XIV. HIGHWAYMAN AND
POACHER SONGS
If the pressgang was an unpleasant factor in eighteenth century life, so also were the footpad and highwayman. The highwayman generally claimed the sympathy of the folk-song maker on the ground that—
“He never robbed a poor man upon the King’s highway,” and that his takings from the rich were distributed among the poor. This atoned for all crimes against person and property that were committed by such men as “Brennan on the Moor,” the hero of a very favourite ballad. Sometimes these highwayman songs take a more moral tone, and the criminal, in the condemned cell, offers his fate as a warning to others. Charles Reilly, for example, sings—
“Adieu, adieu, I must meet my fate, I was brought up in a tender state, Until bad counsel did me entice To leave off work, and follow vice. Which makes me to lament and say, As in my doleful cell I lay, ‘Pity the fall of young fellows all; Ah well a day! Ah well a day!’ At seventeen I took a wife; She was the joy of all my life, And to maintain her rich and gay, I went to rob on the King’s highway, Which makes me to lament and say,” etc.
Poaching was a matter so near the class that sang folk-songs that as a subject it could not fail in interest. If the folk-singer was not himself a poacher he was sufficiently in touch to feel a brotherly sympathy with him in his misfortunes, and in his triumphs, over the gamekeeper. As a consequence there are many poaching songs well known in rural districts, as—“Young Henry the poacher,” “The Sledmere poachers,” “The death of Bill Brown,” “Hares in the old plantation,” etc.
Highway robbery and poaching led to execution and transportation, and both these are subjects for the folk-song maker. The execution songs appear, however, generally to be the work of professional ballad makers, and the “last dying speech and confession” of a criminal, with appended verses, was in print long before he had paid the penalty of his crime. The ballad was sung to one or other of those doleful tunes especially appropriated to this kind of song by the ballad chanter, who hawked the broadsides through the towns on the night of the execution. Frequently the tag to such ditties was—
“Young men all now beware How you fall into a snare.”
In a somewhat similar strain are the songs that tell of the miseries of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, for poaching or other offences.