From Mrs Ford

Collected by Anne Geddes Gilchrist, Blackham, Sussex, June 1906

Anne Gilchrist MSS Collection AGG/8/48, AGG/3/6/2a, Journal of the Folk-Song Society 5 (1915) pp.135-137

Roud 32444

This song was included in the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. The editors, Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd, wrote:

There has been some argument whether this ballad derives from Lady Maisry or Lord Lovel. The manner of the lady’s impending death, which would provide the essential clue, is missing. We do not know whether she is to be put to death on account of her disgrace (like Lady Maisry) or is pining for her lover’s absence (like Lord Lovel’s sweetheart). It hardly matters. In the version of Mrs Ford, a Sussex blacksmith’s wife, the ballad is a good one.

‘Lady Maisry’ is Roud 45, Child 65, while Lord Lovel is Roud 48, Child 75. In fact this song has now been ascribed a separate Roud number, 32444. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, who recorded a version of the song from the gipsy singer Queen Caroline Hughes, asserted that it was “made up of floater-verses from a number of ballads and yet does not appear to be derived from any particular one”. The ballads in question being: ‘Lady Maisry’ (Child 65), ‘Lord Lovel’ (Child 75), ‘Little Musgrave’ (Child 81), ‘The Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter’ (Child 110), ‘Child Maurice’ (Child 83), ‘Fair Mary of Wallington’ (Child 91), ‘Bonny Barbara Allen’ (Child 84), ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’ (Child 74), ‘The Gypsy Laddie’ (Child 200) and ‘Geordie’ (Child 209).  “What does stand out,” they wrote, “and make this song unique, is that a whole series of ballad formulas have been selected and put together in a form which has remained stable”.¹

1. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Travellers’ Songs from England and Scotland, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp.112-15 ↩︎