Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret

Subject: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: Dunlace
Date: 26 Jan 07 - 03:11 PM

Please, does anybody know what Pirie's Chair is? Lizzie Higgins sings a version of Proud Lady Margaret where she is threatened with this chair. Child (and then Brewer's Dictionary) says it's the lowest seat in Hell, but he doesn't give the provenance. Opie says it's a punishment in a boys' game, but again no provenance. I ask on behalf of Ray Fisher.

Thanks for any help.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: katlaughing
Date: 26 Jan 07 - 06:36 PM

I found this on google at http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/piries-chair.html
Pirie's Chair

"The lowest seat o' hell." "If you do not mend your ways, you will be sent to Pirie's chair, the lowest seat of hell."

    In Pirie's chair you'll sit, I say,
    The lowest seat o' hell;
    If ye do not amend your ways,
    It's there that ye must dwell.

Child's English and Scottish Ballads: The Courteous Knight.

Pirrie or pyrrie means a sudden storm at sea (Scotch pirr). "They were driven back by storme of winde and pyrries of the sea." (North: Plutarch, p. 355.)

Hope that helps,

kat

Subject: RE: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 26 Jan 07 - 09:16 PM

Don't I recall hearing that piries are fairies? And that "pirie" as an adjective can mean weird or uncanny?

Although the reference makes it sound as if Pirie is a specific person who has been damned.

Bob

Subject: RE: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 27 Jan 07 - 09:09 PM

Scots "peerie" usually means "small"; it has nothing particularly to do with fairies. You may have confused it with "peri", which is a Middle-Eastern term used of certain kinds of supernatural being; but there is unlikely to be any connection.

Brewer's comment is not particularly helpful: 'pirrie or pyrrie' makes little sense here, and is likely no more relavant than "pirrie" (neat, precise) and several other similar sounding words.

There was some correspondence on the subject in Notes and Queries in 1869. Unfortunately, page images at the  Internet Library of Early Journals  aren't accessible at the moment. However, Professor Child did provide a detailed note in his Glossary. Presumably Ray has already seen this, but probably other correspondents here have not; so I'll quote it in order to save people having to guess in the dark.

"Pirie, in Pirie's chair you'll sit, the lowest seat o hell: I, 429, 30, 31. For the derivation Sir W D Geddes suggests as possible le pire, which would be in the way of the Scottish 'ill chiel.' Professor Cappen writes: 'Familiar name in doggerel lines recited by boys in their games. One boy stood back against the wall, another bent towards him with his head on the pit of the boy's stomach; a third sat upon the back of the second. The boy whose head was bent down had to guess how many fingers the rider held up. The first asked the question in doggerel rhyme in which Pirie, or Pirie's chair, or hell, was the doom threatened for a wrong answer. I remember Pirie (pron. Peerie) distinctly in connection with the doom. Pirie's chair probably indicates the uncomfortable position of the second boy (or fourth, for there may have been a fourth who crouched uncomfortably on the ground below the boy bending), whose head or neck was confined in some way and squeezed after a wrong answer."

The derivation suggested there is guesswork too, but it has the benefit of being logical, which Brewer's guess was not. Geddes, for what it is worth, was Professor of Greek at the University of Aberdeen. I don't know about Professor Cappen.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: Megan L
Date: 28 Jan 07 - 07:51 AM

My gran had a small wooden stool called a cuddie (some cried it a curry)if children were bad they were sent to sit on the peerie cuddie. there was also a custom in scots kirks to have a low stool where sinners sat in full view of the congregation in the hope that humiliation would help them mend their ways.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 28 Jan 07 - 10:56 AM

That was the cutty stool or stool of repentance. Your gran's 'cuddie' was perhaps the same word, though it's worth noting that a cuddie is sometimes a donkey or (perhaps by extension) a simpleton; do you remember which meaning was intended, or was it never mentioned?

It's likely enough that the various 'stool' customs relate to one another; perhaps 'pirie's chair' was originally just a small chair of the sort mentioned above. The association with hell goes back a couple of centuries, at any rate: Motherwell ( Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, 1827, lxxx-lxxxi, note) quotes the verse later included in Child, adding:

"The Scottish Parliament seems often to have afflicted itself in passing acts against the sumptuous and costly claithing of ladies. But this ballad must have done more good than a hundred sumptuary enactments, for it consigned the fair contraveners at once to hell, and to a particular spot of it, of which my ignorance of localities does not enable me to give any farther information than the text affords."

Subject: RE: Folklore: Pirie's Chair - Proud Lady Margaret
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 28 Jan 07 - 10:36 PM

I know a Scottish song with the line "gang awa peerie fairies," meaning "Go away, tiny fairies." Perhaps this is where the mistake originated that a peerie is a fairy.