Origins: The Crab of the Wood

Subject: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Joe Offer
Date: 21 Jul 26 - 02:29 PM

My friend Walter called and asked about a song, "The Crab of the Wood." I didn't know it, but I found it in Bruce Olson's index at Mudcat:
https://mudcat.org/olson/songtxt1.html#CRABWOD

A song in Westiminster Drollery, 1672, begins "There's none so pretty as my sweet Betty" and is directed to be sung to the tune "The Crab of the Wood." In Pills to Purge Melancholy, VI, page 222, 1720, we find the latter song set to music, which by default becomes "The Crab of the Wood." I have not found another tune with better evidence as that for Shakespeare's song, and tentatively advance this one, even though in printing old songs the original tune is sometimes not the one given in Pills. This will do until we have a better candidate.
The song "The Crab of the Wood" is in Witt's Recreation, 1640, and earlier in Bodleian MS Eng. poet. f. 10, MS Eng. poet. d. 152, and MS Malone 19; BL MS Sloane 1489.

    The crab of the wood 
      is a sauce very good
    For the crab of the foaming sea
   
    But the wood of the crab
      is sauce for a drab
    That will not her husband obey

Can anybody tell us more about this song?
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Joe Offer
Date: 21 Jul 26 - 03:13 PM

What's the Crab of the Wood? Google says it's a shelf fungus, but one Website says it's a crabapple. Maybe there's something to the crabapple information:

There are great reasons to harvest crabapples. Besides the fact that they can be foraged from the wild (so are free), they are healthy and healing. British doctor William Salmon found them “cold and astringent,” but suggested that they be “boyled or scalded, and eaten with butter and sugar .?.?. to strengthen the stomach, quench the thirst and cool the heat of fevers.”

Other cultures had their own medicinal practices. Scottish Highlanders mixed crabapples with buttermilk to treat hoarseness and crushed them to relieve sprains and cramps. Even rotten crabapples were valued, applied as a poultice to sore eyes, boils and earaches. Rich in vitamin C, antioxidants and fiber, it is hard to go wrong, unless you overindulge, since crabapples also have a laxative effect.

Even if you don’t eat them, they are still quite useful. Folklore suggests that crabapples, also known as crabs or wildings, were used to determine which suitors were most eligible. In Scotland, a woman was told to put a crab under her pillow on St. Andrew’s Eve, and on the following Sunday, take it to church and the first man she saw standing on the porch would become her husband.

There were a few other suggestions with which I take issue. One, from England, suggests using the crabs to pelt the parson after St. Luke’s Feast. And this disturbing verse was found in T. F. Thiselton-Dyer’s book The Folklore of Plants: “The crab of the wood is sauce very good for the crab of the sea, But the wood of the crab is sauce for a drab that will not her husband obey.”

https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2015/11/04/enchanted-crabapple

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 21 Jul 26 - 03:27 PM

We can wring a little from your list of MSS. I went to the Digital Index of Middle English Verse and found that none of them are catalogued. That means they are Tudor or later. That puts the earliest possible attested date of the song at c. 1500.

The Bodleian Malone manuscripts are the papers of Edmond Malone (1741-1812), one of the first great editors of Shakespeare; if you are among the rare people who consults the apparatus criticus of Shakespeare's works, you'll find that Malone is responsible for many corrections to the texts of the plays. That's not much of a link to Shakespeare, but it's there.

The associated Shakespeare lyric is "An old hare hoar," sung by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet II.iv, lines 134-139 in the Riverside edition. (Note that the very division into scenes is the work of modern editors; the First Folio does not mark them in Romeo and Juliet.)

The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet -- the "bad quarto" -- is so bad for this scene that my critical editions don't even cite it for this passage. So we don't have much in the way of textual information about the Shakespeare lyric. None of my editions suggest anything about a source -- but one points out that "hare" could mean a prostitute, so linking to the "drab" of the "crab" text. One suggests that "Lenten pie," i.e. one eaten during Lent, refers to a man who doesn't have meat, i.e. isn't very manly or perhaps is sexually incapable -- hence, perhaps, a man who cannot make his wife obey him. So this is probably another one of those monotonous jokes about cuckoldry, though more subtle than many.

That's not much, but maybe it will save someone some dead ends.

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 21 Jul 26 - 03:55 PM

Subtle meanings perhaps, but my sceptic head simply takes a literal meaning from this. Crab-apple sauce goes well with crab-meat, but a sauce made from the wood of the crab-apple tree is only fit for a scold.

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 21 Jul 26 - 04:17 PM

We should not automatically assume that "wood" means a product of a tree. "Wood/wud" in the sense of "insane" is very old, and not just Scottish; if the Chaucer glossary by Davis Et Al is to be believed, the only meaning of "wood" in Chaucer is mad or tumultuous.

And then there is "wood" as a reference to priapism. None of my etymological references (Grose, Partridge, Onions) mention this meaning, but Onions, at least, would have suppressed it. I have been unable to find out how old it is. :-(

I am not saying that either of these senses is the one meant in the rhyme. But I don't think we can discount them, either. "Wood" with the sense "wud" was a common word in Middle English.

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 22 Jul 26 - 03:55 PM

Ah, I think I have it now. The second verse surely means a 'switch' from the crab-apple tree and 'sauce' here means punishment. Something similar to 'What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander'. I'm sure there are more apt analogies but I can't think of them just now.

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 22 Jul 26 - 04:14 PM

'Sauce' being used in a similar sense in other Shakespeare plays:

As You Like It. III. 5
He's fall'n in love with your foulness and she'll fall in love with my anger. If it be so, as fast as she answers thee with frowning looks I'll SAUCE her with bitter words. (punish)

Merry Wives of Windsor. IV. 3. I'll make them pay. I'll SAUCE them.

Subject: RE: Origins: The Crab of the Wood
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 22 Jul 26 - 04:56 PM

Steve Gardham wrote: 'sauce' here means punishment

Alternately, in modern terms, "sass." Sauce as in "saucy," as opposed to something you use on food. All these related senses -- impudence, impudent person; but also a rebuke -- are dated to the sixteenth century by Onions (The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology -- a very useful work). So the verse can't be more than a century older than the time Shakespeare parodied it.

Partridge (A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English -- even more useful) lists a number of interesting uses of "sauce" as a verb:
To charge a person extortionately (c. 1600)
To strike, thrash (Ben Jonson, 1598)

There are a number of later variations, but those are the only ones possible prior to 1700.