Wiltshire Wedding (song)

Subject: Wiltshire Wedding (song)
From: pavane
Date: 08 Aug 04 - 03:39 AM

Found this in the Bodley library. I don't have time to transcribe it all at pesent, but you may find it familiar from the first couple of verses. Date not specified, but must be somewhere before 1750?


Wiltshire Wedding

The Wiltshire wedding: between Daniel Do-well and Doll the dairy-maid

All in a misty morning, cloudy was the weather
I meeting with an old man was cloathed all in leather
With a shirt unto his back, but wool unto his skin
With how do you do and how do you do and how do you do agen

The rustic was a thresher, and on his way he hy'd
And with a leather bottle fast buckled by his side
And with a cap of woollen, which cover'd cheek and chin
With how &c

I went a little further, and there I met a maid
Was going then a milking, a milking sir she said
Then I began to compliment, and she began to sing
With how &c

I don't really inderstand what the story may be, except that her father doesn't get to give permission to the wedding, as her mother has already said yes?

It does have at least one other phrase that may be familiar from another song:

I'll plow and sow, and reap and mow (while thou shall sit and spin)

Subject: RE: Wiltshire Wedding (song)
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 08 Aug 04 - 10:08 AM

See thread Lyr Add: All In A Misty Morning

The text posted there has modernised spelling and no source is named; nor is it complete. The song appears in D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719), and on broadsides of the late 17th century (one licensed by R[ichard] P[ocock], and therefore between the end of 1685 and late 1688); set to an older tune, The Friar and the Nun, as Bruce Olson mentioned in the Misty Moisty Morning discussion(s) here. The shortened form recorded by Steeleye Span is in the DT.

More detailed information and references at http://www.folkinfo.org/topic.asp?topic_ID=565

Subject: RE: Wiltshire Wedding (song)
From: nutty
Date: 08 Aug 04 - 12:58 PM

I'm sure that a version of this was recorded by Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span

Subject: RE: Wiltshire Wedding (song)
From: nutty
Date: 08 Aug 04 - 12:59 PM

sorry Malcolm ... I should have read your post properly before diving in.

Subject: RE: Wiltshire Wedding (song)
From: pavane
Date: 08 Aug 04 - 01:51 PM

Funny, I did search the forum and DT for Misty before posting!
Thanks Malcolm

(From the notes at the Bodley site, the Douce collection was bequeathed to the library in 1834, so everything in it must be older than that, and most of it looks much older.)

But I still don't understand meaning of the story, if there is one other than a man getting married to a milkmaid?