The ‘old woman,’ ‘out,’ and ‘in’ are the arrangements of the wool over and under the knitting-pins.”[[680]] The same authority gives other rimes of this sort, more or less suggested by the movements of the work; for instance, a song of Cumberland wool-carders:—
Tāary woo’, tāary woo’, tāary woo’ is ill to spin,
Card it well, card it well, card it well ere you begin.
Slightly different is the song of Peterborough workhouse girls in procession, where the refrain is quite primitive in form:[[681]]—
And a-spinning we will go, will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.
Bell[[682]] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel in the Greenside Wakes Song:—
Tread the wheel, tread the wheel, dan, don, dell O.
The flyting that goes with this refrain is negligible,—a man and a woman on horseback with spinning-wheels before them, singing alternate stanzas in the midst of the fair, with its dancing and merriment, a sort of side-show; but the refrain may well be old.
Songs of the crafts, however, are less likely to hold the festal, gregarious, communal note than those old refrains which took their cadence from the movements of workers in the field. An agricultural community, whether in its rudest stages, a horde that lives in fertile river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory bands of the plain, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to homogeneous conditions and always fosters communal song. Where these conditions survive, this song in some degree survives with them. Corsican labourers in the field, says Ortoli,[[683]] still sing so at their work; the Styrian threshers, eight together, make their flails chorus thus:—