[686]. Coussemaker in his section of songs for the dance, work quoted, pp. 338 f., gives a “ronde” sung during the fête at Bailleul:—
Now the salad must be sowed,
Now the salad must be sowed,
Salad, salad, salad, salad, salad,
Now the salad must be sowed.
Now the salad must be cut,—
then plucked, washed, dried, and so on. The list of these songs could be extended indefinitely; the fact that this of the salad is sung at a quite alien festivity simply proves the vogue of the thing. One must refer, however, to the dances of Catalonian peasants and children, the songs for which are little more than repetition and refrain descriptive of country toil, as quoted by Wolf, pp. 34 f., of his Proben Portugiesischer und Catalanischer Volksromanzen, Wien, 1856.
[687]. Ed. 1825, IX. 41. The phrase “to town” at which our editor boggles, ignorant of its real meaning, is a further proof of the traditional character of this song.
[688]. “Is your throat clear for hooky hooky?” asks Harvest; and the reapers sing the refrain again. Later he speaks of weeping out “a lamentable hooky hooky.” Drake connected hooky with hockey, the hock or harvest cart sung by Herrick. But perhaps “hooky” is to be kept without any such change. Leyden, see Complaynte of Scotland, p. xciii, speaking of ring dances at the kirn or feast of cutting down the grain, says that reapers who first finished the work danced on an eminence, in view of other reapers, and began the dance “with three loud shouts of triumph, and thrice tossing up their hooks in the air.” Cf. the Oxford Dict., s.v. hook, the common word for reaping scythe or sickle from Anglo-Saxon down.
[689]. In his Neydhardt mit dem Feyhel, 1562. See Uhland, Volkslieder, I. 58, and notes, Schriften, III. 24. Böhme follows the song back to the fourteenth century. In the play it is sung by the duchess and repeated by the chorus, as in popular dances of the day.