Here are the notes from Penguin:One Night As I Lay on My Bed (FSJ III 78)
This piece belongs to a sizeable family of night-visit songs (called Fensterlieder — window songs — in Germany). It is related in theme to the well-known "Go from my Window, Go," quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher’s "Knight of the Burning Pestle" (1613), and before that, parodied as a sacred piece in Ane Compendious Booke of Godly and Spirituall Songs (1567). There, the scene is translated to Paradise. The importunate caller at the window is a sinner whom God first refuses but eventually admits by the door. Burns found a three-verse fragment, resembling part of our Dorset version, which he sent to Johnson for publication in The Scots Musical Museum, and, on the evidence of Allan Cunningham’s Works of Burns (1834), the poet probably knew another version, from Nithsdale, ending with the familiar lovers’ vow that the seas shall dry and the fishes fly and the rocks melt in the sun before one proves false to the other. Baring Gould prints a Devonshire version of "Go from my Window," with the words re-written, under the title "Come to my Window." Barrett has a version in BF described by Miss M. Dean-Smith as ‘little altered since (it) appeared in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book’. A Sussex fragment collected by W. P. Merrick is in FSJ I 269. The Somerset song "Arise Arise you Drowsy Maiden" in SFS IV is also related. From stanza 2 onward, our text is from Mr House of Beaminster, Dorset, collected by H. E. D. Hammond in 1906 (FSJ III 79—80).
Here's the entry from the Traditional Ballad Index:One Night As I Lay On My Bed
DESCRIPTION: Singer dreams of his love; the dreams torment him so much that he goes out and calls at her window, bidding her to let him in. She demurs, saying her parents will punish her. He says they're asleep and won't hear; she lets him in.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1803
KEYWORDS: courting sex nightvisit
FOUND IN: Britain(England(South),Scotland)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Vaughan Williams/Lloyd, p. 79, "One Night as I Lay On My Bed" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, LAYBED*
Roud #672
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Drowsy Sleeper" [Laws M4]
cf. "Farewell to Bonny Galaway" (lyrics, theme).
cf. "Go From my Window, Go"
Notes: [The earliest known version of this was a] fragment found by Burns [and] published in Johnson's "The Scots Musical Museum." - PJS
File: VWL079Go to the Ballad Search form
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