SEVEN

Politics and Perfidy

Any given performance of a traditional ballad is the product of converging forces, including the tradition of the ballad as received by the performer, the oral technique of the performer, and the personality of the performer. The personality in turn includes more than the innate traits that determine the basic orientation of the personality, whether light-hearted or serious, easygoing or high-strung. It also incorporates the life experiences, preferences, prejudices, and tastes involved in the formation of the personality, and the entire cultural context as assimilated by the personality.

Because ballads express so much of the singer’s personality and background, analysis and comparison of ballads can reveal the singer’s personal contribution to a variant. G. Malcolm Laws has written:

Variation can reveal much more than the basic fact of traditional existence. From the ways in which ballads vary we can learn something about the mental process of the singers, their taste in subject matter, and even their attitudes toward the songs they sing. (1957, 94)

The first way in which singers reveal themselves is in the very choice of songs to sing. Lucille Burdine’s study of Julie Hefley and Susie Campbell, from remote Newton County, Arkansas, reveals that although the sisters learned songs from the same sources—their father and their schoolteacher—they remember and perform strikingly different repertoires of songs from their childhood:

Driving home, I think of these two wonderful ladies. Julie, the romantic one, who thirty-five years ago liked to picnic with her teenage sons and other youngsters, including myself, remembered all the children’s songs, the nonsensical songs, and the song entitled “Oh Robin Redbreast.” Susie, the more conservative of the two, and Pentecostal, remembered “The Great Titanic,” “The Miner’s Child,” and “Pretty Polly.” How much like each one of them! (1985, 4)

Like Julie and Susie, Agnes Lyle exercises striking choices in her selection of songs. The preceding chapter has indicated the preference for pieces which identify marriage with death. More generally, in full-length ballads and in broadside fragments, tragedy dominates the repertoire. This domination too is a matter of choice, of preference, not of chance or inevitability. For despite the fact that love and death seem to be the favorite ballad subjects, tragic ballads do not dominate the ballad repertoire as a whole. Warren Roberts points out that “although tragic ballads form a large and important group, the majority of the English and Scottish traditional ballads is non-tragic. Several examples indicate that the non-tragic ballads are fully as ancient and as characteristic as those containing tragic action” (1951, 78). In Roberts’s count only 115 of the 305 ballads are uniformly serious in tone and tragic in outcome. But in the Lyle repertoire 16 out of the 22 long texts, and even 3 out of the 7 broadside pieces indicated in the Memorandum are tragic. This proportion is quite high in view of the Roberts statistics.¹

This repertoire, not excluding the “happy” ones, is a study in human perfidy. All of the full-length pieces except for “The Wee Wee Man,” assign a prominent place to human treachery, malice, or faithlessness. The corpus is thus the obverse of Mrs. Brown’s corpus, in which true and faithful love is the uniting leitmotif. The human perfidy in Agnes Lyle’s versions of these ballads takes many forms, but in almost every case some kind of betrayal is involved. Those the hero or heroine should be able to trust—family, lover, king—prove false. In “Fair Janet,” “Johnie Scot,” “Lord William,” “Jamie Douglas,” and “Braes o Yarrow” the woman’s family opposes her love, whereas in “Sheath and Knife” the man’s family seems to be in opposition. “Twa Sisters,” “Babylon,” and “The Cruel Mother” center on murders by a sister, a brother, and a mother respectively. “Hind Horn,” “Earl Richard,” “Little Musgrave,” and “Mary Hamilton” present faithless lovers, and “Little Musgrave” again, “The Eastmure King,” “Gypsy Laddie,” and “Jamie Douglas” present traitorous spouses. In “Sweet Trinity” the betrayer is an employer, and in “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Johnie Scot,” and “Lord Derwentwater,” he is the king himself.

Two examples will make clear the way in which the treachery is underlined in Lyle texts. “The Twa Sisters” is a classic tale of perfidy and misplaced trust. The Lyle text, characteristically, dwells on the cruelty of the older sister. And indeed the sister is cruel. Two Child texts, for example, equip her with a long pole to push the drowning girl back, should she come too close to land. But only Agnes Lyle provides the following grisly detail:

Treachery can go no further.

“The Eastmure King” is another such tale of perfidy and misplaced trust. The Lyle text has an elemental, almost primitive quality. The passions of the principal characters are simple and strong, and lead to violent acts. The beginning of the ballad (stanzas 1-8), with three kings vying for one girl’s heart, is by turns romantic and dramatic. The heroine proves herself an unusually strong person. Marrying for love, she chooses from among her suitors the one who values her “womanheid / and beautie.” But when she awakens to murder, her first thought is not romantic or tragic, it is practical:

How is she to avoid implication in this crime. The Eastmure king appears out of the darkness. Whether or not she realizes that he is the murderer, she is in need of a savior and she entrusts herself to him. The central part of the ballad shows great mastery of ballad resources, considerably more subtle, for instance, than the parallel treatment in Mrs. Brown’s version. In that version the conversation about the child takes place in the murder chamber. The woman knows what the murderer has done and what he intends to do before she goes off with him. In the Lyle version, however, the woman entrusts herself to the Eastmure king first. At this point in the ballad the king has not revealed his true colors either to the lady or to the listener. He is guilty of a crime, true enough, but it seems to be a crime of passion, a terrible but powerful expression of his love. Here the singer exploits the formula “He mounted her upon a steed,” with its understated final lines:

The polarized supra-narrative significance of the commonplace, elopement or abduction, heightens the suspense by its ambiguity. As they ride through the night the murderous king brings up the subject of the child to be born. If the child is a girl, he promises to provide as many as five nurses. Perhaps his love is real after all. But at the end of stanza 11 he vows that if the baby is a boy, he will not let it live; he has finally revealed himself for the villain he really is, and the heroine is wholly in his power. Or so it seems. But a simple switch with a village woman provides the heroine with a daughter and the village woman with a son.

Treachery is emphasized in yet another way in the last act of the ballad. The finale, in which the nearly grown son avenges his father’s death, is framed by references to a garden. In stanza 15,

Stanza 18 concludes the ballad with the lines:

In this case the annular structure is carried to such lengths that the references to the garden frame the references to the slaying. This killing in a garden, underneath a tree, is a relic of an ancient motif more common perhaps in Scandinavian than in Anglo-Scottish folklore. The motif seems to connote treachery, whether treachery committed, as in the Hamlet tradition, or treachery avenged, as in the present ballad. Thus the garden, both as scene of action and as framing device, sets the son’s vengeance in an ageless context, lends to it an archetypal sanction, and highlights the treachery of the crime that it avenges.

One narrative element connecting this tale of treachery and treachery avenged with the wedding-funeral ballads was mentioned in the preceding chapter. When the heroine, on her wedding night, wakes from “a drowsy dream,” she finds “her bride’s-bed swim with blood.” This image of the blood-soaked wedding bed also occurs in the A text of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (Child 74). In that ballad, however, the bloodied bed is only a dream, a nightmare. In the present ballad, nightmare has become literal reality, though the phrase, however appropriate, still reflects an association with the word “dream,” which occurs in the preceding line. This wedding bed in which the blood is that of the groom and not of the bride constitutes one of the most striking wedding-funeral images in the repertoire.

Treachery is the subject of the longest recurrent “theme” (in the oral theory sense) in the repertoire. In three of the ballads, “Johnie Scot,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” and “Lord Derwentwater,” a king writes a long letter to a noble-minded Scots youth. In each case perfidy is afoot, once on the part of the king (“Johnie Scot”), once on the part of a single courtier (“Sir Patrick Spens”), and once on the part of a strong coterie at court (“Lord Derwentwater”). “Johnie Armstrong,” which Motherwell says Agnes Lyle also knew, customarily includes the same “theme.” This “theme” is longer than a commonplace, but utilizes commonplaces in its construction. Like Andersen’s commonplaces, it is not realized in identical wording each time Agnes Lyle uses it. But the affect, the supra-narrative function, remains constant. Lord defines the word “theme” as “[a group] of ideas regularly used in telling a tale in the formulaic style of traditional song. . . . The theme, even though verbal, is not a fixed set of words, but a grouping of ideas.” The definition aptly describes the “King’s Letter Theme.” The ideas that are grouped together may be identified as follows:

1. Perfidy is planned against the hero.
2. King writes letter, seals it, and sends it to hero.
3. Hero receives letter and weeps.
4. Hero announces that he must obey summons.
5. A narrative agent or agents, or sometimes the hero himself, expresses a presentiment that hero will not return if he answers the summons.
6. Hero answers summons, but not alone; companions ride with him.

Agnes Lyle invariably expresses the second and third elements of the “theme” by the same two commonplaces, “The king did write a lang letter” (a commonplace omitted by Andersen), and “When Johnie looked the letter on” (admitted by Andersen), though the wording and rhyme scheme of the commonplaces vary from instance to instance. For the rest of the items, however, the differences in stanzas used, and in amount of narrative detail, are more substantial. Nevertheless, all elements appear, in unvarying sequence. In this fixity of sequence the elements of the “theme” are somewhat like the “functions” in the Propp system.

A closely-related sequence should perhaps be mentioned. In “Geordie” and “Lord William” treachery is in the act of being carried out and a sequence much like the “King’s Letter Theme” is invoked to bring rescue. This sequence has elements corresponding to elements 1-4, and 6 of that “theme.” The principal difference is that the one summoned is different from the one betrayed. Although perfidy is part of the context, the summons itself is honest, coming as it does from the beloved rather than from the king. Since no trap is laid for the rescuer, who has surprise on his (her) side, element 5, presentiment, does not fit into the plot.²

Frequently in the Lyle repertoire the perfidy which threatens the hero or heroine is mindless, malicious, apparently unmotivated meddling. Thus, in “Sir Patrick Spens” the “auld rich knight” puts Young Patrick’s name forward for the voyage. As Patrick reads his commission he breaks into tears of frustration and rage. He finds he has an enemy at court, but does not know who the enemy is or how to confront him. Nor can he escape the trap that the enemy has laid. In “Lord Derwentwater” the entire court turns against the good hero, again without any clear motive other than malice. In “Little Musgrave” the page can not resist creating trouble, and in “Jamie Douglas” the slandering Blacklywood plays Iago to Jamie’s Othello. Even in the more happy ballad of “Geordie” a “bold bluidy wretch” at court, afflicted with jealousy and malice, tries to foil Mrs. Geordie’s efforts.

As the preceding examples bring out, Agnes Lyle’s assignment of perfidy often reflects a social bias. The one sure test of highborn station in her ballads is addiction to malice. The villains are jealous courtiers, treacherous kings, bored or murderous gentlewomen, and social-climbing fathers. The courtiers and pages prove their nobility by dropping a deadly word at the right moment. A brother of the Rose of Yarrow proves his nobility by stabbing her husband in the back. Earl Richard proves his nobility by betraying and mocking the woman he loves, and she responds in kind by killing him as she kisses him. The merchant class, moreover, shares in the perfidy of the gentry. The daughter of the merchant of Lurk kills her own babies, two fathers offer their daughters at the altar of upward mobility, and the shipmaster in “The Sweet Trinity” apparently lets his cabin boy die once the lad has done his job of sinking the enemy ship.

None of the sympathetic characters, however, with the exception of Lord Dunwaters and the two eloping princesses, is identified as titled, landed, or mercantile. In fact, the ballads reflect a surprisingly egalitarian view of humanity. The hero is the common man; the villain is anyone who sets himself up as gentry. In this respect, the ballads are of a piece with Scots literature as a whole, as described by Maurice Lindsay, who considers a “democratic element” to be one of the “most striking characteristics” of this literature, although:

“Democratic” is really not the correct word; it is rather a free manliness, a saeva indignatio against oppression, a violent freedom, sometimes an aggressive spirit of independence or egalitarianism. . . . It is sometimes explained as the result of the Celtic “polity” in which each, whatever his rank, is first and foremost a member of the clan, and also as a result of the pressure from England. . . . As a small country, Scotland may also have had a less exclusive separation of classes than, for example, France and England; that was certainly the impression formed by the French knights in Scotland in Barbour’s time. The less rigid stratification of society in Scotland appears everywhere in Scottish literature. . . . In its negative form, this spirit becomes prideful arrogance and an envious dislike of anybody who is finer, more original, and more sensitive than others or seeks to rise above the common level. (95-96)

Negative or not, Lindsay’s comments apply to the Lyle texts with astonishing aptness.

In accordance with the Lyle egalitarianism, even heroes who have titles in other versions become commoners in her versions. Sir Patrick Spens becomes Young Patrick Spens; Lord William becomes Sweet William. The father in “Sheath and Knife” has a house, not a hall or castle. Hind Horn is simply Young Hind Horn, no knight, and no lord of “many a town.”³ Johnie Scot must depend on a friendly Scottish prince to supply him with armed backing. And Geordie is plain Geordie Lukely, not the Laird of Gight. At times the social status is made quite explicit, as when the third sister in “Babylon” identifies her brothers as a minister, a ploughman, and an outlaw. In the fragments too the heroes are quite ordinary. The maid in the garden is but a maid, and her lover simply a young man. The hero walking out, “the week before Easter,” is likewise simply a young man. Another text features two sailors. And the real heroes of “The Duke’s Chase” are the dogs.

Agnes Lyle uses several ironic devices to bring out the contrast between honest folk and perfidious gentry. In “Eastmure King,” for instance, the heroine’s son is safer with the poor stranger woman than with the heroine’s own kingly husband. Similarly, poor Mary Hamilton comes to the king’s court “to learn some unco lair,” but what she learns is “wantonness and play.” A comparison of “Mary Hamilton” with “The Cruel Mother” raises an interesting question. Given that both women are child-murderers, why is there so much sympathy for one and none at all for the other? The explanation seems to lie in the different social positions of the two women: Mary Hamilton, a maid in the court, is a serving woman put upon by royalty.⁴ But the lady from Lurk, coming from the wealthy merchant class, was hardly seduced by, and may well have forced her attentions upon the clerk. Whether or not she did, she is in a position of power, and those in positions of power receive no sympathy in the ballads of Agnes Lyle.

Recurrent repetition produces yet another king-commoner contrast already commented upon. When Johnie Scot, in stanza 15, cries out:

he is throwing the king’s own words from stanza 3 back in his teeth:

Unlike the king, Johnie is pleased about the coming birth, offering the mother his hand and the child his land.

Given the repertoire’s suspicion of the gentry, coupled with its emphasis on marriage as instrument of death, it is not surprising that the paradigm of treachery in the repertoire is a marriage or liaison between a lowborn person and a member of the gentry. In almost every case in which this union is consummated, the upper-class person then betrays the common person in some way. The Laird of Linlyon, for instance, steals plain Barbara Livingston from her young man of Dundee, and the girl is so miserable she dies of grief. Jamie Douglas believes rumors rather than his innocent wife and lets his jealousy destroy her. Lady Barnabas persuades her young lover to ignore the warning given him. And the king lets Mary Hamilton go to the gallows. Fortunate are the women who elude such a fate: the fair maid who baffles the Baffled Knight and the Bailie’s daughter who ends up with her Sweet William. Even Fair Janet preferred death to marriage with the Southland Lord.

Agnes Lyle’s version of “Little Musgrave” and her version of “The Gypsy Laddie” (see chapter 4) each tell such a story of a liaison between a gentlewoman and a lowborn man. Because the ballads have been so popular, both in later tradition and in the Renfrewshire of Agnes Lyle’s own day, there is a wealth of material for comparison, and one can speak with assurance of the choices which the singer has exercised in forming her version. “Little Musgrave,” in particular, has retained its grip on the imaginations of singers in the twentieth century, in both Scotland and the United States. Agnes Lyle’s version, on first reading, seems to be telling the same story as these later versions. But a closer study reveals that the essence of the Lyle story, its emotional core, is particular to this singer. The passions involved, the sympathies aroused, and the sensibilities expressed are all unique and of a piece with sensibilities, sympathies, and passions throughout the repertoire. Twentieth century singers have shown great sympathy for the illicit lovers in this ballad, as for the lovers in “Gypsy Laddie.” A group of Ohio singers, mother and daughters, has the husband in “Little Musgrave” cry out:

In another American version the lady declares to her husband, who is standing over her with a loaded pistol:

The lady who runs off with the gypsy in American versions of “Gypsy Laddie” shows an equally amazing loyalty to her lover:

Such expressions of high-born loyalty are notably absent from the Lyle renditions of “Little Musgrave” and “The Gypsy Laddie.” In “Little Musgrave” Lady Barnabas seems to be the second wife, married to a man considerably older than herself. She plays ball (stanza 1) and is of child-bearing age (stanza 11). Her husband, on the other hand, has a daughter of marriageable age (stanza 13). She seems to be an idle and discontented woman, with nothing constructive to do. She is the one who makes the first move. When Mossgrey refuses rather strongly, she insists. Her discontent with her husband is obvious:

Further, she keeps an old sword in the bed and threatens to kill the page with it; there is no reason to think she would hesitate to carry out her threat, given the opportunity. When Mossgrey, alarmed, wishes to leave, she tells him the horn belongs to her father’s sheep-herd and petulantly pesters him to lie down: she’s getting cold.

There is no hint of love between the two. Mossgrey even curses the woman when caught in bed with her, but there is nothing he can do. With two swift strokes Lord Barnabas dispatches the guilty pair. His order for the burial of the two lovers is, in the context, bitterly ironic:

She has demonstrated her high breeding by getting Mossgrey killed.

The parallels between the Lyle “Little Mossgrey” and the Lyle “Gypsy Laddie” are many. In that ballad too a woman of high degree, tired of her elegant life, seeks thrills among the common folk. In that ballad too the result is death for the man she becomes involved with (and for his fifteen brothers as well). Neither the gypsies nor Mossgrey can be called guiltless, but their punishments far exceed their crimes because they have allowed themselves to become entangled in a web from which they can never free themselves. The final stanza of “The Gypsy Laddie” expresses bitter irony:

Mossgrey too has died because of a wanton lady. The moral seems clear: Getting mixed up with the gentry can only get a person into trouble, for the gentry love to use a person for thrills but won’t stand by him.

These two ballads—and most of the others in the repertoire as well—seem to be expressing genuine anger. It might seem risky to speak of anger in a traditional text. And yet anger is precisely the affect that distinguishes this text from the comparable material, whether contemporaneous or more recent. As has appeared above, more recent texts emphasize the poignancy of the death of the two young lovers, in the one case, and the charm of the gypsy and the pluck of the lady, in the other. Of earlier texts of “The Gypsy Laddie,” only the Child 200B version is close to Agnes Lyle’s in both time and geography, but several versions are more or less contemporaneous. In these versions the earl does not always win out in the end. The lady, instead, may assert determination, as the B text has it, to drink the beer she has brewed. And the gypsies themselves sometimes go scot-free. Of texts of “Little Musgrave,” eight Scottish versions in Child are contemporaneous with Agnes Lyle’s (D-I, K-L). At least four of these come from Southwest Scotland (E, G, H, and I), and the John Smith version, which Emily Lyle prints from the Crawfurd manuscript (Lyle 1975, 178-181), makes a total of five Southwestern versions, nine altogether, contemporaneous with the Lyle version. A comparison between these other Scottish versions and the Lyle version suggests strongly that the angry tone of the Lyle version must be attributed to the choice of the singer, not to the tradition of the region. The text which Andrew Crawfurd collected from John Smith, for instance, takes a very different tone. In Smith’s version the focus is on Mosgrove, as the hero is called, rather than on the lady. Mosgrove seems to be a totally irresistible person. His charm and beauty are radiant. When Lady Bangwell has “fixt her eyes on Little Mosgrove / As bright as the morning Sun” (the diction is not unlike Agnes Lyle’s here, by the way), she is so swept off her feet that she offers him anything for one hour of his company. Lord Bangwell too finds Mosgrove attractive and charming, and seems to understand the irresistible power of his personality. When the footpage tries to force the issue, Lord Bangwell blows his horn twice, hoping that Mosgrove will hear it and be gone. The boy, however, sleeps through the warning and does not awaken until Lord Bangwell enters the bedchamber. Waking up, Mosgrove does not curse the lady but expresses regret for her ill fortune:

Bangwell kills only Mosgrove, and even that he regrets instantly:

Though all the distinctive elements of this version—the beauty of Mosgrove, the attempt to bribe the page, the warning sounded by the husband himself, and the regret over the death—are found in other variants of “Little Musgrave,” both in and out of Child, Smith achieves a unique blend in this very fine text. Like the later American versions this contemporary Renfrewshire version displays a deep sympathy for all the parties of the drama. The final impression is one of tenderness and grief, not of bitterness and anger. In this respect Smith’s version is very different from that of Agnes Lyle.

The angry tone of the plot conflicts is reflected in the narrative structure of the Lyle ballads. In particular, eighteen of the twenty-two ballads build to a closing stanza (or more) giving a principal character the proverbial last word. For characters in four of the ballads this “last word” is really more of an action: Willie rings the bells of Linkum to vindicate Janet’s virtue; Johnie Scot blows a blast on his horn to vindicate Scotland’s honor; Geordie’s wife rides off with her rescued husband “all for the pride o Geordie”; and:

But in the remaining fourteen cases, the characters find words of rebuke, accusation, or irony with which to close their stories. This chapter has already commented on the bitterness of the gypsies’ final accusation and the irony of Lord Barnabas’s final order. Mary Hamilton provides another example when she bids the king:

The children of the cruel mother, when she begs them to pray for her, reply that “there is pardon for us, but none for thee.” After revealing the crime of the cruel sister, the fiddle strung with the fair sister’s hair adds, “God neer let her rest till she shall die.” When the lusty laird of Linlyon, who could have found dozens of willing women, steals Barbara Livingston from the man who loves her and whom she loves, her Dundee lover sums up the complaint of all who have been oppressed by the powerful:

And so the catalog of reproaches continues.

But what evidence is there that Agnes Lyle chose these endings for her ballads? Might one not argue that all these perfidious elements are traditional, and it is only coincidence that so many appear in this repertoire? Unfortunately for that argument Agnes Lyle herself has provided evidence of the element of choice in the formation of her versions. The pertinent ballad is “Geordie.” In her “Geordie” the hero’s wife is completely self-reliant, though a “bold bluidy wretch” at court tries to discourage and obstruct her petition to the king. In the Child A, C, and H texts, however, an aged lord at court helps Geordie’s wife by persuading the king to let her ransom her husband. Agnes Lyle, as she herself testified, knew that line of development for the story. Motherwell, at the end of his transcription of her text, appended the following note:

Of the preceding ballad Agnes Lile says she has heard her father sing a different set all of which she forgets except that there was nothing said of “a bold bluidy wretch” and in place of what is given to him [sic: the bluidy wretch?] in this version there were the two following stanzas:

In other words, she grew up hearing the ballad sung with the world on Mrs. Geordie’s side and no element of perfidy intruding.

It would be fascinating to discover the turn of thought which led Agnes Lyle from her father’s version, in which the generosity and goodness of people is so touchingly brought out, to her own, in which the lady relies only on herself, and from her father’s version, in which there is no wanton malice, to her own, with its “bold bluidy wretch.” Certainly she has chosen the bitter part, and it shall not be taken from her.

Indeed, faced with such bitterness in ballad after ballad, one feels compelled to attribute anger to the singer herself. Probably unmarried, was she disappointed in love, perhaps through interference of her own family? Involved in a depressed cottage industry in a village culture, was she disillusioned with the weaving fraternity of Kilbarchan, having found that hardship breeds distrust, even among old friends?

Such speculations about Agnes Lyle’s personal experiences or about her experiences with fellow villagers can be no more than that: speculations. When, however, query approaches politics on the regional and national levels, it finds itself on surer footing. There was much in the economic and social life of Scotland in 1825 to embitter the daughter of a Kilbarchan weaver.

By 1825 radical ideas—socialist, republican, and democratic—had been rife for almost a hundred years in Scotland. The American revolution, for example, had been fought for principles hammered out in part by Edinburg lawyers. Paine’s Rights of Man, in Gaelic as well as English, circulated to all parts of the land. And in the next county an Owenite community of mill workers was seeking Utopia in Lanarkshire. Weavers were prominent in all of these movements. The ballads of Agnes Lyle show a political and social consciousness reflective of the times.

TABLE 1

Political Oppositions in the Ballads of Agnes Lyle

In terms of polity, the ballads depict the Scotland of the period, not some mythical or historical reconstruction. There are, for instance, no Jacobite songs in the group. Even the originally Jacobite piece “Lord Derwentwater” has lost its Jacobite slant. The controlling oppositions in the songs likewise correspond to political realities, or at least to political perceptions, in the region and era (See Table 1). The king in the repertoire is the king of England, hates Scots, and can’t be trusted—not a bad summary of the way radical subjects north of the border viewed the Hanoverians. The pervasive opposition of commoner to gentry in the repertoire reflects the upper class embrace of Toryism within Scotland itself (and so, from the radical point of view, its abandonment of Scottishness), in reaction to the various forms of radicalism embraced by the working class. These oppositions are resolved only once in the repertoire, ironically, by marriage, when Johnie Scot’s faithful English princess, abandoning her dowry, assumes the nationality and status of her commoner husband in the clan system of Scotland. In short, Agnes Lyle, in her ballads, offers a biting assessment of social and political realities.

If, then, one considers the declining fortunes of the working man in Scotland in the ten years preceding 1825, the unique political position of the weaving fraternity within which the singer grew up, the treatment that fraternity met at the hands of the government and of the landed and mercantile classes in the so-called radical War of 1820, and the state of the monarchy which was demanding the working Scot’s loyalty, surely one does not need to look any further for a plausible explanation of the bitter anger which pervades this body of ballads.

And so we come to the end of our examination of a test case, that of Agnes Lyle of Kilbarchan. Part I indicated the historical footing on which we stand when we speak of the singer and her times. It then went on to indicate the textual footing on which we stand when we speak of her songs. Part II described a repertoire suffused with formulicity and wholly traditional in technique, poetic and aesthetic. The technique in particular is consistent in its dependence on a meter, the meter of the standard ballad quatrain, as we might expect of a metrical art. Part III revealed that this repertoire is impressed by the stamp of a distinctive personality that reveals itself in its competence and artistry in handling traditional techniques and expressing traditional values. But, as so often happens, this personality also betrays itself in its obsessions and angers—especially in its annulment of the traditional love-death opposition of balladry in a marriage-funeral identification—and in its constant rearrangement of traditional elements of plot, character, and diction to present a picture of the honest Scots working class betrayed by the perfidious gentry.

The songs have been responsibly collected from dictation or singing. They exhibit the pervasive formulicity, along with many other compositional elements, which we have come to identify with orally recreated verse narratives. And taken as a whole they exhibit a consistent style in utilizing these elements, reinforced by consistent and even idiosyncratic deployment of traditional and repertoire-particular ballad leitmotifs, indicating that they are the ballad renditions of a single singer. It seems appropriate, then, to call this group of ballads an oral repertoire in the Parry-Lord sense of that term, and to turn to it for a better understanding of the ballad matrix, that network of personalities, forces, and conditions which gave birth to the great ballads of the classic period.