Very full notes have been added to these by Miss Lucy Broadwood in an attempt to throw light on the origin of the historical incident upon which the ballad story is founded. Two other versions have been published in Longman’s Magazine (volume xvii, p. 217, ed. 1890), and in the Ballad Society’s edition of the Roxburghe Ballads (part xv, volume v, ed. 1885).
Professor Child reprinted the first of these in a note upon “The Death of Queen Jane,” observing that “one half seemed a plagiarism upon that old ballad,” and that the remainder of “The Duke of Bedford” was so “trivial” that he had not attempted to identify this Duke—“any other Duke would probably answer as well.” Miss Broadwood has not reached a definite conclusion, but she inclines to the theory that the Duke of the ballad was William De la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450). She admits, however, that there is a good deal of evidence in favor of the Duke of Grafton, son of Charles II, an account of whose death was printed on a broadside, licensed in 1690. She thinks that the ballad given here is probably a mixture of two separate ballads, the more modern of the two (describing hunting) referring to the death of the son of the fourth Duke of Bedford, born in 1739, who was killed by a fall from his horse in 1767. Woburn only came into the possession of the Bedford family after the accession of Edward VI.
The last stanza refers to the popular superstition that the flowing of certain streams, known as “woe-waters,” was the presage of coming disaster.
No. 22. Death and the Lady
For other versions with tunes see Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume i, p. 169; volume ii, p. 137) ; Songs of the West (No. 99, 2d ed.); English Traditional Songs and Carols (p. 40) ; and Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (pp. 164–168).
Chappell points out that this “is one of a series of popular ballads which had their rise from the celebrated Dance of Death,” and he quotes a very long “Dialogue betwixt an Exciseman and Death” from a copy in the Bagford Collection, dated 1659 (also given in Bell’s Songs of the Peasantry of England). There is a tune in Henry Carey’s Musical Century (volume i, p. 53), set to one of the recitatives in “A New Year’s Ode.” This is headed, “The melody stolen from an old ballad called Death and the Lady.” It is this tune which Chappell prints to the words of “Death and the Lady,” from A Guide to Heaven (1736). The words of this last version are on a broadside by Evans which I am fortunate enough to possess. It is ornamented with a curious old woodcut of a skeleton holding a scythe in one hand and an hour-glass in the other.
No. 23. The Low, Low Lands of Holland
One of the earliest copies of this ballad is printed in Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (volume ii, p. 2, ed. 1776). It is also in the Roxburghe and Ebsworth Collections and in Johnson’s Museum. The ballad appears also in Garlands, printed about 1760, as “The Sorrowful Lover’s Regrate” and “The Maid’s Lamentation for the Loss of her True Love,” as well as on broadsides of more recent date. See also the Pedlar’s Pack of Ballads (pp. 23–25); the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume i, p. 97; volume iii, p. 307); and Dr. Joyce’s Ancient Irish Music (No. 68).
The “vow” verse occurs in “Bonny Bee Hom,” a well-known Scottish ballad (Child, No. 92).
The words in the text are virtually as I took them down from the singer. The tune is partly Mixolydian. The word “box” in the third stanza is used in the old sense, that is “to hurry.”
No. 24. The Unquiet Grave, or, Cold Blows the Wind
This ballad, of which I have collected a large number of variants, is widely known and sung by English folksingers. A Scottish version, “Charles Graeme,” is in Buchan’s Ancient Ballads and Songs; while several traditional versions of the words are printed by Child. Compare the ballad of “William and Marjorie” (Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, p. 186), and versions of the well-known “William and Margaret.” For variants
