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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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- [02:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other wor just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
- [02:38]
Narrator or Singer of Ballads
Unpleasant is the fairyland, but a tale to tell. I at the end of seven years we pay a tithe to hell. I am so fair and full of flesh I'm feared it'll be myself but had I no tumbling she says what now this night I see I would have taken out thy two grey eyes and put in two eyes of trees.
- [03:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think for all of us there are certain songs that stay with us throughout our entire life. Play Me Nusrat Fatth Ali Khan's Terebinar and suddenly I'm in Delhi and it's 2003 and I'm with my late friend Mito. No matter how many times I hear my particular favourites, whether it's Schubert's Stanchion or Joel Sonny's Middle of the Night, they always have the same effect. They remind me of a place or a time or a dear person. And some songs take me back not just to where I was and what I was doing at a particular time or place, but to pivotal moments in the wider world. When the song came out, think, for example, about We Shall Overcome, how it became an anthem of the civil rights movement, resonating in marches and protests. Or do they Know it's Christmas, which brought global attention to famine in Ethiopia? Songs mark watershed moments. Elton John's Candle in the Wind turned into a national elegy for Princess Diana, while Imagine by John Lennon and Robbie Williams. Angels are frequently heard at memorials and vigils worldwide because songs do what spoken words alone often can't do. They crystallise a feeling, a struggle or a hope. And they're passed on. They're sung anew and reshaped across generations. Whether it's a stadium crowd singing for their team, an anthem that unites a protest, or a lullaby that links generations, songs give meaning to moments both grand and everyday. In the early modern period, songs and ballads were also the carriers of news. All contained encoded warnings about morality or rebellion. They captured universal human sorrows, sparked solidarity and calls for change. They were the vessels for myth, magic and collective memory. In a new book, Old Stories of Love and Death from Traditional Ballads, author Amy Jeffs and illustrator Gwen Burns have revived a cast of unforgettable characters, some restless and unruly, to be found in songs oral and written, sacred and subversive. Amy says that what sets these songs apart is their ability to infuse everyday life with music, magic and mayhem. They open a window into how people reclaimed history, challenged the powerful, and found meaning in the quotidian. I'm delighted to welcome Amy Jeffs as my guest today. And as an extra special treat, she's going to give us a musical taste of some of these ballads. She she's joined by artist and illustrator Gwen Burns and the kind of musical artist and illustrator Natalie Bryce, who as a musician and composer performed and dramatized the ballads for the audio version of the book. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Amy, Natalie, Gwen, welcome to not just the Tudors.
- [06:34]
Amy Jeffs
Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.
- [06:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you. So I think the first place we need to start is a question of definition. How do you define a ballad?
- [06:45]
Amy Jeffs
Now, in writing this book, I couldn't really find a satisfactory definition. Broadly speaking, they tend to be written in quatrains, so verses made of lines of four, four line verses and they generally speaking follow an A, B, C, B rhyme pattern. So if I read. Let's read a verse or a stanza from Tam Lin. 4 and 20 ladies fair were playing at the chess and out then came the fair Janet as green as any glass. She's just being rumbled that she's pregnant so she's turned green while playing chess. But that's, you know, we've got ladies fair at the chess fair, Janet, any glass. So you've got the chess and glass being the rhyming parts. They. So it's A, B, C, B. So that's a kind of classic ballad form obviously it's also essential that it tells a story of some kind and what that story might be, the kind of broad subject matter varies widely. So in the big collection of ballad lyrics by Francis James Child, Harvard Professor from the 19th century, you've got a huge number of history ballads, Arthurian, Robin Hood and then likewise these kind of magical, more I suppose personal but quite supernatural ballads which form the bulk of the ballads we've chosen for this book, we've chosen 10 to home in on.
- [08:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And is there a distinction we need to make between ballads and other types of folk song or is that becoming unnecessarily pernickety?
- [08:17]
Amy Jeffs
I think it's probably hard. I mean, I'll turn to Gwen to maybe comment on this.
- [08:22]
Gwen Burns
Well, I think the story, the storytelling aspect, there's so many folk songs that are, I guess you wouldn't think of as ballads which are just a maid, a farmer's daughter going and meeting a young man, for instance. I wouldn't call any of them ballads necessarily. These have much more of an epic.
- [08:44]
Amy Jeffs
Feeling or they're long, many verses and just for context, Gwen runs an all female Morris side and is very lifelong investment in traditional music.
- [08:57]
Gwen Burns
Yeah, a passion.
- [08:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So tell me a bit then about the longevity of a ballad. I mean how long do they kick around? Are we talking several centuries?
- [09:11]
Amy Jeffs
Well, I suppose we can go back and we can find the earliest known ballad in English is in a manuscript from the 13th century in Trinity College Cambridge. And it's, I mean it's fascinating actually because it, it tells a story of Judas that is only otherwise found in an 8th century Coptic gospel. And it's about how Judas is on the road to Jerusalem. He's got 30 silver plates in a bag on his back. And a swickler woman, a treacherous woman, meets him on the road and it says that she's his sister, but it's a sort of quote unquote sister. And she tell, tempts him away to a high place and does something that women do an awful lot of in ballads, which is she puts his head on her lap, which is a very dangerous thing if you're a man and you're in a ballad and you're invited to put your head on someone's a woman's lap. So, yeah, he falls asleep and when he wakes up, the 30 silver plates have, have disappeared. And she says, I know what you could do to get your. The money back for these plates. You could go into Jerusalem and you could betray your master, this teacher you're so fond of, Jesus Christ, and you could betray him, particularly to this man, Pontius Pilate. He really wants to know where he is. And you will get paid back for your 30 silver plates by doing so. So that's from the very fact of what the story is about. A very interesting sort of insight into how narratives sort of transmitted through time and how into different forms. And so it ends up in this ballad text. I'm not sure whether we can say that that ballad had longevity in the sense of it. We know about it because it's in this manuscript. The manuscript happens to survive.
- [10:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Two things I'm struck by with regard to that ballad is one, how neatly it makes a woman at fault for a man's sin. I mean, you know, not only do we have Eve obviously responsible for all sin in the world ever, but now we've got a woman responsible for Judas betraying Jesus, which is, which is fascinating. And also the fact that, that you've got that story in the Coptic Church so many centuries earlier tells us something about the power of oral tradition, doesn't it?
- [11:24]
Amy Jeffs
Yes, I think it's. One of the really possibly complex things about researching the ballads is that oral tradition comes to us, I think, with a. With a political is loaded politically. And the printed culture, print culture has this, and especially manuscript culture comes with an implication of elite consumption, especially in the medieval period and then into the early modern period. And I think that Francis James child in the 19th century was invested in finding a kind of pre literate heritage for Americans by gathering the ballads together in the way he did a kind of literature of the unlettered. But in fact, you know, when you read his incredibly in depth introductions to the ballads, you see how they are related to. You find motifs in ballads that are cropping up in Ovid's Metamorphoses, like in the Ballad of Tamlin, and Tamlin changing into many different creatures in her arms, which is found in the story of Thetis and Peleus. And so how much you can say, is this because of medieval libraries and the books in medieval libraries, or is this an oral tradition? And actually, I think you can fall into the trap of wanting to trace a pure oral tradition, when actually there's not saying that. I mean, your question wasn't implying that, but that we also must guard against investing too heavily in our hope of a pure oral tradition.
- [12:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you have any other examples of ballads that have lasted over time?
- [13:02]
Amy Jeffs
Yes. So I think a ballad I'm particularly fond of is the Cherry Tree Carol. It only gets a small mention in this book, but I want to mention two, in fact. So there's the Cherry Tree Carol stems from a story that we find in the end town plays, which are the first half of the 15th century liturgical plays or mystery plays that were meant to. They're preserved in a manuscript that says, you know, welcome n town, as in insert the name of the town here. So it's some travelling players who are going around performing. And the cycle of stories takes moments from the Gospels and it has within it the Nativity. And it tells us how Mary is traveling to Deathlehem for the census and she's heavily pregnant and it's a snowy landscape, it's a kind of Northwestern European landscape, and there's a cherry tree in her path and as she's riding towards it, the cherry tree bursts into flower and then into fruit. So it's a kind of unseasonable crop of cherries. And she says, oh, Joseph, I would say, love some of these cherries. And he says, it's wild work, the tree's so high, Let the one that got you with child pick the cherries. At which point the cherry tree recognizes the deity in her womb and bows down and she's able to pick her fill. This, like the Judas ballad, also comes from a much earlier source. So this is from the Gospel of Pseudo Matthew, but it's about a date palm on the road to Bethlehem and bowing down so that Mary can pick her fill. I think it's completely fascinating. There's a whole load of research being done on the interest in this idea of an unseasonable crop of cherries in mid 15th century England. They seem to have come really obsessed with it as a kind of symbol of blessings and of the Virgin and the Virgin and Child. But that story survives as a ballad known as the Terry Tree Carol. And I think it survived as a result of Elizabeth I's love of chapel music and kind of chamber music. Another, quite honest to say, very briefly, another example is the story, the medieval saints legend of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln. And this is an instance of one of those saints legends like William of Norwich, which is a story of blood libel against Jewish communities, where they were accused of murdering children in mockery of Christ's crucifixion. And the cult of Little Saint Hugh was extremely powerful around Lincoln and his body was discovered in a well. But it had this whole kind of. This mythology grew up around it in accusing the Jewish communities. It survives as a ballad called Little Sir Hugh. So I think that's interesting in the kind of post Reformation world, he's kind of no longer a saint, Little Sir Hugh. And it's this highly aestheticized story of a Jew's daughter who's clad all in green and she lures him into her father's castle using, in one version, a cherry. So we've got this kind of this innocence, this innocent fruit and murdering him. But that's, I think, a couple of examples there of. And there are many more I could cite of ballads surviving into the early modern period and being alive that whole time.
- [16:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What about the geographical stretch of these ballads? Do they travel far from the places where they originated? I mean, how well known are these over sort of the country as a whole, for example, or over Europe?
- [16:28]
Amy Jeffs
Some of the versions that Francis, James Chard brings many different versions together of each ballad, as many as he could find. And you might have one that's explicitly set in Plymouth in one case, that's an example of a ballad in the collection of Samuel Pepys. But other versions of it are set elsewhere or are quite vague in terms of their setting. The maid and the palmer, which is yet another. I mean, they're not all based on Bible stories, but this is one based on the story of the woman at the well in John's Gospel that has analogues in Scandinavia, where the maid who's washing her clothes at the well is explicitly Mary Magdalene. Another example of a sinful woman, the kind of archetypal sinful woman in the Scandinavian versions. I think she's one of the penances she has to perform. So in the English version, she has to become a stepping stone and a clapper of a bell to pay for her crimes. And also she has to be an ape in hell, which conveniently rhymes with belle. But in the Scandinavian versions, she has to stand naked on the church path for something like nine years, you know, to pay for her crimes.
- [17:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm really struck by the gap between those versions of that story and the one in the gospel where Jesus is just full of grace towards the woman. But in these versions, there's gotta be some sort of penance and payment. It's much more moralistic, isn't it?
- [17:50]
Amy Jeffs
Yes, you're right. That's such an interesting point. I mean, I think even now. Now, though, when you read that gospel text, for listeners who aren't familiar with the story, Christ goes to a well where there's a Samaritan woman and he asks her for a drink, and he asks about her husband, because they then talk about the difference between water for refreshing the body and water for refreshing the soul. And he asks about her husband, and she says, she doesn't have a husband. And he says, you're right, you've had five husbands, but the man you live with now isn't your husband. And I think if you stop. If you were to get. That's kind of the climax of the story. If you were to stop reading there, you could go, oh, you know, she's a bad woman. Yeah, that could be the assumption you draw from it within a certain moral framework. But it's the reading on that you realize, like you say, that's not his verdict on it. And her role becomes very much a kind of evangelist within her community. There's a kind of delight, aesthetic delight in the ballads, in the awfulness of infanticide, husband killing, the kind of. The idea, I suppose there's a carnivalesque dimension to these characters who should be one thing, but are utterly not and maybe appear on the surface to be all innocence.
- [19:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think, therefore, that the ballads tell us about social anxieties?
- [19:16]
Amy Jeffs
You know, I don't know. I wonder if we would go on to BBC or Netflix Homepage and look up the dramas that are available to watch and how many are about, you know, tree crime or supernatural horror kind of crimes? You know, I think that these, the traditional ballads, the ones with the rural settings, much more so than the urban broadside ballads, they're such unimaginable extreme crimes, and the settings are so aestheticized that I think it's about entrenching order. Maybe when you come out of it, there's a Kind of. Isn't it good that our society is the way it is? Isn't it good that we have order and frameworks? And I think that probably, in my opinion, would predominate over, oh, I'm absolutely terrified that this woman that I know is going to kill all her children. I'm glad that I've made the choices I have. I'm glad that I'm behaving. I'm glad that I'm performing my duties.
- [20:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think that's really helpful. Because when. If we start to think about some of the themes in these songs, you know, I was struck by the fact there are so many mythic and supernatural elements in them, and it would be easy to take a leap and say, oh, they're much more obsessed by this sort of thing than we are. We don't really add that kind of element to our songs today. But as you have just reminded me, it is all over the dramas that we watch, you know. You know, the totally obsessed with ghosts or whatever it is. So perhaps the comparison with songs is not the only comparison we should be making, because these are storytelling devices. These are ways of communicating at a time before Netflix.
- [20:56]
Amy Jeffs
Yes. And I think that the thing I like to think about the melodies and the meter is that they're mnemonic devices. I'm remembering the texts of these ballads much better now that we have Natalie's performances of them, because I'm hearing how the melody is highlighting particular words or particular moments or giving more meaning to them by the mood of the melody. And so, if you want, they are tools, the melodies and the rhyme patterns and the stress patterns for these stories to survive and be passed on.
- [21:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we've heard a bit about morality. Lots of songs today are love songs. Do we find that amongst these ballads?
- [21:43]
Amy Jeffs
Yes. I mean, yeah, Tamlin's a great example of that. And it's so exciting and it feels so subversive because the hero is a heavily pregnant woman called Janet, and she is charged by her own kind of. By her own instigation, rescuing her elfin lover from Elfland.
- [22:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, this is one of the ones that you might sing, is that right?
- [22:10]
Amy Jeffs
Yes, we'd be delighted to.
- [22:12]
Natalie Bryce
So the melody that I'm using comes from Scotland, I believe, from 17, what was recorded in 1796 by.
- [22:20]
Amy Jeffs
Recorded, I suppose. Yeah.
- [22:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Transcribed.
- [22:24]
Natalie Bryce
But obviously it's probably much, much older than that. So a lot of these melodies are what we would call modal. So these are the scales that predate the common musical scales, such as major and minor. So it kind of predates 1600s. So we can be pretty sure that it's much older.
- [22:44]
Amy Jeffs
And it might be that this melody originated with a different set of words attached to it as well, isn't it? Because we sometimes find, you know, broadside ballads with sung to the tune of, well, a day. Or there's one reference in one of the ballads we've included to a tune called Mole Sims, but it has a girl's shin bones dancing to the tune of Mal Sims, which is like, everyone knew these melodies and you could attach different words to them. So, anyway, we will sing a little of Tamlin. We're going to come into the story where she has asked Tamlin, her elfin lover, where he's come from, like, is he human? And he says, I was. I was born and baptised in the land of the living. But he was out riding, he fell from his horse and the fairy queen caught him. And then he's explaining to her now where he lives.
- [23:32]
Narrator or Singer of Ballads
Unpleasant is the fairyland but an eerie tale to tell ay. At the end of seven years we pay her tithe to hell I am so fair and full of flesh I'm feared it'll be myself.
- [24:01]
Amy Jeffs
So he's just told her there that every seven years a tithe is paid to hell of the prisoners of Elfland or the people that have been abducted to it. And he's worried because he's so beautiful that he's next in line to be paid at the very end when all the actions happened. The fairy queen is furious with him and we'll just sing this final verse.
- [24:23]
Narrator or Singer of Ballads
But had I known Tam Lin, she says, what now? This night I see I would have taken out thy two grey eyes and put into eyes of tree.
- [24:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That was absolutely beautiful. I just want you to keep singing. And it's so enchanting. It is partly, of course, that you have beautiful voices, but it is also the modal nature of it. But to be taken into this aural world of the past, I find it puts a bit of a shiver down my spine, actually, because it's a way of accessing the past that we don't normally have. It's amazing.
- [25:11]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. I mean, for me, I've got goosebumps now as well, but it's the. Especially as the rain is pouring down out here outside, it's perfect. Perfect weather for this. The idea that this wouldn't have survived if it didn't delight people. And I think that kind of delight of, oh, the fairy Queen hissing in Tamlin's ear. I would have taken out your Two Gray Eyes and put in two Eyes of Tree and imagining an audience of. I mean, the first record, the first reference to this ballad is 1549 might not have been those exact words. But sharing that aesthetic, that shiver of aesthetic pleasure at a spooky story with somebody from that many hundreds of years ago, I think is, like you say, just a really interesting way of engaging with history.
- [25:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, because one of the things that it's hard to do is access either the humour of the past, what made them laugh because humor's so situational, but also what made them scared and so just having that moment. But as you say, that visceral description of the punishment. And can we talk a bit about women? We've discussed how women are often the focus of the kind of morality aspect of these, but in this song, there's quite a bit about girl power, as the Spice Girls might have put it, female agency. Is that an unusual feature of songs from this period?
- [26:37]
Amy Jeffs
Actually? I mean, the other ballad we'd love to discuss with you is Lady Isabel and the Elfin Knight. We've got quite a few ballads, and I don't know if it's just because we were the ones sifting through Francis James Child, Book of Ballads, collections of ballads, but there are numerous ballads where the female protagonists are surprisingly forceful and not always vilified, you know, by the narrative. And Janet, the protagonist of Tamlin is certainly one of those. I think it's so interesting because you want to say, God, isn't this strange for this ballad that could be 16th century or earlier, to have this woman who, I mean, she's told, you know, I forbid you maidens, all that wear gold in your hair, to come and go by Carterhoe. For young Tam Lin is there, the first thing she does is hitches up her green kirtle, ties up up her hair and marches off. I mean, they're also told that he will take your maidenhead if you don't go with a gift. She just rocks up at the well without a gift. You know, she's like, that's it, I'm going. And in some versions of the ballad, he rapes her. But in some, it just reads to me as completely her decision to go and have sex with this elfin knight. And then she's pregnant and her father says, what are you gonna do? Who are you going to name as the father? And she says, well, only my lover who is an elf in grey. She refuses to pick any knight in his court to claim as the father because she wants her elf. And so Then she's got to go and rescue him from fairyland, which is going to involve, in some versions, she's extremely pregnant when she's marching up the hill at midnight on Halloween to Miles cross to wrest him from the Seelie Court out of the sky. You know, part of me, the cynic within me is like, oh, well, you know, it's just my modern sensibilities that think this is, I don't know, that want to make more of her role or like, you know, how much was this shocking to earlier? And there's one, you know, there's a text by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nash called Choice of Valentines or Nash and His Dildo is a. Another title. And intriguingly, and this isn't kind of a smoking gun, we can't say for sure that he is referring to the Ballad of Tamlin, but we do know that it was circulating at this time. He talks about this main character, Tomalin, who has. His lover has moved to the city. He goes to find her, it turns out she's become a. A very sought after prostitute. And he goes into the brothel and has to. I think he has to pay extra to go to her room. He's so excited to see her. It's a very erotic comedic poem. He's so excited to see her. He actually. It's over before they even start, you know, having intercourse. And she then sort of helps him so that they can have another go. And when it's again over, before she's ready for it to be over, she gets out a tool to help things along. And so this character Tomalin is just completely emasculated by his mistress, Francis, she's called. And in the text of the poem it says cursed, counterfeit, eunuch dildo. And it's thought that. Well, we know that dildoul was a nonsense term used in ballads as a kind of euphemism for sexual organs, especially male sexual organs. We get these nonsense terms anyway for more kind of innocent meanings like hey diddle diddle, we know from nursery rhymes. And here it's a eunuch dill dul, it's a pretend one. So it's, you know, possible that. And actually. And Thomas Nash, the narrator, kind of, as he comes to the end of the poem, he says, I'm sorry about my writing, I was nursed by an elf. I think there's, I mean, you know, there's glimmers of satyrising and maybe if he didn't mean it in this, then readers surely will have. Have detected references to the Ballad of Tamlin in there and the emasculation potentially in some readers eyes of this elfin knight who has to be rescued by Janet.
- [30:32]
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- [31:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [32:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The work that I've done on 16th century France, which was an ordinary woman there. One of the things that I was struck by, which actually is quite convicting it was I was struck by the fact that women were just really, really vociferous and outspoken and bolshy and got their own way even though they're operating in a. A society in which patriarchy absolutely is the water in which they swim. And they don't have lots of official power, but they do have a lot of unofficial power. So, I guess, although of course, there's going to be an element of you choosing ballads that appeal to you, I think we can certainly consider that that is there. You're not making it up for this idea of women being powerful. And I wonder what sort of message it would have sent to women who heard it in, say, the 16th century.
- [33:43]
Gwen Burns
I was just thinking that as Elfland kind of runs sort of alongside and out of sight of the real world in people's imaginations at that point, maybe the women's world kind of does the same thing, and they can think of these songs. And while they don't have the power on one level, there is a kind of another level where they can listen to these narratives and feel a sense of agency and identify with things.
- [34:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So this is a period in which encounters with the supernatural for women generally don't end that well. This is a period where witchcraft becomes a crime and women are convicted of it in large numbers. And we do have various mentions by certain women who are convicted of witchcraft, of talking of another world. There are some Scottish witches who refer to elves. And there's a connection with the witchcraft case and this song as well, isn't there?
- [34:46]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. So it's not exactly a direct connection with the song, but I think it's really relevant. It's the Scottish woman Bessie Dunlop, who was an accused witch and tried in 1576, describes in her trial how she. She was looking after her very sick newborn baby when a large woman appeared in her cottage door and told her that her baby was going to die, but her husband, who was also sick, would recover. The woman then leaves and another visitor arrives, who's a man who introduces himself as Tom Reed. And he says that the woman that just visited her was the fairy queen and that he himself died at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, 29 years previously. And he gives Bessie Dunlop a length of green thread, which she says in the trial she subsequently used as part of her practices as a midwife and healer within her community. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to bring her story in my discussion of Tam Lin, because the book is structured with short stories, kind of reimaginings of the ballads, followed by historical commentaries to see how we can connect them to real past experiences, is that I think it's easy for us today to dismiss stories of faerie or Elfland as whimsical or not having great moment, perhaps historically, but actually that this, by that period, as I understand it, visions of Faerie. I mean, James the First of England, Sixth of Scotland, says in his demonology that people have these demonic phantasms that they call fairy. And so there's this sense that there's no such thing as fairies, but there could be demons and devils masquerading as fairies to enable accused witches to do their work. And, you know, this was taken seriously enough in the trial of Bessie Dunlop to have her tortured with incisions above her mouth and sleep deprivation, and finally she was strangled to death. So I think that that alone tells us that in engaging with these stories and trying to identify with them, it's not whimsy. It's not, you know, it's a serious part of history and it had serious consequences.
- [36:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, that's very interesting. And there's a message here, also, isn't there, about the importance of overcoming trials of courage and renewal, which must have been also a kind of serious charge on people at the time. And I. And given that the place that they're otherwise hearing music is in the church, do we have here a kind of a counter culture or a second culture, I suppose, of songs and ballads operating outside the conventions of the church?
- [37:29]
Amy Jeffs
It's very interesting that you say that, because Bessie Dunlop does say that Tom Reed says he preferred it because it. Perhaps because it was almost more accommodating to those kinds of belief systems than post Reformation culture. And I do wonder, and this is just me wondering, that whether there was an almost rebellious quality to singing some of these stories at this time, and the fact that they've survived that period of persecution and kind of extreme extremism is, I think, an insight into the daring of people. This follows on really nicely, I think, from the story of Bessie Dunlop, because the Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, this is collected much later. We'll sing a bit, but there's also that we have a story of a accused witch in here as well, in their sort of historical commentary. So where did I write it down? Lady Isabel. So this is collected from buchan's manuscript to 1828. So quite a late source. But I think that your melody is from.
- [38:35]
Natalie Bryce
So it's from. It was transcribed in 1873 in Somerset set.
- [38:41]
Amy Jeffs
And again, it's modal. It's got that kind of.
- [38:43]
Natalie Bryce
Yeah, relatively modal.
- [38:44]
Amy Jeffs
So whether or not the ballad text itself, you know, we can't say how old it is. The motifs in it are Extremely old and fascinating. There are multiple versions where she has different names. Her parents are the king and queen. In this version, she's sad and a bird appears that sort of turns into a harpist. Yeah, she's a teenager. I think that's how we imagine her. She's this kind of really bored and she can't go anywhere. And she's, you know. A bird appears who turns into a harpist who sends everybody to sleep with the music on his harp apart from her. And then he leaps onto a berry brown horse and she climbs up beside him. They go riding out. And in this version, they ride to Weary's well, which is behind Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh. So we've got this kind of Edinburgh setting for this. He then asks her to wade into the water and he says, no harm, will you before. Oftentimes I've watered my steed at the waters of Weary's well. And she starts doing as she's told. But at this point, she begins to feel very nervous about why she's run off with this man and he's not quite as he seems, and obviously he's supernatural. She starts resisting, but he sort of encourages her. And he then says once she's sort of far enough in to be very vulnerable, he says.
- [40:00]
Narrator or Singer of Ballads
Seven Kings Daughters I've drowned there in the water of Weary's well and I'll make you the eighth of them and ring the common bell.
- [40:17]
Amy Jeffs
So he admits to her that he has killed seven king's daughters in these waters and now he's going to make her the eighth of them. She then tricks him. And in the various versions of the ballad, there are many ways of tricking him. In this one, she lures him. She says, I just want a kiss before you kill me. So he rides in and she then pulls him from the horse and she says this kind of quip back, which is.
- [40:39]
Narrator or Singer of Ballads
Since Seven Kings Daughters you've drowned there in the water of Weary's well I'll make you bridegroom to them all and ring the bell myself. And Dale she wrestled and Dale she swam she swam to dry land she thanked God most cheerfully the danger she overcame.
- [41:11]
Amy Jeffs
Aye, she wrestled and aye, she swam she swam to dry land she thanked God most cheerfully the dangers she overcame but as the setting of Weary's well is, I think, particularly relevant, you've got to imagine these pools that sit behind Arthur's Seat on the other side from Edinburgh. And it's so strange how you kind of walk down from Duddingstone and you're suddenly in the middle of nowhere, it seems. And the idea that it could be a city on the other side of this extinct volcano is almost unthinkable. And not all of the versions of this ballad stipulate Weary's well. The wells are Weary or Weary's well are attested in a map from 1821, but there's a reference to sort of elfin apparitions from pools at the same site, from a witch trial, a woman called Janet Boyman, who was executed in 1572. So from her trial, and she describes going to these pools to look for advice on how to heal one of her clients. And a male figure sort of rises up from the pool and she greets him, I think, fascinatingly, in the name of the father, the son, King Arthur and Queen Elspeth, which maybe you can shed more light on. But I just think it's fascinating that although this ballad is collected fairly late, I think the probability that the pools that she's talking about are the wells are Weary or some pools right near them because of other descriptions from the trial, and that there's an association between kind of elfin, male elfin visitors and these pools suggests a kind of a real antiquity of something there, even if it's not the ballad itself. What are you doing in a meeting? That could have been an email. That's right, you're losing interest. Don't let it happen to your money, too. Vanguard's CashPlus account can't help you at work, but we can help with your savings because Vanguard believes in giving you more. So how much interest could you earn? Find out@vanguard.com cashplus offered by Vanguard Marketing Corporation member FINRA and SIPC.
- [43:27]
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- [44:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating. It reminds me of the work how to Kill a Witch, which we did podcast on some time ago with Claire Mitchell and Zoe Vendettosi, who are, you know, Witches of Scotland. And I remember they've got a story there precisely about a woman coming across an elf while out, you know, on the hills in Scotland. And so we are touching on this deep vein of tradition here. What sort of message would a song like this convey to women at the time. Do you think? Is it saying it's okay to be cunning and deceitful if you're in danger or.
- [44:49]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah, I think the thread that runs through the various versions. I mean, Gwen, you sing a version of this ballad to your daughters, don't you?
- [44:55]
Gwen Burns
Yeah, I sing it. It's not an elf, it's a real man. And it's called May Colvin. And she just elopes with a real man, False Sir John. But really similarly, he says he's gonna chuck her in the water. She says, oh, let me pray first. And she sort of kneels down. And as she's just about to kneel down, she grabs him by the waist and chucks him in instead. But, yeah, I've sung that for years. It was funny. Cause I didn't really know about Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight. But it's clearly the same song, but a terrestrial version.
- [45:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What a joy that must be for your daughters. My son has now started saying to me, please don't sing to me when I'm. It comes to bedtime.
- [45:33]
Amy Jeffs
They love it. They love the murder of the. They ask you to make up stories about specific characters in the ballads.
- [45:39]
Gwen Burns
Yeah, I have to tell the stories of the ballad or the songs. I sing them from each character's perspective.
- [45:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Wow.
- [45:48]
Amy Jeffs
The message is so intriguing, isn't it? Because, I mean, I think it's an idea of freedom. There's this theme that runs through Lady Isabel and the elf Might. And the various versions, including the one that Gwen cited, of birds. So in our version that we've chosen, he's a bird at the beginning, and then he appears. It seems as though he's a bird initially. And he transforms into a harp. It doesn't explicitly say it. And then he's able to kind of suddenly be on a horse in May Colvin when she gets back from having escaped. Is this in the one that you. There's a parrot.
- [46:21]
Gwen Burns
I don't sing about the parrot, but you can usually a parrot.
- [46:24]
Amy Jeffs
There's usually a parrot who says, where have you been? And she said, don't tell anyone about False Sir John. And then when her dad comes in saying, what was that parrot squawking about? The parrot says, oh, there was just a cat at my cage door. But it's okay because May Colvin scared it away. And it's like a little tiny version of the story. But the parrot tells it in a kind of allegory almost. It's very strange. But this is again, me sort of wondering how the tradition is traveling. Because I was thinking Lady Isabel is a young woman entirely subject to her parents control. She says, oh, woe is this heart of mine. Like probably, you know, when it says her parents have fallen asleep and suddenly she can go off with a random night man. I think the implication is that she feels that she's trapped. She's in a world where she has no freedom. Once her parents are asleep, she can go off and do something enchanted, sleep, do something wild and, you know, inadvisable in a way. It's a kind of teenage fantasy. And you find there's another ballad called the Earl of Mar's Daughter, where she's visited by a man in the form of a bird who comes to her kind of bedroom window and they have a protracted affair and have many children together. And each time she has a baby, he takes it off to his kingdom. And eventually her parents are like, oh, we found a husband for you. And they have no idea she's already spoken for. And so when she's about to get married, her lover rocks up with his brothers and I think also lots of their children in bird form, and they carry her off to his kingdom. And this reminded me of going really way back into the Middle Ages, the 12th century texts of Marie de France, which are stories spun from, she claims, Breton ballads or layers. And she talks about a woman who is imprisoned in a tower by her elderly lover, who is visited by a Elfin knight in the form of a. He comes as a falcon and then turns into a man. When her husband finds out, he puts spikes in the window and wounds the falcon and she has to chase after him. There's this whole story. There is, I think, quite a genuine and not moralizing or patronizing message of are you dreaming of freedom? And you know, the dangers of freedom. Freedom can be perilous, you know. But appealing to listeners who knew what it was like to have to do as you're told, maybe, and to have.
- [48:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
To marry the person who has been chosen for you. Yes.
- [48:56]
Amy Jeffs
And what if a beautiful lover appeared on your windowsill and, you know, could carry you away? Yes, exactly.
- [49:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Would women have sung these songs, do you think? Was singing songs really a sort of male occupation as balladeers or traveling songs?
- [49:14]
Amy Jeffs
That's such a lovely question. One of the biggest and earliest collections of ballad lyrics is from a woman called Anna Brown. Nae Anna Gordon, who was born in. She's from Aberdeenshire in 1747, and she was taught to sing by her mother, Lilias Forbes, but she also had an aunt called Mrs. Farquharson and an elderly nurse. And it was all three of these women that taught her her repertoire of ballads. And it's thought that Mrs. Farquharson was the richest source for her. And this is because she'd been married to a vicar in the Braemar district of Aberdeenshire. We can maybe assume she had learnt it from women she was working with within her rural community. But the other interesting, I think, quotation we could use to substantiate and argue or to support an argument for women's transmission of these songs is from a 19th century collector called William Motherwell. He talks about the spirit of credulity with which he heard the ballads being sung. So he's living in the 19th century and he went around collecting ballads, writing them down directly from singers, and he's got such a grandiloquent way of writing. But he talks about really irritating some aged virgins, he calls them, by implying that their songs weren't true, that weren't literally true. So he says, from no discourteous motive, but from sheer ignorance of this important article of belief, I have, unfortunately for myself once or twice notably affronted certain aged virgins by impertinent dubitations touching the veracity of their song. And he says, an offence which bitter experience will teach me to avoid repeating. So what these aged virgins said or did in response to his doubts is, yeah, we can only imagine.
- [51:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What do you think, as we come to an end, is the contemporary relevance to the songs you've collected in your book? Are there still lessons that we can learn from?
- [51:21]
Amy Jeffs
I think we can all chime in on this. I do want to say that, you know, they are, for some, still a living tradition and. And there's a strong, also revivalist world of balladry. I have, quite deliberately, because my training is as a medievalist, tried to stay within the historical world of ballads. But I'll hand over to Gwen, who is more engaged in contemporary folk culture or traditional English music.
- [51:49]
Gwen Burns
Yeah, I mean, two instances of these specific songs from this that we've covered in the book have recently been sung to me in completely unrelated scenarios. Once in a pub, a friend of mine stood up and sung the Two Sisters. Not the same version that we've got, but a version of it. And I was at a festival in the summer, a. It was a folky festival, I guess it was a Jack and the Green festival, but I was speaking to a nice older lady Morris dancer, and she just started singing Thomas the Rhymer, reeling it off off her Head. And for those people, definitely, these are just songs that they. They just sing.
- [52:34]
Amy Jeffs
And it. Fascinatingly, the melody that she chose.
- [52:36]
Gwen Burns
Yes.
- [52:36]
Amy Jeffs
Was the melody that Nat the ee.
- [52:39]
Gwen Burns
Yeah. It was very, very similar to the version. The melody that Natalie has sung.
- [52:44]
Amy Jeffs
Beautiful, kind of haunting. And I think in terms of, you know, one of the things I think can be tempting to do as a historian is become religious about your period, your kind of. I'm a medievalist. Everyone needs to learn about the Middle Ages. We need the Middle Ages or like the Middle Age or somehow, like the Middle Ages needs us, like some kind of dogma. And I don't know if this is the same for people that, you know, spent their whole lives researching the Tudors, for instance, but it's that feeling of ballads as a really strong living tradition, have perhaps had their time in the sun in their form, as they were, as we've collected in this book, and that's okay. And predominantly, as across the board, as a society, we're consuming stories in very different forms and, you know, television and whatever else people use now. I don't know. And so podcast, hopefully. Exactly. So I think it's like, what's so exciting about delving into the stories in these ballads is seeing how consistent we are as humans in the themes we delight in aesthetically and the tussles we're having, what we're using stories for, sort of defining what is order in our lives and what is order in our society, and what is. Almost by looking at it turned upside down, looking at it torn to shreds or through the looking glass, in the sense of going to somewhere like Elfland or into the supernatural, I find that anchoring.
- [54:10]
Natalie Bryce
I just think they tick many, many boxes. Great stories, great melodies, you know, cautionary tales, and there's a lot of joy to be had.
- [54:21]
Amy Jeffs
That's exactly it. Why didn't we just all say that they're joyful. They're horrible and joyful.
- [54:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
They absolutely are. And I'm struck by the fact that to get the full experience of your work, you know, we're going to need both a physical copy to see Gwen's beautiful illustrations and an audio version so that we can hear Natalie's tunes.
- [54:47]
Amy Jeffs
I would just like to say, you know, it was important, as we sort of conceived of this project, that it was a collective enterprise, because I think when you're working with material that was born collectively, that doesn't have specific authors, trying to make it a collaborative project was really important. And the first thing that happened was Nat recorded an arrangement of the trees so high and the mood and atmosphere of that. I mean, we actually all recorded a primal scream in the studio simultaneously. Nat's was way better than mine and Gwen's, and we had to do it two more times. And her husband just sat there patiently while these three women wailed like banshees behind him.
- [55:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Him.
- [55:27]
Amy Jeffs
But, yeah. And that's embedded in the arrangement. But that sort of gave us a starting gun for. And we agreed we'll take each take the ballad, choose a version of the ballad, we'll go away and we'll sketch in our respective media. We'll come back and we'll say, okay, what spoke to you? And what spoke to you? And how can we edit what we've done? And so the text, being my sort of contribution, is profoundly influenced by Nat and Gwen's life experiences and artistic interests.
- [55:58]
Gwen Burns
Absolutely. But also what's interesting is what did speak to us is mainly our own personal experiences, which show that that's what the songs are kind of about. Even if they are about the supernatural. We were able to draw from our own experiences. They're really about life.
- [56:14]
Amy Jeffs
They're very. There's a great deal of realism. Yeah, isn't there?
- [56:17]
Gwen Burns
Yeah. These.
- [56:18]
Natalie Bryce
Talking about the ballads. Well, we munched many crackers and cheese and thrashed out many themes. You know, they. They did bring up lots of anger, lusty thoughts, vengeful.
- [56:31]
Amy Jeffs
I know, I know.
- [56:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think we're all going to carry away the picture of Tam Lin in our head. Yeah.
- [56:35]
Amy Jeffs
So. So that's. You know, there's all.
- [56:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to find our elf.
- [56:39]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. We're not the first people in the 21st century to draw artistic inspiration from the corpus of traditional ballads. And we won't be the last. And we hope that people enjoy this. This bit. This version.
- [56:52]
Gwen Burns
Yeah.
- [56:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you, all of you. Amy Jeffs, Gwen Burns, Natalie Bryce, it's been an absolute delight to talk to you about these and to hear you.
- [57:02]
Amy Jeffs
Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [57:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer, Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddow, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and notjusthetudorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.
- [57:49]
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