21B. There Was a Rich Englishman- Hager (WV)
21B THERE WAS A RICH ENGLISHMAN
(The Jolly Thresherman)
Contributed by Mr. John B. Hager, Madison; Boone County, July, 1918. He called it a very Old English Ballad."
1. There was a rich Englishman, in England he did dwell,
He had a fine fortune, he managed it well.
And it happened so one day he was taking of a walk,
When he met a poor thresherman and with him did talk.
2. "Oh poor man, oh poor man, oh poor man," said he,
How do you maintain your dear family?
I learn you've several children and the most of them are small,
And how you do maintain then I can not tell at all."
3. "Oh, sometimes I reap and sometimes I sow,
And sometimes from hedging to ditching I go.
There's nothing, that oons srong from the harrow to the plow,
and so I make my living by the sweat of my brow.
4. "At night, when I come home, oh how weary I feel,
The youngest of my family, I dandle on my knee;
The rest flock around with prattle and with noise
and this is all the pleasure a poor man enjoys."
5. "Oh me and my wife were joined in Roanoke,
And like two royal lovers we never would provoke;
We do not value riahee and we never will be poor,
For we always keep the thieves and the robbers from the door."
See NC III 89-90.
Also the Journal of American Folklore, 1939, p. 60.
For an exhaustive list of references and a text in five stanzas, see Kittredge, Journal XX p. 553. He writes: "This is a condensed
rifacimento of a favorite seventeenth-century black-letter ballad in Roxburghe (a:soe;, Pepys (2:56, c. 22, fol. 157), and other oolleotions (Ebsworth, Roxburghe Ballade, 348-350) "The Nobleman's Generous Kindness, or, The Country Man's Unexpected Happiness. The original has seventeen stanzas (Cox). In both A and B part of the first line has been used as the title to replace the local title of "Old English Ballad" for A and "Very Old English Ballad" for B (Halpert).