Ballads of Love and Death

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Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Janica, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries. the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. But the same. And the mass of the beaten goal.

In this episode of Gone Medieval, we're going to dissolve the boundaries between history, myth, and melody. Because we are talking about ballots. Ancient story songs that were passed from fireside to fireside, from nurse to child. Songs that were rooted in the lived experience of ordinary people. In their verses, we can catch a glimpse of both the extraordinary and the everyday. The hopes, fears, and dreams that occupied medieval minds.

Our good friend Amy Jeffs, who we've been catching up with throughout the year on Gone Medieval to talk about saints, has just published old songs, stories of love and death from traditional ballads. It's beautifully illustrated by Gwen Burns. In it, they invite us to wander through the enchanted landscapes of Britain, guided by stories that have been sung, whispered, and reimagined for centuries.

A whole cast of unforgettable characters are brought to life in these songs. Some familiars, others shrouded in the mists of time. From fairy haunted hills where elf queens kidnap poets, To the shadowed forests of Northumberland, where a girl tends to a dragon who was once her brother. Where golden-masted ships are captained by the devil himself, and boys are wed before their voices break.

And as an extra special treat today, Amy is joined to give us a musical taste of some of these ballads by Natalie Bryce, as well as her illustrator, Gwen Burns. Natalie is a self-proclaimed fierce songwriter. Love it, girl. Yes. Amy, Natalie and Gwen, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you so much for having us.

I am so excited for this today. I've been really looking forward to it for weeks now. And I think this is going to be a really exciting one for everyone because I think the term ballad is one that... Everyone's heard. Everyone kind of understands the idea that there is a ballot out there. But before we get into all of that, I'm going to make us eat our vegetables and be a historian and define our terms. So how do we define a ballot?

makes it a specific thing as opposed to just, you know, a folk song or a troubadour poem? You know, what makes that ballad a ballad? So a ballad in literary terms can be defined as a narrative poem, often written in quatrains, so stanzas of lines of four, with an... A, B, C, B rhyme pattern. So I'm trying to think of a good example. I even think like, if I was to leave my husband dear and my two babes also, what have you to take me to if I with you should go?

So the dear is the first line, which doesn't rhyme with the third line, which ends with two, but babes also and I should go do rhyme. So that's an example of a standard ballad form. But in reality... It often disobeys those rules and maybe it's more helpful to think of them just as story songs.

Okay. So I like this. So we've got a song that's got a plot. Maybe it rhymes in a particular way. This is the thing, right? I'm sitting here being an academic and I'm trying to get you to trap something that's really powerful. poetic and rooted, I guess, in kind of an oral tradition. The term ballad is late. I think pre-19th century it referred to a dance form. So that also makes it trickier.

He's trying to attach our compulsion to taxonomize to something that... was born before that compulsion yeah i guess that makes sense which is such a historian thing that we love to do you know we're always putting a term on something that didn't exist trying to categorize a time period in a way that nobody thought you know it's like

We can make paradigms and tables, but when something has emerged organically and as part of a living tradition, it will fall outside of the parameters we set. And I mean, I suppose that we could say that you've gone about approaching them. outside of these parameters, which is one of the reasons why we're going to get to do so many cool things today. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've been approaching them outside of the academic framework as a result? Well, I mean...

I think it's so interesting, isn't it, how when you're researching medieval texts and artworks, you know, it's inspiring. And one of my favourite medieval personalities is Marie de France. which I'm sure is the same for you. Of course. And, you know, her whole opus really rests on this idea she had of spinning stories from Breton Lays, which were essentially story songs.

the minstrelsy of Brittany. And so her narratives are kind of expansions of these stories, as I understand it. And I don't think the stories, the songs themselves survive, but her stories give us a glimpse of what they might have been. At least that's what she claims she's doing, isn't it? It might be that she's just sort of pointing to an authority. So the idea behind this book is taking 10 traditional ballad lyrics and reimagining them as short stories.

following up with historical commentaries. And so the story bit, I feel like, is rooted in inspiration from Marie de France. That's my authority. I'm going to her. The way it sort of fell maybe outside of the usual patterns is that it was actually born as a project of three threads with pictures, words and music. And it was our intention from the get-go that...

all three threads of the project should sort of happen simultaneously and emerge together and influence each other. Yeah, I mean, me and Amy, we were talking about work and I said I wanted to make like an anthology of folk. It was folk song, actually. It wasn't necessarily. ballad but whatever the difference is to illustrate it i wanted to illustrate yeah i wanted to like illustrate an anthology of of folk song and then we quickly realized that

we would like to do something together. Because I'd been reading Arthur Quillacouch's collection of anthology of ballads for quite a few years as bedtime stories and just loving the stories and digging down into them and enjoying learning the dialects that they were written in as well. So when Gwen said, my dream, my absolute dream gig would be to illustrate.

a compendium of folk songs i was like well i don't know about a compendium but what about something like this but nat and i had been in touch for a couple of years prior to that point and sort of looking for an excuse to work together as well and that's a composer so yeah i think it Was that actually a children's birthday, Harty? Yeah, I think it was your daughter's second or third birthday. We got together and had a feverish, intense conversation about how this would be our dream project. Yeah.

So the novelist Max Porter, who's a friend of mine, he sometimes does projects where an artist will produce a series of illustrations or artworks and he will respond with a text. And so the text doesn't necessarily have supremacy.

And I thought it was such an inspiring idea. And so I said to Gwen and Nat, let's each take the lyrics of a traditional ballad. Let's go away and produce kind of sketches in our various media, come back and compare what we've done and see what... was emerged as particularly exciting or interesting for each of us and try and find a line of best fit through those three responses so that it's a real unity so that the printed edition

is suffused with Gwen's illustrations and the audiobook is illustrated with Nat's musical dramatisations of excerpts from the ballads but they are all with the text a single sort of Creation, I suppose. I love this because it is... quite medieval in its own way. Getting together at community events like birthday parties, having all of these dreams and exciting things and just doing it by word of mouth and coming in to bring it together. I absolutely love that.

the collaboration via whatsapp we were all in our respective hermitages kind of working on our thing and then um but actually then we'd meet once or twice you know every couple of months we'd meet at the pub And we'd be like, we'd talk about the feelings behind the stories. So, you know, in The Demon Lover where a kind of an old flame.

very very attractive and roguish old flame appears on her doorstep she's now married with children and says to her you know i thought you were waiting for me you know i've got a fleet of ships so the um the greatest of the ships has a mast of gold and taffeta sails you know come away with me i'll show you the world you know in some ways although it's a very supernatural and kind of extreme situation she's in we were finding our own life experiences informing

how we related to the story. And I felt like also... readers would would find that as well you know that roguish old flame disappearing and being like let's run away let's run away that look you can't bring that up and not sing it for me now can we hear a little bit so that this is one of the things i loved about this ballad i mean it's actually collected fairly late but

The way it describes the lover's ship with the golden mast and the silk or taffeta sails. And it's kind of, once she gets on it, in some versions, there's no mariners. He's promised there was going to be 24 mariners to wait on her hand and foot, but then she gets on, there's no one. It's deserted.

who's sailing this ship, you know. It's quite evocative of Yishma, Mario de France's narrative, where he finds this... ghostly ships just floating in a harbour and it too has golden sails got ebony rails it's it's got a bed in the middle and there's a kind of i think a a fossil of that kind of storytelling tradition in this

We're going to come in to the point where she has decided to run away from her family, just set aside all of her duties and obligations and just go for it. And so it's that moment of stepping onto the ship. What hills are yon yon pleasant hills that the sun shines sweetly on? Beyond are the hills of heaven, he said, where you will never win. Ugh, okay, I love it.

I guess my question about this is you mentioned that this is mirroring in a way or having some callbacks to some of Marie Défense's work. Did these ballads actually survive for you to dig them out like this? Are they published somewhere? Like, are you getting these from word of mouth? Like, how did we... So I think...

I mean, there isn't, obviously, and I know that you weren't implying this with your sort of precie, but there isn't a direct link back to Marie de France. And what's interesting is how motifs and tropes kind of travel through time. and across things like the Reformation. And when I was reading Arthur Quillacouch's 1929, I think, edited volume of ballads, I was reading it as a medievalist and...

The same thing I remember thinking as a teenager reading Catherine Briggs' collection of British folk tales, which is, oh, I really hope this is super old. This just feels like super, super old. I really want it to be. And so part of this project for me as a historian was... trying to find some instances where we can say with certainty, this is medieval. And where sometimes, I mean, there's one or two instances, for instance, Thomas the Rhymer, where you can say this definitely is.

a medieval ballad or a medieval narrative at least that's been turned into a ballad it's wonderful to see the motifs and tropes going right back to the classical period right across Europe and beyond and so Our primary source for this choice of ballads was Francis James Child. So he's a 19th century Harvard scholar, American, who collected across five volumes, hundreds and hundreds of ballads. And he worked across, I think it was 13 languages.

He collects every version he could find of each ballad. And then he, in that wonderful Victorian antiquarian way, where someone's definitely washing all his clothes and cooking all his meals, because he's just poured himself into this for years.

provided kind of every like a commentary an introduction precedes each collection of versions which takes the reader through every analog he can find either in related ballad traditions like scandinavian ballad traditions or german or elsewhere but then also into literature so going back to Ovid's metamorphoses or medieval texts like Thomas the Rhymer. And so it was just incredible. I mean, I remember when I worked in the British Museum.

we would sometimes work with a Victorian antiquarian called St. John Hope, his notes on museum objects, and they were always just so meticulously researched. And it feels like this with Francis James Child too. So that's...

All but one of the ballads is from Francis James Child. The stories may pick up on motifs from more than one version, but it will be in the back of the book we've put... versions of each of the ballads and then put footnotes so that readers can kind of trace the plot well speaking of can i get you to sing some more for me Yeah, just, I suppose, I'm not quite sure which one you'd like to perform next. I had it down that we'd maybe do the Maid in the Palmer, but...

Up to you, what you'd like to go on to. Well, I think what would be really nice, while we're with The Demon Lover, and looking at the kind of persistence or legacy of certain medieval... narrative worlds I suppose is that there's one part of one version of the ballad where she has been at see you now for two weeks or three weeks and she sees two landscapes either side of They were sort of going through a channel between two lands.

It's very evocative. There are otherworldly landscapes that she can see, and it's really reminiscent of otherworld narrators, so the Voyage of St. Brendan and going into the earthly paradise, but also then the dream vision of Pearl, where he sees the heavenly landscape. And I think these two verses are, for me, among the most kind of chilling and moving of the whole corpus of traditional ballads. So we'll just do another bit of The Demon Lover so you can hear those.

What hills are yon yon pleasant hills that the sun shines sweetly on? yon are the hills of heaven he said where you will never win she said also dreary with frost and snow oh yeah Oh, I love this. Okay, I guess that... You've mentioned now that this has echoes of things that we see in other medieval stories like Marie de France or in vision narratives like we see in the Pearl poem.

But can we talk a little bit about the themes in it? So, for example, we've got this runaway wife, you know, the kind of sinful woman who's running back to her ex. Is that something that we see a lot in ballads? The earliest recorded... ballad in english and i mean recorded as in written down is in a 30th century manuscript which is now in trinity college cambridge in the wren library and obviously there's no notation so this is this is

inferred to be a ballad from its form and the other aspects of its literary qualities. So it's based on a narrative from Coptic Gospels of the Twelve Apostles. which is an 8th century manuscript, just one 8th century manuscript that survives in. But this story tells us about Judas. He's walking to Jerusalem and he's going to the market and he's got a satchel with 30 silver plates in it. And he meets what the Middle English tells us is a swickler women.

on the road to Jerusalem and it says that she's his sister but I think that's a kind of sister in quotation marks and she takes him off to a high place and does what women constantly do in ballads she puts his head on her knee This is like an extremely powerful and dangerous thing to do to a man in the world of baladry. Who amongst us can resist the charms of having our head on a woman's knee? Wow. Okay. And things happen. So he falls asleep.

on her knee. And then when he wakes up, the silver plates have gone. And she says to him, oh, you know, you've got this master, Jesus Christ, who you talk so much about, you like him so much. But if you went into Jerusalem now and gave him up,

to this man called Pontius Pilate. He'd pay you back for the 30 silver plates you'd lost. He'd pay you enough for you to compensate you for that theft. And so then Judas goes into Jerusalem, betrays Christ. And so the whole betrayal... that kickstarts the whole kind of crucifixion, resurrection, everything narrative of the Gospels is pinned on the actions of this woman, this swickler woman, in the earliest English ballad.

Oh, well, you know, I'm sure that somehow there was a way to blame a woman for everything, you know, other than just Eve, I guess, which is what made it necessary in the first place. But I guess here we. Again, we're kind of seeing this idea, you've got this woman who's beautiful, right? The beautiful woman who convinces this man to come put his head on her knee, etc. And so you've got this kind of pretty woman who is like secretly awful.

on the inside. Is that something that we see a lot in terms of ballads? Yeah, the use of biblical narratives is kind of a jumping off point for a ballad narrative. So there's...

a ballad that's collected slightly later called The Maid and the Palmer. And it's about a woman who is washing linens or clothes at a well and a palmer or a pilgrim. comes to her and asks for a drink and she refuses him the drink. And then he says, well, if it had been your lover who had come from Rome, you would have given him a drink. And she says, oh, I've never had a lover. And he says, peace, fair maid, you are foresworn, nine children you have born. And then it sort of...

In the way that the ballad describes her, it says the maid she went to the well wash and the dew fell off her lily white flesh. It's all this very images of washing and of purity and of innocence. But as the ballad progresses and the pilgrim reveals his knowledge of her crimes, you realise that potentially she's an infanticidal maniac. it's more complex and subtle. I don't know. It's interesting how, I mean, Nat, maybe you want to...

You became quite close to this valid in your exploration. Oh, God. Yes. I mean, sorry, I'm just throwing you right in there. No, I mean, we spoke about the whole idea that maybe she has postpartum psychosis. if we're going to read it within a more modern, forgiving context. And whilst I was poring through the Bronson book, I think there were quite a few possibilities for that particular one, but I ended up making it quite dissonant.

and dark to really bring to light the themes within the ballad. And to complicate her character. In our sort of treatment of her, maybe it's not so... She's not such a clear-cut villain as in the medieval version. This ballad...

has relations in Scandinavia, in which she is quite clearly Mary Magdalene. She's cast as Mary Magdalene. But actually, the biblical model it derives from is the Gospel of John, and it's based on the story of the woman at the well. So I'm sure some listeners will have... thought of that as I was relating the story in which Jesus meets a Samaritan woman so the Samaritans are kind of there's like a hostility between

the Jewish communities and Samaritan communities in this sort of historical setting. But he has a conversation with her, which is really shocking. And he asks her for a drink, just as the palmer does in the ballad. And he says that the water in the well will only slake her. bodily thirst but the living water of god will ensure she's never thirsty again and she asks for some of this living water and he says she should fetch her husband

And she says she hasn't got a husband. And he says, no, you're right. You've had five husbands, but the man you live with now is not your husband. So... And then she ends up becoming a kind of evangelist for Jesus' teachings within her community. But you can see how, I think it's fascinating how this ballad, The Maid and the Palmer.

has taken sort of aspects of that story, but really caricatured them and also brought in this particular, I mean, you really feel the landscape of... kind of maybe a northwestern european well with that darkness and and the way i mean there's one surviving version of this ballad from ireland which i think is more better known the well below the value that goes

green grow the lilies oh down among the bushes oh if you were a man of noble fame you'd tell me who was father to them in the well below the valley oh green grow the lilies oh Down among the bushes, oh. And I think there's a darkness which is taking us out of the Middle East.

I also did want to say, while we're on this theme of things coming out of Gospels or out of the Coptic Gospels of the Apostles, there's also the Cherry Tree Carol, which we don't feature as a story in this book, but which derives from... a much earlier apocryphal gospel narrative from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew about the Virgin travelling to Bethlehem with Joseph and she's heavily pregnant and she sees a date palm. covered in fruit and she wants to pick the dates.

But she can't reach and she asks Joseph and he refuses. And so then the date palm kind of senses the deity in her womb and bends down to her and she's able to pick her fill. And this in the End Town plays, which is early 15th century text of mystery play. Thank you.

We have that story reworked as Mary on the road to Bethlehem in midwinter in a snowy landscape and a cherry tree miraculously bursts into fruit before her. She asks Joseph to pick her some cherries and he says, let the one who... got you with child pick the cherries um so of course the cherry tree then bends down and he looks like a right wally but uh that endures as a ballad into the post-medieval period and beyond to the present day it's i think that's you know

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Yeah, that's a really interesting one as well, because we've been talking about all of these ballads that involve women behaving badly. Oh, she's pretty, but she's a slag, you know, over and over again. And then here you have Mary. who outwardly you could, in theory, think that she's done something wrong, but really her husband being the jerk in this one. So it's a nice little inversion. I mean, it's also very funny, this idea of Joseph as a baddie.

wrong and yeah or just a bit bit grumpy cantankerous joseph yeah like get past the fact that it's not you know that it's god's child not his It's just not a characterization I'm used to seeing for Joseph. But I guess this is one of these things. It's taking these biblical stories and making them sort of everyday and common. You know, these are the sort of behaviors that you might...

know from people in your actual communal circle as opposed to from, you know, the Bible. I guess that's the thing is we've got a lot of kind of... biblical messages or stories that are being brought to the fore. in terms of these ballads. So who's delivering these? I mean, you were saying that you see echoes of Marie de France. Like, are we seeing women being like, yeah, we're all slags except Mary? Or is this something that we would expect more from a male tradition?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really tricky question because I think there's basically very little evidence, but especially of what was happening in rural communities. One of the earliest big collections of ballads is from... I want to say 18th century Aberdeenshire, collected by a woman called Anna Brown, named Anna Gordon. She learned them from her mother, her aunt and her nurse. And her aunt...

Mrs Farquharson had been living in rural Aberdeenshire in the region of Brymar and so it's thought that she learned her repertoire from the, she was a vicar's wife I think, so she was kind of in the community. So it's three women teaching Anna Brown what then goes into this manuscript that she gets published via her father's connections, I think, in the University of Aberdeen. But...

From an urban perspective, it's clearer that women are playing a significant role. So in the post-medieval period with rising urbanisation, driven by women moving into cities to go into roles in domestic service, you also... get a surge of urban poor and especially women who have become pregnant and haven't then been able to secure marriage and are then in quite a desperate situation. And one of the ways in which they could earn money was to take sheaves of pamphlets from...

printers within the city which bore ballad lyrics, sing the ballads at street corners and sell the lyrics to passers-by and take a cut. You know, there's a strong emphasis in some of these, and you get quite a few traditional ballads within these broadside ballads. pamphlets but also ones that are about recent events or histories or

kind of strange natural phenomena. A lot of like scaffold side confessions of contrite women who've killed their husbands. You know, one of the major themes is infanticide. And it's just interesting that you would have had... presumably quite a lot of women with babies standing on street corners singing these songs and there was even a suspicion that people were renting out babies for these women to hold to make them look more sort of you know sympathetic or to evoke the sympathies of passers-by

And I just, maybe, and this is just a complete maybe, but there's a touch of humour about a woman singing a song about a terrifying infanticidal mother while she's there rocking a baby and she's like, come on, give me some money. You know, I don't know, there's... I think it's wanting to see in the past a kind of nuance and like a subtlety of meaning that allows these women more agency and personality than being simply victims or simply... Madonna as a whole. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I suppose there's also something here where we're getting these stories about these terrible women, very bad mommies who killed their children. And, you know, to be fair, in medieval life, infanticide is much higher. than it is now because there's no kind of very useful forms of contraception and that sort of a thing. And so I guess that we're also offering this juxtaposition. It's like, well, you know, I'm sure we could all agree that.

infanticide is bad and here I'm actually nice mommy so yeah okay maybe I'm a fallen woman but oh it could be so much worse and it will be worse if you don't give me money right now

I think it would be, while we're on the subject of the Virgin, I think that's a really interesting aspect of the Thomas the Rhymer ballad. Ah, can we hear that? Yes, yes. It's so brilliant for this particular podcast because it's thought to date from the 14th century, the romance of Thomas the Rhymer, which I think it's Victoria Flood suggests that it was based...

That the romance, the Middle English romance we have of Thomas the Rhymer from the 14th century may have actually been spun out of a ballad, which doesn't survive, possibly. But then a ballad survives from the later period. which seems to draw on the romance. So the kind of exchange of genres going on, which is perpetuating this story. But it's about the political prophet, who's known as...

Thomas the Rhymer or Thomas of Urkel-Dune, who lived on the borderlands and in the 13th century. He's a historical figure and is said to have prophesied. a great deal about the wars the coming wars between the English and the Scots and in some versions the prophecies are quite pro-english in other versions this prophecy is quite pro-scottish but the ballad is like an introduction to the prophecies the prophecies are very lengthy and cryptic but the the ballad was this like warm you up

The romance is likewise the kind of warming you up for how did he receive the gift of prophecy to make these ballads? And it's all about him lying under a tree called the eels and oak. And next to Eildon Hill, near Elston and near the Melrose, you can see from that hill. And the fairy queen emerges from the hillside and comes to him. And what's interesting is...

Because the ballad survives in the post-Reformation period, and yet in the ballad, he still mistakes her for the Virgin Mary. And speaks to her in very reverent terms, as you might expect from a pre-Reformation Christian. He's lying on Huntley Bank under the Eildon tree and he sees this beautiful woman riding towards him. And it says her shirt was of the grass green silk, her mantle of velvet fine, and every tress of her horse's mane was...

hung with 50 silver bells and nine. True Thomas, he pulled off his cap and laughed it low down to him. All hail thou mighty Queen of heaven, for thy pier on earth I never did see. And then she says, oh, no, no, Thomas, she said, that name does not belong to me. I am but the queen of fair Elfland that I'm hither come to visit thee.

We would love to sing a little bit more if that's all right, because the lyrics to this ballad are so haunting. And what's amazing is how much these lyrics relate to the medieval romance version as well. She takes him through the hill. into the other world but it's a long journey and the first thing they start they stand on a kind of cliff and look out over the landscape and there are multiple roads leading off and she can see

She says, See ye not yon narrow road so thick beset with thorns and briars? That is the path of righteousness, though after it but few inquire. Which I think is so fascinating. It's not that the path to righteousness is narrow. because it's always been narrow. It's because it's overgrown. It's because not enough people walk it, which I think is a really beautiful, subtle distinction between the different ways of that.

road is described and then she says and see ye not that broad broad road that lies across that lily leaven that meadow of lilies that is the path of wickedness though some call it the road to heaven and then And see not ye that bonny road That whines about the furley brain That is the...

This night must go. The reason that she's taken him into the hill at all is because in the medieval version, it's quite clear that he rapes her seven times. Actually, quite a big plot incident. In the... ballads versions it's a less clear-cut moment it seems in this one it's definitely she says to him

Harp and carp, Thomas, she said. Harp and carp along with me. And if you dare to kiss my lips, sure of your body, I will be. So she's telling him, don't touch her. But then he says, soon he has kissed her rosy lips all underneath the eilden tree. And she says, now you want to go with me. Like, now we're off. So they then are travelling through Elfland. She warns him that he mustn't speak ever or he will never go home again. And they wade through a river.

And this river is not an ordinary river. So we'll just sing this verse. For all the blood that's shed on earth runs through the springs of that country. So she goes, she takes him to Elfland and in this version of the ballad, she gives him an apple from a tree and makes him eat it and it will give him a tongue that will never lie. And so then when she sends him back... he's able to speak the truth. It's more complex in the medieval ballad narrative. But the final verse is...

And a pair of shoes of velvet green Until seven years were gone and passed was never seen This is such an interesting one to me because it combines so many medieval traditions that I'm used to, you know, like stories of the other world, ideas about what happens in... you know, fairy, the other world, what have you. But we're using it in this context of the border wars, and we're using it to kind of make a justification for who should rule whom.

So we've got the other world here showing us that there are like varying political structures in places or I mean, what are we doing here with this? You know, like it's clearly we're trying to make a political point. But who are the fairies and who's the wronged party? You know, because I don't know. I'm afraid that I'm a hopelessly 21st century person. And I'm like, did you sexually assault that woman? Are you and you're the hero? What's happening here?

Yeah, I think it's this idea. I mean, it's interesting, even in the medieval romance, trying to work out the fairy queen's motivations in relation to Thomas. is she punishing him or is she giving him a gift? You know, what is going on? And if she's giving him a gift, why? He's attacked her seven times. It's really baffling. But I think that lifting it out in a way...

she's the fairy queen. You know, she's a really big deal. And for me, the way I could see through this story and identify with her as a character is that she just stops giving a damn about him. She realises he doesn't matter. And she realises, so what we've got in the medieval romance and what also happens in the Ballad of Tam Lin is that the fairy queen has to pay a tithe to hell every seven years, which...

implies to me that Elfland is a subject state of hell. It's paying tribute, which is what the Scottish kings would have to do if Edward I becomes their overlord. There's a sovereignty theme running through here. I thought that maybe I became more interested in the stories.

reimagining from this ballad of the fairy queen suddenly wanting to rebel because actually when you read about what fairies do and why the rebellion turning things upside down turning over the table is just that's what they their role is and so maybe she wants to shake things up politically in the land of the living and so she throws Thomas back with a tongue that can never lie and she's like okay let's see how you deal with truth

You bunch of weirdos. Oh, I love that. There's also something here because we already immediately have a kind of topsy-turvy society when we're presented with the other world, right? Because we've got this, here's the fairy queen. who leads the society. And she's out doing her thing, like walking around on her very fine horse and, you know, trying to just have a nice life, which you don't get to see ordinarily for queens in... the world of humans so is this a you know a way of

getting some catharsis for women do you think or is this just a another way of highlighting the fact that the other world is strange oh you never know a woman might have agency well and it's i think it's also a fantasy that you go somewhere where she's powerful But she's in some ways like she's not a real world threat because she's beyond the veil. But she she's also very beautiful and sort of somehow sexually available in a way, as long as you are willing to risk your.

immortal soul. Well, who amongst us, you know? Yeah. The other thing that's sort of, I think, intriguing about the sovereignty issue, I thought initially maybe she's planning to give Thomas the Rhymer in Tithe to Hell. And then what if the reason she throws him back to the land of the living is because she decides she doesn't want to pay the hell tithe anymore? That it somehow contradicts the very essence of fairy and elf land to be a subject state. And that was, I mean, just...

At a completely pedantic level, medieval Christianity probably created this idea of Elfland as a subject state of hell to deal with fairy belief and to accommodate it in some way. And it probably... there was a point at which it was its own independent state and imaginations of the populace. So maybe that was a way of bringing that into the fiction to kind of test that theory. Yeah, that makes sense. Because how do you explain what this... third space that is neither subject to...

ordinary society, ordinary Christian society, nor is it necessarily evil. It's just this other thing. It is incredibly complex, especially as you get further into the medieval period and, gosh, into the early modern period.

when things really solidify in terms of belief, I guess that makes sense. Adding the political structure on top is so interesting because, I mean, the impetus to try to... to explain how fairy can exist is very funny to me like oh yeah we've got to have an intellectual framework for why the other world is you know yeah i mean what you're saying about how solidified it gets i mean we talk about this early on in the book with the trial of

Bessie Dunlop, the accused witch, who said her newborn child was sick, her husband was sick, and a large woman appears in her cottage door and tells her her baby's going to die, but her husband will recover. and then leaves again. And then it's followed up by, her visit's followed up by the visit of a man who calls himself Tom Reed.

who says he died at the Battle of Pinky, which was 1547, so 29 years earlier, he died in the Battle of Pinky. And he says he's been living in Elfland ever since. He says that the woman had been the fairy queen. And he gives Bessie some green thread, which she then uses as part of her work as a healer and midwife in her community. But when she gets taken to trial, she describes this encounter. This is how we know about it.

she's tortured with incisions around her mouth and strangled to death in the end. And that's, I think, indicative of how dangerous these beliefs were perceived, not just as figments of her imagination as she was calling up devils. So the kind of... transition from story to reality and the distinctions between the two historically are I think fascinating and very terrifying.

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Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating point because we see as we get more and more into the modern period that there is less room for the sort of imaginative. play with the third space. And there is much more of an idea that the supernatural is malignant. It's something malign that is coming for people. And again, this increased association of femininity with those evil and malign spirits, you know, like, oh, the fairy queen.

She was tithing to hell. Oh, so she's the kind of bad one, right? Not the man who assaults her. This woman who's in an impossible situation and just wants to kind of do her best for people, oh, that's very bad because that guy is from hell. But it also has this interesting way of sort of letting these male...

presence is off the hook you know it's like it's a it's a male dead demon fairy something you know it's like you have this man who follows the fairy queen and then does something bad but you know oh they're not really the issue here are they it's it's how women work she's the predator yeah yeah yeah

Yeah, I mean, we did prepare a verse of Tamlin, if you want to hear that. Oh, I'd love to hear it. Yeah. Actually, I will just say before we dive into that, this melody you just heard of Thomas the Rhymer was collected in, what's it, 1578? Yeah. Wow. With Thomas the Rhymer, it was really, really lovely because I turned the page and there were only two melodies to choose from and normally there's about...

60 to 100. So I thought, oh great, this is going to be an easy one to do. So there was one from 1578 and I think the other was 1830. And of course, I'm trying to go for the earliest ones possible. So it was obvious which one to go for. And there's something really beautiful about these very early melodies in that they aren't obviously major or minor. They're sort of set apart from the obvious keys that we now use. So there's this ambiguity ever present in them, which I really enjoy.

I guess I've got one question about that as well. The presence of so many different melodies that you can find for varying ballads. I suppose that this is just indicative of how popular these are as a story form, as an art form going down through time, because, you know, it's a lot easier to just say, oh, well, no, we're sticking with the one.

Or if a tradition peters out, you're just going to have that. But if you've got 30 versions of a song, that means that people are digging it, no? Yeah, it's absolutely mad. You've got versions. hailing from Aberdeen in the 1800s and then right the way through to Virginia in the 1940s. And you can just see the various incarnations that have happened along the way to travel.

And I think presumably that the mobility of the broadside pamphlet as a way of conveying the lyrics, and I guess this is just a guess, but more likely to find people that can read.

text than can read notation perhaps and that melody is being transmitted either because in some cases with broadside ballads it will say some to the tune of well a day so there's a popular melody that everyone knows And the lyrics, it happens still, and I was raised in the Anglican tradition, and you've got your hymns old and new, and it's like, songs the traditional melody of, and it's just...

rewritten different lyrics. We've been working on this book but completely unrelated. I was out at a pub and I was with some people who were singing and someone just started singing one of the songs that... we've covered in this book. It just felt like a really perfect end to it all because they're still being sang.

she wasn't like this is a nice old song she just sang the song and yeah and actually on the thomas the rhymer front where were you uh you ah yeah yeah and earlier in the summer i was at like a festival uh just jack in the green festival in Bradford-on-Avon and I was chatting to a nice older lady, Morris Dancer, and we were talking about ballads and she just started singing Thomas the Rhymer at me and I recorded what she was singing.

And when Nat sensed what she'd recorded, it was the same tune, pretty much the same tune. And she just kind of reeled it off in the middle of this festival. So they're still very much alive, these songs.

Gwen, we've heard a lot about how we find inspiration from a textual standpoint or a musical standpoint. When you're doing the illustration, what... is it that you draw from in order to get your point across here so very varied inspiration and just talking about thomas the rhymer for one it's got to me it had this really medieval

kind of feeling to it anyway it obviously being such an old valid so I took loads of inspiration for for instance Bruegel paintings one of the artworks is basically just lifted from a collection of Beugle paintings that I looked at and kind of mashed together in my own illustration. And it's really obviously a copy of Bruegel paintings. But also just my own love of fantasy illustration from the late 90s, early 20th century of fairies.

The idea of trying to paint Fairyland as well was difficult. I looked at a lot of very old paintings, but I also looked at surrealist art, Leonora Carrington, and tried to... sort of mix it all up into one coherent beautiful book it's so beautiful and I feel it's so nice to be able to say that because

I'm so proud of knowing Gwen and the work that you've done on the printed edition and equally the musical work that Natalie's done. I really want to ask Gwen about The Worm because there's The Ballad of Alison Gross. features a young man being transformed into a worm. And I think this word worm to mean dragon in folklore is so intriguing and then the challenge of illustrating that.

Gwen, from a fantasy perspective, are there any works that you have in the book that really hit the angle of the fantastic? Are there any creatures that you particularly like? Yeah, in the ballad of Alison Gross, there is enormous, ferocious worm that I had to paint. thinking of the worm sort of in the classical I guess sense that it's a dragon but I also it's a man that turns into a worm and in the song this man is naked a lot of the time

Felt like the worm should represent that naked man as well. So it's a very kind of peachy, fleshy, flaccid worm. Get him. It's quite disgusting. I really enjoyed painting it. I think I love... fantasy art and my father actually has painted a lot of dragons he's done a lot of work as a fantasy illustrator and his dragons are really scaly classic dragons so I really wanted to make a dragon that I hadn't seen before

So that's why I did a peachy worm. I love this because it's a whole new take on would you still love me if I was a worm. Also, I think you've really, because he's so hideous and he's got these...

prongy sort of anglerfish style teeth. But in the ballad, he's also a really pathetic character. And here you've got this young woman combing his hair. I mean, this is another challenge of the ballad. It says his sister comes every Saturday to comb his hair. You're like... she wants to love him if he was a worm yeah I got his sister sort of leaning against a tree and he's laid his

head on her, his massive worm head on her lap. I tried to show where her feet are, where his flesh is quite kind of saggy around her feet. And he's looking up with a sort of... He's looking up at her, but he looks kind of sad and fed up. But he's also got these horrible spiky teeth. Sparse hairs on his head. Yeah, he's got about three, you know, like a proper comb over.

that she's trying to go. It's a really big theme. The laps, Alison Gross is structured around these laps and the lap of the witch, the lap of his sister, the lap of the fairy queen and then also throughout. the corpus that we've selected the 10 we have chosen are not indicative of the whole corpus of balladry like we haven't got any histories we haven't got any arthur ones you know that kind of thing having a man's head on your lap after we'd been

talking about that I had to go and I just encourage anyone who has like a male partner or husband or whatever just just put his head on your lap and see how you feel because I think it does feel a little bit powerful I feel like I think you could do something bad Look, I want you to know that I use my powers of having a man's head on his lap for good, personally. But, you know, that's just...

There are actually, like, I remember reading, you know, the publication The Week years ago, I remember reading about how it had become a really big fad in Japan to buy extremely realistic feeling female lap cushions.

And that men were buying them, businessmen were buying them. I'm not surprised. There's nothing new under the sun, I'm telling you. I guess that really says a lot, right? Because we have... You all doing this really interesting work to kind of reclaim these ballads, you know, think about the characters in it in different ways. But we definitely still have this tradition, right? You can just run into a woman and she'll be like, ah, Thomas the Rhymer.

Here it is, you know. Gwen can run into a woman and she'll say, oh, Thomas the Reimer. Yeah, you know, it's amazing. You know, so as much as, you know, you have 30 to 60 versions of a song and a melody, I guess we still have... This is still a tradition that's ongoing and that you all are part of. Yeah, I mean, I've been quite cautious to say that I'm coming to this as a medievalist and that my offering rests on my kind of training as a medievalist.

and then have the fun of hearing back from people like Gwen who are very much engaged in contemporary British folk culture and sort of Morris dancing and traditional folk singing and sort of them being a conversation. I think this is so interesting. the relationship between what we call folk culture and maybe academia, because I think there can sometimes be a sort of friction.

And rightly so, given how some academics have behaved through the 20th century in relationship. But I think actually it's quite interesting to see how much like discussion and consensus and collective storytelling. is part of both worlds. There's a lovely bit at the end of Tamlin where the fairy queen is really crossed with him and she says... Well, we'll sing it, but what she says evokes in my mind memory of Burkhard of Worm's Penitential, which is 11th century. He's got a whole section on...

The sins committed by women and what they're... Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, does he? And one of the things he accuses women of is he says, if you believe that you, when you're snuggled up next to your husband in bed, can fly off without leaving your bed.

And go through closed doors and fly off around the world with other women and kill people who are baptised and then take out their hearts and replace them with straw and bring them back to life for a bit. Then two weeks on bread and water and seven years penance.

I love it. It's like, yeah, a normal thing. Like, yeah, I'm always lying in my bed imagining I'm just flying off around the world with Nat and Gwen. Like, genuinely. Anyway, so what the fairy queen... threatens Tamlin with at the end of the ballad where she's really angry with him yes this was collected in 1792 But had I known Tamlin, she says, what now this night I see? Oh, I love it. Come on, justice for the fairy queen. Let's go, girl.

You know, finally, finally something for the ladies. You know, no wonder these songs still kind of have a resonance today. No wonder we're still singing them and collecting them. Because... It's almost as though you want to circle back to these stories and get some justice for the people who are involved. You want to kind of make a case for them or put them into our own context. I think there's something so human about them that... really makes us still connect to them.

I think when you just scroll through, I don't know, the dramas available on the BBC, for instance, you're seeing the same themes, the kind of murder, sex, birth, betrayal, revenge. And it's really, this is just... putting those stories into a world that's so especially the traditional ballads with their kind of forests and the seas and rivers and other world i mean the secondary world universe is completely entrancing

This has been absolutely fascinating, and I don't want to stop doing it, but perhaps could you all sing us out on something? Because I... Don't ever want you to stop. Lady Isabel. Lady Isabel. Oh, yeah, that's a banger. Let's have that. A high-impact tune.

Yes, okay, so we're going to sing. So there was, behind Arthur's seat in Edinburgh, there's a loch and there are some pools, which... are now partially destroyed because of the victorian railway but they were known as the wells are weary and i think they appear on an early 19th century map called the wells are weary there's also a um

records of a witch trial in which an accused witch called Janet Boyman describes summoning an elfish apparition from a pool behind Arthur's seat in order to get advice on how to heal someone. And this ballad was collected pre-19th century, talks about a sort of elfin knight kidnapping a girl entirely. She's completely consensual. That's the first.

Taking her to the weary's well, the wells are weary, and encouraging her to walk into the waters. And she gets increasingly unsure of whether or not she wants to do that as he encourages her. It turns into a really moving story of her vanquishing him. And I won't describe all of it, but the final verse is when she's been victorious and she's come out of this terrifying encounter alive.

And if we were going to get any merch made for this book, the first half of the line. And I, she wrestled and I, she swam. It's just gorgeous. Okay. and I she wrestled and I she swam and she swam to dry land And God most cheerfully, the danger she overcame. Yay! I love to end on a high note. Yeah, come on, Lady Isabel, get him. Who amongst us does not love to vanquish a kind of bad boyfriend? It's still true today. He's a really bad boyfriend. One of the worst.

My thanks again to Amy Jeffs, Natalie Bryce, and Gwen Burns, and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember... You can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription.

You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time! That the sun shines sweetly on Oh, yon are the hills of heaven Where you will never win. Oh, what in a mountain is yon, she said. Also dreary with frost and snow. Oh, yon is the mountain of hell, he cried, where you...

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