"The thrush has lost his beak, how will he manage to sing, and yet he sings, the poor thrush, yet he goes on singing."
The chant then enumerates the bird's tongue, one eye, two eyes, head, neck, one wing, two wings, one foot, two feet, body, back, feathers, tail; always returning to the statement that the bird, although it is divided up, persists in singing.
The French word merle stands both for thrush and for blackbird. The blackbird is held in reverence among ourselves in Salop and Montgomeryshire, and blackbird-pie was eaten in Cornwall on Twelfth Night.[68] But there is no reference to the sacrificial slaying of the bird, as far as I am aware. In the French chant the bird continues to sing although it is killed. The same idea finds expression in our nursery song of Sing a Song of Sixpence. This piece, taken in conjunction with the eating of blackbird-pie in Cornwall and the French chants, seems to preserve the remembrance of the ancient bird sacrifice. The first verse of this rhyme appears in the collection of 1744, in which "naughty boys" stands for blackbirds. In other collections the piece runs as follows:—
Sing a song of sixpence, a bagful of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pye
And when the pye was open'd, the birds began to sing;
Was not this a dainty dish to set before the king?
The king was in his parlour counting out his money,
The queen was in the kitchen eating bread and honey,
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,
Up came a magpie and bit off her nose.
(c. 1783, p. 26.)
The magpie is "a little blackbird" in the version of Halliwell, which continues:—
Jenny was so mad, she didn't know what to do,
She put her finger in her ear and cracked it right in two.
Halliwell (1842, p. 62) noted that in the book called Empulario or the Italian Banquet of 1589, there is a receipt "to make pies so that the birds may be alive in them and fly out when it is cut up," a mere device, live birds being introduced after the pie is made. One cannot but wonder if the device was a mere sport of fancy, or if it originated from the desire to give substance to an ancient belief.
Again, the robin redbreast was sacrificially eaten in France at Le Charme, Loiret, on Candlemas, that is on February the first (Ro., II, 264). There are no chants on the sacrifice of the robin in France, as far as I know. Among ourselves, on the other hand, where no hunting of the robin is recorded, a piece printed both by Herd[69] and Chambers suggests his sacrifice. The piece is called by Chambers The Robin's Testament, and it describes how the bird, on the approach of death, made a bequest of his several parts, which he enumerated exactly in the way of the sacrificial bird-chants current in France. They were his neb, feathers of his neb, right leg, other leg, feathers of his tail, and feathers of his breast, to each of which he attributed a mystic significance. The piece in the combined versions stands as follows:—
Guid-day now, bonnie Robin
How lang have you been here?
I've been bird about this bush,
This mair than twenty year!
Chorus: Teetle ell ell, teetle ell ell.
Tee, tee, tee, tee, tee, tee, tee,
Tee, tee, tee, teetle eldie.