As "Logie's daughter" or as less boisterously insulting but no less provoking "lady gay," the heroine of #112 comes from a long tradition of irrepressible, lusty living. To be sure, that tradition seems more obviously exemplified by the tavern "drab" in Robert Burns' folk cantata, The Jolly Beggars, who sings:

I once was a maid, though I cannot tell when,

And still my delight is in proper young men; . . .

And whilst with both hands I can hold the glass steady,

Here's to thee, my hero, my sodger laddie.

Still the lusty wench at heart, the singer is bold in her taste for "proper young men" (and, of course, drink), which is to say, her taste for lusty young men -- especially that epitome of male boldness (and inconstancy!), "my soldier laddie." More disorderly than the "lady gay" of #112 and a world removed, it would seem, from the proud lady of #44 (or "proud Maisrie" of # 219), her disreputable figure poses an easily dismissed challenge to polite society Yet the folk commmonplace of "the lady loved the soldier because he was so bold" refers to the privileged heroines of the high folk pastoral too; their taunts lend vital support to what I might well have called the myth of "the lady and the soldier" or "the lady and the grenadier" instead of "the lady and the lusty smith." They are the deep rule-breakers, the deeply and creatively "disorderly" women with whom society has never quite come to terms and who are thus commonly presented in simplified, less sexually unsettling forms.

Now the folk commonplace is a cliche of deceptive simplicity. "Because he was so bold a warrior," we might say, invoking what Zink has termed "the epic state of love" -- of love, that is, as a sentimental, distinctively feminine enterprise for which the warrior hero has neither time nor taste. So the epic Song of Roland recounts the treachery leading up to the hero's battle with an overwhelming Saracen host, and finally his quarrel with his comrade-in-arms over blowing the great horn for help; on the point of death he addresses his trusty sword, his emperor and his God, even arranging his body to be seen plainly facing the enemy. And his betrothed, the "fair Alda"? She only comes in as an afterthought, almost a hundred verses later, to be told of Roland's death and promptly die.

But, of course, we also hear "because he was so bold a wooer," and with that figure of irresistible sexual force we invoke a lustier state of love; while in the "combat" of lusty courtship we invoke a kind of female valor too. So an early scene in the TV dramatization of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd has the handsome captain exercising his dazzling swordplay about Bathsheba's unflinching face, and we immediately understand the physical attraction -- the high erotic tension -- between them. It's a scene enacting the same "outdoing" female spirit that early balladry celebrates with the maiden boast carried to explicit sexual dare ("Let the elphin knight do what he will/ my maidenheid I'll then keep still"). And though it leads to a disastrous marriage, we applaud Hardy's scene for the sexual magic it evokes -- applaud its call to exuberant courtship contest, to courtship as contest, contest as a come-on...

Indeed female "outdoing" can be seen as a sexual dare in itself. The lady who so gleefully outwits the shepherd lad, the "Handsome Cabin Boy" who "so exceeded" her male shipmates, the "Undaunted Female" who "fought so manfully" -- they’re all "sexy" in a far more exciting way than the frills-and-fainting figures that polite society once labeled "feminine." They all pose a sexual challenge, though "the undaunted female" (or "the beautiful damsel"), heroine of a once popular broadside that Cecil Sharp termed "the ABC of English folksong," poses it in curiously genteel form. In a kind of "criminalized pastoral scene" where she proves man's "overthrow" but first provokes his lust as implicit sexual victim, we see one of the ways in which the complex pastoral scene can be simplified and, yes, sexually trivialized.

To be sure, the song isn't explicitly about sex. The first man this "pretty fair maid" meets as she wanders through the countryside with a box full of all her belongings upon her head (no, I'm not making this up!) -- "an able man and strong," who "took her by the hand and led her to a lane" -- speaks only of delivering up her money. But overtones of a sexual "robbery" surely resonate too as,

The tears from her eyes like two fountains did flow,

Saying "where shall I wander, or where shall I go?"

And while this young fellow was feeling for his knife,

This beautiful damsel she took away his life.

("The Beautiful Damsel" from Mrs. Wilson of Northhamptonshire)

With no unseemly taunting or even boasting, the song proceeds to a thoroughly genteel conclusion. A "noble gentleman" returns with her to the body and blows a whistle, whereupon "four stout and able fellows came tripping o’er the hill." They're immediately seen to be confederate robbers, so the gentleman shoots one of them, and, with borrowed weaponry again from the first body, she shoots the other three,

And when this noble gentleman saw all the robbers dead,

He took the damsel by the hand, and thus to her he said,

"I’ll take you for my own bride, for the deed that you have done,

In taking of your own part and firing off your gun."

How very like the conclusion to "Billy [or Jimmy] Taylor" a ballad still very popular in America! For its heroine also uses impressive male weaponry (a "double barrel gun") against a miscreant male (the faithless lover she’s followed on board ship), and the captain’s reaction is equally admiring: "he has made her chief commander over a ship and a hundred men." She's a spunkier, altogether more modern heroine than the "undaunted female" (and her reward is more modern too), but both are applauded for boldly "outdoing" men (and both rely upon borowed arms) even as neither upsets established notions of sexual respectability. They do not send the mixed message -- the invitation to bold courtship and promise of strong resistance -- that we hear in "The Baffled Knight." They do not taunt.

To be sure, the taunting can be trivialized too; it can become part of a calculating social game. So a version of #112 from the early 18th century, which is no longer sung today (were all 63 verses ever sung?), invites us to applaud a whole series of "merry intrigues" of which the "gate trick" is only the first. It triggers the lecture we have come to expect about "he that would not when he might," as well as an admonition not to fear "her gay cloathing nor the wrinkling of her gown." These exhortations to boldness are still sung, more or less, as we hear in "A Lady’s Policy" (and still convey, perhaps, an unfortunate sense that the enterprise just takes a bit of prosaically easy shoving and pushing). I cannot imagine anyone singing today, however,

But if you chance for to meet a maid

a little below the hill, sir,

You need not fear her screeking out,

for she will quickly lye still, sir.

(from the Child "C" version of "The Baffled Knight")

Woman as prey. It’s a distasteful picture. But will she "quickly lye still" because she’s incapable of resistance? Or because her resistance is all a sham anyway, part of a contrived social game to boost her marriage market value? For the lady’s "delight and pleasure" in how she "might baffle him again" and "unspotted still remain, with her pure virgin treasure," suggests, at least to the modern ear, a very worldly awareness of her virgin "worth." And her last "merry intrigue" does indeed seem unpleasantly plotted, a far cry from the careless opening line of "There was a knight was drunk with wine." For she ensures his final tumble into the moat by sawing partway through a moat-crossing plank. By then, of course, after a particularly humiliating third intrigue (it entails pulling his long leather boots only halfway off, leaving him stumbling about "like a crippple," stuck fast "like a thief in fetters," and "rouling in the dark" all night) the knight is cold sober and in a towering rage:

Three times she has affronted me,

in crimes which I cannot pardon,

But if I an’t revenged, said he,

let me not be worth a farthing.

I value not her beauty fair,

tho once I did dote upon her;

This trusty sword shall now repair

my baffled, blasted honour.

Now here, surely, is intended rape. Rape in proper feminist terms too, as a crime not of sexual passion but of thwarted power. Rape as revenge in a ballad text that betrays its own taunting voice, "sophisticating" (and finally criminalizing?) the pastoral scene where "The Undaunted Female" criminalizes it more directly. And both of these folk or quasi-folk narratives show woman, for all her trickery and all her prowess with borrowed arms, as man’s implicit sexual victim. Depicting her as purely resistant to male lust or as not really resistant at all, both subvert the taunting female voice, and both are found in broader forms of discourse.

So W.P. Jones, puzzling over the witty femme d’esprit in the French "folk pastourelle" and ascribing to her the single goal of "saving her honor," employs the encoded language of our "lady gay" but with none of her fine mockery; he evidently believes in the automatic gendering that underlies a phrase like "you shall have your will of me." (To be sure, I cannot say just what our "lady gay" believes, but I submit that it is impossible to sing her line, "Then you shall have your will of me and likewise twenty pound" -- the last word coming on the raised lead-in note to a frolicsome chorus -- without making her sound less than intimidated. And I don’t mean anything so selfconscious as irony; as Bronson says, "the ballad text simply loses what doesn’t sing," and irony, leaning as it does on normally unstressed words, is very hard to sing. But the formal submissiveness of the lady’s language in this "code phrase" is belied by her later words and, yes, by the tune.)

Jones "uncomplicates" the pastoral heroine in one direction, refusing to admit she might share with man anything so unlady-like as lust, while a discourse that paints woman as man’s uncomplicated sexual partner -- i.e., the discourse of the sexual revolution -- does so in the other direction. For opposite reasons, then, the discourse of revolution has agreed with a Victorian-minded professor in discrediting the drama of the high folk pastoral scene, that is, in discrediting the conflict that fuels its central sexual dare. And in so doing, both discourses flatten sexual mystery into political correctness.