The Maid and the Palmer


"The Maid and the Palmer" is an English language medieval murder ballad with supernatural/religious overtones. Because of its dark lyrics, the song was often avoided by folk singers. Considered by scholars to be a "debased" version of a work more completely known in European sources as the Ballad of the Magdalene, the ballad was believed lost in the oral tradition in the British Isles from the time of Sir Walter Scott, who noted a fragment of it having heard it sung in the early years of the nineteenth century, until it was discovered in the repertoire of a living Irish singer, John Reilly, from whom it was collected in the 1960s, although subsequently other versions have surfaced from Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s; an additional full text, collected and notated in around 1818, was also recently published in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads under the title "The Maid of Coldingham", having remained in manuscript form in the intervening time. Based on a tape of Reilly's performance provided by the collector Tom Munnelly, the singer Christy Moore popularised the song under its alternate title "The Well Below the Valley" with the Irish folk band Planxty and later solo performances/recordings, this song providing the title of that group's second album released in 1973; the song has subsequently been recorded by a number of more recent "folk revival" acts.

Synopsis

A palmer begs a cup from a maid who is washing at the well, so that he could drink from it since he is thirsty. She says she has none. He says that she would have, if her lover came. She swears she has never had a lover. He says that she has borne nine babies and tells her where she buried the bodies. She begs some penance from him. He tells her that she will be transformed into a stepping-stone for seven years, a bell-clapper for seven, and spend seven years in hell.
In some variants, the children were incestuously conceived. Also in at least one version collected in Ireland, and more so in European variants, the palmer is identified as God or Jesus.

Commentary

This ballad combines themes from the Biblical stories of the Samaritan woman at the well, and Mary Magdalene. In several foreign variants, the palmer is in fact Jesus. Mary Diane McCabe, cited below, says that John Reilly was reportedly aware that the story concerned Mary Magdalene, although whether this was before or following a suggestion by Munnelly is not recorded, while other sources cite Munnelly reporting that John Reilly also identified the palmer as Christ; another unique, additional Irish variant collected by Munnelly from Willie A. Reilly, another traveller, specifically identifies the stranger as Christ: "Oh, for I am the Lord that rules on high / Green grows the lily-O / Oh, I am the Lord that rules on high / In the well below the valley-O".
A Breton variant of the song is called "Mari Kelenn" ; in this version, the element of meeting at the well is missing, and there is more emphasis on the penance that must be performed by the woman, plus the method of her ultimate absolution.
Child, 1882 discusses the history of this ballad in detail over 4+ pages. By analogy with its European counterparts, it seems clear that Child 21 is a British "Magdalene ballad", although the identity of the protagonist has been lost. Mary Diane McCabe, who corresponded extensively with the Irish collector Tom Munnelly regarding this and other ballads, regarded it as such and wrote:
Joseph Harris of Harvard, 1971, speculated that the evolution of the ballad followed 3 stages : in Form I, Mary Magdalene has sinned, meets Jesus who gives her a penance of seven years in the wilderness, after which she is received in heaven; in Form II, also in Catalonia, the narrative acquires elements of the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, in which the woman does not at first recognise Jesus but he surprises her with his detailed knowledge of her sins; and in his Form III, interpreted as arising in Scandinavia, the new motif of child murders is introduced, and it is this form that then spread through the English and Scottish, Scandinavian, and Slavic ballad areas.
A more extensive account of the European counterpart/s of the song and its apparent history is contained in a 1992 thesis by Ann-Mari Häggman entitled "Magdalena på källebro : en studie i finlandsvensk vistradition med utgångspunkt i visan om Maria Magdalena" and in the Finnish Folklore Atlas.
Writing in 1984, David C. Fowler presents an analysis of various aspects of the ballad, suggesting that the well at which the action is located may be a derivation from Jacob's Well, scene of the biblical conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, that the inclusion of the figure of the palmer lends considerable antiquity to the text, and that the "Lillumwham" and other apparent nonsense lines in the Percy version appear to be later, and highly incongruous, grafts to the original verses. He also is of the opinion—in contrast to that of other scholars, who emphasise the "redemptive" potential of the penances—that the proposed penances could actually be intended to be ironic, in which case redemption would likely be never attainable for the protagonist.
Within the UK/Irish versions collected, the "incest" element is most apparent in the longer version collected by Munnelly from John Reilly, in which the latter sings "Two of them by your father dear, Two more of them came by your uncle Dan, Another one by your brother John."
A different ballad "The Cruel Mother", Child ballad 20, exists in a number of variants, in some of which there are verses where the dead children tell the mother she will suffer a number of penances each lasting seven years; those verses properly belong in "The Maid and the Palmer".
The Welsh scholar and poet Tony Conran expressed the view that the version in Percy did not have the correct ring of authenticity, but was instead an "Elizabethan anti-catholic burlesque of a lost earlier version", however it does not appear that subsequent scholars have commented either positively or negatively regarding this hypothesis.

Survival and publication history

For this ballad, Child had access to only two English text versions without tunes, one longer one with 15 verses stated as being from p. 461 of the Percy Manuscript dating from the mid seventeenth century, plus another fragment with 3 verses only, recalled by none other than Sir Walter Scott, the latter dating from early decades of the nineteenth century. In Percy it appears under the name "Lillumwham", a possible nonsense word that appears in Percy's interpolated refrain for each verse: "Lillumwham, lillumwham! Whatt then? what then? : Grandam boy, grandam boy, heye! Leg a derry, leg a merry, met, mer, whoope, whir! Driuance, larumben, grandam boy, heye!". In an article "Songs connected with customs" published in 1915, A. G. Gilchrist, Lucy Broadwood and Frank Kidson suggested that these words may be related to the turning of a spinning wheel, while Richard Firth Green in 2004 suggested that they may relate to a ploughboy or carter's calls. In either scenario, or any other not yet suggested, when Percy's manuscript collection was transcribed by Furnivall for publication, the ballad was included in the latter's section comprising "Loose and Humorous Songs", accompanied by a comparison with other ballads that humorously suggest methods by which a woman who has lost her virginity might regain it by some clearly unworkable means, presumably a reference to the last verse of the Percy version: "When thou hast thy penance done / Then thoust come a mayden home."
The fragment quoted by Child originating from Sir Walter Scott does not have the "Lillumwham" nonsense-style chorus but instead had a first refrain line that Scott did not recall, followed by a second, "And I the fair maiden of Gowden-gane". Unbeknown to Child, what appears to be a complete text of possibly the same version, with the refrain "The primrose o' the wood wants a name"/"I am the fair maid of Coldingham" had been collected at a similar time by the Reverend Robert Scott, minister of the parish of Glenbuchat in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, set down about 1818, under the name "The Maid of Coldingham", however this version remained in manuscript form and was not published until almost two centuries later, first appearing in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads compilation and then again in 2007 in The Glenbuchat Ballads by David Buchan and James Moreira, the latter work being a full transcription of the collection made by the Reverend Scott in the early part of the nineteenth century.
Unlike many other ballads that survived relatively prominently in oral tradition up to the twentieth century, this ballad appeared to be extinct in the British-Irish oral tradition until it was collected by Tom Munnelly from the repertoire of the settled Irish traveller John Reilly in 1967 and 1969, under the name "The Well Below The Valley"; in Reilly's versions, the refrain is "Green grows the lily-o, right among the bushes-o", occurring after the third line of every verse which is always "...At the well below the valley-o". Munnelly transcribed the longer version where it appeared in Ceol: A Journal of Irish Music, III, No. 12, p. 66 and subsequently in B.H. Bronson's "The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads". In his remarks on the song, Dr. Bronson states: "It was not to be expected that a traditional version of this ballad, which had barely survived in a fragmentary form in Scotland a century and a half ago, should have turned up in Ireland after the second world war. But such is the case, and we have word of yet another variant in the same vicinity in the year 1970...".
In fact, unknown to, and/or overlooked by both Munnelly and Bronson at the time, a "full text" of the Well Below the Valley variant had already been collected by Pádraig Ó Móráin in 1955 from Anna Ní Mháille, an old lady from Achill Island in County Mayo, with the opening verse:
, while a shorter set of words had also been recorded, again in Ireland, by Seamus Ennis in 1954 from a different singer, Thomas Moran, and released on LP by Caedmon in 1961.
Subsequent to his recording of John Reilly, Munnelly also encountered versions of the song from two other travellers in different locations, as described further in the "Recordings" section, while a separate Irish revival singer and songwriter, Liam Weldon, recorded a partial version in the 1970s stated to have come from one Mary Duke, possibly also a traveller. Julia Power, a settled traveller resident in Dublin, also recalled the line "at the well down in the valley" as part of a song, as recorded in Dublin in 2015–2016.
McCabe's thesis, pp. 392–396, also lists over 30 variants of Child no. 20, "The Cruel Mother", in which either the seven year penances, or reference to being a porter in hell, occur, apparently as borrowings from the present ballad, comprising 12 from Scotland, 2 originally from Ireland, 6 from Canada, and 12 from the U.S.A.
Despite its rarity in Britain, the ballad appears to have been popular and widely distributed elsewhere in Europe, in particular in the Finland/Sweden area, where—in the form known as "Mataleena" or "Magdalena på Källebro", clearly related to the figure of Mary Magdalen—a large number of performances have been documented. Although no complete version has been found in the United States, John Jacob Niles in his publication The Ballad Book reproduces three stanzas stated to have been collected in 1932 from a child in the Holcomb family in Kentucky, about nine years old, who "got the verses from an uncle", the first of which reads "Seven long years you shall atone / Derry leggo derry don / Your body be a steppingstone / Derry leggo derry downie" and which he identifies as a fragment of the present ballad, under the title that he assigns to it, "Seven Years", however it should also be noted that some more recent authors do not accept all of Niles' statements regarding ballads that he claimed to have discovered, especially in Kentucky, that have been reported by no-one else.

Recordings

Traditional (source) singers

The Irish song collector Tom Munnelly was instrumental in popularising the song in the 1970s folk revival, having heard it sung by John Reilly in County Roscommon in 1963. He recorded at least two versions from Reilly; the shorter version of the two, with ten verses, was released on Reilly's posthumous Topic LP The Bonny Green Tree, also re-released on volume 3 of the 1998 Topic "Voice of the People" series, O'er His Grave the Grass Grew Green – Tragic Ballads. Prior to the official release of his Reilly recordings, Munnelly played his tape to Christy Moore who then used it as the title track to the 1973 "Planxty" album of the same name. A more extensive, 1969 recording from Reilly exists in the tape collection of D. K. Wilgus, and can be heard via this . Earlier, in 1954, the song collector Seamus Ennis recorded singer Thomas Moran of Mohill, Co. Leitrim singing a partial version ; in Moran's version the refrain appears to belong to a previous Child Ballad but the remainder of the text is that of the present song. Mis-titled "The Cruel Mother", Moran's version was actually released earlier than Reilly's, on the 1961 Caedmon release The Folk Songs of Britain, Vol. IV: The Child Ballads 1, re-released under the same title as Topic 12T160.
Subsequent to hearing and recording the version/s by John Reilly, Tom Munnelly taped additional versions of the song from two other singers in Ireland, a Willie A. Reilly aged 35 near Clones, Co. Monaghan in 1972, and a Martin Reilly aged 73 in Sligo, Co. Sligo in 1973; both were travellers and possibly related, but distantly, to John Reilly of Boyle.. The same author notes yet another version obtained by Irish revival singer Liam Weldon, stated as being "as learned from the singing of Mary Duke "; Weldon is described elsewhere as having "a lifelong interest in the songs of the Irish Travelers". As performed by Weldon, Mary Duke's is only a partial version, comprising the initial encounter at the well between the protagonist and the "man riding by" but none of the subsequent revelations of child murders and associated penances.

Revival singers