The Gallows and the Golden Ball: An Analysis
The Gallows and the Golden Ball: An Analysis of "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" (Child 95)
by Ingeborg Urcia
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 79, No. 313 (Jul. - Sep., 1966), pp. 463-468
[Proofed once. Urcia's conclusions about "The Distressed Handmaid" appear to be erroneous.
R. Matteson 2015]
The Gallows and the Golden Ball
An Analysis of "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" (Child 95)
THE POPULAR BALLAD known as "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" (Child 95) [1] has been found not only in England and Scotland, but also in every part of the United States, in the West Indies, and even in Australia. It has been made into singing games and cante fables, has been acted out on stage, and has even appeared as a children's game in the slums of New York. Yet its basic structure and narrative elements have changed surprisingly little over centuries of migration and adaptation. Almost all the versions set in with the climax of the story. The girl, presumably already with a rope around her neck, calls upon the judge or executioner to stop, since she sees her father approaching. She then asks her father whether he has brought the gold to buy her freedom, but is cruelly disappointed when her father declares that he has only come to see her hung. The same question and answer pattern is repeated when the mother appears, followed by the brother, and the sister. Finally the lover comes and brings the means to set her free. A ballad, by definition,[2] is supposed to tell a story. Yet strangely enough this
is not done in the "Maid." All such pertinent facts as why the girl is condemned, why her life can be ransomed for gold, and why her relatives turn out to be so heartless are not given. Thus our British and American versions obviously represent only part of a much longer story. The purpose of this analysis is to try to uncover the basic narrative structure of this ballad, and in the process to answer some of the more puzzling aspects it presents. Most ballad critics[3] who have tried to do so have approached the "Maid" through its numerous European analogues. But while it is true that these analogues present very interesting and complete stories about a girl in mortal danger who is rescued by her lover, the link between these analogues and "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" is still a tenuous one. We shall, therefore, approach our ballad directly through its known British and American versions and attempt to uncover through them the story as it originally emerged.
The twelve versions of "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" which Child quotes all start with an appeal to the judge: "O Good Lord Judge and sweet Lord Judge,/ Peace for a little while!/ Me thinks I see my own father,/ Come riding by the stile." [4] This is rather surprising because the scene takes place under the gallows and the girl should be pleading with the executioner rather than with the judge. Probably the two persons were originally separate and have become confused and made into one, a process which is strikingly illustrated by an Australian version called "Dear Johnny," where the lover and the hangman have been confused. [5]
Nevertheless this mentioning of the judge suggests that the ballad once contained a scene in court as well as under the gallows. Except for minor details the British versions vary very little; the price asked for the release of the girl consists of money, a fee, gold, silver, or a combination of all these items. Likewise the number of relatives is very consistent: father, mother, brother, and sister.
The Scottish versions (Child D, E, F) are far more explicit in details. In version D the name of the lover is mentioned as "Willie" (the name, incidentally, of the hero of numerous British ballads, and thus probably just borrowed from general ballad tradition). More interesting is version E, saying: "For yonder comes him Warenton, the father of my child." Do we have here a clue to the crime of the girl? Is she condemned for her loss of virginity? At this point little can be concluded from this clue, but we shall come back to it later in our discussion. Child F offers some new details about the price for ransom: "have ye brocht my silken cloak or my golden key?" Version I, also a Scottish variant, is the only one to add a curse motif. The girl, after having been freed, says: "'Gae hame, gae hame, father' she says,/ Gae hame and saw yer see;/ And I wish not a pickle of it may grow up,/ But the thistle and the weed'." To her mother she says: " 'And I wish the girds may a' loup of,/ and the De'il spill a' yer gill'." The brother shall be killed by his own wife, and the sister's eyes may be picked out by crows. Interesting as the curse motif is, however, it was probably taken over from some other ballad because it is found only in this one Scottish version and generally is quite common in traditional ballads (see the "Cruel Brother" [Child I]: "And what will you leave your brother John?/ A pair of gallows to hang him on").
Only one English version seems to offer a clue to the original story of the ballad in England. In an appendix to Henderson's Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Border, Baring-Gould gives a version from Yorkshire to which a short introductory story is attached. This introductory story has two variants. In one form a girl is given a golden ball by a stranger, and for losing it is condemned to death. The other form of the story tells about a servant girl who has to clean a golden ball of a rich lady every day. Eventually she loses it and is supposed to be hung. In both cases the girl does not appeal to her relatives for money, but asks whether they have found the golden ball, which her lover finally brings. Here the relatives do not appear as cruel as usual, since the loss of the ball is not their fault and they may not have been able to find the ball. But even then they seem to gloat in her misfortune, having explicitly come to see her executed. No evidence suggests that this version of the "Maid" is older than the other variants, and the question arises of whether it represents a remnant of an older ballad or a "modern" attempt to rationalize the hanging. Pohl [7] regards this Yorkshire tale as a mixture of fairytale motifs which were added to the ballad after it had already been sung in its usual short form for a long time. The implications of this version upon the history of our ballad will be further discussed, but first an examination of what happened to the "Maid" after it migrated to the New World is needed.
This migration took place possibly as early as the seventeenth century. According to Kittredge[8] it was said to be prerevolutionary "on the basis of local information," and Davis[9] calls it "an old song in Yorkshire (!) dialect brought to Virginia before the revolution." From Virginia the ballad spread all over the United States. We find it as far north as Montana, and all over the Southern states. Its similarity with the Negro spiritual probably accounts for its tremendous popularity among the Southern Negroes. How closely its repetitive pattern resembles the spiritual is illustrated by the following comparison. The pattern of an American version of the "Maid"[10] has the following structure: "I looked over yonder and I see Paw comin'/ He's walked for many a mile/ 'Say Paw, say Paw, have you brung me any gold?'/ . . ." (substitute "Maw," "Sister," "Brother," "Truelove"). A well known Negro spiritual shows a similar pattern: "I've got a robe/ You've got a robe/ All God's children have a robe/ . . ." (substitute "crown," "song," for "robe"). [Presented by Reed Smith, 1928] The rigid frame made it easy to memorize the ballad, and also accounts for the surprising conformity of most American versions. Thus, although the number of American versions is very great, they can easily be classified in a few groups since most variants show only minor local changes.
Coffin [11] distinguishes six major types. Type "A" includes direct parallels to the British versions printed by Child. As such they offer little that is new, and the main difference between the individual versions of this group lies in the appellation of the judge as hangman, ropeman, hanger-man, hangs-a-man, and other dialect forms. The "A" versions are also of interest in determining the geographical location of each version. While some speak simply of the gallows tree, others are more specific in this respect. In Virginia and North Carolina the willow tree is specified; in California, the juniper tree; Montanah as the white oak; and an Australian version talks about the exotic tyburn tree. This Australian version is also distinguished by other details. It calls the hangman "Johnny," probably a confusion with the lover, although it is not unusual either for the American versions to call the judge by a name such as Joshua, or even to make him a captain.
Type "B" follows the same pattern as type "A," except that now a hint is given as to the crime of the girl. This group contains all the so-called "Golden Ball" versions. Instead of asking her relatives for gold or fee, the girl asks whether they have brought the golden ball which she has either lost or stolen. Sometimes the missing objects may either be a golden cup,[12] or a silver cup, [13] but usually it is a golden ball. Most ballad critics simply regard these versions as attempts to explain, to "rationalize," the story of a hanging without a crime. Two factors speak against this. First we have one English version which also contains the golden ball, namely Child 95H. This version has been collected in Yorkshire, and the earliest American versions are supposedly written in Yorkshire dialect. This seems to point to the Yorkshire version as the source for many of the American variants. Of course, dating any of Child's versions with enough accuracy to establish which one preceded which is not possible. But it must be remembered that the British versions do not automatically come earlier than the American versions, as is often supposed. In fact, some ballads which migrated to America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have preserved older versions than those which remained in England and often became corrupted, or disappeared altogether. Thus quite possibly the American versions of the "Maid" which tell of a golden ball are direct descendants of the Yorkshire versions, and these in turn represent the only extant original versions, while all other British and Scottish variants are compressed remnants only.
The objection might be made that a single version such as Child 95H may simply present the case of a mixed ballad, that is, a ballad to which verses or themes of other ballads have become attached, especially if in no other cases has the ball motif been combined with the execution scene. Fortunately, the Yorkshire tale is not the only one that combinest hese two scenes. A ninth-century Ir ish tale of the "Distressed Handmaid" [14] tells about a bard who gives a precious silver object into the keeping of his handmaid and then throws it secretly into the sea because he is in love with her and needs a subterfuge in order to demand that she recompense him with her honor. There are also the Scottish versions (Child D, E, F) in which the girl does not ask for money but for such items as a gold key, but these are less explicit.
Type "C" does not add much to our ballad story. Here the prisoner is a man who is saved by his girl friend. Examples of such sex reversals are frequently found among Slavic ballads, but are also found in English versions. H. C. Krappe [15] tries to deduct from the sex of the ballad hero the origin of the ballad version because, he argues, if a man is the hero this shows that the version originated from a country or area where the position of woman is low, that is, where they are not worth saving. This speculation, however, seems to be rather farfetched, and a simple explanation of the problem lies in the fact that the ballad singer changed the sex of his hero according to his own.[16] In any case no evidence suggests that the hero of our original "Maid" was a man rather than a girl. Type "D" includes all versions in which the prisoner waits in vain for release. Since Coffin cannot list any existing versions of this type, and I have not been able to find any from any other source, I doubt whether such variants actually exist. Types "E" and "F" (the fate of the girl is uncertain) are simply incomplete and need not concern us here.
Under type "G," however, some significant versions w hich shed light upon the basic narrative form of our ballad are again found. Coffin includes in this type all sorts of secondary ballads, games, cante-fables, and badman versions. Here careful discrimination must be made between those versions of our ballad which date back to older elements and those which have undergone the process of zersingen (literally: singing to pieces), which ultimately may result in a completely different ballad. The effect of this process is the mixing of two or more ballads or songs with similar themes: the ballad singer has forgotten or misunderstood part of the ballad and has substituted other lines which to him seem more comprehensible or which have a related subject. Usually these versions are easy to spot since both songs are still recognizable. Wells[17] prints such a mixed version as follows:
"(The father says:) 'No sir, no sir, I've brung ye no gold,/ no gold for to pay your fine,/ For I have just come to see you hanged,/ hanged on the gallows line./ You won't love and it's hard to be loved,/ And it's hard to pay your fine,/ You have broken the heart of many a true love,/ True love, and you can't break mine'." The latter lines, which have been grafted onto the "Maid," seem to have their origin in popular song and are vaguely reminiscent of blues such as "Careless Love." The final result of this process of zersingen can be found in the so-called badman versions of the "Maid," where nothing is left of the ballad except a stanza or two.[18]
In contrast to these modern adaptations of the popular ballad which try to rationalize a story which has long been lost, or is no longer understood, one type of our ballad, although of more recent origin, has preserved ancient elements. This is the cante fable found chiefly in the West Indies, but also in the Southern United States, and considered by Reed Smith to be an example of the ballad's disintegration. Actually the cante fable seems to have preserved many traits which have been lost in the traditional ballad versions. An example will illustrate this point: the green hill as entrance to the other world is an ancient Celtic motif, but most of the traditional ballads that deal with supernatural elements have lost this feature in their later versions ("The Wee, Wee Man," Child 38). Yet from Missouri we have a cante fable of the "Maid" which still retains the otherworld motif. [19] An old beggar, hospitably received by a Negro family, gives the daughter a golden ball which transforms her into a white girl. An Obeah woman poisons the mother, marries the father, and cuts the string on which the ball hangs from the girl's neck. She then accuses her stepdaughter of killing her mother. Sentenced to the gallows, father, mother, and beau (because she is black again) pass by unheeding. Only the old beggar producese vidence of the stepmother's guilt and frees the girl. The beggar, who has become a beautiful young man, and the girl then go off together and disappear inside a green hill.
There is no reason, then, not look to the cante fable for traces of the original narrative of the "Maid." And it is here that is actually found an almost unchanged version of the "Maid" as it appeared in the "Distressed Handmaid" of the ninth century. A girl whose stepmother is angered by her refusal to marry her suitors is accused of having stolen a golden watch, and as a resulti s to be hung. [20] True, in the modern version the handmaid has become a Negro serving girl, and the jealous wife who in one version of the "Handmaid" throws the silver cup away has become the maliciouss tepmother, but that does not altert he theme much. So far then, the crime of the girl has been retraced: it appears to be the loss of the golden ball. Yet this crime certainly does not account for the cruel behavior her family displays toward her, especially since most versions make it clear that the girl has lost the golden ball unintentionally, or that it has been taken from her.[21]
Is there yet another criminal action, of more far-reaching consequence, involved in her punishment? Child 95E speaks of the lover as "Warenton, the father of my child." Can we assume that the girl's loss of her virginity is a reason for her family's behavior? The plight of the handmaid has its origin in the illicit love of the girl's master, which causes either him or his jealous wife to persecute her. In the cante fable and the Yorkshire ballad this element has been obscured-no particular reason is given for the stepmother's hatred or the stranger's gift. Yet originally the girl must have been involved in the violation of some sex tabu, a crime of much greater severity than the mere loss of a golden ball and, furthermore, the kind of crime which would possibly turn her family from her. This crime, incidentally, appears surprisingly often in the older versions of many traditional English ballads (see "Lizy Wan" [Child 5I] or "Edward" [Child I3]) but is usually obliterated in more modern variants (whether through failure of the singer to understand or from puritanical reasons is hard to say). As the ballad moves further away from its source the dark elements of the original crime become obscured. The golden ball, once perhaps symbolic of the girl's loss of virginity, becomes merely a prop in the narrative, until finally only the scene under the gallows and a faithful sweetheart are left-and the romantic conclusion that "love conquers all".
NOTES
1. Francis J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston, I882-1898), II, 346-355.
2. MacEdward Leach, The Ballad Book (New York, 1955), I.
3. See especially Erich Pohl, Die deutsche Volksballade von de Losgekauften, Folklore Fellows Communications, CV (1934), 1-265, for an exhaustive study of the European migration of the ballad.
4. Child, 95 A.
5. Reed Smith, South Carolina Ballads (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1928), 85 ("Johnny Dear," an Australian variant of "Maid").
6. S. Baring-Gould, Appendix to T. F. Henderson's Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Border (London, 1866), 333 (Child 95 H).
7. Erich Pohl, Die deutche Volksballade.
8. H. C. Sargent and G. I. Kittredge edition of Francis J. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston: Houghton Miffln, Students' Cambridge Edition, 1904), Introd. xxv.
9. A. K. Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1929), 360 A. 10. Reprinted in E. K. Wells, The Ballad Tree (New York, 1950).
11. Tristram Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America, The Bibliographical and Special Series of the American Folklore Society, Vol. II (Philadelphia, 1950), 96ff.
12. C. J. Sharp, Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians (London, 1952), I, 208, Version II. 3. Ibid., 208, Version I.
14. Thesaurus Paleohibernicus, II, 345 (version reprinted in Pohl, Die deutsche Voksballade).
15. H. C. Krappe, "The Maid freed from the Gallows," Speculum, XVI, No. 2, 236ff.
16. An example for this sex reversal according to the singer's own sex can be found in the ballad "The farmer's cursed Wife" (Alan Lomax, The Folksongs of North America, [New York, I960], 187). The male singer sings: "That goes to show what a woman can do, she's worse than the Devil and she is worse than you." A female version which I have heard says: "Oh the women they are so much better than men, if they go to hell, they get sent back again."
17. Wells, Ballad Tree, Appendix.
18. An excellent example of this is a North Carolina version of the "Maid" (printed in Henry Mellinger, Folksongs from the Southern Highlands [New York, 1938], E) which represents a mixture with "The Boston Burgler," a popular badman song.
19. Mary A. Owen, Voodoo Tales (New York, I893), 185.
20. W. Jeckyll, Jamaican Songs and Stories (London, I907), 58ff.
21. In Sharp, Version I, the girl accuses herself: "I have stoled a little silver cup," but this seems to be a local corruption.
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