Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 09:50 AM

As we cross-posted absolutely simultaneously, you might have missed my last post, which I therefore commend again to your attention.

Meanwhile, please demonstrate what the existence of a popular — indeed much-loved by many — royal family has in common with badger culling, homophobia, sexism... or indeed, all the items your list of indisputably OK·to·the·fully-paid-up·progressive·agenda with each other. I expect there are people who don't want to cull badgers but would welcome a reduction in immigration, or think that the restoration of some corporal punishment might protect a few old ladies from getting mugged and would rather not have a travellers' camp set up just outside their village, but regard ethnic minorities as welcome within the overall community (THESE ARE ONLY EXAMPLES, NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENTATIVE OF MY OWN VIEWS). So in what way is this list of OK causes embraced by Fred McCormick in any way relevant to the point at issue?

My last three posts have been entirely relevant to 'the topic which opened the thread in the first place'. It's yours which haven't, you know.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 09:32 AM

Sorry M. The thread drifted long before I said that.

As regards examples of anti-monarchist traditional songs, I have already explained why there are no great numbers of them.Tell you what. Why don't you read what I said instead of repeating what you think I said?

Regarding being a democrat and holding minority opinions, here's a few of the other things I'm opposed to:-

Capital punishment
Corporal punishment
Badger culling
Homophobia
Benefit cuts
Racism
Antisemitism
Travellerphobia
Sexism
Immigration quotas
Repatriation of ethnic minorities


Granted I'm not nowadays in a minority on all these issues. But I certainly was when I began campaigning. Thank God there are some people who are willing to change thir minds.

And oh yes. Regarding accepting the will of the majority. Where do you think I would have stood had I been in Germany in the 1930s? With the majority, or against it?

Sorry for the continuing thread drift. Can we get back to the topic which opened this thread in the first place?

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 09:32 AM

--How do we know? Nobody asked them...--
.,,.
Oh, come on, Fred. Don't pretend to be more stupid than you are with another so completely disingenuous point. All evidence, from broadsides like 'When The King Enjoys His Own Again' to the popularity of the reopening of the theatres and the astonishing flowering of new drama at the Restoration, one of the greatest and most productive periods in English drama, attests to the fact that the Restoration of the Monarchy was pretty nigh universally welcomed with enormous RELIEF, after nearly 20 years of misery under the tyranny of those of the 'we know what is best for everybody' persuasion so admirably summed up in the tone of the posts of the likes of you.

Have you ever read an essay by Kingsley Amis called "Why Lucky Jim turned right". I commend it to you ~~ he'd got your number, right enough.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Allan Conn
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 09:24 AM

"I am looking for British songs and tunes from all ages which reflect ant-monarchist sentiments."

One can argue over what is and isn't a folk song but to be fair the original question, as shown above, wasn't only asking for older or traditional songs. Songs and tunes from all ages were his words! Later on in the thread people questioned whether there were many older songs of that said type.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 08:45 AM

You were responsible for the drift, Fred, by saying that you would go on singing anti-monchst songs because you hated the monarchy, without engaging with the obvious intention of the OP, as to whether there were any folk-songs ~ which the ones you are so determined to go on performing manifestly aren't ~ which expressed the sentiments similar to these of yours.

If you object to my statement about what the people wanted, Fred, let's hear you respond with some examples to all the traditional songs and lore I have adduced above which clearly express the generality of the people's satisfaction and comfort with the institution of the monarchy. We know that you hate them, thank you; but now demonstrate that this is, in any sense, a popular or widely-held view. Otherwise I stick to my opinion that yours is an atypical minority position, entirely unworthy of the priggish, holier-than-thou self-satisfaction, entirely misplaced in one who lays claim to democratic views, with which you appear to urge your posture. Now show me different ~~ from tradition or from any other pov.

Put up or shut up.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 08:07 AM

Guest. Sorry but I wasn't responsible for the thread drift.

MTHEGM. (but it WAS restored, because PEOPLE MISSED IT AND WANTED IT BACK). How do we know? Nobody asked them.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 07:58 AM

==I hate the monarchy and I will continue to sing anti-monarchist songs==
.,,.

Meant to add, tho the poster who cross-posted with me above has actually partly made the point, that you can sing all the anti-monarchist songs you like, & I hope you will have a ball doing so (just so long as I don't have to listen): but they won't be in any meaningful sense the "Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs" specified in the thread title, no matter how often and how vociferously you sing them. And do for crying out loud take in the point that your 'hatred' is a view to which you are perfectly entitled, but is not that of the generality of the people.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 07:47 AM

Whhhhaaattttt!? right back to you, Fred. The Press Gang, the floggings, whevs, continued unabated as before under the Commonwealth,and would have done so whether the monarchy had been restored or not (but it WAS restored, because PEOPLE MISSED IT AND WANTED IT BACK. Why else?) & are part of a completely different discourse from attitudes to the Monarchy-as-such. If you can't distinguish the two discourses, it is your perceptions at fault. Remember the man who had had a right-hand amputated because it who had written a pamphlet which offended Queen Elizabeth waved the bloodied stump & cried a loyal blessing on the Queen. {Regret have forgotten his name tho the story well authenticated - anyone remind me of it?} I think he was as daft as you do; and that his treatment was iniquitous. But he recognised that the law was not made by the Queen herself, who represented a world-view which he shared in general if not in specific detail.

"You'll be telling me next that they just couldn't wait to be press ganged ... and hauled off to be shot in foreign wars". Never mind what I'll be telling you: look again at "On Board a 98", the pressed man looking back on his life of service and 'blessing his fate' in having been made to '[do] my duty, serve my King', collected by Vaughan Williams, and see that that tells you:- that, yes, some did.

This is not to say that royalty do not have their own contribution to make to the discourse, an are rightly despised if they don't ~~ as I myself despised the present Queen's late sister who wanted all the privileges and respect while doing all she could to prove herself unworthy of them.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 07:44 AM

But that is to miss the point. I hate the monarchy and I will continue to sing anti-monarchist songs

I thought the point of this thread wasn't "Does Fred hate the monarchy?" - or "are there any anti-monarchist songs for Fred to sing?" - but "are there any traditional anti-monarchist songs?". Despite Steve's passing handwave at the top of the thread, the answer so far seems to be No, or "it depends what you mean by 'anti-monarchist'", or "it depends what you mean by 'traditional', and actually who cares if a song's traditional anyway?"

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 25 Feb 13 - 06:51 AM

MTHEGM. "But Jim, Fred, et al, none of you has really answered my point, which I think I have demonstrated many instances to support:~ that the vast majority of the folk for the vast majority of the time actually liked being ruled by a monarch"

Whhhhaaaattttt!!!!!!!!! This crowd of uneducated thickos, sorry, peasants, sorry, feeling sensate human beings actually enjoyed paying rents and tithes and taxes to the richest entity in the land while they pesonally starved. Come off it. You'll be telling me next that they just couldn't wait to be press ganged, flogged and carted, and hauled off to be shot in foreign wars. What a splendid lot of noble unself-serving lot of chaps. A pity the ruers of our land couldn't have followed their example.

But that is to miss the point. I hate the monarchy and I will continue to sing anti-monarchist songs. And that is irrespective of whether the latest MtheGM revelation, sorry, opinion, has a shred of historical veracity. What's more, irrespective of whether I'm in a minority or not, I will continue to campaign for the abolition of the monarchy while I have breath to do so.

It's called democracy, doncha know. and there's precious little of it around these days.

Oh yes, and I note that you very quickly dropped the subject when I corrected your assertion that Alexander Somerville 'only' received 50 lashes of the whip. Yes, I know I got my own account wrong, but that just shows the importance of consulting an unimpeachable source, rather than relying on Wikipedia or memory.

In fact, Brian Behan's introduction to the MacGibbon & Kee edition of Somerville's memoirs claims that because Somerville was given 100 lashes of a cat of nine tails, and each tail had 6 strands, he was actually lashed 5,400 times.

"Here's a health to King George"? Not for me buddy.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Nikkiwi
Date: 24 Feb 13 - 11:53 PM

I suspect you'd have better luck finding Anti-MONARCHY folk songs if you spoke/read french.....

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 Feb 13 - 04:11 AM

☺〠☺~M~☺〠☺

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 Feb 13 - 01:58 AM

... and there you are, Jim Carroll: now you have a Fairy Godmother too.

Enjoy!

☺〠☺~M~☺〠☺

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 Feb 13 - 12:29 AM

Not so at all, I fear. There is more than one way of moving things on to a personal plain when you can't think of any rational responses to arguments adduced, which is what you are, entirely irrationally, accusing me of doing, JMcL. You didn't like the points I made, so you moved on to the personal, quite unjustly dismissing my manner of making them as unkind {'bitchy', 'patronising', 'mentally unstable' yet! ...} to poor little JimC, who, you thus implied [I repeat, who is 'patronising' whom?] would be helpless without you to champion his cause! Not worthy of you, Jim. Surprised and disappointed.

'Jesus!' & 'QED' right back to you.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim McLean
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:34 PM

Q.E.D.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:18 PM

Sorry, Jim McL -- can't see what brought that on at all. Jim C has been accusing me of evading his questions, has been confusing cause & effect, and generally, as I see it, muddying the issue. What on earth is so 'bitchy' 'personal' or 'patronising' in pointing out that this is my perception of his arguments?

Anyhow, I have no doubt that Jim C would feel well able to fight his own corner, without feeling any need for you to rush to his defence since you seem to consider him incapable of answering for himself.

Who is being 'patronising'?, and to whom?, I would beg you to consider.

Thank you for your affection, which is reciprocated. But I still can't see where you consider me to have demonstrated any symptoms of mental instability.

Regards

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:15 PM

"that yours are misguided, doctrinaire and patronising towards those whom you claim to represent"
Sorry - don't know any other way to interpret this whatever way it's worded - " whose interests you claim to urge" - both are equally inaccurate to the point of dishonesty.
I make no "claims" whatsoever; I base my beliefs on my personal experiences, observations, readings and discussion.
I spent my entire working life as a manual worker - a domestic electrician - and I will spend the rest of it as a retired manual worker - it doesn't make me right in my beliefs, but it does mean I have had some practical experience to measure those beliefs against.
"Hypocrisy" (thank you for the spelling correction) was probably the wrong word - on this occasion anyway - unpleasant (and continuing) dishonesty is much nearer the mark.
If I ever claim to "represent" or "urge for" anybody, feel free to put me in my place, but until then, please stop inventing convenient and inaccurate agendas for me in order to win arguments.
Now please let this thread continue uninterrupted by our extremely unpleasant bickering.   
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim McLean
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:06 PM

Jesus, Michael, why are you so bitchy? Simply reply if you like but in a decent, sensible and with less personal, patronisiing attacks. I fear for your mental stability and I say this with all honesty and affection.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:45 PM

'As I have already said - I'm not questioning your description of 'how' it was, just trying to understand 'why', which seems to be far easier to ignore than answer in your case'
.,,.
Not just 'was', I repeat, but 'is'!

Not sure that 'why?' is really a valid question for you to expect a specific answer to, in a case which deals with likes & dislikes; how is one to get further than Disraeli's useful formulation of "Those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like"? I have simply averred what seems to me a demonstrable fact regarding the people's preferences, which you have been havering between saying you don't question and denouncing as impossible to be the true will of the people because Carroll and his like must know better. You have, anyhow, for all your saying, been disingenuously providing your own answers haven't you? "Conditioning, coercion, fear of consequences" & so forth. And then say you are not questioning 'how' it was, but 'why'; why should I provide answers as to 'why' when you seem so self-satisfiedly cocksure of the answers for yourself?

And you then have the all-fire gall to accuse me of hypocrisy. Honestly, Jim, you should be ashamed, both of your woolly, self-contradictory thinking, and of your own hypocrisy. But I don't expect for a moment that you are.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:26 PM

Again, Jim, you only selectively read what I wrote. Just as you accused me of saying you made 'guesses' when I had carefully spelled out which statement of Fred's I was referring to, so this time you quote back at me a formulation ['claim to represent'] which I had already explicitly anticipated your finding uncongenial and suggested an alternative.

Can't see what I have said to incur your accusation of hypocrisy; but then it is a notoriously easy and convenient little bit of mud to throw at any available target when all else fails.

I am fully aware of the irony in the tone of your valedictory sentence. But many a true word, as they say...

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 01:54 PM

...." ask them what they thought of the monarchy."
As I have already said - I'm not questioning your description of 'how' it was, just trying to understand 'why', which seems to be far easier to ignore than answer in your case.
"that yours are misguided, doctrinaire and patronising towards those whom you claim to represent"
Have I - or has anybody ever claimed to represent anybody - don't really expect to get an answer to this one?
I leave that to our elders and betters.
"misguided, doctrinaire and patronising"
And I shall keep my not unsimilar view of your good self only to add sprinkle of hypocracy.
Anyway, I think we've taken up far too much space on something that is only marginally relevant to this thread.
I'm sure you're right - you usually are.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim McLean
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 01:25 PM

I wrote my anti monarchy/republican songs starting in the mid 50s. Josh MacRae was criticised in the Scottish press and banned from singing them in Glasgow public halls. The Sunday Post carried a report that "questions had been asked in the House" by a Scottish MP about this "seditious material". I, too, remember having to stand in the street with fellow school pupils and wave union flags when royalty visited Paisley. I think the people who do this freely are the types who swooned at Frankie Sinatra or the Beatles or want to touch the hem of anyone famous .. look at the public adulation of celebrities .... "princess Kate" is a prime example where photos of her royal bump command thousands of pounds. Why people fall over themselves to drool at unelected heads of state or film stars is beyond my comprehension. But I suppose it was ever thus ... however change can happen, Ireland did it.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 12:23 PM

No, Jim ~~ I didn't mention you in connection with 'guesses'. It was' as I made perfectly clear, Fred who used the word 'guess', explicitly, in his silly last post --

Tell you what. Go and dig up the bones of a few landless labourers and ask them what they thought of the monarchy. My guess is that they regarded it with very much the same fervour as Marx regarded the carbuncle he had once had on his dick.

I assure you I was using the word advisedly; so don't you be so paranoid, eh?

The rest of your post simply confirms what I have said; you will keep your opinions, Fred will keep his: finding some common ground between you is not exactly 'lumping you together'

Meanwhile, I shall keep mine, that yours are misguided, doctrinaire and patronising towards those whom you claim to represent -- or, if you don't like that formulation, whose interests you claim to urge. Say what you will, people did and do like living under a monarchy as a generality, tho not all monarchs are equally popular or respected; and they have always been good at getting rid of the ones who don't come up to scratch, from beheading them in Whitehall to sending them to live with scandalous divorcees in the South of France!

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 09:46 AM

"like making daft 'guesses'"
A little arrogant assuming my opinions are "guesses" British politics has been a life-long interest of mine and personally, I have no interest in what Fred has to say on the matter, nor how he chooses to say it - my opinions, beliefs and understandings are my own, nobody elses.   
Don't you think that lumping us together as "you guys" appears to rule out the idea that any of us possess the ability of independent thought? - and that our life experiences count for nothing?
I know what I know, I believe what I believe and my experiences are mine alone.
As far as Ireland goes, you misunderstand me, probably deliberately.
I am making passing no opinion on Irish history; I am reporting what I believe happened and why, also based on a lifetime's interest.
The brutish behaviour of the British establishent transformed general Irish opinions from bemused hostility to admiration, to rebellion and finally to a passion that brought about a civil war - nice work, if you can get it.
Your attitude here confirms something the late lamented Frank Harte once said in his opening remarks to a lecture he gave on Irish political songs at the National Folk Festival at Sutton Bonnington.
He said "Most English people don't understand the Irish (pregnant pause) but most of us Irish understand the English".
I can still see the visible shiver that went down the spines of the assembled company of a roomful of somewhat genteel EFDSSers.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 08:52 AM

Quite ~~ a perfect example of that misgovernment that Miss Holding taught me of, Jim. The treatment of Connolly was unpardonable, as was the whole existence of the Black & Tans But why were Pearce & Connolly at it anyhow?

I don't think people do now, or ever did, spend much time actually thinking about royalty. And I had an experience in Northampton much like yours of turning out to cheer a King whose car was behindhand so drove past much too fast. But my point is that, so far as they come into people's consciousness at all, feelings towards them are warm; and opportunities are welcomed of standing and expressing that warmth with applause if they just happen to be on a train that arrives at one's local station.

You guys are caught in the usual trap of claiming to be democrats, yet desperately urging opinions, like making daft 'guesses' as to what the bones of long dead working men might say if asked [see Fred's last post!], which you know in your ♡s [again, you think you don't but you do!] fly right in the face of the popular will which you purport so 'democratically' [if a bit patronisingly] to respect.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 08:33 AM

We must agree to disagree about the present situation - maybe things were very much different were you were brought up and spent the major part of my life than where I was.
Not to say that people didn't treat organised royal events in the same way as they did Christmas (which has as little to do with Christianity as November the 5th has to do with the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament).
My experience among the people I worked with right up to the time I retired was that royalty was a non-issue and the few to whom it was important tended to be figures of fun.
The way I described the Easter Week events was exactly as I believe it happened - I would highly recommend Thomas M Coffey's Agony At Easter for some remarkable eye-witness accounts of the end of the rebellion in Dublin. The image of Connolly strapped into a chair because he was too badly wounded to stand in front of a firing squad remains the most powerful image of those events even today.
Had the British packed all the rebel leaders off to Frongoch along with the rank-and-file rather than systematically butchering them, I have little doubt that they would have remained in the public mind as a bunch of cranks and there certainly would have been no impetus for the War of Independence that followed.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 07:45 AM

Don't be disingenuous, Jim. Ireland was never a "solid part of the British Empire", as many other countries were, hard as it may be to recall it now. I know there was a briefish Sepoy Revolt, Indian Mutiny, whevs, in the 1850s; but in Ireland it has been a long & unbroken history of simmering resentment with many actual outbreaks. Even in the patriotic wartime 1940s, I remember being taught as fact by Miss Holding at Northampton Town & County School that "We have always misgoverned Ireland" [her very words SFAIR], going into all the history of Cromwell, the Georges, the lot. "Solid part of the Empire" forsooth!.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 07:31 AM

And I am not sure why I put my last post in the past tense, come to think of it. You might not like it; but most people still like it. I won't rehearse yet again the story of the King & Queen, Geo VI & the later-to-be Queen Mum, visiting my Garden Suburb School when it got bombed out in 1940, his exquisite courtesy to a woman near me who called out 'good luck', the big girl who slapped him on the back so that she could tell people she had touched the King, &c. It is all on an old thread somewhere. But I will add that I felt an identical atmosphere & attitude in a crowd gathered outside Ely Station about 4 years ago to welcome the Queen off a train from London, my just happening to be there because I was meeting some friends travelling on the same train. The crowd spontaneously clapped. My friends thought I was winding them up when I texted them to tell them HM was on their train, which they didn't even know, but were over the moon to have a chance of catching a glimpse of her as they alighted. These were all just ordinary typical people; & to my mind they are much more ordinary & typical than your grudging and envious selves.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 07:24 AM

"the vast majority of the time actually liked being ruled by a monarch"
Which really doesn't answer the effect of the cultural manipulation that undoubtedly took place. If you are conditioned to "like" something of which you have no knowledge other than that which you have had hammered into you throughout your conscious existence, is that "liking" or just accepting what has been fed to you without question?
For centuries the monarchy has been no more than cultural wallpaper covering the cracks and defects of our society; there to be rolled out in times of need.
I'm not questioning your description of 'how' it was Mike, just trying to understand 'why' it was, and how quickly the situation could change when the circumstances were right .
It's difficult not to remember the fact that the rebels who took over the GPO in Dublin in 1916 (Ireland was then a solid part of the British Empire ) had to be protected from jeering, missile-throwing Dubliners demanding to know why they "weren't with our lads in the trenches" and within eighteen months were lauded as national heroes, eventually leading to the treaty.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 06:40 AM

But Jim, Fred, et al, none of you has really answered my point, which I think I have demonstrated many instances to support:~ that the vast majority of the folk for the vast majority of the time actually liked being ruled by a monarch, whom they were prepared to bless and respect, whom they thought of as personifying a deeply held patriotic feeling they shared, and whom they rejoiced and felt honoured in serving ~~ "I've done my duty, served my King, and now I bless my fate". I know this flies in the face of much that you lot hold dear in your turn; but I don't think all your urgings of coercion and conditioning and legislative terrorising are going to make this, imo, incontrovertible fact go away.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MartinRyan
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 06:07 AM

Phil

Well analysed.

Regards

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 06:00 AM

the almost insurmountable combination of conditioning and coercion

The hegemony of the ruling class, in other words. I agree.

It depends how you look at it, though. Did those pressures stop a kind of subterranean oppositional working-class consciousness expressing itself - or did they stop it developing in the first place? If it's the latter, we may have to accept that folk radicalism is a modern phenomenon, and the old songs come out of a tradition that was never - or only very rarely - at all radical.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Allan Conn
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 05:52 AM

Certainly as far as Scotland goes in the 17thC etc wouldn't it be right to say that the movement that was anti-monarchy (that is the more extreme of the Covenanters) weren't exactly known for their songs of any kind never mind anti-monarchy songs? Psalms aside! Don't know if that is the same for the Puritan wing in England?

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 05:34 AM

"Runs rather counter to the view of folk song as being inherently a counter culture"
Not if the source of that counter culture is answerable to laws which make sure that certain subjects are no-go areas.
Couple this with generation after generation who have been brought up to revere the monarchy on a daily basis (can still remember being forced to stand on the road outside Speke Secondary Modern School in the pissing rain to watch the Queen Mother being driven past at high speed (she didn't even bother to wave to me!) and you have the almost insurmountable combination of conditioning and coercion.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MartinRyan
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 05:13 AM

There's a distinct whiff of the "Heads I win, Tails you lose!" argument about this - there are no anti-monarchist folk songs because the manarchy were so anti-folk...". Runs rather counter to the view of folk song as being inherently a counter culture, so to speak.

Regards

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 03:23 AM

It is hardly surprising that there are few anti-monarchist songs in Britain:
"Parliament passed the Treason Felony Act in 1848. This act made advocacy of republicanism punishable by transportation to Australia, later life imprisonment. The Law Lords ruled in 2003 that this law does not prohibit peaceful printed advocacy of anti-monarchy sentiments.[4]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicanism_in_the_United_Kingdom
As recently as the (last) Royal wedding (Gawd bless 'em!), police were accused of heavy-handed tactics in preventing anti-monarchist demonstrations and the courts later ruled that their behaviour was permissible when the matter came to court.
This thread prompted me to search through our books for examples - I had forgotten this gem - 'Caricature History of the Georges' or "Annals of the House of Hanover, compiled from the squibs, broadsides, window pictures, lampoons and pictorial caricatures of the time", by Thomas Wright esq., FSA, John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly (1867) - well worth a peep for a non-establishment commentary on the times, including the monarchy.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:51 AM

So there are 6 examples from tradition [so far] expressing folkloric love of or respect for royalty, and/or satisfaction in living and serving under it; and not a peep from Fred. Where he got to? Give up, eh, Fred? Admit your baseless assertions, with no supporting instances, were no more than that, do you?

And if GUEST Father Xmas doesn't like it, he can stick it up his chimney, with the vomit-inducing luv & compliments of

~M~

& here's hoping he'll throw up all over his nice white beard and red suit...

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 Feb 13 - 02:39 AM

"I've done my duty, served my King, and now I bless my fate."
         'On Board a 98'

DT ~~ From the book, "A Bonnie Bunch of Roses,"
edited by Dan Milner, 1983.
Collected by Vaughan Williams.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: kendall
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 04:23 PM

I have a song that supposedly tells the truth about Bonnie Prince Charlie, but it's not trad.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Father Christmas
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 03:36 PM

MtheGM, groan, groan,smug, smug, vomit, vomit.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 07:02 AM

After reflection (and another coffee) I think you're right - the "great mon" is the supreme arbiter, & if an appeal to him didn't sort things out she'd be willing to fight.

It's quite a complex thought, actually (this may be the second coffee talking) - if she had clothes (or clogs) to put on, she'd go to London, and if that appeal didn't work then she'd fight. But the song's just established that they're dirt poor, and for just that reason they're never going to get the chance to appeal to the King - and by implication they're never going to fight. It's like a rather dark version of "There's a hole in my bucket" - "I'm too poor to afford decent clothes, I'd fight for my rights but I should appeal to the King first, but I can't appeal to the King because I haven't got any decent clothes".

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 06:19 AM

Re Mrs Gaskell & The Cotton Weaver song ~~ The Oldham Weaver, she calls it in Mary Barton ~

Suggesting that she 'bowdlerised' it, Phil, implies some sort of 'definitive' version from which she had departed; as which, as we all know, there is no such thing regarding a song in the tradition. It is perfectly possible that it came to her [from one of her husband's congregation, perhaps?] in the form she quotes it in the novel.

I don't think, anyhow, in the version in which she says that, if things don't alter when she has seen the Great Man, she will fight "in blood up to th'een", that she literally means that she will actually physically attack the King himself; simply that she will take a more aggressive initiative in general.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 05:11 AM

Thread drift alert:

Have I mentioned before, talking of songs on the Aldermaston marches, that I shared a flat at the time of the first march in West Hampstead with John Brunner, sf writer?; one of the initial march-planning CND meetings, with Pat Arrowsmith, Mike Randle, John Hasted, et al, took place in our big living-room. It was John Brunner who wrote the recognised CND anthem, The H-Bomb's Thunder [to tune of The Miners' Life Guard], which was sung on all the marches, &, I believe, the US equivalents. John could not sing a note, so showed me the words in draft & asked me to sing it back to him to see how it sounded. So I can claim to be the first person ever to sing this song, since sung by millions!.

Sorry for thread drift; but it is a true tale.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 03:45 AM

I can remember being there at the birth of a potential anti-royal song on one of the Aldermaston marches.
We had drawn level with Windsor when somebody asked did anybody have a song about royalty.
Somebody obliged with (to the tune of Bless 'Em All)

"Anti-royal, anti-royal,
We're singing an anti-royal song,
We're singing it as we are marching along,
Singing an anti-royal song.

Where's the queen, where's the queen,
Where's the queen as we're marching along,
She's up in the palace a-sitting on the throne,
Singing an anti-royal song."

Others joined in, adding improvised verses and eventually it grew to about half a dozen and took a cumulative form.
Hardly deathless verse, but it took our minds off the sore feet for a time.
I later heard it from a totally different part of the march
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 22 Feb 13 - 03:02 AM

Those verses in the Four Loom Weaver were controversial in their time - Mrs Gaskell bowdlerised them when she quoted the song. I think the very thought of imagining being prepared to fight the King, if it was absolutely necessary, was pretty daring.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 21 Feb 13 - 02:45 PM

And consider The 4-Loom/Poor Cotton Weaver, whose wife's instinct in times of hardship is, if able to get clogs for the journey, to go to London to appeal to the King, confident of his sympathy; and will resort to fighting only if disappointed therein. Even so, she asserts that, for all her poverty, "She's nowt against t'King, But she likes a fair thing".

A naive, but surely moving, simple soul's attitude ~~ a bit of folkloric instinct, in fact.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 21 Feb 13 - 01:55 PM

"If you can drink one glass, then we can drink two
Here's a health to Victoria, the same unto you
Mind what you're doing and see that all's right
If you give naught, we take naught, farewell and good night"

Heysham Pace-Egging Song

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 21 Feb 13 - 12:46 PM

You're clearly just listening to a different lot of May & Whitsun songs, Fred.

And try also those dialogue "Servingman and Husbandman" paeans to the joys of country life, which invariably end with some such formulation as

"So come good people all, and be you great or small
Honour the King of this land;
And let us whatsoever to do our best endeavour
For to maintain the husbandman".

The Mummer's Play, as you well know, would also end with victory and glorification of St George as emblem of Crown and Country.

You have spent this whole thread asserting that the people hated their monarchy, but have been unable to produce one iota of popular evidence, and have had to fall back on fantasies of digging up a labouring man's bones and communicating with them in some anagogic fashion. Whereas I have just produced for you three examples of explicitly expressed royalism in three strains of widespread popular song &/or lore. I have not claimed that such sentiments will be explicit in every version; but you have not demonstrated any reason whatsoever to dismiss or discount them.

And what was the proud title of the girl chosen to preside over the May ceremonies, eh? She wasn't the Commissaress of the May, was she?

I say again ~~ live with it.

~M~

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: MartinRyan
Date: 21 Feb 13 - 11:54 AM

Heard a very interesting talk by Terry Moylan (he of The Age of Revolution in the Irish Song Traditon) the other night. Based on the contents of a songbook called Paddy's Resource published by the United Irishmen in the period approx. 1790-1810. This included "The Carmagnoles", of which the final verse is:

Old church and king, in close embrace
The burdens of the human race
The people tell you to your face
That you will soon repent it;
For kings in power and preaching drones
The source of all our heavy groans
Down from your pulpits and your thrones
You'll tumble unlamented

Chorus
For was not I oft telling thee
The French could fight right heartily
The Carmagnoles have made you free
So now you may believe me.

Revived in recent years by a number of singers - including Mudcat's own Liberty Boy, who used a line of it as title of his last CD!

Regards

p.s. I'll see if I can find audio/video online.

Subject: RE: Anti-Monarchist Folk Songs
From: GUEST,Fred McCormick
Date: 21 Feb 13 - 11:42 AM

Sorry M. If you actually went and visited a few Easter and Whitsun customs, as I do, you would find very little pro-royal sentiment being expressed. Ditto for customs from any other time of the year. EG., in the entire corpus of South Yorkshire carols, I cannot think of a single one which incorporates that sort of nonsense.

In fact, pro-royalist sentiments in British folksongs generally are not very common, and thankfully they're even rarer in Ireland.

Tell you what. Go and dig up the bones of a few landless labourers and ask them what they thought of the monarchy. My guess is that they regarded it with very much the same fervour as Marx regarded the carbuncle he had once had on his dick.