From Mr Coomber

Collected by Anne Geddes Gilchrist, Blackham, Sussex, May 1907

Anne Geddes Gilchrist Collection AGG/3/6/17a, AGG/3/6/17b

Roud 608

Anne Gilchrist took down a very similar tune from another Blackham resident, William Ford – see I prithee, love, let me in – and a full set of words from Mr Ford’s daughter Ethel as The Cottage in the Wood.

From Mr Coomber

Collected by Anne Geddes Gilchrist, Blackham, Sussex, May 1907

Anne Geddes Gilchrist Collection AGG/3/6/22, AGG/8/76, AGG/8/77

Roud 158

When this song was included in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society Volume 5 (1915), pp.161-163, Anne Gilchrist gave the singers as “Mr. and Mrs. Coomber”, but in her MS copies the source is given only as Mr. Coomber.

From Mr Coomber

Collected by Anne Geddes Gilchrist, Sussex, May 1907

Anne Geddes Gilchrist Collection AGG/3/6/16A, AGG/3/6/16B

Roud 1040

From Mr Coomber

Collected by Anne Geddes Gilchrist, Withyham, Sussex, May 1907

Anne Geddes Gilchrist Collection AGG/3/6/14, AGG/8/27

Roud 178

The song was included in the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd, 1959, with a somewhat more coherent set of words than Thomas Coomber had sung. Malcolm Douglas, writing in the revised edition, Classic English Folk Songs (EFDSS, 2003), identifies the additions as having come from printed broadsides, and the version sung to H.E.D. Hammond by Mrs Gulliver of Combe Florey in Somerset (HAM/2/2/23). He also refers to Frank Kidson’s statement that a “gentleman soldier” was one in a yeomanry regiment, and suggests that Anne Gilchrist’s note “sung in camp” indicates that Thomas Coomber had served in the local militia, and had learned the song at a militia camp.