"He rade an' she ran": female commitment and male flight

It may well strike the reader -- it certainly strikes me -- that we have been preoccupied with sexual resistance for entirely too long. How refreshing to move on to the other side of a kind of "erotic divide" and, in a chase down the king's highway -- her chase of him -- which the folk imagination has worked into three separate ballads, to find no lessening of female will or energy! But, of course, this is also where a weakness of the pastoral scene comes glaringly into view: that the fleeting moment of erotic delight has unequally shared consequences. For women bear babies, and what is more, balladry seems to suggest, in a world of mixed-up love and lust women are especially given to the baby-friendly fantasy of enduring romance; they appear indeed more focused than men on "love."

So our starting ballad of "The Twa Magicians," dwelling at length, and in magical detail, on persuasive lovemaking, concluded that "the lusty smith became her love" -- in short, that lovemaking engendered female love -- while these later ballads of female love and loyalty portray the man, now that the lady is "won," in full flight from commitment to her. In other words, they raise the question of just where love comes into the picture for him. Or more precisely, in this "romance of the body" conjured up by the high folk pastoral, how is he finally persuaded to the full commitment that she would seem to have made with the sexual act itself?

To be sure, the lady (in #44), who set the sexual stakes and set them high out of mighty maiden pride, would seem to have roused the lusty smith both to "magical" lovemaking and to a measure of commitment. At least, belated male commitment isn't an issue in #44, as it is in ballads which begin with unplanned erotic encounter and go on from there, like our first "chase" ballad, "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter" (#110) or the simpler, more romantic "Broom of Cowdenknows" (#217). And perhaps part of the reason it isn't an issue in our central ballad (aside from the obvious one that the action of #44 never really progresses beyond sex!) is related to that bugbear of the primal heterosexual power relation -- the spectre of debasing sexual "submissiveness."

While alien to the combative spirit of "The Twa Magicians," the spectre of submissiveness haunts, or once haunted, the opening action of both #110 and #217. Both follow upon a lusty wooing, though the "bonny lass milking her yowes [ewes]" in #217 doesn't chase after the "merry gentleman" who engaged in a kind of ride-by sex with her and who happily returns in time to claim paternity of her unborn child, wed "the bonniest lass that e'er I've seen" and announce his own high station. She simply endures the biological consequence (and in earlier texts, the attendant social odium) of an encounter presented in terms of the man's overriding sexual will:

He's ta'en her by the milk-white hand,
an' by her green gown-sleeve,
An' led her intae a misty bough,
an' speired [asked] o' her nae leave.
("The Broom of [the] Cowdenknows" as retrieved from The Digital Tradition)

Or as earlier texts variously put it, "an' there he took his will o' her (he's bowed her body to the ground, he's laid her low on the dewy grass....) but of her parents (her kin, her friends...) he asked no leave."

To be sure, she also longs "for his twinklin' ee [eye]," so it's not quite fair to say that she "simply" endures the biological consequences of lovemaking. But there are far more immediate and complicated consequences to lovemaking in #110, or the misnamed "Knight and Shepherd's Daughter" -- indeed it's the first time I had to look up a ballad in the Child collection just to make sense of the story! -- and they confirm the erotic potency of a wooing once depicted as indistinguishable from common rape:

He took her by the milk-white hand,
And laid her on the ground,
And whan he got his will o' her,
He lift her up again.
("The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter"; Child's version 'B')

and even explicitly as rape:

He caught her by the milk-white hand.
And by the grass-green sleeve,
And there has taken his will of her,
Wholly without her leave.
("The Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter"; version 'E')

Is this the same act which in largely extinct rape and bridestealing ballads engenders tears and curses or, in the Rob Roy ballads where the lady is exhorted to "be content" and "never think of going back until your dying day," simple silence?

Not judging by the subsequent actions of the supposed "shepherd's daughter"! Yet it comes as something of a letdowm, after the taunting "lady gay" of #112, to find these pastoral heroines on the other side of the "divide" behaving with such apparent sexual passivity; and I am not surprised that, as generally sung today, neither #110 nor #217 makes any attempt to describe the critical action. Thus, taking off from its old nostalgic refrain of,

"O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom, the broom of the Cowdenknows,
Fain would I be in the north country, tending my father's yowes."

"The Broom of the Cowdenknows" usually turns into a lyrical song of loss and yearning -- male yearning for a lost pastoral love -- the refrain that never quite accorded with the happy ballad ending only requiring a change of possessive adjective ("herding her father's yowes"), the original sexual action buried in a haze of remembered mutual love ("How blithe was I each morn tae see my lass come oer the hill....").

"The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter," sung today as "I'm a Forester in the Wood," still opens with the critical pastoral encounter; but the action now takes place "off stage," in the imaginative space between the first and second stanzas:

I'm a forester in the wood,
And you're the same design;
It’s the mantle o' your maidenhead,
Bonny lassie, never mind, and sing diddy-i-o, sing fal-a-do, sing diddy-i-o-i-ay.
Since you've laid me doon,
Come pick me up again,
And since you've ta'en the wiles o' me,
Come tell to me your name, and sing ....
("I'm a Forester in the Wood," from the singing of Norman Kennedy, ref. Child 110)

Though this end of the ballad has been greatly truncated, the impression of a lustily "impersonal" wooing remains. And with the ensuing chase, she on foot and he on horseback, so does the impression that our heroine wishes to cleave to a man whom in civilized terms she scarcely knows!

To be sure, one can attribute this chase to her sense of social survival: the knowledge that as "damaged goods" she desperately needs a husband (i.e., the same grim reality with which we might dismiss the hint of failed erotic magic in "Eppie Morrie"). In Child's 'E' version, this explanation gains support from a lengthy initial debate over the worth of the woman's virginity, the man first offering extravagant gifts, all spurned as inadequate to "mend the miss that ye would do to me," and declaring at last that "ye my love shall be, and gold ye shall have none." An essentially similar debate takes place in the long extinct rape ballad of "Crow and Pie" (#111), for here the "faire mayde" only curses the man who "layd hur downe vpon the grene" after telling him he should wed her or, at the very least, "some of your good ye wyll part with me," in other words, after seeking "damages" -- and "payment" being refused.

In #110, the suppression of this entire commercial line of thinking opens the door to wholehearted erotic fantasy. One can, of course, sing the song in a spirit of grim social reality, but I very much doubt it has so gripped the folk imagination. It grips my imagination rather as a portrayal of feminine desire suddenly and strongly fixed upon one man -- fixed on him indeed after extraordinarily persuasive lovemaking. So sung (and I'm leaping over two stanzas here that dwell on the man's various names) the following stanzas seem to me perhaps a bit larger than life (like "Eppie Morrie") but emotonally utterly believable.

When he heard his name cried oot,
He's mounted on his steed;
She's buckled up her petticoats,
And after him she's gaed.....
He rade and she ran
The lang simmer's day
Until they cam' to a water
That was called the river Spey.....

The water is sae deep, my love,
I fear ye canna wade;
Before he got his horse well oot,
She was on the other side.....

But about this name business. "Tell to me your name?" means a good deal more than "what can I call you?" It also means "who are you?" and "are you of a class I could marry?" -- a critical question if the pastoral connection is to endure; and in older versions of "The Broom of Cowdenknows," for instance, it's answered, on both sides, with prevarication. But the "forester's" answer here, and the "bonnie lassie's" answer back seem simply nonsensical. Or at least they seemed so before I checked with Child:

Sometimes they ca' me Jack,
and sometimes they ca' me John,
But when I’m on the king’s highway,
young William it’s my name....
They neither ca' you James
nor dae they ca' you John,
But when you’re on the king's highway
young Gilbert it’s your name....

Why Gilbert? Well, it's a Latinized form of William, and older texts illuminate the exchange with "when I'm into the king's [high] court, Mitchcock [Lichcock, Hitchcock...] is my name," the lady promptly identifying this uncourtly alias as "Richard" (the man as "Earl Richard") "in the Latin tongue." It's no such thing, of course, but the man's flight is clearly provoked by his roll in the bracken proving dangerously learned. In the most complete texts of this ballad, he later tries to disguise himself in a court "line-up" by limping and winking, for, even against the evidence of her "Latin" and her "gay clothing," he still believes the "shepherd's daughter" (as older texts identify her at the outset) to be of lowly birth; in fact, he appears to have swallowed whole her mischievous claim to be a "beggar's brat." This claim, embroidered with references to her "auld mither's" uncouth habits of eating and sleeping, goes back to the immensely popular "Marriage of Sir Gawain" in which a lusty young bachelor atones for an act of rape by commiting himself to marrying an old crone (as she magically presents herself until the very wedding night....)

But we don't need the whole complicated story (it can run to 60 stanzas!) to understand what’s going on here. Female commitment and male flight. It's an age-old theme, in medieval love complaints as in "Dear Abby" newspaper columns, usually expressed today as a difference between male and female "timetables." Of course, women are generally counseled against the confrontational action taken by our ballad heroine, but then, the modern woman cannot bring her man to the altar (she certainly cannot convert pastoral adventure into a binding tie!) by invoking the law on him as our heroine does:

Noo she’s in afore the king,
Bowed doon upon a knee;
There is a chancellor in your court,
An' he has robbed me. ...

"Robbed" is the right and proper language of the time here; it lends gravity to a case which with further questioning -- "did he steal your mantle or did he steal your fee or did he steal your maidenheid, the flower o' your body?" -- is deemed resolvable only by marriage or else ("gin he be a married man") by a hanging from the nearest tree. In other words, we are back in the rule-bound world from which both pretend "shepherdess" and pretend "forester" would seem to have been taking a holiday, indulging desires particularly forbidden to virtuous young women. A critical difference, to the modern ear, between "of her he asked nae leave" and "of her parents he asked no leave," may well have seemed a distinction without a difference to earlier singers, who might have pointed out that, without her parents' "leave" -- without the firm expectation of marriage, that is -- no maiden in her right senses would say yes to lovemaking. Certainly not to a complete stranger, not without erotically powerful persuasion, which of course she could never explain to her social peers. Far better to say, "I was robbed," as indeed, from the implied "submissiveness" of her behavior at the beginning of the ballad, an outside observer might conclude to be essentially true.

For it’s not just in the language of a bygone era that the man plays the "heavy" here but in the pastoral scene itself, in its most enduring hold on our collective imagination. It evidently requires that the man play a role of extraordinary outward sexual power, while the woman, with all conflict resolved, plays one of, well, melting "acquiescence" (not a very magical word in its dictionary sense, but at least it has a melting sound). Hers is a hard part to distinguish from banal sexual submissiveness -- to distinguish even from the part of the rape victim (though I'm sure she has no such trouble) were it not for the way the ballad dwells upon the chase, and the way the same unlikely chase is taken up by two other ballads, one of which (#218 or "The False Lover Won Back") virtually makes it into the entire plot, while adding the hauntingly simple "chase refrain" of

It’s love for love that I do want,
And love for love again;
It’s hard when I love you sae weel,
And you nae me again, bonnie love,
And you nae me again.
(as sung by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger)

To be sure, the heroine who wins her man through sheer dogged pursuit here is pregnant, so she has a very "practical" motive for chasing after him:

It's when will ye be back again
It's when will ye be hame?
heather hills are nine times brunt
An' a' grown green again, bonnie love.
An' a' grown green again.
O that's o'er long tae bide, bonnie love,
O that's o'er long frae hame.
For the baby that's nae born yet
Will be o'er long wantin' its name, bonnie love,
Will be o'er long wantln' its name.

Yet surely the whole point of this song is the feeling of sexual yearning it evokes. Strong yearning put into strong action.

He's turned aboot his high horse heid,
And fast awa' rode he;
And she kilted up her gay clothing,
And fast, fast followed she, bonnie love.
And fast, fast followed she.
The firsten toon that they cam to
He bought her hose and shoon,
And he bade her rue and return noo
And nae mair follow him, bonnie love,
And nae mair follow him.

It's love for love that I do want
And love for love again....

And it works here, improbably enough as he finally stops trying to buy her off with gifts of clothing and jewelry, agreeing at last, in a stanza sung by both voices, that,

There's comfort for the comfortless,
And honey for the bee;
And there's nane for you but me, bonnie love,
There's nane for you but me, bonnie love,
There's nane for you but me.

"The Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter" doesn’t put erotic desire into quite these lyrical terms. It’s much more of a ballad than #218 (that is, it’s more of a story), but when it tells us that "she's buckled up her petticoats and after him she’s gaed," we may recall the heroine of the simpler, better known ballad taking the same action. And it is hard indeed not to imagine that both heroines want their man in the same powerful, deeply physical way. It's hard to imagine that either woman merely "submitted."

So while objectively put, especially summed up in the formulaic language of the old ballads, the pastoral scene does smack suspiciously of rape or an all-too-easy seduction, the chase in #110, reinforced with the lyrically expanded chase of #218, suggests that something quite different must have happened. Something that "The Twa Magicians" rightly approaches with magical language? And how fitting, as well as narratively nonsensical, is the revelation with which #110 now concludes:

Noo, when it cam' tae the wedding,
They laughed tae see the fun;
She's the Laird o' Urie’s daughter,
An' him but a blacksmith's son....

We have been prepared for the revelation of the woman’s high status almost from the start, but amost from the start, too, we could have inferred that the man was high-born. Earlier versions often make him kin to the king, while Child’s sole comment on the exception -- version 'K' -- is to say that in this "vulgar copy, the man is absurdly made a blacksmith's son, though a courtier." Child is right, of course. It doesn’t make sense; it doesn't even square with the immediately preceding lines of the enduring variant:

I wisht I'd drunk the water
the nicht I drunk the wine.
Tae think that a shepherd's daughter
should hae been a love o' mine....

Would a lowly blacksmith's son feel so humiliated? Surely not. But at the last minute, making him of lowly birth is apparently an irresistible joke. It reflects what seems to be a common delight in mixing "degrees" (often a "lass of low degree" and a man of high, especially in romantic ballads that bring him to the altar without any extraordinary effort on her part). More specifically, it conforms to the tendency we have already noted in British balladry for the high folk pastoral to turn on its head the pastourelle's knight-and-shepherdess pattern of social standings. And yes, if only by happy accident -- an accident that "fits" -- the nonsensical ending recalls the ballad of the lady and the lusty [black]smith.

This enduring variant of "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter" connects to the "The Twa Magicians" with its off-stage, extraordinarily persuasive physical lovemaking. Its lively heroine confutes the spectre of feminine "submissiveness," and yet the way she gains her point in the end is not an altogether satisfying answer to the question we posed at the start of the chapter. How, in this ongoing "romance of the body" (which could also be called a celebration of the childbearing female body) is he persuaded to full commitment? By court decree? By the court of public exposure? "The False Lover Won Back" suggests that the pursuing pregnant heroine has indeed a certain moral "righteousness" on her side -- Jonathan Rauch, in The New Republic of April 30, '01, would call it the "Hidden Law" of public opinion -- but our third "chase" ballad also suggests a visceral male reaction to woman's childbearing power.

It merits, I think, a new chapter.