Waxford Town- Mary Ann Haynes (Bright) 1972 Yates
[From Mike Yates, Musical Traditions recording (MTCD320) Here's Luck to a Man ... An Anthology of Gypsy Songs & Music from South-East England; 2003. His notes follow, and are lacking with regard to the Mauge reference (see my headnotes).
R. Matteson 2016]
Mary had been born in 1905, in a Faversham waggon parked behind The Coach and Horses in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Her father, Richard Milest, was a horse-dealer whose family would accompany him across England during the summer as he made his way from fair to fair. "We used to go to the Vinegar & Pepper Fair at Bristol, then to Chichester, Lewes, Canterbury and Oxford, then up to Appleby and back down to Yalding." Mary's husband died suddenly, leaving her with a large family, and, having settled in Brighton, she worked as a flower-seller, earning enough to support her family. Mary died in 1977.
MacColl & Seeger quote an American source [Cox] who says that the villain in this song was a John Mauge, who was hanged at Reading, Berkshire, in 1744. But, we know that Waxford Town comes originally from a long 17th-century ballad The Berkshire Tragedy, or, The Wittam Miller, a copy of which may be seen in the Roxburgh Collection (vol. viii p.629), and it may be that Mauge's name came to be associated with the earlier ballad because of the similarity of his crime. Later printers tightened the story and reissued it as The Cruel Miller, a song which has been collected repeatedly in Britain and North America (where it is usually known as The Lexington/Knoxville Girl).
Both Laws and Roud differentiate between the two versions, giving Roud 263, Laws P35 for one and Roud 409, Laws P24 for the other. However, since Roud includes 228 and 197 examples of each, it must be clear that there will be many versions which, like the above, fall into the grey area between them.
Waxford Town- Sung by Mary Ann Haynes a traveller from Brighton. Collected by Mike Yates circa 1972.
There was a pretty girl in Waxford Town,
She fell in love with a miller boy.
Oh, he asked her [to] go walking,
Through fields so sweet and green,
So they might walk and they might talk,
For to plan their wedding day.
Oh, he pulled an hedge-stake from the hedge,
And he beat her to the ground.
To John says she, 'have pity on me,
I'm not fit enough to die.'
Now when he got to his master's house,
It was at the break of day,
His master woke and let him in,
By the striking of a light.
He asked him, cross-questioned him,
'Look at the blood-stains on your hands and clothes.'
The answer, John, oh, he thought fit;
'Sir, it's a-bleeding from my nose.'
Just a few days after,
Oh, this poor girl she was found,
A-floating by her mother's door,
Oh, that led to Waxford Town.
This young man was taken up,
And he's bound down in irons strong.
Oh, there he did lay patient there,
For the murder he had done.
Spoken: That's Waxford Town...that's old too...my grannie...my grannie used to sing that...Yeah, Waxford Town.