"The Grey Cock"-- A Drollery Version
[Footnotes moved to the end, some minor editing to clarify ll=lines, not proofed.
R. Matteson 2012]
"The Grey Cock"- A Drollery Version
by Albert B. Friedman
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 67, No. 265 (Jul. - Sep., 1954), pp. 285-290
"THE GREY COCK"--A DROLLERY VERSION
BY ALBERT B. FRIEDMAN
DURING the Commonwealth period, a fairly numerous, though short-lived, species of anthology was evolved in London-the drollery.[1] These facetious little collections of miscellaneous verse were sponsored by disappointed Royalist wits who hoped by this means to buoy up the spirits of the king's party. Their coarseness and more than occasional obscenity, which posed so great a problem for Victorian editors, probably represented originally a device for mocking the oppressive moral standards of the sanctimonious Saints, whom the Royalists could no longer combat openly. As one might expect of miscellanies intended primarily for a sophisticated, indeed an aristocratic, audience, witty epigrams, satires and urbane Cavalier lyrics bulk largest among the contents. Nonetheless, the compilers, exploiting every source of mirth and sensation, and untrammeled by literary standards, included a surprisingly large quantity of poetry of a popular, even folk, character. In Wit Restor'd (1658), Child discovered versions of "Johnie Armstrong" (No. 169), "Little Musgrave" (No. 81) and "The Twa Sisters" (No. 10). The same ballads were reprinted in Wit and Drollery (1682). "John Dory" is mentioned in Bishop Corbet's "A Journey into France" and parodied in Sir John Mennis' "Upon Sir John Suckling's most warlike preparations for the Scottish Warre," both drollery poems, though the ballad itself does not appear. Child could also have found in Choyce Drollery (1656) the original of "Musselburgh Field" (No. 172), which is represented in his thesaurus only by a fragmentary copy from the Percy Folio MS.[2] Several of these folk ballads show clear signs of a broadside provenience, and more typical broadside ballads-accounts of rural festivities and seductions, topers' songs and obscene satires like Sir John Birkenhead's "The Four-Legg'd Elder"-are scattered profusely throughout.
But perhaps for the folklorist the most tantalizing pieces of drollery are those poems that suggest some connection with the folk lyric. One such poem is "An Old Song" in Wit Restor'd with the same burden ("Back and sides go bare") as the famous drinking song in Gammer Gurton's Needle. A set of verses in Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems (1661 beginning "Begon, begon my Willy my Billy" turns out to be a decapitated version of "Arise, my juggy, my puggy," a song appended to the 1638 edition of Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, snatches of which are heard in various plays of Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, and in Ophelia's mad medley.[3] Westminster Drollery (1671) prints a short version of "Gilderoy," and other Scottish songs, especially those of the Jocky-woos-Jenny variety, are far from rare in books of wit and drollery. Unfortunately, due to editorial refinements, the folk qualities of many drollery poems are not obvious; it often requires the removal of several layers of sophistications to lay bare the "uncooked" song beneath. That such an examination can be rewarding I have tried to demonstrate below by explicating a song from Henry Bold's Latine Songs (1685). I trust my attempt will encourage students of English folksong to re-examine the drolleries with closer attention than they have yet been accorded.
Bold, a Royalist don and minor functionary, had amused himself and his friends for a number of years by revising, "mocking," and turning into Latin his favorite trivial and jocular poems, several of them possibly of his own making. The posthumous collection Latine Songs, for example, brings together Campion's "Thou art not fair for all thy red and white" and both a "mock" and "straight" version of the same poet's "Fire, fire, lo I burn in my desire!" The latter had made its way earlier into at least two drolleries.[4] Among the many ballads Bold dignified with Latin were "The Gelding of the Devil" and a weak rifacimento of "The Four-Legg'd Elder." A more significant item is "Chevy Chase," which is paralleled on the facing rectos with the stanzas of "Ludus Chevinus," made "By Order of the Bishop of London." Bold's Latin version of "Chevy Chase" was several times reprinted,[5] and it is quite possible that Addison's manner of recommending this ballad in his famous Spectator papers-his citing of classical parallels, that is-may have been inspired by Bold's Latin exercise. Our own concern, however, is with Song XIII, pp. 44-48:
1. I Love my Love, she not me,
2. Because I am so poor;
3. But, poor or rich, she hath my heart,
4. And shall have evermore.
5. I went unto my true Love's Gate,
6. And knocked at the Ring;
7. So ready was my own, her self,
8. To rise, and let me in.
9. I looked in my true Love's face,
I0. Methought she seem'd but wan;
11. I took her in mine arms so wide,
12. And carry'd her to bed agen.
I3. Where all the fore-part of the night
14. Together close we lay,
15. And all the latter-part of the night
16. She slept in mine arms till day.
17. But cursed be that little Tirry-Cock
I8. That crow'd in the morning so soon;
19. I thought it had been the dawning of the day,
20. When 'twas but the light of the Moon.
21. Then up I rose, and donn'd my Cloaths,
22. And walk'd over the Plain;
23. Wishing my self on my true Love's Bed,
24. And her in mine arms again.
Lines 23 and 24 are an obvious echo of the fine dramatic lyric "Western Wind":
Westron wynde when wyll thou blow
The smalle rayne down can rayne
Cryst yf my love wer in my armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.
The quatrain is preserved in B.M. MS. Royal Appendix 58, a music-book of the early 16th century.[6] No other copy of the words or music is known, although another tune bearing the same name is used as the subject of three masses in B.M. Addit. MSS. 17802-5 (1530-40). Ten Brink thought the lines traditional, and, in support of this suggestion, Chambers quoted parallels for the first two lines from "The Unquiet Grave" (Child No. 78), from "Waly, waly, gin Love be bonny," and from a canon (No. 6) in Ravenscroft's Pammelia (I609). The Bold ballad is further testimony that the lyric was, or at least the last two lines were, moving down in an extra-manuscript tradition.
The first stanza of Song XIII is the most difficult to explicate. In Line 7 the singer's true love is "ready" to admit him and complaisant thereafter, which hardly accords with his complaint in line 1 of unrequited affection. Almost certainly the first stanza is not organic to the piece. It appears to be either a burden or, more probably, a stanza of another song to whose melody the present piece was to be sung. This device for "leading" music from one song to another was common in Tudor songbooks and is not unrelated to the method used for indicating the tunes of broadside ballads. Despite the slight metrical irregularity of Line 1, one might well place these four lines in the early 16th century. It may be worth noting that a line from a song in the "Western Wind" MS. runs "She hath my hart . . . and euer shall."[7]
Among the Roxburghe Ballads is a humorous song with the burden "I love my love, and she loveth me,"[8] and a similar affirmation, one may recall, is made in the well-known lyric "Black is the Color." But perhaps the closest analogue is found in an American folksong recorded by Sharp entitled "I Love My Love."[9] The most important portion of the song are lines, 5-20. This I take to be a hitherto unnoticed version of "The Grey Cock" (Child No. 248). Child printed the ballad from Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (I776). Herd's initial version, recorded in his first edition (1769), was, like the Bold ballad, of only four stanzas (I, 4, 6, 7), and the additions do not improve it.
1. 'O saw ye my father? or saw ye my mother?
Or saw ye my true-love John?'
'I saw not your father, I saw not your mother,
But I saw your true-love John.'
4. Up Johnny rose, and to the door he goes,
And gently tirled the pin;
The lassie taking tent unto the door she went,
And she opend and let him in.
[Bold] I went unto my true Love's Gate,
And knocked at the Ring;
So ready was my own, her self,
To rise, and let me in.
6. 'Flee, flee up, my bonny grey cock,
And craw when it is day;
Your neck shall be like the bonny beaten gold,
And your wings of the silver grey.'
7. The cock prov'd false, and untrue he was,
For he crew an hour oer soon;
The lassie thought it day when she sent her love away,
And it was but a blink of the moon.
[Bold] But cursed be that little Tirry-Cock
That crow'd in the morning so soon;
I thought it had been the dawning of the day,
When 'twas but the light of the Moon.
The promise made to the cock, which seems to be essential in all variants of "The Grey Cock" is lacking, it will be noticed, in the Bold ballad. The latter also differs from Child's version by including two stanzas (11. 9ff.) devoted to the couple's love-making. This passage, however, is not extraneous. One of the two variants of No. 248 recovered in America contains these lines just before the bargain:
All around the waist he caught her
And unto the bed he brought her,
And they lay there a-talking awhile. [10]
Of course there was originally something more candid and circumstantial here, as there is in Bold, but the missionaries (alas!) had preceded Sharp into the Carolina hills.
It remains now to discuss the bearing which the Bold ballad has on the two chief problems associated with "The Grey Cock." William Chappell, as a first thrust in one of the many Anglo-Scottish duels which litter the ballad field, accused Herd of having taken his ballad from a copy in an English song collection, Vocal Music; or the Songster's Companion (1772) [11]. In this he was mistaken, for the ballad is recorded in Herd's first edition (1769) and in the collector's manuscript notebook. Even without this evidence, it should have been evident to Chappell that instead of Herd "Scottifying," Vocal Music had Anglicized the ballad; for, as J. C. Dick points out,[12] the English "twirl'd at the pin" shows not only unfamiliarity with medieval hardware, but also a misunderstanding of Scottish "tirl'd." The Bold ballad would have delighted Chappell because it reveals the presence of "The Grey Cock" in England a century before Herd discovered it in Scotland. Moreover, the North Carolina ballad is closer akin
to the "lost" English ballad than to the Scottish.
More interesting than this bibliographical quarrel is the question as to whether "The Grey Cock" is an aube or a revenant ballad. The problem hardly presented itself to Child. In all the copies available to him, there was nothing more sinister than the cockcrow, and there was even one instance in a French aubade where the false bird was a cock instead of the usual lark. He pronounced the piece, therefore, "a variety of aube." The revenant theme is strongly suggested, however, in the North Carolina version collected by Sharp. "When will you come back to see me?" the girl asks; and her lover replies: "When the seventh moon is done and passed and shines on yonder lea,/ And you know that will never be." The implications of this answer were first grasped, though timidly, by C. R. Baskervill in an article on "English Songs of the Night Visit."[13] The revenant aspects of No. 248 are brought out more clearly in a brilliant note-marred, unfortunately, by factual slips-in Phillips Barry, F. H. Eckstrom and M. W. Smyth's British Ballads from Maine.[14]
The Maine variant of "The Grey Cock" is a curtailed example of Herd's longer version and is itself of little importance, but it provided the occasion for the editors to draw attention to a version of "The Grey Cock," entitled "The Lover's Ghost," in P. W. Joyce's Old Irish Folk Music and Song.[15] There the girl is the revenante.
'You are tired, you are pale,' said the young man to his dear.
'You must never again go away.'
'I must go away when the little cock will crow,
For here they will not let me stay.'
Against this, I would set lines 9-10 of the Bold ballad:
I looked in my true Loves face,
Methought she seem'd but wan.
This is only a hint, but as ballad language goes, fairly explicit. The anti-climactic lines 21-22 are yet to be noticed. For this purpose one must introduce "Willie's Fatal Visit" (Child No. 255), a poor thing of Buchan's finding.
Child thought this ballad a medley of several others, among them "The Grey Cock." The climax, Willie's leaving "by the light o the meen," occurs in the tenth stanza. The rest of the ballad is taken up with Willie's fatal experiences in a graveyard and parts of it may well be, as Child seems to have supposed, spurious. But the twelfth stanza, undoubtedly genuine, testifies that lines 2I-22 of the Bold ballad are not an intrusion. It runs,
Then Sweet Willie raise, and put on his claise,
And drew till him stockings and sheen,
And took by his side his berry-brown sword,
And ower yon lang hill he's gane.
Bold prints,
Then up I rose, and donn'd my Cloaths,
And walk'd over the Plain ...
Reading through the ballads again, one notices that the Bold version is first person throughout, whereas the Herd ballad begins with first person dialogue and shifts to third person, a common ballad practice. I suspect that the first stanza of the Bold ballad was also first person dialogue-observe that it sets the scene in the same way as the Herd incipit-and the body third person. However, a sophisticated poet setting the ballad down on paper might well neglect the quotation marks around the dialogue which are supplied by the intonation of the voice. He would thus have in his copy an abrupt shift from first to third person and would be tempted to regularize the construction. This is apparently what Bold (or some predecessor) did.
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Footnotes:
1 For a recent discussion of the genre, see Courtney Craig Smith, "The Seventeenth-Century Drolleries," Harvard Library Bulletin, 6 (1952), 40-51.
2 See Albert B. Friedman, "A New Version of 'Musselburgh Field,'" JAF, 66 (I953), 74-77.
3 Cf. Beaumont and Fletcher Variorum, IV, ed. A. H. Bullen (1912), p. 287.
4 Choyce Drollery (1656), ed. J. W. Ebsworth (Boston, Lincs., 1876), p. 97; Windsor Drollery (I672), I, p. 126.
5 Notably in Sylvae (Dryden's Miscellany), 3d ed. (1702), pp. 238-263; and Deliciae Poeticae (I706), pp. 124-I4I. This last collection was reprinted in 1708 and I709 as Mirth Diverts All Care.
6 Ewald Fliigel, "Liedersammlungend es XVI. Jahrhunderts,"A nglia, 12 (1889), 260; E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics (I926), p. 69.
7 Fliigel, I889, p. 260.
8 Roxburghe Ballads, J. W. Ebsworth and William Chappell, eds. (London, I869-99), II, p. 285.
9 Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London, I932), II, p. 269.
10 Sharp and Karpeles 1932, II , pp. 259-260.
11 William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855-9), p. 73I.
12 J. C. Dick, The Songs of Burns (1903), p. 387.
13 C. R. Baskervill, "English Songs of the Night Visit," PMLA, 36 (1921), 605.
14 Phillips B arry, F . H. Eckstrom a nd M. W. Smyth, B ritishB alladsf rom Maine (New Haven, I929), pp. 301ff.
15 P. W. Joyce, Old Irish Folk Music and Song (Dublin, I909), p. 2I9.