Bluegrass Messengers

The Cambric Shirt- Daniels (VT) pre1934 Flanders G

[Title provided in Flanders,  Ancient Ballads; 1966; notes by Coffin follow.

R. Matteson Jr. 2014]
 
The Elfin Knight [Notes by Coffin]
(Child 2)

On page 227 of Ben Botkin's Folksay 1930, L. W. Chappell points out that "Riddles, perhaps even more than most types of traditional lore, have a way of 'staying put.' " It is not surprising then to find "The Elfin Knight," widespread, but relatively unvarying, in both Britain and America. The major collections in the two countries usually include it, and it has been the object of a good bit of study. Its popularity is undoubtedly due to its presence in  broadside tradition; Child B is a black-letter text from Restoration times, and the ballad appears in American songsters and on American broadsheets  just before the Mexican war, Phillips Barry, with the help of George Lyman Kittredge, has reviewed the printed tradition of the song in JAF, XXX,
284, and a bibliography of song-sheet texts is given there. For a start on further references, see Coffin, 30-31 (American); Dean-Smith, 65, and Belden,  (English); and Greig and Keith, 1-2 (Scottish).

The relationship of this song and others like it to British courtship customs and vestigial fertility rites has never been thoroughly discussed. However, there is enough evidence to warrant research along these lines. As most scholars have recognized, the elfin lover of the British texts and child's title is nor native to the ballad and the riddler is a mortal lad. The situation is that of courtship, not unlike the one in the widespread Aarne-Thompson, Mt. 875. The most common refrain, as in Versions A-B and D-G, a corruption of "rosemary and thyme," preserves the plant symbolism of fidelity and fertility. It is these herbs that the girl such as Madeline in Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes"  put on either side of her bed to dream of her lover. Also, the riddle, as Charles Francis potter indicates on page 940 of The standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and, Legend, may be solved as a sort of sympathetic magic to insure the success of critical ventures like those into love and marriage. certainly the relation of riddling to puberty and fertility rites is to be found everywhere.

The song is in Phillips Barry's British Ballads from Maine, 3.

The eight tunes included here fail into three main groups: 1) the versions sung by Underhill, Luce, Delorme, and possibly Perkins; 2) the versions of Gray and Daniels; and 3) those of Morton and Richards, whose relationship, if any, is quite distant. There is also a possibility that the Perkins version is related to that of Richards rather than group 1. Group 1 corresponds to BCI, group B, and so does group 2, although the two groups represent distant relatives in BCI. Strangely enough, our group 3 also corresponds to some tunes in the large group B in the BC classification, whose integrity is upheld only by a large number of intermediate versions, and which consists of rather diverse materials. our groups 1 and 2 seem to have variants which are widespread in the United States, in conjunction with Child 2 texts. The Perkins, Morton, and Richards tunes have fewer analogues and are not so typically representative of the Anglo-American ballad style as the other tunes in this collection of Child 2.

(Answer)
"'Tis now you're going to Cape Ann;
Remember me there to that same young man
And he shall be a true lover of mine.

"Tell him to buy me an acre of land
Between the salt water and the sea sand.

"Tell him to plow it with a horse's horn
And plant it all over with one peck of corn.

"Tell him to reap it with a sickle of leather
And bind it all up in one hummingbird's feather.

"Tell him to pack it on one cake of ice
And drawer it all home with one yoke of mice.

"Tell the fool when he's done his work,
To come to me and he'll have his shirt.