Hi,

Here are Gilchrist's comments on the Randal name (1907 JFSS):

While the poisoning story itself was probably current in Europe at an early period, the following suggestions may be offered as to the reason why the name "Lord Rendal" should be traditionally connected with the ballad in England and Scotland:

(1). - Randal III, sixth Earl of Chester, 1181, (died 1232) divorced his first wife, Constance, widow of Geoffrey Plantagenet, and married again, "for which sin, as many men suppose, this Ranulph [Randal] deserved to dye without issuie and to relinquish his honors unto the sonne of his sister." [The quotation is taken from The Catalogue of Hontor, 1610, an old peerage in the writer's possession].

(2). - He was succeeded by his nephew John, whose wife "was infamous for plotting to take away the life of her husband John by poison."-[Ibid.]

(a). - Following upon a contemporary belief that Randal left no heir because of his sin in divorcing his first wife and re-marrying, may there not have arisen the story that a young son and heir, child of the second wife, was poisoned by his "stepmother" (i.e. the divorced Constance) at her own house, returning to his mother to die? (This would explain the "Wee Croodlin' Doo" form of the story, with its conjunction of "stepmother " and "nammy," though, at the same time, the "mammy" of the nursery version may simply have been the child's foster-mother or nurse).

If, when the real circumstances had somewhat faded from memory, people wished to find a romantic reason for the fact of Randal III's leaving no heir and the earldom thus passing to his nephew, a divine judgment might be the explanation offered by the priest and the scholar, but the common folk would, I think, be much more likely to seek a human agent in the first wife, dishonoured, jealous, and revengeful, and thus to attach to Randal an already existing ballad-story. (It will be remembered that Constance's own son, Prince Arthur, had been done to death).

(b). - The fact, or story, that Randal's nephew and successor to the title was poisoned by his own wife may later have become attached to Randal himself by confusion with the (presumptive) poisoning legend about Randal's young son and heir. These suggestions do not, of course, interfere with the circumstance of the Lord Randal story being current in Italy or other countries at a much earlier date. They merely aim at explaining why the hero should be called Lord Randal in the English form of the ballad. (See Chappell's Popular Music, p. 10, for an account of the services English minstrels rendered to Randal, when besieged in 12I2. This (or another) Randal seems to have been early a popular hero, for Longland describes his Friar as much better acquainted with the "rimes of Robinhode and of Randal, erle of Chester," than with his Paternoster)- A. G. G.

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Richie