Proud Lady Margaret- Chapter 7; Edmunds
[Excerpt from: Susan Edmunds, (1985) The English riddle ballads, Durham theses, Durham University; Chapter 5.
Barely proofed, Appendix F, at the bottom, has ballad text list.
R. Matteson 2014]
CHAPTER SEVEN: 'PROUD LADY MARGARET' (CHILD 47)
Although Child places this ballad relatively early in his collection, between 'Captain Wedderburn's Courtship' and 'Young Andrew', a Percy Folio piece, and although its content has links with Child 46, historically and stylistically it belongs with the other Scottish compositions of the eighteenth century, among 'Lord Lovel' (Child 75), 'The Wife of Usher's Well' (79), 'Sweet William's Ghost' (77) and the other 'revenant ballads.'[1]
These pieces reflect one of the most productive phases in the development of the ballad, when the form was popular in the widest sense, among antiquarians and poets as well as among the ordinary people who sang them. It was at this time that many of the stanzas, phrases and motifs now known as 'ballad commonplaces' became established, such as the motif of the love-animated plants on the graves of lovers, the rose growing round the briar, which first appears in print, it seems, in the late seventeenth century broadside of 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74), and was used thereafter by the Scottish balladists at almost any opportunity, for example in 'Earl Brand' (7), 'Fair Janet' (64), 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet 1 (73), 'Lord Lovel' (75) and 'The Lass of Roch Royal' (76).
There has been a tendency among ballad critics to dismiss these ballads as hybrids at best, and at worst as forgeries, overlaid as they often are with the marks of over-enthusiastic editors or collectors. Matthew Hodgart, for example, comments on the 'birk hats' motif in 'The Wife of Usher's Well' (79): The folklore of this moving poem need not be taken too seriously. It may be yet another Scots creation of the eighteenth century[2].
The pure-bred folk ballad in English, however, untouched by print or by 'literary' interference, is rare; ancient specimens of the same are rarer still. The most revealing judgement on the authenticity, or the potential authenticity, of a ballad, must surely be its acceptance into the oral tradition, by singers who perhaps took their folklore more seriously, even in the eighteenth century, than the editors who embellished it, and who might not have required a footnote to explain the significance of hats of birch. (Child himself did not understand, as the balladist would have understood, that the sons in the ballad must return to lift their mother's curse on nature.[3] The Scottish Romantic ballads in Child's collection were nearly all popular enough to be still sung through the nineteenth century, and many of them into the twentieth. Moreover, the distinctions between 'literary' and 'folk' material are more blurred in Scotland than in England, and not only because of a few individual collectors like Scott and Peter Buchan, whose long experience
of the traditions they published may be said to have earned
them the right to introduce a few variations of their own.
These men were not isolated cases, but a part of a long line
of bookish folk-poets and folk-based art-poets, including
Robert Burns and Mrs. Brown of Falkland, who was the daughter
of a professor and wrote poetry, as well as being one of the
most important soun:es of orally transmitted folksongs and
ballads. In more recent times, Hamish Henderson writes of many such examples of the interaction of the two cultural
strands, discovered in the Lowlands in the last thirty years
and recorded in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies
in Edinburgh. Willie Mathieson of Aberdeenshire, for example,
a farm worker, carefully transcribed songs heard from other workers, and from children, and also wrote verses of his own; he was familiar with the published works of Gavin Greig, yet his singing is unquestionably a part of an oral, living tradition[4].
The Scottish folk traditions have always been taken more seriously than their counterparts in England, and in the eighteenth century in Scotland, it was still possible to be a professional minstrel, either as a town piper, an office that survived the Reformation, or as a wandering 'Jackie'; these were the last survivors of the medieval Joculatores.[5] Such professionals were no doubt responsible for some of the composition, as well as the preservation and transmission, of the Romantic ballads.
These ballads, then have a right to be included among the company of their more venerable fore-runners. The Scottish oral tradition is usually its own best judge and censor, and generally disposes rapidly of superfluous detail and indecorous style, such as are found in some eighteenth and early nineteenth century texts. The texts of 'Proud Lady Margaret' show a remarkable development from a wordy, sometimes overcomplicated narrative, to the rhythmic, starkly compressed form of the last known version, which was collected from Bell Robertson in 1914 (viii); with all its Romantic corners knocked off, the ballad has assumed the same form and style, if not quite the dramatic potency, as the more celebrated 'traditional' pieces like 'The Twa Sisters' (Child 10) and 'The Cruel Mother' (20).
Only seven complete texts survive, of which only one (iii) has a tune; in addition to these are two tunes, one with a single stanza of text, the other printed with a text after Scott's (vii; ix). Historically, the texts span about a century and a half; geographically, they are confined to an unusually small area in the north-east of Scotland,[6] although the origin of Mr. Hamilton's text, from Edinburgh (i) cannot be definitely known, since Edinburgh housed immigrants from all parts of Scotland. There is also some doubt that all Buchan's texts were from the North; in a letter to William Walker, 22nd July 1895, Child wrote:
Buchan's northern ballads are clearly not all northern; his blind beggar picked up things where he found them, and my friend Davidson, an Old Deer man, was inclined to use strong language of Buchan for pretending that his ballads were (all) of the North.(7)
However, all the other texts of Child 47 can be located in
the Eastern lowlands north of the Tay, and there seems therefore
to be less reason to doubt Buchan in this instance than in others. Dunfermline is mentioned in two texts (iv; vi) as the brother's burial place; it is possible that this detail was borrowed from 'Sir Patrick Spens' (Child 58), but the town is appropriate in both ballads as a royal seat and a burial place for many Scottish kings and nobles.[8] The earliest date that can be specifically put to the ballad is 1803, the date of publication of Scott's Minstrelsy, but the age of informants puts the date back another generation. Mr. Hamilton, Scott's informant, got his text from his mother; Mrs. Harris, the source for (iii), learned the ballad from a nurse in the last years of the eighteenth century. Laing's text (vi) was 'from the recitation of old people.'
There are a number of obscurities in all the texts, which, for a group confined to so small a geographical area, show a remarkable amount of variation in content. (See
Appendix F). By far the clearest is the Glenbuchat version
(ii), which is not yet in print; though not perfect, this
text is a sophisticated and largely coherent treatment of
the theme, and it sheds much light on the more confused Child
texts. Closest to the Glenbuchat version is the Harris text
(iii), and these two would seem to stem from a common source.
Of the other texts, the two Buchan versions form another pair
(iv; v) but are not identical. The Scott text is fairly
close to these (i) and the Laing text (vi) shares some basic
elements with them but has been much embellished.
A. The Description of the Lady.
The visual image of Lady Margaret, or Janet as she is in the Buchan versions, is crucial to the ballad, which relies for its impact on the juxtaposition of proud beauty and ugly death. All the complete texts but one (viii) have reference to her physical appearance; the most explicit is the Laing text (vi). Here we are given a neat, three-stanza introduction to 'Fair Margret,' a luxury rarely found in an orally transmitted text. She is described as young, proud, and of 'high degree', no less than the King's cousin; she spends all her money on 'the gay cleedin' that comes frae yont the sea' and all her time on self-adornment; thus the opening scene where she is found combing her yellow hair, one of the famous 'ballad commonplaces', may also be regarded in this case as psychological realism.
We are given a second picture of Margret as her brother describes her, coming in at the kirk door with gold plaits in her hair and gold pins in her sleeve. This picture, a lady in gold at church, is found, in various forms, in texts (ii, iii, iv and v): in the Glenbuchat text (ii) she wears not only gold but also diamonds and rubies, with which she distracts the other worshippers, an accusation also made in (v).
Margaret/Janet is pictured first in (i, iii, iv and v) as looking over her castle wall, a favourite position for ballad ladies and possibly an inheritance from the popular medieval tradition of the castle as an image of virtue, or of man, which is assailed by the vices, headed by the Devil himself.[9] In this case, the symbolism is relevant, for the lady is being tempted as well as tried; this is most clear in the Glenbuchat text. It may be significant that in this text the lady is not safely behind the castle wall but is
wandering alone and at night in the grounds, which the knight obviously thinks improper, and which she defends defiantly:
O I'm come hither in my sport
An' sportin does me good(st. 3)
This may itself be another commonplace, found also in 'Tam Lin' (Child 39) and derived possibly from the medieval pastourelle tradition, which is found in English lyrics such as 'The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale' (from Harley MS. 2253):
Mosti ryden by Rybblesdale,
Wilde wymmen forte wale
and welde which ich wolde (choose)
Founde were the feyrest on (possess)
rat ever wes mad of blod and bon. . . [10]
Even closer to the ballad, and from the same manuscript, is 'The Meeting in the Wood', which opens with a similar encounter:
In a fryht as y con fare fremede {wood; unfamiliar)
y founde a wel feyr fenge to fere. . . [11] (meet)
The girl answers at first aggressively:
Heo me bed go my gates lest hire grenede (angered)
ne kepte heo non henying here. (insults)
B. The Description of the Knight.
Here, there is less agreement between the texts, as the knight is the centre of the ballad's most serious confusion, the dual identity of brother-lover. In visual terms, there are two separate characterisations of the knight in the texts: in (i, iii, iv and v) he is in the costume of a tradesman's son: his boots are too wide, his horn is worn too low, his hat is too big, and in the case of (iii), his steed is 'winder sma'', although this is contradicted later on when he turns his 'hie horse head'. This last betrays the influence of the second possible characterisation, found only in the Glenbuchat text (ii), where the knight is addressed throughout as 'gallant' or 'gentle', and whose milk-white steed is so conventionally large that the lady remarks sarcastically:
There's few o you that's gentle knights
For as high a horse as ye ride.(st.4)
This may also be a figurative expression meaning that the knight is offensively overbearing in his manner; 'on his high horse'. However, there is no indication that she seriously doubts his nobility, and there is no mention of strange clothing. Why, then, does he appear in the Harris text with a small horse, and apparently in disguise as a tailor's son? Wimberly has suggested that the small horse may reflect a folk belief that ghosts are of less than human stature[12],
but there are no other traces in the ballads of such a belief,
and it seems more likely that, if the line means anything at
all, it is just another indication of low rank.
It seems possible that the knight's disguise, which has little dramatic relevance, arises from a misunderstanding of the taunting dialogue that appears in the Glenbuchat text. Here, it is the knight's behaviour, not his appearance, which belies his rank, as the lady's immodesty belies hers. Their
mutual taunting on this theme is a part of the game which
the knight plays to lure his sister into consenting to lie
with him, so making her guilt all the greater when the truth
is revealed. The 1ady1 s complaints that, in accosting her
rudely, he has not acted like a gentle knight may have been
taken by more literal minds to indicate that he is actually
in disguise; and once such an interpretation had been made,
the knight would very readily slip into the stereotype of the returned lover (as for example in Child 17, and the John
Riley ballads) , who has more reason for disguise and who is also testing a lady. It is one of the most intriguing traits of ballad transmission that a character, plot or even a whole ballad may slip into another convention and change its
nature, by some association of ideas. It is not impossible
that the whole of the mock-wooing episode in the Glenbuchat
text is the product of such a transformation; a bona fide
disguised lover may have become confused with a revenant
brother whose original purpose had been less complicated.
As a whole, however, the ballad works so well that the welding
of brother and lover into the mysterious character of the
knight from Archerdale must surely be more than an accident.
Revenant brothers, though rare in English and Scottish
balladry, have venerable ancestors; Greek and Slavonic
traditions provide parallels which Peter Dronke believes stem
from a tradition current in 1 the world of late antiquity'[13] In the 'Lenore' ballads of Greek popular tradition, a dead
brother carries his sister home to their mother (who dies of
shock), and this usually involves a macabre journey on horseback,
like the one in the 1689 broadside composition, 'The
Suffolk Miracle' (Child 272). Closer to home are the ballads
in which a brother is recognized too late to prevent incest
or murder, 'Babylon' (Child 14) and 'The Bonny Hind' (50); it
seems probable that these themes provided the inspiration for
the character of William in Child 47, coupled with the thriving
tradition of the revenant lover. (Child 74, 77, 78, 255 and
the parody 295).
C - G. The Opening Dialogue
In this, the Glenbuchat text is again more sophisticated and developed than the others, and the preliminary dialogue, in which the lady and the knight question each other on their breeding, leads naturally into the questions proper. The less sophisticated versions, however, have the bonus of a grim and possibly unintentional irony, as the knight declares that he will be the lady's lover or die, to which (in i, v and viii) she replies carelessly that many have died for her already. The Buchan text (iv) becomes very verbose at this point as the knight goes through a series of conventional wooing gestures: he asks for pity; he will put smiths in her smithy, tailors in her bower, cooks in her kitchen, and corn in her land. This last is a borrowing from conventional
ballad stock and similar stanzas are found in contemporary texts of 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet' (Child 7JC, H). The lady is unmoved by this verbosity and proceeds without comment to her riddles.
H. The Questions.
Here, the texts fall into three categories: those which have a riddling sequence, along the lines of Child 46; those which have apparently straightforward questions about Archerdale; and those which have no questions at all (vi, viii). The Glenbuchat and the Harris texts (ii, iii) form the second of these categories, and the Harris version is the only one of the Child texts to make sense of the passage. In the Glenbuchat text, instead of a formal exchange of irrelevant riddles, the questions are a game of evasion in which the knight keeps leaping onto (and presumably down
from) his milk-white steed, while the lady asks him questions
in order to detain him. These have the appearance of being the first questions that come into her head: 'Where were you
born; how were you brought up; what do the ladies wear':
but the answers are on a different level entirely (see Chapter
8). Since the knight is really the lady's brother, he clearly
cannot answer her questions truthfully without revealing his
identity too soon, unless the two children were brought up
separately. He produces instead an imaginary, otherworldly
story of being born in a greenwood 'at the foot of a greenwood
tree' (st.7), and being brought up in Archerdale in a
strict Christian discipline:
We learned how to live on Earth
To keep us free frae sin
An when we come to Heaven's yates
The way we may get in.(st.10)
When questioned about his meat and drink in Archerdale, the knight replies in a typically emphatic, almost ritualistic style:
0 black, black was our bread lady,
An brown, brown was our ale
An red, red was the wine lady
We drank at Archerdale.(st.13)
In a similar style, the lady is told that the Archerdale ladies wear gay green clothing and milk-white cowls. Thus, the overall picture of Archerdale is a scene of traditional ballad images and colours, but overlaid with Christian virtues that make it specifically a 'good' greenwood. The ballad language works symbolically to indicate a world that is far removed from the lady's worldly 'garden green', both because it is romantic and because it is virtuous, as she is not. It indicates that the knight is on a different plane from his sister, even if we are to assume that the story is based on truth and the children were separated, and even before it is revealed that he is dead. (Archerdale does not seem to exist in reality; the nearest name is Archiestown, between Inverness and Aberdeen).
While he is answering the lady's questions, the knight continues his game by repeatedly making as if to go, in an excellent use of the conventional repeated stanza:
Now lady by your leave he said
An a your craft ye ken
An he mounted on his milk white steed
Afore the lady's een.(sts. 8, ll, 14, 16)
Finally, this forces her into accepting his original offer and begging him to stay, revealing the motive for the questions:
For if I talk awile to you
We'll baith ly on ae sheet.(st. 7)
At this, he immediately reveals his identity in a stanza which shows the force of the simplicity of ballad language at its best:
0 no, 0 no ye lady fair
0 no, it canna be
For I'm your brother Lord William
Come frae the dead for thee.(st.15)
Thus the question sequence is dramatically linked both to the initial dialogue and to the unfolding of the plot.
The same is true of the questions in the Harris text
(iii), though the scale here is more modest. The questions
are still asked as a delaying tactic, but their concern is
not so much Archerdale itself but the 'wondrous lied' (talk) 21.7. that the knight has learned there. The lady seems to be
testing the knight's knowledge of the class to which he
claims to belong, as all three questions are concerned with
the trappings of courtly life. This motive is suggested
also in the Buchan text (iv), where the questions are introduced
as follows:
If ye be a courteous knight
As I trust not ye be,
Ye'll answer some o the sma' questions
That I will ask at thee.(st.12 )
Courtly questions are asked also in the first category of
questions sequences, the texts with riddles (i, iv, v), but
except in (i), where they were supplied later by Scott's
informant, only the answers remain, an indication of the
confusion which surrounds these passages. There are two
possibilities explaining the confusion. The first is that
the Harris text is an ingenious reworking of a straightforward
description of life at -Archerdale, into a riddle framework,
although the questions are still not riddles proper. This
would explain the fact that the answers to the questions
turn up more frequently than the questions themselves. The
other possibility is that the original text had a series of
questions in which the knight's claim to noble birth was
tested, and that the Glenbuchattext is an independent readjustment
of the ballad. With such little evidence, it is
virtually impossible to make a choice between these two
possibilities, but the artisitic superiority of the Glenbuchat
text, where the questions make such good dramatic sense, tends
to favour the first possibility. Furthermore, it seems likely
that the riddles or questions concerned with drink - the
'berry-brown ale in a birken speal 1 and 'wine in the horn
green' - are imported from a tradition of drinking-songs,
for they have parallels in 'John Barleycorn', the ceremonial
drinking-song which has been in print since the seventeenth
century. In a version used in the 1Haxey Hood' ceremony in
Lincolnshire, the ninth stanza runs as follows:
You can put red wine into a glass,
Put brandy into a can,
You can put Sir John in a nut-brown jug
And he'll make the merriest man.[14]
This borrowing, as well as adding to the confusion surrounding this part of the ballad texts, might easily have suggested the questions found in the Harris text: 'What gaes in a speal? What in a horn green?'.
In either case, the additional questions in this category, some of which are clearly borrowed from Child 46, wrench the ballad into a new shape, for the riddles become a courtship match. One stanza in particular from text (iv) seems to have been transplanted from 'Captain Wedderburn':
Mony's the questions I've askd at thee,
And ye've answered them a'
Ye are mine, and I am thine,
Amo' the sheets sae sma.(st.15)
This contradicts the motive given earlier of testing the knight's rank. The rhetorical questions of the fish and the pennies, found in (i, iv and v), may have originated in a separate folksong, and their inclusion in the ballad was perhaps influenced by the 'impossible task' questions that occur in some versions of the English revenant ballad, 'The Unquiet Grave' (Child 78):
Go fetch me a nut from dungeon keep,
And water from a stone,
And white milk from a maiden's breast
That babe bare never none.[15]
These lines are spoken by the dead lover, who is disturbed by the tears of his mistress; they are answered with the formulaic conclusion, 'Go dig me a grave . . . ' Logically, they have no more place here than the rhetorical questions in Child 47, but they have a metaphorical poignancy, linking the barrenness of the grave with the emptiness of the lovers' future.
Another revenant song, which uses the similar rhetorical device of adynata to express the hopelessness of the lovers'
situation, was recorded from a singer in Birmingham in 1953. The dead lover has crossed the 'burning Thames' to reach his
mistress; at dawn he must leave her. The song finishes with the stanza:
'Then it's Willie dear, and handsome Willie,
Whenever shall I see you again?'
'When the fish they fly, love, and the sea runs dry, love,
And the rocks they melt by the heat of the sun'[16]
The riddle of the 'seemliest sight' found in (iv and v), the two Buchan texts, seems out of place, and was probably the result of pastoral improvisation to fill the stanza.
I. The Inheritance.
All the complete texts except the Glenbuchat and Harris (ii; iii) have a section in which the lady declares the property to which she is heiress, but the section is usually confused, the problems being mainly in arithmetic, which is hard to follow at the speed at which a ballad is recited or sung. In the Scott text (i), Margaret lays claim to
twelve castles in all, nine from her father and three from
her mother. She claims to be the only heir. Her brother,
however, contradicts this with the familiar formula:
'O hald your tongue, Lady Margaret', he said,
For loud I hear you lie;
Your father was lord of nine castles,
Your mother was lady of three,
Your father was lord of nine castles,
But ye fa heir to but three'(st.14)
Unless the lady is illegitimate, which seems an unlikely complication, this suggests that she has among her other faults the crime of cheating her brother of his inheritance, but since he is already dead, this makes no sense.
Text (iv) makes more sense of the passage:the lady says she is heir to all twelve castles except that she has a brother 'far ayont the sea'. This is his cue for revealing his identity, and the castles are thus used as a recognition token, as the sisters in 'Fair Annie' (Child 62) are made to realise their kinship by the formal declaration of Annie's parentage.
There is an added complication in the Scott text, however, for after laying her claim to the castles, Margaret tells her suitor that he will be able to plough and sow around them, and that the meadows will be mown on the 15th May. As he contradicts his sister's claim, William turns this offer into a curse, by reversing the words:
And round about a' thae castles
You may baith plow and saw
But on the fifteenth day of May
The meadows will not maw.(st.15)
The symmetry of this is suspiciously neat; it reveals an author conscious of the ballad tendency to repeat stanzas with slight variations, especially in dialogue. However, such repetitions are usually less laboured, and work with simpler material, as in the exchange between another brother and sister in 'Babylon' (Child 14A):
'It's whether ye will be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?'
'It's I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife'(sts. 4-5)
It may be that the brother's curse in the Scott text was an original stanza, which generated the sister's inverse promise: but the stanzas are not well integrated with the rest of the ballad. Another trace of well-informed self-consciousness is found in the same text in the repetition of the stock formula in which Margaret is accused of lying:
'0 hold your tongue, Lady Margaret', he said,
'Again I hear you lie . . . '(st.l8)
These traits suggest that the processes of development, by which a ballad takes on the distinctive, well-used style of the genre, may in this case have been artificially hastened on their way; however, there is no need to attribute this to Scott himself, who no doubt could have made a better job of tidying up the loose ends of the text, had he wished so to do.
K. The Grave and the Ghost.
In texts (i, iv, v and viii) the lady shows a wish to follow her brother, once his identity is revealed, to the grave, and in this she is following the tradition of the revenant lover ballad 'Sweet William's Ghost' (Child 77), in which the lady (also Margaret in most versions) follows the corpse and asks if there is room in the grave for her, a stanza that has been adopted into 'Proud Lady Margaret' in Bell Robertson's version (viii). The tradition is found in Scandinavian sources also; it is rooted in the idea that the
dead are still in their graves, or barrows, to be called on, rather than transcendental spirits. Taken literally, the idea can produce some very gruesome pieces, such as the Danish ballad 'Aage og Else 1 ,[17] in which the revenant lover brings his coffin with him when he visits his betrothed and describes his grave to her, and the vivid details of the corruption of the flesh given in Child 77 (F sts.5-6). This
physical approach to death, and life after death, can be
contrasted with another dialogue between the living and the
dead, the father and daughter in the fourteenth century poem
Pearl. Although the child is not a revenant in the sense
that the ballad characters are, because she is seen in a
vision, the conversation has some similarities with the
dialogue of 'Proud Lady Margaret'. The child's father says
that he will join her, but they are separated by a stream
which he oannot cross, and he has to be told that this is
because he is not worthy:
'py corse in clot mot calder keue' [18]
Because of original sin, man must go through death to attain union with his dead beloved. The message in 'Proud Lady
Margaret' is slightly different; in (i), Margaret cannot go with her brother because she is unclean, but in (iv) and (v) there is another reason: the living cannot enter a grave. Thus the two contrasting views of death are both given. In (viii), only the second reason is given.
The mixing of these two concepts calls into question the nature of the ghost; is he a spirit, or an animated
corpse? Wimberly uses evidence which suggests the latter,
in this and other ballads, to argue that the revenant ballads
are concerned with primitive, non-literary ghosts, who relate
to 'a period of thought when mankind had not yet grasped the
idea of the separation of the soul and body, or, it is very
possible, had not yet conceived the idea of the soul'.(l9)
David Fowler, on the other hand, finds evidence in the same
texts that the revenant narrative is derived from medieval
romance, where ghosts are ethereal and conform to Christian
doctrine on the matter.( 2o) The earliest British revenant
ballad, 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William' (Child 74) supports
Fowler's argument: the ghost is seen in a dream, like King
Ceyx in the Ceyx and Alcyone story in Chaucer's Book of the
Duchess. She glides, and is described as a spirit (A) or
ghost (B, c); she makes no mention of graves or worms. In
Child 77, however, the case is not so clear. Although Ramsay's
text (A) has the ghost vanish in a cloud of mist (which Child points out as a modern addition), he is in all other respects and in all other versions corporeal: his mouth is cold and smells of clay. His lady strikes him on the breast to return his troth; and he gives a physical description of the coffin and the grave. He is nevertheless still described as a spirit as well as a ghost.
However, the existence of such corporeal ghosts in the
ballads need not contradict Fowler's argument for a medieval
connection. There was a considerable vogue for confrontations
between the living and the dead in late medieval poetry, which
used the macabre to enforce the memento mori theme, as in the
'Mirror for Young Ladies at their toilet' (Harley MS. 116):
Maist thou now be glade, with all thi fresshe aray,
One me to loke that wyll dystene thi face.
Rew on thy-self and all thi synne vpracet[21]
The descriptions of death in such pieces were most commonly applied to women, in contrast to their earthly finery, and
could be just as gruesome as the ballad descriptions, as for example in the fifteenth century poem printed from MS. Bodley
789 by Rosemary Woolf, where the corruption of a lady's body is given in vivid detail on the theme of:
Mi bodi pat sumtyme was so gay,
Now lied and rotid in de ground[22]
In this tradition, for dramatic purposes, the corpse must be animated to the extent of being able to speak; and this would naturally lead to the idea that the spirit had reinhabited the body. Thus, despite theological teaching on the
subject, literature could produce a 'ghost' which was both Wimberly's 'primitive' animated corpse and a transcended
spirit which had returned to warn the living against pride. This is, in effect, the nature of the ghost in 'Proud Lady Margaret'. In (i), he appears to be an ordinary living man, and it is only the description of the grave, in the final stanza, that reveals his ghostly nature. In (iv and v) his appearance and exit are supernatural, but his grave is described in physical detail, so that he is both ethereal and a grave-dweller. In (vi) he enters like a mortal, but gives himself away by wearing a white scarf, presumably a literary vestige of the shroud that William brings with him in Child 77 (c). The Harris text is the least explicit, and
the brother's identity is only revealed when his sister remarks with gruesome naivety:( 23)
'Ye are as like my ae brither
As ever I did see;
But he's been buried in yon kirkyard
It's mair than years is three' (st.10)
The brother in the Glenbuchat text, apart from the hints given in his replies to his sister's questions, is treated as a mortal until he makes his dramatic revelation (st.18). His statement that he has 1 come frae the dead for thee' at first suggests that he has come to fetch her from life, as Clark Sanders promises Margret in Child 77 (B st.10):
'Gine ever the dead come for the quick,
Be sure, Margret, I'll come again for thee'
However, it turns out that she has time to repent before her death and he has come to warn her of the consequences if she does not leave her proud ways. In the last two stanzas, he becomes the conventional walking dead, having to return when 'the cocks hae crawn in merry Midlert' and waving his 'lilly han'; but he makes it clear· that it is Heaven to which he must return, and not the grave, of which there is no mention. In Bell Robertson's text, on the other hand (viii), there is no mention of Heaven but only of graves. Thus, the most that can be said in general terms about the nature of the revenant in this ballad is that the individual responsible for each text has employed the concept that seemed to them the most dramatically effective. In the eighteenth century, no balladist can come into Wimberly's category of primitive thinkers, but the concept of a material revenant is too powerful and effective to die out, and the texts show that, as in the late medieval tradition of the macabre, it can combine well with the more literary and Christian concepts of the transcended spirit.
L - M. The Knight admonishes his sister for pride.
The Scott text (i) stands apart in this: William has come to humble his sister's heart that has 'gard sae mony die'. This is presumably a reference to the riddle test which this text alone treats unambiguously as a courtship ritual. More usual (ii, iii, iv, vi) is the more powerful complaint that he cannot rest in his grave (or, in (ii), in Heaven) because of her sinful pride.
It is unusual for a revenant to be concerned with the
sins of others, unless that sin be their own murder, as it
is in 'The Cruel Mother' (Child 20). More common motives
in the ballads are to quieten the grief of the loved one,
which disturbs the dead (e.g. Child 78, 49), or to retrieve
a plighted troth (Child 77). Lady Margaret in Child 74
appears to announce her death, and the sons in Child 79 come
back to lift their mother's curse. Outside the ballad
tradition, however, there are precedents for the brother's
admonition. Medieval exempla, epitaph poems and romances
often feature revenants from Hell or Purgatory, who appear
in the form of devils or corpses to warn the living of their sufferings.[24]
Child cites French popular songs with thesame theme in his headnote to No. 47. Of particular interest in this case is the fourteenth century Scottish alliterative romance, 'The Awntyrs off Arthure', in which Guinevere's mother appears to her daughter in the form of Lucifer, to warn her of the damnation which she herself suffers. There is a full description of the torments, and the lady asks her mother what it is that grieves God most. The answer is:
Pride with ~e appurtenance, as prophetez han tolde
Bifore pe peple apert in her preching.[25]
There is also a juxtaposition of worldly beauty and the grimness of Hell:
I was radder of rode pen rose in pe ron,
My ler as pe lele lonched so light.
Now am I a graceless gost and grisly I gran;
With Lucyfer in a lake loz am I light.[26]
This contrast is close to the memento mori theme which is the mainstay of the plot of 'Proud Lady Margaret'. The ballad form is well adapted for bold juxtapositions, because of its regularity and simplicity; the two halves of the stanza answer each other in a pattern often reinforced by the tune, in the forms ABBA (as in the Harris tune) or ABAB (as in Mrs. Gordon's tune). The juxtaposition of the traditional ballad image of the court lady, decked with gold and jewels in her yellow hair, and the equally traditional, relentness cruelty of death, was common in the Scottish ballads of this date; the most influential was probably
Child 58, 'Sir Patrick Spens,' with such stanzas as:
0 lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi thair gold kerns in their hair,
Waiting for thair ain deir lords,
For they'll se tham na mair.(A st.10)
The revenant theme lends itself particularly well to gruesome contrasts in this pattern: the most extreme are to be found
in texts of 'Sweet William's Ghost' (Child 77). For example, when the lady asks her lover if he has brought her any 'precious things', he replies:
I have not brought you any scarlets sae red,
No, no, nor the silks so fine;
But I have brought you my winding-sheet
Oer many's the rock and hill(C st.5)
Here, as with many other ballad techniques, the emphasis is on the visual, with the vivid picture found also in the fifteenth century illustrations of the Dance of Death (for example, the painted screen in Hexham Abbey) where the skeleton stands by the side of the richly-dressed king or nobleman; and in the popular theme of The Three Living and the Three Dead, which was brought to England and Scotland from the Continent, and in which the living, engaged in some sport or pleasure, are suddenly confronted by the dead who stand in their path, and who take the form of skeletons or corpses.[27]
There are two potential contrasts in 'Proud Lady Margaret' between the picture of Margaret in her finery and the picture of her brother in his grave; and between her cheerfulness at the beginning of the story and her sorrow at the end; both contrasts work well in visual terms. In the Buchan text (iv), however, the visual technique is interspersed with verbose, abstract admonitions, as in the cumbersome stanza 30:
vyou're straight and tall, handsome witnall
But your pride owergoes your wit,
But if ye do not your ways refrain,
In Pirie's chair ye'll sit'
The only other known occurrence of the term 'Pirie's cnairv, or, 'the lowest seat o nell', as it is conveniently glossed in the following stanza, is in a boys' game described by Professor Cappen.[25] One boy stands with his back to a wall, while a second bends towards him, his head in the first boy's stomach, thus forming a 'chair'. A third boy sits on this, holding up a number of fingers, which number must be guessed by the second boy. The penalty for a wrong answer is given in a doggerel exchange as 'Pirie's Chair', 'Pirie' or 'Hell'.
Sir W. D. Geddes suggested a derivation of the word from the French 'le pire'[29], but there is no evidence of the word elsewhere. A more likely derivation is from the legend of Piritnous, which would be known by schoolboys from Virgil, Homer, Horace or Euripides. Piritnous is punished by Pluto for attempting to carry off Proserpine, by being confined in
chains and tormented in Hades.[30] 'Pirie', from 'Piritnous', reminiscent of 'Ninny's tomb' in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
is a plausible abbreviation; and a piece of schoolboy classicism, incorporated into a traditional game and subsequently
adopted for the embellishment of a ballad, is very much in the tradition of the dual culture of Lowland Scotland, discussed above. However, it is telling that the balladist feels it necessary to expand the term as 'the lowest seat o hell' in the next stanza; like the ballad techniques which were too carefully woven into the Scott text (i), the term is used self-consciously. It did not survive into any of the later known versions.
The Glenbuchat text {ii) is also more verbose than the others at this point, as the brother tells his sister to repent while there is still time to 'seek frae Christ a boon'. The stern moral tone of the ballad has been pointed out as exceptional, since ballads are supposed to be impersonal, carrying no moral comment. This is not to say that the ballads are amoral; although their narrators and their protagonists are not prone to sermonizing, they can express a powerful sense of values, without which they lose their
dramatic force. The values which often come to the fore are
the loyalties and tabus that seem the most deeply engrained
in the human psyche: loyalty to the family, fear of incest,
sexual jealousy and sexual desire are the most common motives
for action, the action often leading either to marriage or to
death. Unlike the medieval tradition of exemplum and allegory,
which separate moral and action, the ballad tralition treats
them as one, and sometimes with greater success. 'Child
Waters' {Child 6J), for example, where Burd Ellen, pregnant
and dressed as a little footpage, runs barefoot behind her
lover's horse, has more resonance and poignancy than its
exemplum counterpart, the story of Patient Griselda, where
the moral is carefully underlined.
Where 'Proud Lady Margaret' differs most from the majority of ballads, and from 'Child Waters', is in the choice of moral, and in the prolonged treatment of it in some versions. Pride is rarely regarded as sinful in the ballads; the one other notable instance is in 'Sweet William's Ghost' (77F st.6) which seems, as Child points out, to have borrowed considerably from 'Proud Lady Margaret.' In other ballads, pride is sometimes held up as a virtue, as in 'Fair Annie' (62), where there is no disapproval expressed of Annie dressed in her finery, to outshine her rival at her wedding. Ballads are more usually concerned with palpable crimes, acts of the flesh, than with sins, acts of the spirit.
Tunes:
The three tunes that survive with the ballad are, as Bronson says, unrelated. Unfortunately, Bell Robertson
never sang her ballads, and so there is no indication as to
whether her text had a musical tradition of its own. Bronson
suggests that the Harris tune is from an eighteenth century
hymn, and this is quite possible, since the two were often
interchangeable, as a minister of Wick, William Geddes,
remarked in 1683:
It is alleged by some, and that not without some colour of reason, that many of our Ayres and Tunes are made by good Angels, but the letter or lines of our songs by devils.[31]
The tune from Christie seems to have been sung with a text
derived from Buchan's, according to Christie's note, and the
third tune, from Mrs. Gordon, is with a fragment which is
close to the Buchan text (iv). This may have been learned
from a published collection rather than from an oral source.
Conclusions.
The variety found within the limited scope of 'Proud Lady Margaret' indicates how much a ballad can alter without the stabilising influence of a broadside or chapbook text.
The variety must also be attributable to the inherent confusion of the plot, with its intertwining of the conventions of revenant lover, brother, and riddle courtship. It required a sophisticated psychological treatment to accommodate the brother and lover duality, and this it found in Glenbuchat. It is tempting to lay this at the door of the minister, especially since the heavy Christian moralising is most pronounced in this text. However, in the Glenbuchat collection as a whole, there seems to be no evidence of reworking by a single hand; style varies considerably from a highly developed 'oral' style to the broadside manner. There is no evidence to suggest substantial Christian overlay, and no attempt to
expurgate such obviously pagan elements as the drinking of
the blood of the slain in 'Yarrow' (Vol.IV). In general, the
texts are strong, imaginative and intelligent, with some gaps,
but usually coherent, indicating a healthy tradition rather
than a cunning editor.
Nevertheless, good ballads do not make themselves, and each of the seven texts of Child 47 show marks of careful composition, whether in the intelligent manipulation of the plot (in the Harris text), or the 'literary' overworkings that now seem so incongruous in the BuchaJ texts.[32] There is no need to accuse any of the editors or collectors of fraud; as always, the actual originator of the ballad is unknown, always one step away from the evidence, but the rapidity with which the ballad adapted its shape shows that there were several people who took an active interest and an active part in the development of balladry. These people recreated the texts, not in the oral-formulaic style which David Buchan claimed for Mrs. Brown of Falkland(33), but deliberately, consciously, and quite possibly with pen in hand. The Glenbuchat and the Harris texts seem to represent a different strand of tradition from the others, mainly
because their treatment of the questions, though not identical,
is more coherently worked into the plot. The other strand,
with the riddle sequence and the inheritance claim, includes
the rest of the Child texts and fragment (vii). Which of
these two traditions came first, it is now impossible to say,
but it seems in general more likely that a coherent text
was broken down into a confused medley, than vice versa. The
dates are too close to be of much help here.
The last judgement of the ballad must be its last recorded version, the Bell Robertson text (viii) of 1914, by which time it had reached a balanced, manageable form of six stanzas. The introduction, the entry of the ghost and his exit, have all been pared away, and what remains is a dialogue in which each stanza from the lady is answered, with hypnotic regularity, by an echoing stanza from the brother. The menace that makes the Glenbuchat text so powerful is
preserved here; the juxtapositions of worldly wealth and
happiness, and the horror of the grave, remain to reinforce
the admonition against pride, which occurs in the very centre
of the ballad. The story of the revenant brother was
evidently strong enough to survive the century, to emerge as
worn down and polished as the old 'classic' ballads. It is
only unfortunate that no records survive of what was
happening to it during that time.
NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN (CHILD 47).
1. See David Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, pp.183-206.
2. Matthew Hodgart, The Faber Book of Ballads, p.25l.
3. Child, headnote to No.79, II p.2J8.
4. Hamish Henderson, 1The Ballad, the Folk & the Oral Tradition', in E. J. Cowan, The People's Past, pp.106ff.
5. E. J. Cowan, 'Calvinism and the Survival of Folk', ibid., p.35.
6. See below, and Appendix F.
7. Letters on Scottish Ballads from Professor F. J. Child to W. W., Aberdeen, p.24
9. Many examples of the medieval tradition of the castle are given by M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan State Univ. Press, 1952). A particularly relevant example is the heroine in the Digby play Mary Magdalen (E.E.T.S. 283, 1982, pp,37-42) who from her castle fights the seven deadly sins who assail it, especially Lechery and Pride.
10. G. L. Brook, of MS Harley pp.27-9.
11. Ibid., No.8 pp.39-40. the Middle
12. L. C. Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Popular Ballad, p.244.
13. Peter Dronke, 'Learned Lyric and Popular Ballad', Studi Medievali, XVII (1976), l-40.
14. Recorded by Peter Kennedy & Seamus Ennis, Topic, 'Songs of Ceremony', The Folksongs of Britain IX.
15. L. Broadwood & J. A. F. Maitland, English County Songs, p.35, st.4.
16. Cited in Dronke, .cit.
17. Described in Child, headnote to No.77, II p.227.
18. E. v. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Clarendon, Oxford 1974), 1.320, p.12.
19. L. C. Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, p.228.
20. Fowler, A Literary History, p.l84.
21. Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, No.152, p.241.
22. Rosemary Woolf, The English Lyric in the Middle Ages, pp.317-18. The poem is from a MS. of private devotional pieces.
2J. The same effect is sought more self-consciously by Wordsworth in the lines from 'The Thorn':
Is like an infant's grave in size,
As like as like can be:
But never, never anywhere,
An infant's grave was half so fair.
Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, revd. E. de Selincourt, (o.u.P. 1975) p.l57.
24. E.c. No.LXVII in Sidney Herrtage, The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, 'How a woman, who was damned, appeared to her son'. See also Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, pp.J09ff.
25. Ralph Hanna III, The Awnt rs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn (Manchester Univ. Press 197 , p.75 Douce MS. 11.2J9-40).
26. Ibid., p.71 (11.161-164)
27. Woolf, .£12· cit. pp.J44-6
28. Child, glossary, V p.J65.
29. Ibid.
30. E.g. Horace, Odes, III4.
31. Cowan, The People's Past, p.42
32. The controversy over Peter Buchan's editorial practice is discussed in D. Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, Chap.l6, and also in W. Walker, Peter Buchan and other Papers on Scottish and English Ballads and Songs Aberdeen 1915. The latter describes Child 7 as one of the texts in the Harvard MS. most freely cut and altered, the alterations being in different hands, but
mostly in those of Alexander Laing and Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.
33. D. Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk.
________________
APPENDIX F: CHILD 47, 'PROUD LADY MARGARET': DESCRIPTION OF TEXTS.
Key to Description of Texts.
A. Lady Margaret/Janet walks up and down one night, looking over her castle wall.
A1 . A lady walks in a 'garden green' at night.
A2. A knight comes to Archerdale and sees a lady looking over a castle wall.
A3 . 'Fair Margret1 is described as a high-born, proud young lady, who spends her time and her ample fortune
'adorning her fair bodye'. She sits in her hall one night, combing her yellow hair.
B. She sees a knight approach the gate.
B1. She sees a knight ride over the down.
B2 . A knight appears in the lady's hall.
C. She challenges his rank as a gentleman.
C1. He asks her why she is alone: she replies she is 'In her sport'. He asks if she wants a gentle knight to lie with her: she questions that he is worthy of the title. He dismounts.
D. She asks him his will.
D1. She asks his birth: he at the foot of a tree, foster and to fee', says he was born in a greenwood and sent to Archerdale to
E. He says he seeks her love, or will die.
E1 . He says he wants to be her lover till he dies.
E2 . He accuses her of immodesty.
F. He assures her he is a gentleman, and will put smiths in her smithy, tailors in her bower, cooks in her kitchen and butlers in her hall, and plant corn in her father's land.
G. He turns to go, and she detains him.
G1 . She says many have died for her.
H. She asks him questions which (or, some of which) he answers.
H1 . She questions him about Archerdale, and he replies.
I. She describes her inheritance.
I 1. She remarks on his likeness to her dead brother, William.
I 2. She says that if he stays and talks, she will lie with him.
J. He reveals his identity as her brother.
K. She says she will go with him and he refuses her: she is too unclean. He describes his grave.
K1. She asks if there is room in the grave for her: he replies there is not.
L. He explains that he cannot rest because of her pride.
L1. He has come to humble her haughty heart.
M. He admonishes her vanity and warns her of her mortal fate.
N. He vanishes.
N1. He leaves her mourning, though he found her adorning her hair.
N2. Dawn comes and he is forced to leave, waving his 'lilly han.' She is left watering the garden with her tears.
DESCRIPTION OF TEXTS.
(i) 'Twas on a night, an evening bright'
Place: Edinburgh
Date: 180J
Source: Sir W. Scott, Minstrelsy, III p.275: 'Communicated by Mr. Hamilton, music-seller ... with whose mother it had been a favourite'.
Child 47A.
Description: 19 stanzas, + 2 added by Scott.
A B C E Gl H I J K L.
The questions: Wherein leems the beer?(in a horn)
Wherein leems the wine? (in glasses fine)
Wherein leems the gold? (between two kings fighting)
Wherein leems the twine? (between a lady's hands)
What is the first flower? (primrose)
What is the bonniest bird? (thristlecock)
How many pennies make J times £3,000?
How many fish in the sea?
(ii) 'Archerdale'
Place: Glenbuchat, Aberdeenshire
Date: 1818
Source: Glenbuchat MSS II No,lJ (King's College Univ.
Library, Aberdeen): collected by Rev. Robert
Scott, minister of Glenbuchat, and one of his
daughters.
Description: 25 stanzas
Al Bl c1 E2 Dl G Hl G H1 G H1 I 2 J L M N2 .
Questions:
What learning did you get? - (to keep us free from sin, that we might go to Heaven).
What was your meat and drink? - (Black was our bread; brown was our ale; red was our wine).
What do the ladies wear there? - (Green is their clothing; milk-white are their cowls)
(iii) 'There cam a knicht to Archerdale'
Place: Perthshire
Date: c.l820
Source: Mrs. Harris. Learned in childhood from an old
nurse, who learned the songs in her own child.
hood, transcribed by her daughter. Harris MS
fol.7, No.J. Child 47D.
Description: 15 stanzas
A2 C E2 G H1 GIl J L M N1 •
Questions: What goes in a speal? (Ale)
What goes in a horn green? (Wine)
What goes on a lady's head? (Silk)
Tune: Bronson 47.1
(iv) 'There was a Knight, in a summer's night'
Place: N. Scotland
Date: 1827
Source: Peter Buchan, Ballads of the North I p.91.
Motherwell, Minstrelsy, p.lxxxi, and MS. p.591,
both from Buchan. Child 47B.
Description: 32 stanzas
A B2 D E G1
C F H I J K L M N.
The Questions:
What is the fairest flower? (primrose)
What is the sweetest bird? (mavis)
What's the finest thing a king or queen can wale?
(yellow gold)
How many pennies in £100?
How many fish in the sea?
What's the seemliest sight you'll see on a May morning?
(A milk-white lace in a fair maid's dress)
. .(Berry-brown ale and a birken speal)
. . (and wine in a horn green)
(v) 'Once there was a jolly hind squire'
Place: N. Scotland
Date: c.l828
Source: Buchan MSS. II 95 (British Museum Add.29408-9)
Child 47C.
Description: 21 stanzas
A B2 DE G1 C H K J K M N.
Questions:
What is the first flower? (primrose)
What bird sings next unto the nightingale? (thristlecock)
What's the finest thing a king or queen can wale?
(yellow gold)
How many pennies in £100?
How many fish in the sea?
What's the seemliest sight you'll see on a May morning?
... (Ale in a birken scale)
... (Wine in a horn green)
... (gold in a king' s banner)
(vi) 'Fair Margret was a young ladye'
Place: Angus
Date: 1829
Source: Alexander Laing of Brechin, Ancient Ballads
and Songs from the recitation of old people
(unpublished) p.6. Child 47E.
Description: 12 stanzas
A3 B2 D K1 J L M N1.
(vii) 'When ye gang in at yon church door'
Place: New Deer, Aberdeenshire
Date: 1907
Source: Mrs. Gordon, a cottar woman, aged 60. Greig
MS. IV 39; Greig and Keith, Last Leaves, p.37.
Description: l stanza: M.
Tune: Bronson 47.3
(viii) 'What is your will with me young man?'
Place: New Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire
Date: Jan. 31, 1914
Source: Bell Robertson, 'got when a girl from another
girl about her own age'. Duncan-Greig MSS.
LX 101; id., Ballad Book III (778), between
pp.63-64;-Last Leaves, p.37.
David Buchan, A Scottish Ballad Book,(Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London 1973) p.151.
Description: 6 stanzas.
D E1 Gl K J K1 .
(ix) Tune only
Place: N. E. Scotland
Date: 1876
Source: W. Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs procured
in the counties of Aberdeen, Banff & Moray,
I p.28. Printed with text after Scott.
Bronson 47.2