Richard

Sorry if the link did not work or was wrong. As requested I have come back to try again. I can get to the piece by googling. It is called 'From Journalism to Gypsy Folk Song. The Road to Orality of an English Ballad' and it is by Tom Pettitt. I first encountered it on Mustrad but it seems to me on various sites.


Trying a blue clicky: http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/warwick.htm

Pettitt argues convincingly that the words of the song derived largely from newspaper accounts of a specific crime, in 1818 Nuneaton. Pettitt narrows it down to a particular written source by noticing an error on both versions. It was an odd case because the thieves pleaded guilty, thus ensuring a harsh verdict. The song was much later collected from the Brazil traveller family who sang many variations of it. Pettitt can therefore study the history of the song and the way that the collected versions vary, and draw conclusions accordingly.

Pettit says '...the original song, “The Lamentation of W. Warner T. Ward & T Williams,” was a broadside ballad, indeed a classic crime-and-execution news ballad opportunistically presented as a “last goodnight,” ostensibly comprising the confession, regrets and valediction of the condemned criminal(s) on the eve of execution'

Pettitt has traced contemporary newspaper accounts of the indictment and trial, and demonstrates how the writers of the ballad used these in their piece. This is why he calls the piece 'From journalism'.


If I remember aright, he credits Mike Yates for noticing that the Brazil song was more or less the same as the broadside.

This article is not based on 'first printing' data only in claiming a written origin for the song collected from the Brazil family.

When I mentioned ploughboys etc I was taking it from Uniformitarianit's post of July 18th, 2.33. This quoted an earlier post by the same poster, which referred to 'ploughboys, milkmaids, weavers'. I since googled the term 'ploughboy' and it seems to refer to the boy who guided horses pulling a plough, rather than the man who handled it.

This detail may help to date things as early ploughs used oxen, not horses. We could use a dictionary to get an idea of the earliest known use of the word 'ploughboy' but I'm not sure it would get us very far.

Just a thought. But songs about ploughboys and milkmaids, both young people, do suggest to me the romantic pastoral poetry for which there has at several points in time been a fashion. I also stand by my point that the use of the specific words 'ploughboys' and 'milkmaids' reflects romantic thinking about country life. When I did family history, the 19th family who had apparently owned some cows tended to die of tuberculosis. Not so romantic a life. And I am sure that the women of the family did a lot more than milk cows all day; and that ploughing was just one job to be done during a hard agricultural year: the terms smack of romantic views of what was a hard life through the ages. Though milkmaids were believed to be prettier as they were immune to small pox, having had cowpox.

On literacy in Ireland: https://www.nala.ie/literacy/literacy-in-ireland. It says one in six Irish adults has difficulty understanding basic texts. And on page 12 here you will find a comparative chart. Not so much difference between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the UK then?

Did medieval English peasants really sing at all? Maybe Roud has some evidence on this topic? In which case, yet another good reason to buy this interesting book :) :)

"Your Jacobite poet takes us back to Steve Gardhams original reaction to the entire repertoire from 'Frog and the Mouse' to a song about an Irishman killed in the Birmingham Blitz during W.W.2. - Steve has now adapted his argument to those song made in the latter half of the 19th century What are we talking about here - all the repertoire or Just Steve's adaptation.?" Sorry, I could not quite follow this, but presumably the person for whom it was written will have followed it.