The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty: A Contextual History

Abstract

It has not proved particularly easy to trace what is usually thought of as ‘folk song’ in England back into the eighteenth century. It is, however, possible in some instances to identify vernacular songs of the kind that were later recovered by folk song collectors circulating in earlier centuries in printed form, and to find contemporary references to the ways in which they were being used. This article takes this approach to one such ballad, The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty, which was sung in England and was eventually collected in Newfoundland, but which in its earlier history strays well outside what might be thought of as the conventional folk song paradigm.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Anna Kearney Guigné at Memorial University of Newfoundland for her invaluable assistance with the Newfoundland versions of the ballad, and to Meghan Forsyth and Brian Peters for advice on the Newfoundland tunes. I am also very grateful to the Librarian of the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts for supplying me with a digital copy of the thirty-one-stanza broadside held in the New York Public Library.

Notes

Notes

1 Cited from An Excellent Ballad of the Life and Death of King Richard the Third (Northampton: printed by Wm. Dicey; and sold at Mr Burnham’s snuff-shop, and by Mathias Dagnell, bookseller, in Aylesbury; Paul Stevens, in Bicester; Wm. Ratten, bookseller, in Coventry; Caleb Ratten, bookseller, in Harborough; Tho. Williams, bookseller, in Tring; Anthony Thorpe, in St Albans; Wm. Peachey, near St Bennet’s Church, in Cambridge; Mary Timbs, in Newport Pagnell; John Timbs, in Stony Stratford; Jer. Roe, in Derby; John Hirst, printer, in Leeds; and by Churrude Brady, in St Ives) [ESTC T180800]. More than two dozen Dicey broadsides with this sort of wording have been identified to date.

2 There is extant from the Sheffield printer John Garnet a list of horses entered to run at Doncaster in 1740, which is presumably just one surviving example of many such printed sheets: [A List of the Horses &c. Enter’d to Run at Doncaster on Wednesday the 18th Day of June, 1740] (Sheffield: printed by J. Garnet) [ESTC N10394].

3 The table of contents identifies the paper as ‘On the Writings of Southey, Lloyd, &c.’ The same paper was printed under the title ‘Modern Poets’ in The Scourge; or, Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly 6 (1813): 375–81.

4 Reprinted in the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 3 (1821): 806–807.

5 Palmer (1986) found the memoir in the Warwick Advertiser of 20 February 1847.

6 A Garland of New Songs, containing 1. The True Lovers Yoke; 2. The Unconstant Lover; 3. The Sportsmans Delight; 4. The Guardian Angels (great veriety [sic] of songs and histories are printed and sold by W. Appleton, Darlington) [ESTC T40510]. Appleton dates from British Book Trade Index (http://bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/).

7 See the section on ‘The Ballad as Song’ for some more information concerning the old lady (Mrs Gaden) and her ballad.

8 For the Dicey/Marshall firm and their successors, see Stoker (2014, 2017).

9 A copy of this image, in reverse, is printed with The Wittham-Miller … or, The Berkshire Tragedy (printed and sold by D. Wrighton, 86, Snow Hill, Birmingham) [Cambridge University Library, Madden Ballads 1.51; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Harding B 6 (98)], where it serves as a generic murdered woman scene.

10 There is currently some confusion over the cataloguing of these copies in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) (http://estc.bl.uk/). Aldermary Churchyard copies without imprint can be distinguished by the exact positioning of the woodcuts, but they may not represent truly distinct states.

11 The Derbyshire Tragedy; or, A Warning Piece to All Perjur’d Young Men (licensed and enter’d according to order) [ESTC T32329].

12 The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty; or, The Shepherd’s Daughter Betray’d [ESTC T22912] (Madden Ballads 1.74), with a woodcut of a robed figure holding a large scimitar-like weapon in a generic rural setting.

13 The Bloody Gardiner; or, The Shepherd’s Daughter Decoy’d [ESTC N48586] (New York Public Library, *KVB Broadside Ballads 164).

14 Cited from microfiche copy at London, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Maud Karpeles Manuscript Collection, MK/8/21a, MK/8/23. Published by Karpeles (1971, 111–12 and 319; 1934, 39–43 and 75; n.d., 12–15 and 47). A version based on the May McCabe version collected by Karpeles was recorded by Newfoundland singer Laverne Squires in 1969 (Squires 2017, track 10).

15 This letter seems to imply that Mrs Gaden lived in Crimscote, Warwickshire. My thanks to the British Library Archives, who have been unable to trace the donation of such an item to the British Museum Library.

16 Journal of the Folk-Song Society 2.3, no. 8 (1906): 194–95. See also note at MK/5/70 (a).

17 It has not been possible to identify the collection to which Karpeles refers, but I am grateful to Susan Halpert of the Houghton Library for trying to track it down. The transcript has ‘lords of all the globe’ instead of the usual and more grammatically coherent reading, ‘lord of all the globe’ (stanza 7), and while it is scarcely conclusive, ‘lords’ occurs in the broadside ascribed to Pearson of Manchester which could have originally been a Bebbington broadside since Pearson bought his predecessor’s stock of stereotype plates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Atkinson

David Atkinson is the author of The Ballad and its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory (2018), The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts (2014), and The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice (2002). He has co-edited (with Steve Roud) Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century: Producers, Sellers, Consumers (2017) and Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions (2014), (with Andrew C. Rouse) Ethnic Mobility in Ballads (2017), and (with Ian Russell) Folk Song: Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation (2004). He is the editor of Folk Music Journal, Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, and Executive Secretary of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (Ballad Commission).