Westminster-Drollery Appendix, p. liv. “The Green Gown,” Pan, leave piping, &c.
Under the title “The Fetching Home of May,” we meet an early ballad-form copy in the Roxburghe Collection, i. 535, printed for J. Wright, junior, dwelling at the upper end of the Old Bailey. It begins “Now Pan leaves piping,” and is in two parts, each containing five verses. Three of these are not represented in the Antidote of 1661. Wm. Chappell, the safest of all guides in such matters, notes that “the publisher [of the broadside] flourished in and after 1635. No clue remains to the authorship.” (Bd. Soc. reprint, iii. 311, 1875.)
As in the case of the companion-ditty, “Come, Lasses and Lads” (Westm. Droll., ii. 80), we may feel satisfied that this lively song was written before the year 1642. No hint of the Puritanic suppression of Maypoles can be discerned in either of them. Such sports were soon afterwards prohibited, and if ballads celebrating their past delights had then been newly written, the author must have yielded to the temptation to gird at the hypocrites and despots who desolated each village green. We cannot regard the Roxburghe Ballad as being superior to the Antidote version: But they mutually help one another in corrections. We note the chief: first verse, So lively it passes; Good lack, what paines; 2, Thus they so much; 3 (our 4), Came very lazily. It is after the five verses that differences are greatest. Our 6th verse is absent, and our 7th appears as the 8th; with new 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10th, which we here give, but print them to match our others:
THE FETCHING HOME OF MAY.
(The Second Part.)
6.
This Maying so pleased || Most of the fine lasses,
That they much desired to fetch in May flowers,
For to strew the windows and such like places,
Besides they’l have May bows, fit for shady bowers.