark-brown maiden land, 0 skipper!" ("Lat du dat swartbrun Maken to Lanne gahn, o Schipmann!") The Westphalian tune-in curtailed form-is here given, to compare with the Westmorland air, "Arise, Daughter Ellen," noted at Keswick by Miss Gilchrist. When the Keswick air is put into common time some curious likenesses appear between the two tunes. In particular, phrase (b) of the German air is much the same as the refrain of the English one. And this sets one wondering concerning the migration of ballads, nursery songs and games. It is here worth mentioning that in the last years of Elizabeth's reign the copper-mines at Coniston were developed by a flourishing company of Germans, who had their smelting-houses at Keswick, settled in that neighbourhood and round about Kendal, as vell as Coniston, and married into the best dalesfolk families.[2] These mineworkers have left their names (Austrian, Styrian, Tyrolese,) in the parish registers of Hawkshead, Coniston, etc. It is obvious that such settlers must have introduced some of their own stories, rhymes, games and snatches of song amongst the North- country families into which they married, and this fact may help to explain the mysterious appearance of un-British folk-stuff with which our collectors are sometimes confronted, more especially in relation to children's traditional songs, games and tales. Besides the Westphalian version I know of two other very interesting and quite distinct German traditional versions of the ballad under discussion. One is called "Liebesprobe" ("Ach Schiffmann, lieber Schiffmann, halt, halt, halt, halt, halt, halt!") and is from North Germany. The other is called " Die Losgekaufte" ("Ach, Schiffer, lieber Schiffer, stoss noch nicht ab, und mache Halt!").
Both these versions are in Deutsche Volksliedermit ihren Original-Weisen, collected and edited by W. von Zuccalmaglio, A. Kretzschmer, etc. (Berlin, 1840). In January and February of 1895 there appeared an interesting correspondence in the Athenaeum, concerning "The Golden Ball" and "The Prickly Bush" songs and tales. Amongst the chief correspondents were the Rev. Edmund Venables and Mr. Sidney Addy. The discussion arose from the quotation of the rhyme beginning:
"O sister, sister, 'ave you found my golden balls,
Oh, 'ave you found my key?"
introduced by Mr. Morley Roberts in Red Earth. Mr. Addy, in his letter to the Athenaeum, gives a "Golden Ball" story taken down by himself in Derbyshire. In this a mother gives her two daughters each a golden ball which they must never lose, for if they do so they will be hanged. The elder girl sends her ball twice into a blacksmith's shop. Twice he returns it to her, threatening to keep it if she lets it go again. She lets it go the next day and he refuses to give it up, so she is led to the gallows-tree. We seem here to have a suggestion of a duel between the "coal-black smith" and the maiden, such as forms the basis of the numerous British and foreign ballads of which "The Two Magicians" or "Coal-Black Smith" is a traditional survival (see Journal, Vol. i, p. 50, and Folk-Songs from Somerset.) Cf. also the Celtic story to which I refer in Journal, Vol. iv, No. I4, p. 46, about the boy Ceudach's ball, which he lost in the house of a woman who was a silver-worker and, like the smith, a magician.- L. E. B.
O SCHIPMANN.
WESTPHALIAN BALLAD,
FROM Der ZupfgeigenhansI. (LEIPZIG, 19I2.)
Langsam
"O Schipmann, o Schipmann! 0 Schipmann du, vor
go - den Dank la du dat Schip-ken riim - me gahn, un la datswart-brun
Ma- ken to Grun - ne gahn, 0 Schip-mann, o Schip mann!"
* The girl uses phrase (a) in her reply, twice over.
The heartless relations and the sweetheart answer her in the same phrase, using it once only, and they end with the (b) refrain, addressed to the skipper.
Footnotes:
1. Compare a verse of an old ballad preserved in David Herd's MSS.:
" Oh, if my love was a coffer of gold
And I the keeper of the key-'
2. I am indebted to Miss Gilchrist for several interesting details concerning these foreign settlers, she has found in wbich J. C. Cox's Parish Registers.-L. E. B.