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Boccaccio, Hans Sachs, and The Bramble Briar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

H. M. Belden
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Extract

Of the British ballads not included in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads one of the most interesting is that which, following the example of Professor Tolman's correspondent, I shall call The Bramble Briar. Altho in poetic quality it is inferior even to that broadside version of Chevy Chase the serious discussion of which in the Spectator provoked the raillery of Wagstaffe, yet I have ventured to deal with it here at some length; for it is interesting not only because of its possible relation to Boccaccio, Hans Sachs, and Keats, but in itself. It is a fairly clear instance of what to some expounders of ballad doctrine is a contradiction in terms: it is a traditional vulgar ballad.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , 1918 , pp. 327 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1918

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References

1 A. H. Tolman, Some Songs Traditional in the United States, Journal of Amer. Folk-Lore, xxix, p. 168.

2 I have used the more exact record of the text, as he took it down from the singing of a Mrs. Overd at Longport in Somerset in August, 1904, given in the Journal of the Folk Song Society, ii, p. 42.

3 Ballads and Rhymes from Kentucky, ed. by G. L. Kittredge, J. A. F.-L., xx, pp. 259 f.

4 The Vulgar Ballad, Sew. Rev., xix, pp. 222 f.

5 British Ballads in the Cumberland Mountains, ibid., pp. 321 f.

6 Songs of the Open Road, pp. 10 f. Only the last seven of the twelve stanzas belong to The Bramble Briar; the first five are a form of A Brisk Young Country Lady.

7 J. F. S. S., v, pp. 123 f.

8 Ibid., pp. 126 f.

9 J. A. F.-L., xxix, p. 169. Secured for him by Miss Mary O. Eddy from Miss Jane Goon of Perryville, Ohio. Professor Tolman has kindly sent me a complete copy of this version for use in the present article.

10 Since this paper was written Mr. Sharp has published his admirable collection, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Putnam, N. Y., 1917). In Seaport Town (No. 38) is represented by one text fuller than A V and the beginnings of three others—all from North Carolina.

11 Pp. 376 ff. For convenience of reference I have numbered the several versions as follows :

American versions—

  1. A I:

    A I: The Apprentice Boy (Shearin).

  2. A II:

    A II: The Bramble Briar (Tolman).

  3. A III:

    A III: The Lonesome Valley (Pettit).

  4. A IV:

    A IV: The Merchant's Daughter (Beiden).

  5. A V:

    A V: In Seaport Town 1 (Sharp).

  6. A VI:

    A VI: In Seaport Town 2 (Sharp).

British versions—

  1. B I:

    B I: Lord Burling's Sister (Broadwood).

  2. B II:

    B II: In Strawberry Town (Sharp).

  3. B III:

    B III: Bruton Town (Sharp).

  4. B IV:

    B IV: The Brake o' Briars (Gillington).

12 The lack of this item in A VI is doubtless a mere failure of memory on the part of the singer.

13 B I, however, in which the girl, instead of dying on her lover's grave, returns to denounce her brothers, probably lacks this feature only by lapse of memory. B IV has a conclusion of its own: the girl poisons herself and her brothers, and “All four of them in one grave do lie”—a denouement which may plausibly be credited to the gypsies from whom this version was recorded. The word “brake,” also (B II-IV), is not found in the American versions.

14 Journal of the Folk Song Society, i, p. 160.

15 I. e., Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, The Golden Vanity, and The Twa Sisters, Nos. 73, 286, and 10 in Child.

16 It is the verse form of The Drowsy Sleeper, The Silver Dagger, Little Sparrow, Lord Bateman, William Taylor, and many ballads on the theme of the returned lover, such as The Sweetheart in the Army, John Reilly, and William Hall. A hasty glance at the one-volume edition of Child showed no ballad in which this verse form was carried thru consistently. Bonnie Annie (No. 24) is in four-beat couplets with feminine endings.

17 Such repetition as it has, e. g. the stanza about the high hills and valleys (or mountains) that occurs twice in A I—IV, the corresponding matter in B I and IV, the “gores of blood” in B II and III, seems due merely to inertia; it has little in common with the repetition in Babylon or in Lord Randal.

18 In his notes to Professor Tolman's article, J. A. F.-L., xxix, p. 168.

19 In a note on this ballad in Folk Songs from Somerset.

20 E. g., The Cruel Brother, Clerk Saunders, The Bent Sae Brown, The Braes o Yarrow. When I printed A IV and The Constant Farmer's Son in the Sewanee Review in 1911, Mr. Wm. MacMath of Edinburgh wrote to me: “It would not greatly surprise me if The Constant Farmer's Son, and The Merchant's Daughter should be found to have an affinity with The Braes o Yarrow”; and he pointed out particularly that in versions J, K, L of that ballad the lover is a “servant lad in Gala.” The Braes o Yarrow does indeed show what the popular ballad makes of such a theme. There is social inequality between the lovers in most of the versions; those in which the man is a “servant lad” have not a little of the vulgar ballad quality; but he is nowhere presented as in the service of the girl's brothers. And despite his social status the lover is heroic; he fights against heavy odds, disposing in proper ballad fashion of all his assailants (nine in most versions) save one, who gets in behind him or overcomes him when exhausted by the length of the contest. Either the fight is agreed upon beforehand between the combatants (A, B, C, D, E, F, H, I) or the girl's father sends the lover forth to fight for her hand (J, K, L), or the girl herself (whether intentionally or not is not clear) betrays him into an ambush (M, N). In The Bramble Briar, on the other hand, as in the Decameron,, there is no fighting; the lover is simply and suddenly murdered, and the telling of it is as brief as the doing. There is in several of the versions of The Braes o Yarrow a foreboding dream, but no revelation by a ghost. For the girl's behavior afterwards see below, Note 63.

21 E. g. in The London Merchant (Pitts). Most commonly, however, these street ballads of the merchant's daughter end with the father blessing the wilful pair.

22 The opening is lacking in A V and B I and IV. In B II and III the father has become a farmer under the influence of countless stall ballads glorifying the farmer's life. In B I the brother is a lord.

23 Miss Goon, being questioned upon this point by Miss Eddy, averred that “it is the name of the man that these two brothers killed,” but darkened counsel by adding that it is a “a feminine name from the Hebrew Solomon.”

24 He is a “servant man” in all the versions and a “prentice” in A I, II, IV.

25 “A raging sea there for to sail” (A III), unintelligible as it stands, is probably a vague reminiscence of the same idea.

26 “One day” (A I), “one night” (A II), “one evening” (A IV-VI).

27 “The oldest brother” (A I), “he[r] two [brother[s]” (A II), “her brothers” (A IV, V), “her oldest brother” (A VI), a brother in B I, II, III. This part of the story has been elided in B IV; see note 6, above. Boccaccio has: “il maggior de' fratelli.”

28 Only one version of the ballad, A VI, agrees with Boccaccio in giving the girl three brothers; in the others she has two. But the three brothers have no distinct functions in the plot; all that the action demands is that there shall he more than one, so that they may be seen plotting together. Two brothers will do as well here as three; and Keats, who professedly drew his story from Boccaccio, gives Isabella two brothers, not three.

29 In the ballad, a hunting party; Boccaccio says simply: “sembianti faccendo d'andare fuori della città a diletto.”

30 “Un luogo molto solitario e rimoto”; “a lonesome valley” (A I, III), “the bramble briar” (A II), “a lonesome desert” (A IV), “that lonesome valley” (A V), “a ditch … where only bush and briars grew” (B I), “a brake … where briars grow” (B II, III), “down in those woods where briars grow, … in the brake of briars” (B IV). The place is also described as “a patch of briars” in a variant line of A I.

31 “Cianciando e ridendo con Lorenzo come usati erano”: “and with this young man they both would flatter” (A I), “and upon the salome they loaved and flattered” (A II), “and this young man they both did flatter” (A III). A V has simply “they both insisted”; A VI, “but little did he think of the bloody murder, a-hunting he did agree to go”; B I, “they asked him to go a-hunting.” “These serpents' whine” is Keats's expression for it.

32 “Avenne una notte, che avendo costei molto pianto Lorenzo che non tornava, et essendosi alla fine piangendo addormentata, Lorenzo l'apparve nel sonno”: “all on that night, while she lay sleeping” (A I), “one night, while she was lying sleeping” (A II), “all on that night as she lay mourning” (A III), “next morning she was silent, weeping” (A IV), “while she lie on her bedside slumbering” (A V), “as she lay dreaming on her pillow” (B I), “then to bed this fair maid went, lamenting for her own true love; she dreamt” (B II),“ she went to bed crying and lamenting, lamenting for her heart's delight; she slept, she dreamed” (B III), “she went to bed the same night after, she went to bed immediately, she dreamt” (B IV). A VI has lost this step in the story.

33 “Pallido e tutto rabbuffato, e eon panni tutti stracciati e fracidi”: “all wallowed o'er in gores of blood” (A I); practically the same language in A II, III, IV, V, B II, III; “covered all over in great drops of blood” (B IV); “dressed all in his bloody coat” (B I); lost in A VI.

34 “O Lisabetta, tu non mi fai altro che chiamare, e della mia lunga dimora t'attristi, e me con le tue lagrime fieramente accusi; … e … le disse che più nol chiamasse nè l'aspettassi”: “Why do you weep, my pretty fair one? It is a folly you may pawn” (A IV) ; “My dear, leave off this crying, it is a folly for you to know” (A II) ; “My love, it's but a folly, for this is me that you may see” (A I); “Don't weep for me, my dearest jewel, don't weep for me, nor care nor pine” (B I) ; omitted in the other copies.

35 “E per ciò sappi che io non posso più ritornarci, per ciò che l'ultimo dì che tu mi vedesti i tuoi fratelli m'uceisono”: “For your two brothers killed me, rough and cruel” (A V), “For your two brothers killed me so cruel” (B I), “Your brothers both being rash and cruel—” (A I) ; lost in the other copies.

36 “B disegnatole il luogo dove sotterrato l'aveano, … disparve”: “In such a valley you may find” (A I), “In such a place, love, you may me find” (A II), “Go over hills and lofty mountains, this lonesome place you may me find” (A IV), “In such a place you may me find” (B I), “You rise up early tomorrow morning, and straightway early to brake you know and there you find my body lying covered over in a gore of blood” (B II) ; lacking in the other copies.

37 Alone, in the ballad; in Boccaccio, attended by a servant who has been her confidante. Keats makes this servant an old nurse, a figure for which he has a romantic predilection (cf. The Eve of S. Agnes) ; and Sachs, in his “tragedi,” elaborates her into a veritable Kupplerin.

38 Since the ballad does not use the pot of basil motive, the plots diverge from this point. In the Decameron the action at the grave is brief and reserved. Finding that she cannot take with her the whole body, she quickly outs off the head, wraps it in a napkin, re-inters the trunk, and returns to her chamber, where “sopra essa (the head) lungamente e amaramente pianse, tanto che tutta con le sue lagrime la lavò, mille basci dandole in ogni parte.” In the ballad the passion is acted over the body in the “lonesome valley,” the “brake,” the “bramble briar.” Yet the action is much the same. “His pretty cheeks with blood were dyed, His lips were salt as any brine; She kissed them over and over, a-crying, ‘You dearest bosom friend of mine,’” (A I), and practically the same language in A III-V; “Kissing on her bended knees” (A II); “She kissed his cold, cold chin a-crying: ‘You are the daughter's dearest dear’” (A VI) ; “She took her handkerchief out of her pocket For to wipe his eyes for he could not see” (B III); “She took her handkerchief from her pocket And wiped his eyes though he was blind, Because he was some true lover, Some true lover a friend of mine” (B II), and similarly in B IV. The “handkerchief” suggests the asciugatojo in which Lisabetta carried home the head and the bel drapo in which she afterwards wrapt it for burial.

39 A I, II, IV, V, VI, B I, III, IV; adding “And we no more of him could find” A II, “And never more we could him find” A IV, “No more of him it's could we find” A V, “No more of him we could not see” B I, “And what became of him we do not know” B IV, or ominously, “His face you never more shall see” A I, “And his fair face you shall see no more” A VI, “We've a-left him behind where no man can find” B III.

40 “She seems” in A I must be a corruption, due to misunderstanding, of “you seem.”

41 One has already been considered, Note 28.

42 “Sie riten ausz zu dem stat thor, In masz, zu suchen wildes spor,” H. S. II (see below).

43 “With belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman's dress,” stz. xxiv.

44 See above, Note 19.

45 I number the versions for convenience of reference:

H. S. I. Historia. Em kleglich geschickte von zweyen liebhabenden. Der ermört Lorenz (Hans Sachs herausg. von A. von Keller, ii, pp. 216 ff.). 256 lines, in four-beat couplets. “Der spruch der ist mein erst gedicht, Des ich sprüchweiss hab zu gericht. Anno salutis 1515, am 7 tag Aprilis.”
H. S. II. Die Lisabeta mit irem Lorenzo. In der silberweis Hans Sachsen (Samtl. Fabeln und Schwänke von Hans Sachs herausg. von E. Goetze und Carl Drescher, iii, pp. 9 ff.). Fifteen 18-line stanzas of rather elaborate versification. “Anno salutis 1519.”
H. S. III. Ein trawrige tragedi mit sieben personen zu spielen, von der Lisabetha, eines kauffherrn tochter, und hat fünff actus (Keller, viii, pp. 356 ff.). “Anno salutis 1546 (read 1545) jar, am letzten tag December.”
H. S. IV. Der ermört Lorenz. In dem schwarzen tone H. Vogel (Goetze u. Drescher, iv, pp. 400 ff.). Three stanzas of 20 lines each. “Anno salutis 1548, am 23 tag Julii.”

A fifth rendering, anonymous, “im rosenton H. Sachsen,” found in a Weimar ms. and dated 1549, was ascribed to Hans Sachs by J. Bolte in his edition of Montanus' Schwankbücher in 1899 (p. 577).

This has not been accessible to me; but as it has not been included in the Goetze u. Drescher edition, of which the latest instalment (1913) gives the mastersongs down to a date considerably later than 1549, and in which Bolte is a collaborator, I presume the ascription has been given up.

46 “In Cento Novella ich las” (i, 1); “ich lase In cento novella” (ii, 3 f.); “Wie die Bocatius beschrieb” (iii, 5); “Peschreibt Pocatius mit Peschaide” (iv, 58). The “Cenito Novella” is Steinhöwel's translation of the Decameron.

47 Hans Sachs herausg. von Keller u. Goetze, xxv, p. 206.

48 Printed at Ulm before 1500. Available in A. von Keller's reprint, Stuttgart, 1860.

Doch vergasz er seins schwertz.
Nun umb den ersten schlafe
Lorentzo die zeit drafe,
Kham stil und pracht sein wafe,
Dadurch er wurt befrit. H. S., ii.

50 This answer, natural as it is, is found nowhere else. Keats here follows Boccaccio. In The Constant Farmer's Son the brothers tell her that her lover has fallen in love with another girl—a similarly obvious answer, which however is found only in the stall ballad.

51 Simply “disegnatole il luogo dove sotterrato l'aveano.”

52 Keats, with the romantic artist's love of handscape, has enlarged and particularized:

So these two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
The brothers' faces in the ford did seem,
Lorenzo's flush with love.—They passed the water,
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.
There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
There in that forest did his great love cease.

Later the ghost describes his burial place—not without reminiscences from Coleridge's Osorio:

Red whortleberries droop above my head,
And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed
Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
Comes from beyond the river to my bed.

Next morning Isabella and the old nurse “creep along the river side” and into the forest until

The evening came,
And they had found Lorenzo's earthy bed;
The flint was there, the berries at his head.

53 It may be pointed out, merely as a curious coincidence, that Keats (stz. xxxvi) describes the ghost's voice as sounding “like hoarse night winds sepulchral briars among.”

54 Drawn probably from German popular poetry. Mr. Phillips Barry reminds me of the slaying of Siegfried by Hagen as he stoops to drink from a spring under a linden tree:

Do viel in die bluomen der Kriemhilde man:
Das bluot von sinen wunden sach man vaste gan.
Die bluomen allenthalben von bluote waren naz.
Nibelungenlied, xvi, 74, 86 (ed. Zarncke).

55 “Except the hunting party (see Note 42), which is an interpretation of ”a diletto“ too natural to need accounting for.

56 The head of a man at once loved and hated. But wild and folklike as this vision is, and whencesoever Heine may have got it, we should rememher that as we have it it is the work of a modern romantic poet, with all the hitter-sweet imagination of his kind.

57 The High History of the Holy Graal, transl. by Sebastian Evans (Temple Classics), i, pp. 40 ff.

58 The Green Knight's head is, of course, a magic head, like that of the elf-knight in certain Continental forms of the story of Isabel and the Elf-Knight (see below, Note 60). The two heads in Perlesvaus turn out (High History etc., i, p. 127) to be merely symbols of Adam and Eve, the “old law” or dispensation.

59 W. P. Ker, On the History of the Ballads, 1910, p. 25.

60 In certain Dutch, Flemish, and German forms of Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight (see the preface and notes to this ballad in Child's collection) the elf-knight's head is cut off and speaks thereafter, asking to be rubbed with “salve” or “maidens-grease” as a means of restoring it to life; and in the Dutch and Flemish versions the girl carries it in her lap and shows it to the elf-knight's mother. It is of course a magic head. The only mention I find in English ballads of heads preserved is when Sir Andrew Barton, after a fight with the Portuguese, “salted thirty of their heads, And sent them home to eate with breade” (Child, iv, p. 504)—a far cry indeed from poor Lisabetta and her pot of basil!

61 It is remarkable how little English ballads owe to the romances of the Arthurian cycle. Of the 305 ballads in Child only two, Nos. 29 and 31, are drawn from Arthurian romance. Beyond these the ballads show only a name now and then drawn from the “matter of Britain.” No. 30, King Arthur and King Cornwall, represents one of the stories of the Charlemagne cycle.

62 See above, page 336.

63 There is one ballad in Child's collection, Lady Diamond (No. 269), which is certainly drawn from Boccaccio and which may seem to contradict my generalizations about the ballad temper. But I do not think it does. It is the story of Guiscardo and Ghismonda (Decameron, iv, 1), perhaps the most famous and most often repeated, in both literary and popular form, of all Boccaccio's tales. Tancred, Ghismonda's father, has Guiscardo killed and his heart served up to Ghismonda in a golden cup. Ghismonda washes it with her tears, pours over it a decoction of poisonous herbs which she has prepared for the purpose, drains the cup (these last two items are omitted in the ballad), and dies. The notion of making a woman eat the heart of her lover (the heart is actually eaten in another form of the same story, Decameron, iv, ix), which has its roots very far back in primitive magic, belongs in just that category of violent horror which appeals to vulgar (or shall I say popular?) sentiment. Clouston, Popular Tales, ii, p. 191, cites an eighteenth-century chapbook in which the theme is curiously modernized, the heroine being “one Madam Butler, a young Gentlewoman and a great Heiress, at Hackney Boarding School.” Boccaccio himself seems to have felt the difference in quality between the two motives; his Ghismonda is a regal nature, a philosophical Cleopatra who plans her acts and in a long speech before her death justifies them, and convinces her father that his behavior is illogical, while Lisabetta weeps her life away in tender and silent seclusion over her beloved grasta.

How the popular ballad handles such a situation as that of Lisabetta when she finds her lover's body is shown in The Braes o Yarrow, which, as we have already seen, bears in some respects a decided analogy to Boccaccio's story, tho there is no reason to suppose it derived therefrom. When the lady finds her true love lying slain upon the Braes of Yarrow, she swoons thrice upon his breast (A), kisses his mouth (A, G, M), cheek (E), lips (F, H, I, L), takes him in her two arms and kisses him “thorough” (I), combs his hair (A, E, F, G, H, I, L, M), drinks the blood that runs from his wounds (E, F, G, M), bathes his wounds with tears (I), washes him in the well-strand and dries him with the holland (J, L), and then, tying her long hair around his neck (?A), waist (B, D, Q, R), or hand (C), or his long hair around her waist (J) or to her horse's mane (K). drags the body home, where, refusing her father's consolation (B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M), she dies. Some of these manifestations of the girl's love and grief are much the same as in The Bramble Briar, which however does not descend to the grotesquerie of towing the body home by the hair. The difference in emotional quality between this grotesquerie and the pathos of Lisabetta's behavior needs no comment.

64 An Irish version reported in the Journal of the Folk Song Society, ii, p. 285, has retained this feature but has lost pretty much everything else of the original ballad. One of the versions in Campbell and Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians has a trace of the old ending.

65 E. g., ‘Pretty Polly’ B, Journal of Amer. Folk-Lore, xx, p. 263; ‘Pretty Polly’ in Miss Wyman's Lonesome Tunes. The text of this ballad in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians retains the old ending.

66 So far as I have been able to learn no source for this story has been alleged beyond the song from which Boccaccio here quotes. T. Cannizzaro's book, Il Lamento di Lisabetta da Messina e la Leggenda dal Vaso di Basilioo, Messina, 1902, I have not been able to consult.

67 It is somewhat surprising, in the light of this remark of Boccaccio's, that the notion of a “lost romance” from which he quoted the two lines should have been so widely accepted. It was first put forth, apparently, by Du Méril in his article on the sources of the Decameron (Histoire de la Poesie Scandinave, Paris, 1839, p. 349) ; and as late as 1886 Child wrote, in a note to the preface to Clerk Saunders (Engl. and Scot. Pop. Ballads, ii, p. 156), that “there was a ballad in Boccaccio's time (of which he cites the first two lines), on the story of G. iv, N. 5, of the Decamerone; a tale in which three brothers kill their sister's lover, and bury the body in a solitary place, and his ghost appears and informs the sister of what had happened.” Du Méril knew or knew of the song as it was printed in the Canzoni a Ballo of 1568, which he conceived to be a making over of the original ballad. Fanfani printed the song as he found it in the Laurentian ms. (14th cent.) in his 1857 edition of the Decameron. But quite apart from this evidence that the song Boccaccio refers to was essentially the same as that printed in the Canzoni a Ballo, it is quite apparent from Boccaccio's own words that the canzone did not tell the story. If it had done so, why should the ladies, who had heard it sung “assai volte,” still have been unable, in spite of their questionings, to learn “qual si fosse la cagione per che fosse stata fatta?”

68 Cantilene e Ballate, Strambotti e Madrigali, nei Secoli XIII e XIV, Pisa, 1871, pp. 48 ff.

69 There is an English translation—not quite clear in one important point, I think—by John Payne in H. Buxton Forman's Poetical Works of John Keats, Appendix X.

70 So Carducci's text; but in a note he prefers the reading salernitano, and Scherillo prints salernetano.

71 Or “did not guard it well by reason of the man I loved so much” —“ch' i' n'ebbi mala scorta dal messer cui tanto amai.” Payne renders this “Yet kept one day, through him whom I adore, I'll ward upon my gear.” Whatever meaning Payne may have attached to “through him whom I adore” the girl cannot be supposed to say that by reason of her devotion to her dead lover she neglected the pot of basil in which was buried that lover's head. My friend and colleague Mr. Giuseppe Cherubini, to whom I submitted the question, writes: “I would interpret lines 19–20 thus: ‘I gave it very bad protection from the man I loved so much—I did n't protect it from’ etc… . If the lines were to be taken in their innocent meaning I would translate them thus: ‘It is only a short while that it was entrusted to me by the man’ etc.,—but that would not go with what precedes (ll. 5, 11, 18). I think your inference is right also from what seems to transpire from ll. 28–34.”

72 This “uomo che m'e stato tanto rio” is obviously (if we put Boccaccio's story out of our minds for a moment) the “messer cui tanto amai” of 1. 20.

73 The word grasta belongs to the Sicilian dialect. Note also that Boccaccio lays the scene of the story in Messina. The basil cult is especially strong in Sicily and southern Italy.

74 Quoted here from The English Physician, ed. of 1799, p. 28.

75 Botanologia Medica, Berlin, 1714, pp. 116 ff.

76 Mythologie des Plantes, Paris, 1878–1882, ii, pp. 35 ff.

77 Apparently because it would imply that she had “lost her basil.”

78 Richard Folkard, Plant Lore, p. 146. Unfortunately Folkard does not give his authorities.

79 E. Rolland, Flore Populaire de la France, ix (1912), p. 40.

80 It is characteristic of folk-lore, and especially of the folk-lore of plants, that the same idea should be attached to various species; as de Gubernatis says (ii, 91) : 'Ces confusions sont tres fréquentes dans la nomenclature botanique, où le même nom a été attribué a une foule de plantes différentes.“ J. B. Porta in his Natural Magic (French edition of 1571, p. 20a, quoting Martial—by mistake, as Mr. Phillips Barry points out to me, for Pliny, Hist. Nat., xix, p. 57) says that if basil is planted repeatedly it turns into wild thyme and then into cresson or water-mint. What Pliny wrote was: ”Namque et ocium senecta degenerat in serpyllum, et sisymbrium in calamintam.“

81 Quoted in Littre s. v. marjolaine. The whole passage (Aresta Amorum, Paris, 1555, p. 101) runs: “ainsi qu'il estoit sur les rues pour aller la nuict resueiller les potz de marioleine, et planter le may deuant l'huys d'une moult gracieuse dame.” The Aresta is a curiously pedantic collection, in French and Latin, of decisions in the court of love.

82 Flore Populaire, ix, p. 29. Rolland adds: “C'est la rime qui a amené l'idée”; but in the light of the folk notions here assembled this is an inadequate explanation.

83 Ibid., p. 34.

84 How much of this particular symbolism is an inheritance from ancient religion, magic, and medicine and how much is due merely to delight in the fragrance of these herbs—how much indeed of the ritual and magic attributes were derived in the first place from their actual physical properties—is a problem in folk-psychology which fortunately we need not here attempt to solve.

85 Sharp, Folk Songs from Somerset, No. 110; also in his One Hundred English Folksongs, No. 34. His text is from Somerset, where he says he has taken down twenty-four versions of “this dual song,” i. e., Sprig of Thyme and Seeds of Love, which run into one another and are commonly held to be one song, tho Mr. Sharp undertakes to distinguish them. See also Sussex versions, J. F. S. S., i, pp. 86, 210; and a fragment from Nottinghamshire, J. F. S. S., ii, p. 288, where Kidson quotes a version printed in A. Campbell's Albyn's Anthology in 1816, beginning:

O, once my thyme was young,
It flourished night and day,
But by chance there came a false young man
And he stole my thyme away.

86 Rue vies with the labiates as a simple in the number and contrariety of its virtues. It has been famous as an antitoxin since (the time of Mithridates; it was a favorite prophylactic against the plague; Porta in his Natural Magic (ed. of 1571, p. 18b) says of it what he and others say of basil, that it thrives upon abuse; and he adds (p. 132a) that it is of use “pour refroidir le desir de luxure” and (p. 133“) to procure abortion. Zorn (Bot. Med., 1714, p. 589) quotes the ‘Salernitani’ as authority for the statement that ”ruta viris minuit Venerem mulieribus addit“—which affords a sufficient commentary, quite apart from the English word-play (rue = repent), upon its appearance in The Sprig of Thyme.

87 Cf. The Seeds of Love (Sharp, One Hundred Engl. Folk Songs, No. 33). The imagery varies. Waly Waly (ibid., No. 39) has this:

I thrust my hand into one soft bush,
Thinking the sweetest flower to find.
I pricked my finger to the bone,
And left the sweetest flower behind.

A copy of Seeds of Love printed by Nappey of York (Harv. Libr. 25242.17, n, p. 204) has:

I'll get me a posey of hyssop no other flower I'll touch
That all the world may see I lov'd one flower too much
I lock'd my garden gate and resolv'd to keep the key
But a young man came a courting to me and stole my heart away.

The Wheel of Fortune, printed by Stephenson, Gateshead, (ibid., i, p. 111), has:

He has spoiled all my good behaviour,
And broke my fountain against my will.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

You are the man that broke my fountain,

But not the man that shall break my heart.

Nappey's print of The Sprig of Thyme (ibid., ii, p. 204, on the same sheet with Seeds of Love) has this:

But now my old thyme is dead,
I've got no room for any new,
For in that place where my old thyme grew,
Its run to a running running rue.
But I'll put a stop to that running running rue,
And plant a fair oak tree,
Stand up you fair oak tree,
And do not wither and die,
For I'll prove as true to the lad that I love
As the stars prove true to the sky.

The oak tree appears also in a Sussex version of Seeds of Love, J. F. S. S. 1, p. 210.

The folk fancy, which eschews or ignores the more dignified types of figurative expression—simile, decorative metaphor, personification, apostrophe—is by no means averse to a certain kind of wit, especially in dealing with erotic themes. “Old fashioned love,” says Donne, catches men “riddlingly.” Witness the riddle ballads at the beginning of Child's collection, and such pieces as Crow and Pie (Child, No. 111) and The Nightingale. Nor is its use in ballads restricted to those of a ribald or mocking temper. There are few more tragic ballads than that which takes its title from the image of the sheath and knife (Child, No. 16).

88 If a written source must be assigned, it may be found in an author with whom Boccaccio was thoroly familiar. The reason given for Dido's flight from Tyre (Æneid, i, 343 ff.) is essentially the same story. Dido's husband is treacherously slain before the altar by her avaricious brother, who “factum … diu celavit et aegram multa malus simulans vana spe lusit amantem,” until at last her husband's ghost, “ora modis attollens pallida miris,” comes to her in a dream, reveals the crime and tells her of a great treasure hidden in the ground by means of which she may establish a new state in Africa—for the story is here raised to a political and dynastic level.

89 “Yet in which the murder-and-ghost story is separable, and at the demand of vulgar ballad taste is separated, with the marks of Boccaccio's handling still strong upon it, in The Bramble Briar.

90 See Note 67.

91 De Gubernatis has indeed a quite different idea of the antecedents of the basil story. Getting together divers legends, Indian, Greek, Italian, Russian, Roumanian, Silesian, Bavarian, in which some plant or flower—basil, corn-flower, chicory—is said to be a maiden transformed by longing for a lost or rejected lover, or the lover himself so transformed, he interprets them all as forms of the sun myth, coming from India thru Greece and Byzantium to Slavic and Western Europe. See Mythologie des Plantes s. vv. basilic, bluet, chicorèe, tulasi. Collectively the evidence is imposing, and makes it highly probable that somewhere in the backward and abysm of folk fancy such a notion attached to the cult of basil. The folklore of any given object is commonly an accretion of many elements, frequently incongruous and frequently no longer clearly distinguishable. But that the Sicilian song as we have it and as it was current in the fourteenth century was not a lament for the loss of a lover's head buried in a flower pot, or for a lover transformed into a flower, the text itself bears witness.

92 Printed in the J. F. S. S., i, p. 160; also, from a stall ballad in the British Museum (without the printer's name) in Sew. Rev., xix, p. 222.

93 In Catnach's print it is directed to be sung to the tune of Young Edwin in the Lowlands, which could hardly be used for The Bramble Briar. Each stanza after the first closes with the words “constant farmer's son,” constituting a refrain. There is no trace of a refrain in The Bramble Briar.

94 All these changes are in the direction of fitting the story into the English life and temper.

95 So I infer from the fact that he describes his place of business sometimes as “near the Coburg Theatre” and sometimes as “near the Victoria Theatre.” The Royal Coburg Theatre became the Victoria Theatre in 1833. See Besant's London South of the Thames, 1912, p. 83. But since the ballad was also printed by Catnach, who went out of business in 1839, it is perhaps more likely that Catnach was the first printer of it.

96 Harvard Library 25242.2, p. 258. This collection has about three score ballads with Taylor's imprint, very many of them with the name of the “writer” affixed—a procedure not customary among nineteenth-century London ballad printers. Taylor's “writers” or purveyors of copy were George Brown and John Morgan, whose names appear with about equal frequency on his prints. According to a writer in the National Review, xiii (1861), p. 409, John Morgan at least was a real person; and no doubt George Brown was too.

97 See Kittredge's note, J. A. F-L., xxix, p. 169.

98 Note 14.

99 In his Tragical Tales, 1587; pp. 183 ff. of the Edinburgh reprint of 1837.

100 The Decameron … translated into English Anno 1620 (Tudor Translations), 1909, I, p. cxxiv.

101 Those of 1587, 1620, 1684, 1820, 1822.

102 E. g. Kitty Kline (J. A. F-L., xxii, p. 240), or The False True Lover and many other accretions of ballad detritus in the collection of the Missouri Folk-Lore Society.

103 One of our versions, B IV, is recorded from the singing of English gypsies; and it is a tempting guess that gypsies have been the carriers of this ballad both in England and America (a number of gypsies, most of them bearing good Scotch names, were deported from Glasgow to America in 1715; see Journ. of the Gypsy Lore Soc., o. s., ii, p. 61). Besides their trades of fortune-telling, tinkering, and horse-trading gypsies have plied that of entertainment in Great Britain since the sixteenth century, when they used annually to gather on the 'stanks’ or marshes of Roslin and give “severall plays” (F. H. Groome, Gypsy Folk Tales, p. 124, note). They are great tellers of folk tales. Miss Broadwood, J. F. S. Soc., v, p. 7, points out that four versions, so corrupt as to be partly unintelligible, of the old “carol” or homiletic known as The Moon Shines Bright or Christ Made a Trance were recorded from the singing of gypsies, and believes that the gypsies in their wanderings “had probably passed on a distortion of the text to one another.” These distortions are in kind remarkably like those found in The Bramble Briar. On the other hand, there is no evidence that any of our American versions are associated with gypsies, and Miss Broadwood traces her version (B I) thru three generations of what seems unimpeachable Hertfordshire stock.

104 The murder of Gus Weeks and his wife and children by two cattlemen, George and Bill Taylor, in Linn County in 1894. See A Study in Contemporary Balladry, Mid-West Quarterly, i, pp. 162 ff. Wallace's ballad was taken up, remade, and sung by other local “carnival companies” until in a few years it was known and sung by the country people, in widely varying yet related forms, thru considerable parts of the state.

105 If he was blind or quite illiterate we must suppose that the story was read or told to him from the book, and that he then proceeded, like Caedmon, to regurgitate and chew the cud.

106 Its geographical range in America suggests that it came with the Scotch-Irish in the eighteenth century.

107 A striking instance is that of Young Charlotte, for which see Barry, William Carter, the Bensontown Homer, J. A. F-L., xxv, pp. 156 ff.

108 Robert Jones, a blind fiddler who made his rounds in Missouri a few years ago, sold a “Comic and Sentimental Songster” containing one piece of his own composition and a miscellany of popular favorites. It bore the announcement that “If anyone should desire a book they can obtain it by sending their name and postoffice address with ten cents in silver to the postmaster at”—Dexter, Missouri, in one copy that I have seen; Hillman, Indiana, in another. Blind Jasper Kinder and his wife similarly sold a book of the songs that they sang in Howell County. Songs so learned pass of course into the learner's repertory of song. I have a copy of McAfee's Confession, words and air, sent me in 1912 by Miss Colquitt Newell from Farmington, Missouri. The tune she took down from the singing of a friend, Mr. C—–; the words she copied from a “book of ballads and songs some new, some old, … bought by him from a blind man selling them thru that town about ten years ago. He learned several tunes for different songs in the book from this blind man, who would sing them from the street corners.” The procedure has not changed, apparently, since the time of Autolyus and the Barnes family (cf. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 5).

109 Most of Grundtvig's great collection of Danish ballads is drawn from ms. ballad-books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Shirburne Ballads is such a collection made (from printed ballads) in England in Elizabeth's time; Percy's famous Polio ms. is another made some half-century later.