Sweet William- Richards (NH) 1942 Olney/Flanders B
[From Ballads Migrant to New England, 1953 and Ancient Ballads III, 1963. Notes by Coffin/Flanders follow.
R. Matteson 2012, 2015]
The Famous Flower of Servingmen
(Child 106)
The tradition of "The Famous Flower of Servingmen" has died out in England. It is still known in the northeastern United States but not to the rest of the country. Its New England survival can probably be laid to its inclusion in The Blackbird Songster (New York, c. 1845) and its circulation about the region in other printed forms, such as the one in The Charms of Melody. All five texts given below and the two in Phillips Barry's British Ballads from Maine, 227 (the entire recovered American canon), are from print or close to it.
On page 280 of British Ballads from Maine one will find a reprint of The Blackbird, songster text, which Barry feels the printer must have taken from oral tradition. It is related to the fragment sent to Percy in 1776 by the Dean of Derry (See Child, II, 429). In it the stepmother rather than the mother is the villain, and most of the analogous stanzas are markedly different in phrasing and even detail. The text Barry got from the Irish woman in Brunswick and the Flanders B-D2 series below are somewhat closer than this to the Derry fragment. Although all of these also blame a step-mother rather than a true mother, Barry's text and Flanders B include the sweet William pseudonym, and Flanders C, D1, and D2 have at least a single exactly corresponding stanza. One is safe in saying that the Derry fragment, the Songster text, and the five pieces recovered from Northeastern oral tradition are of the same general sort. However, Flanders A, the version from print, is close to Child's full text, a seventeenth-century broadside in which the heroine is Elise and not Ellen or Eleanor. The Charms of Melody text is somewhat longer than the Child broadside, thirty-four stanzas against twenty-eight, but the similarities are striking line after line. See also Greig and Keith, 85-86.
B. Sweet William- Mrs. Belle Richards (Colebrook, NH) 1942 Olney/Flanders
1. My father was a noble knight,
My mother was a lady bright
And I myself a gay lady,
But now I wait as a servant boy.
My father built me a lovely bower,
It was fine as any flower;
'Twas covered all o'er with the beautifulest green,
Oh, such a bower scarce e'er seen.
My father matched me with a knight'
My stepmother owed me a dreadful spite,
She sent four robbers all in the night
To rob my bower and slay my knight.
'Twas all alone they did him kill,
And all alone they left him still;
There was nothing left to wrap him in
But the bloody sheet where my love was slain.
'Twas all alone I dug his grave
And all alone in it him I laid,
While Christ was priest and I was clerk,
I laid my love in the clay, cold earth.
I saddled my horse and away did ride,
With sword and pistols by my side;
I cut off my hair and changed my name
From Ellen Fair to Sweet William.
I rode till I came to the King's high hall,
And for my supper I did call,
I gave the porter a gay, gold ring
To carry my message unto the King.
The King came down and thus did say,
"What can you do, young man, I pray?
If you can do what I want you to,
I'll hire you for a year or two."
" 'Tis I can be Your kitchen cook,
Or I can be your stableman,
Or I can be waiter all in Your hall
And wait on the nobles as they call."
" 'Tis you shan't be my kitchen cook
Nor you shan't be my stableman,
But you shall be waiter all in my hall
And wait on the nobles as they call."
The King being gone one day from home,
There was no one there but the good old man.
Sometimes she sighed, sometimes she sang,
Sometimes the tears down her cheeks did run.
The King came home and thus did say,
"What news, what news, old man, I pray?"
"Good news, good news, my King," said he;
"Sweet William is a lady gay."
'"Go bring me down a suit of silk--
It shall be white as any milk.
I'll dress her up in the silk so fine
And make her rule over all that's mine."