Give me a looke, give me a face,
That makes simplicitie a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, haire as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me, 10
Than all th' adulteries of art,
That strike mine eyes, but not my heart.
XVIII.
THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD.
The subject of this very popular ballad (which has been set in so favourable a light by the Spectator, No. 85.) seems to be taken from an old play, intitled, Two lamentable Tragedies; The one of the murder of Maister Beech, a chandler in Thames streete, &c. The other of a young child murthered in a wood by two ruffins, with the consent of his unkle. By Rob. Yarrington, 1601, 4to. Our ballad-maker has strictly followed the play in the description of the father and mother's dying charge: in the uncle's promise to take care of their issue: his hiring two ruffians to destroy his ward, under pretence of sending him to school: their chusing a wood to perpetrate the murder in: one of the ruffians relenting, and a battle ensuing, &c. In other respects he has departed from the play. In the latter the scene is laid in Padua: there is but one child: which is murdered by a sudden stab of the unrelenting ruffian: he is slain himself by his less bloody companion; but ere he dies gives the other a mortal wound: the latter living just long enough to impeach the uncle; who, in consequence of this impeachment, is arraigned and executed by the hand of justice, &c. Whoever compares the play with the ballad, will have no doubt but the former is the original: the language is far more obsolete, and such a vein of simplicity runs through the whole performance, that, had the ballad been written first, there is no doubt but every circumstance of it would have been received into the drama: whereas this was probably built on some Italian novel.
Printed from two ancient copies, one of them in black-letter in the Pepys Collection. Its title at large is, The Children in the Wood; or, The Norfolk Gentleman's Last Will and Testament: To the tune of Rogero, &c.
[Ritson thought he had refuted Percy's statement that the play was older than the ballad by pointing out that the latter was entered in the Stationers' books in 1595, but I find in Baker's Biographia Dramatica an assertion that Yarrington's play was not printed "till many years after it was written." The following is the form of the entry at Stationers' Hall, "15 Oct. 1595. Thomas Millington entred for his copie under th[e h]andes of bothe the Wardens a ballad intituled The Norfolk Gent, his Will and Testament and howe he commytted the keepinge of his children to his owne brother whoe delte most wickedly with them and howe God plagued him for it." Sharon Turner and Miss Halsted favoured the rather untenable opinion that the wicked uncle was intended to represent Richard III., and therefore that the date of the ballad was much earlier than that usually claimed for it. Turner writes in his History of England, "I have sometimes fancied that the popular ballad may have been written at this time on Richard and his nephews before it was quite safe to stigmatize him more openly."
Wailing, or Wayland Wood, a large cover near Walton in Norfolk is the place which tradition assigns to the tragedy, but the people of Wood Dalling also claim the honour for their village.
Addison speaks of the ballad as "one of the darling songs of the common people, [which] has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their age," and points out that the circumstance