Old Country Life

by S. Baring-Gould

How completely the itinerant singer of ballads and teller of folk-tales has disappeared—driven from the houses of the gentle, because the young people have books now, and amuse themselves with them, and he lingers on only in the ale-houses; such men are few and far between, feeble old men, who can now hardly obtain a hearing for their quaint stories, and whose minor melodies are voted intolerable by young ears, disciplined only to appreciate music-hall inanities.

There are still a few of these men about, and as I have taken a good deal of pains to get into their confidence, and collect from them the remains—there exist only remains—of their stories, musical and poetical, I am able to give an account of them which ought to interest, for the old village bard or song-man is rapidly becoming as extinct as the dodo and the great auk.

The village bard or song-man is the descendant of the minstrel. Now the minstrels were put down by Act of Parliament in 1597, and were to be dealt with by the magistrates with severity as rogues and vagabonds. That sealed the doom of the old ballad. All such as were produced later are tame and flat in comparison with the genuine songs of the old times, and can at best be regarded only as modern imitations. The press has preserved in Broadsides a good number of ballads, and The Complete Dancing Master and other collections have saved a good number of the old tunes from being irrevocably lost. But by no means all were thus preserved; a great many more continued to be sung by our peasantry, and I quite believe the old men when they say, that at one time they knew some one hundred and fifty to two hundred distinct songs and melodies; their memories were really extraordinary. But then they could neither read nor write, and the faculty of remembering was developed in them to a remarkable extent. I have heard of two of these men meeting to sing against each other for a wager. They began at sunset; one started a ballad, sang it through, then his opponent sang one, and so on. The object was to ascertain which knew most. The sun rose on them, and neither had come to an end of his store, so the stakes were drawn.

These old minstrels all are in the same tale, when asked to sing, "Lord, your honour, I haven't a sung these thirty year. Volks now don't care to hear my songs. Most on 'em be gone right out o' my head." Yet a good many come back; and I find that when I read over the first verse or two of a series of ballads in any collection, that the majority are either known to them, or suggest to them another, or a variant.

It is not ballads only that are stored in their memories—many ballads that go back for their origin to before the reign of Henry VII., but also songs that breathe the atmosphere of the time of Elizabeth. Mr. R. Bell, in his introduction to his Songs from the Dramatists, says, "The superiority in all qualities of sweetness, thoughtfulness, and purity of the writers of the sixteenth century over their successors is strikingly exhibited in these productions.

"The songs of the age of Elizabeth and James I. are distinguished as much by their delicacy and chastity of feeling, as by their vigour and beauty. The change that took place under Charles II. was sudden and complete. With the Restoration love disappears, and sensuousness takes its place. Voluptuous without taste or sentiment, the songs of that period may be said to dissect in broad daylight the life of the town, laying bare with revolting shamelessness the tissues of its most secret vices. But as this morbid anatomy required some variation to relieve its sameness, the song sometimes transported the libertinism into the country, and through the medium of a sort of Covent Garden pastoral exhibited the fashionable delinquencies in a masquerade of Strephons and Chlorises, no better than the Courtalls and Loveits of the comedies. The costume of innocence gave increased zest to the dissolute wit, and the audiences seem to have been delighted with the representation of their own licentiousness in the transparent disguise of verdant images, and the affectation of rural simplicity."

Very few of the songs of the Restoration have lingered on in the memory of our minstrels, if ever they were taken into their store. Many of the songs of that period were set to tunes that have passed on from generation to generation, up to the present age, when they are all being neglected for wretched, vulgar songs, without fun and without melody. The ballad especially is death-smitten. Folks nowadays lack patience, and will not endure a song that is not finished in three minutes. The old ballad was a folk-tale run into jingling rhyme, and sung to a traditional air; it is often very long. One I have recovered, The Gipsy Countess, runs through over twenty verses. The very popular Saddle to Rags runs through some twenty-two, Lord Bateman has about fifty, and Arthur of Bradley has hardly any end to it. A ballad cannot be pared down greatly, as that destroys the story, which is set to verse to be told leisurely, with great variety of expression.

In 1846 the Percy Society issued to its members a volume entitled Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, edited by Mr. J. H. Dixon, who gives in his preface the following account of the sources whence he collected them:—"He who, in travelling through the rural districts of England, has made the roadside inn his resting-place, who has visited the lowly dwellings of the villagers and yeomanry, and been present at their feasts and festivals, must have observed that there are certain old poems, ballads, and songs which are favourites with the masses, and have been said and sung from generation to generation." When I was a boy I was wont to ride about my native county, putting up at little village inns for the night, and there I often came in for gatherings where the local song-man entertained the company. Unfortunately I did not make any collection at the time, though snatches of the songs and wafts of the strains lingered in my head. I dare say that there are still singers of ballads in other parts of England, but my researches have been confined to the west. Somerset had its own type of songs with peculiar cadences, and Devon and Cornwall were rich to overflow in melodies. Wherever I go in quest of a song-man, I hear the same story, "Ah! there was old So-and-so, eighty years of age, died last winter of bronchitis, he was a singer and no mistake." They have been struck down, those old men, and therefore we must prize the more those that are left.

Anciently—well, not so very anciently either, for it was within my memory—almost every parish had its bard, a man generally the descendant of a still more famous father, who was himself but the legatee of a race of song-men. This village bard had his memory stored with traditional melodies and songs and ballads, committed to him as a valuable deposit by his father, wedded to well-known ancient airs, and the country singer not only turned from the affectation of the new melodies, but with jealous tenacity clung to the familiar words. Words became so wedded to airs that the minstrels, and their hearers and imitators, could not endure to have them dissociated.