The Integrity of "Sir Patrick Spence"
The Integrity of "Sir Patrick Spence"
Author(s): William H. MatchettReviewed work(s):Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Aug., 1970), pp. 25-31
THE INTEGRITY OF "SIR PATRICK SPENCE"
WILLIAM H. MATCHETT
IN introducing the eighteen versions of "Sir Patrick Spence" which he had collected, F. J. Child chose from among them the eleven-stanza poem which most subsequent anthologists have apparently agreed is to be preferred: "This admired and most admirable ballad is one of many which were first made known through Percy's Reliques. Percy's version remains, poetically, the best. It may be a fragment, but the imagination easily supplies all that may be wanting; and if more of the story, or the whole, be told in H [twenty-six stanzas], the half is better than the whole."[1]
It should like in this article to discuss why Percy's version (Child's A) is indeed the best and why it should be considered not fragmentary but complete, the original which subsequent handlers, missing the point, inflated and mutilated. In spite of their popularity, Percy's eleven stanzas continue to be something of an enigma. What are they all about? The primary assertion of the hero's worth is of course clear in the rousing conclusion:
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feit.[2]
All on the boat have drowned; but the poet, in the way he places them on the sea floor, proclaims the knight to have been the best man of the lot. Just who they are or what their mission may have been, however, he does not tell us.
Nor does history. Percy, listing the ballad as "given from two MS copies transmitted from Scotland," could give little information: In what age the hero of this ballad lived, or when this fatal expedition happened that proved so destructive to the Scots nobles, I have not been able to discover; yet am of the opinion that their catastrophe is not altogether without foundation in history, though it has escaped my own researches.... In some modern copies, instead of Sir Patrick Spence hath been substituted the name of Sir Andrew Wood, a famous Scottish admiral who flourished in the time of our Edw. IV. but whose story hath nothing in common with this of the ballad. As Wood was the most noted warrior of Scotland, it is probable that, like the Theban Hercules, he hath engrossed the renown of other heroes.[3]
Child could offer only a few speculations, concluding, "For one, I do not feel com- pelled to regard the ballad as historical" (2: 19); and subsequent investigators have not found any additional information which could challenge such an opinion.[4] Lacking any trace of an actual Sir Pat- rick Spence, we cannot specify a particular king. Nor do we know when the ballad was written.[5] The best we can say is that it was probably fiction.
But if the ballad does not glorify an actual hero, why was it written? It is too compact for us to believe that the author's interest lay in tale telling for its own sake, while the final affirmation implies moral fervor, if not defiance. The force behind this ballad derives not only from approval of a fictional Sir Patrick; it derives, as I hope to show, from a broader political stance. This larger dimension is confirmed both by new evidence as to the meaning of a hitherto obscure key word and by the cumulative implications of peculiarly pre- cise imagery. "Sir Patrick Spence" may well be, in our present sense of the phrase, a protest ballad.
As is usual in ballads, the plot is skeletal:
The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
O quhar will I get a guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?
What ship? Sail it where? Why? The poem answers none of these questions of elementary journalism. Nor are modern readers alone in wondering about such details, for it is fairly clear that at least one of the motivating forces behind the expanded versions of the poem is a desire to provide answers for just such questions. Detail is added to colorful detail- a climb up the mast, a mermaid, featherbeds, of which there are eventually "five and fifty."[6] And among these details are conflicting answers to the usual questions. In the longest version (Child's I),[7] Spence sinks on his way home from Norway where he has delivered the king's daughter, who is to be queen there; in H, he sinks while en route to Norway to fetch a princess from there. (Both versions thus keep free of involvement with the death of a bride.)
Norway and the royal bride point toward the historical occasion of the 1281 disaster, cited as follows by Robert Chambers: "Fordoun, in his History of Scot- land, relates the incident, in a paragraph which I translate for the convenience of the reader: 'A little before this, namely, in the year 1281, Margaret, daughter of Alexander III., was married to the King of Norway; who, leaving Scotland on the last day of July, was conveyed thither in noble style, in company with many knights and nobles. In returning home, after the celebration of her nuptials, the Abbot of Balmerinoch, Bernard of Monte-alto, and many other persons, were drowned' " (p. 3). Though one cannot deny the remote possibility of a connection between the original poem and this event, it seems rather more likely that Norway and the royal bride were brought in later as the result of a search for an explanation.[8] Since such specified missions, along with the other additions, serve only to detract from the poem's impact, we may have fair confidence that Percy's version is the original. Not only is it easier to find a motive for adding stanzas than for deleting them, but the eleven-stanza version, though shorter, is in fact complete [9] and more effective. Plot is a vehicle, not an end in itself; if the poet tells us nothing about the reasons for the voyage, that is because they are peripheral to the meaning of his poem.
The poet is not creating difficulties through neglect; he is using enigma. His method is one of implication, in detail and in total effect. His conclusion states that the drowned men lie in a certain position on the sea floor; it implies its more important meaning that the commoner, Sir Patrick, is a better man than the lords.[10] Or consider the obvious example of the king's letter:
The first line that Sir Patrick red,
A loud lauch lauched he:
The next line that Sir Patrick red,
The teir blinded his ee.[11]
To give Sir Patrick's response without quoting the letter is clearly to demand consideration of the implied contents and, beyond this, to invite comparison of the king and Sir Patrick through coming to understand the relationship between them. Though it is possible to expend considerable ingenuity here and to invent plots which carry far past the information given in the poem, there are certain minimum implications upon which all readers should agree: (1) the letter contains the king's orders to sail; (2) as the following stanzas make clear, "this time o' the yeir" [12] is no time for sailing, all seamen know this, and no one, not even Sir Patrick, can expect to survive; (3) Sir Patrick's change in response as he reads the letter results from his recognition that it probably seals his doom.
Beyond these clear implications, there are others which are less definite. That "loud lauch" might be the plain man's amusement at the flattery of a court letter, or it might be the sailor's amazement at the landlubber's stupidity. Either of these is more in keeping with the poem than would be simple joy at having received a letter from the king. The tear implies more than selfish sorrow; it is best taken as recognition of the inevitable total loss of his ship and all aboard it. Sir Patrick is no rebel. Flatterer, plotter, or fool though the king may be, Sir Patrick accepts his letter as an order. His question is not "Should I obey it?" but "O quha is this has don this deid, / This ill deid don to me...?" The answer can only be that the king has done it, for he sent the letter, but that obvious answer would seem to be sidestepped by the very fact that the question is asked. Our attention is directed behind the king to the "eldern knicht" who suggested Sir Patrick's name. The implication is that someone wishes to destroy Sir Patrick; however, it is not obvious whether this "eldern knicht" is to be considered powerful in his own right or whether his sitting "at the kings richt kne" implies that he is a mere toady offering the suggestion he knows his master wishes to hear. One may conceive of a king so ignorant of the ways of the weather that he can be used by his subjects to dispatch their personal enemies, or a king so unctuously malicious that he maintains his facade of detachment while murdering the best man in his king- dom. Either way, he is no model of royal perfection. Though Sir Patrick's question is pregnant with implication, the obvious answer is not contradicted: the ultimate responsibility lies with the king. But whatever his faults, he is the king, and Sir Patrick is a loyal subject. The poem may, in fact, be more decisive about this king than modern readers have recognized. At least one word which is enigmatic now, and would seem from some of the changes made in the ballad to have been troublesome even then-the description of the king's letter as "braid"- may well be explained by its hitherto unnoticed appearance elsewhere. Modern editors who gloss the word are apt to tell us merely that it means "broad," leaving us about as puzzled as we were before. Those who give other glosses seem to be guessing, with perhaps the most ingenious guess-ingeni- ous, though probably both irrelevant and wrong-that of the editor who says the word means "public, as in broadcast." [13] Of the other Child version, three (G, H, and I) repeat the word "braid," while J gives "broad." Version D gives "bra"-pre- sumably a form of "braw," meaning fine, or at least expressing admiration-which seems to be an attempt to make sense with- out too great a change. Versions B, E, and F change to "lang," which does make more sense for a letter than "broad," while C calls the letter "large." None of the versions from K to R mention the letter at all.
But the word appears in another context, and that one, confirming this, supplies us with a precise denotation. In All's Well That Ends Well, Diana, having allowed the false Bertram to believe he has wooed her successfully, soliloquizes after he has left the stage: "Since Frenchmen are so braid, / Marry that will, I live and die a maid" (IV, ii, 73-74). In context, as the OED asserts, the word must mean deceit- ful.[14] Several Shakespearean editors, fol- lowing the OED, have noted that this is its only known occurrence. I am suggesting that it occurs again in "Sir Patrick Spence."[15] It is true that there are "braid" letters and "broad" letters in a number of other ballads, but, just as I suspect the popularity of "Sir Patrick Spence" accounts for the repeated laughs giving way to tears, so I think that these other letters also derive from Sir Patrick's. For one thing, they do not usually turn up in what appear to be the earliest versions of the ballads but rather as new details in versions collected quite late; for another, when they appear they tend to be followed by the laughter- then-tears response of Sir Patrick Spence.[16]
That the king, having written his letter to Sir Patrick, "signd it wi' his hand" naturally implies a letter dictated to a scribe, but the force of the couplet lies in the fact that he was willing to set his royal signature to a deceitful letter. This detail surely tends to focus the blame on the king himself, strengthening the implication that he is malicious and weakening the possi- bility that he is merely uninformed about the weather.
But Sir Patrick is not the only one destroyed; an unspecified number of noblemen, as well as the crew, go down with him. It is impossible to determine from the poem whether the king is sacrificing Sir Patrick to rid his court of these lords, is sacrificing them to rid himself of Sir Patrick, or is sacrificing all to some other purpose. This also must be irrelevant to the meaning of the poem. What is clear is the poet's evaluation: he almost gloats over the deaths of the noblemen, dividing them absolutely from the hero he affirms. One is aware first of the sardonic humor with which he reports their deaths:
O our Scots nobles were richt laith
To weet their cork-heild schoone;
Bot lang owre a' the play wer playd,
Thair hats they swam aboone.
Fussily loath to wet their feet, they end up thoroughly wet, their hats floating above them. Though less pronounced, the sardonic strain persists in the two stanzas reporting the hopeless vigil of their wives. But why two stanzas? In so brief a poem, two such similar stanzas may at first appear ex- cessive. It is precisely here that we should become aware of another major implica- tion. Only a few details lend variety. The stanzas begin identically, picking up and extending the "lang" of the preceding stanza. "O lang, lang, may thair ladies sit" opens the first of these paired stanzas, and the second changes only the pronoun and the verb: "O lang, lang, may the ladies stand." "Wi' thair fans into their hand" is the second line of the first, while the second stanza substitutes "gold kems in their hair." In the first stanza it is Sir Patrick they will not see "Cum sailing to the land"; in the second it is "thair ain deir lords" they will see "na mair." Of these variations, the most striking are the cos- tume details. Innocent in themselves, they become significant in the repetition, for fans and gold combs, especially when added to cork-heeled shoes,[17] are foreign, southern, perhaps specifically Spanish, frippery. The poet pictures the nobility not only as fussily dandified but as distinctively un-Scottish.[18]
When we now remember the king's "blude-reid wine," we realize that the court is represented as all of a piece. It is clear what a good Scotch king ought to be drinking instead of that southern import. Though the line obviously connotes that he is a blood drinker, one suspects that the poet counts upon an even stronger aversion in his audience to the fact that the king is not a whiskey drinker.
In other words, whatever the motives of the king, whatever we may guess about his plot relation to the lords who drown, the real point of the poem lies in the contrast the poet draws between the court and Sir Patrick. Though probably fiction, this is nonetheless a poem of political protest, an attack upon the effeminate foreign influences in the court, a patriotic affirmation of the manly, loyal Scotsman isolated from power, "walking on the sand." The king's first innocent-sounding request for a "guid sailor" leads to the wasteful death of "guid Sir Patrick Spence," the adjective having shifted to stress virtue more than capability. No particular motive is given for this misuse of goodness, this apparent animosity to virtue. The poet does not deal in motivation: he presents it as Scotland's tragedy that the country is ruled by so un-Scottish a king, a scoundrel whose yes-men sit at his knees, while he wastes the services of those at whose feet the whole foppish court deserves to lie. Though it speaks thus in the idiom of its time-though it is propaganda for a cause, or against a regime, historians might judge in terms other than the poet's- "Sir Patrick Spence" is not merely a period piece or a literary curiosity. It continues to convey forcefully that recurrent emotional experience which is compounded of disaffection from one's government and loyalty to one's ideals for one's country.
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Footnotes:
1 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York, 1957), 2:17-18. The prefatory note to volume 2 (Child's part 4) is dated 1886. In spite of his preference for Percy's version, which spells the name Spence, Child adopts in his discussion the Spens spelling of other versions, and his choice has led most anthologists to revise Percy's spelling. In dealing with what are supposedly transcriptions of oral materials, one should perhaps not quibble about such details, but I see no reason for abandoning the Percy spelling as I argue for the superiority of Percy's version.
2 Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 2d ed. (London, 1767), 1:76-78. The first edition, which I have not seen, was printed in 1765.
3 Percy, p. 76. Wood is the hero of Child's D.
4 It is true that Robert Chambers, in The Scottish Ballads (Edinburgh, 1829), adopted as occasion for the ballad William Motherwell's citation of an event in 1281; but this, as I will suggest below, is not very convincing and, in any case, pro- vides no corroborative mention of a Sir Patrick Spence. I owe my belated knowledge of Chambers's volume to the kindness of Professor G. Ross Roy, who, after reading a draft of this article, not only called my attention to this version but pro- vided me with copies of the relevant pages.
5 The usual assumptions would place its composition somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. David C. Fowler, in The Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, N.C., 1968), assumes that it was written in the eighteenth century shortly before Percy received it from Edinburgh in August 1763 (pp. 239-40), and considers it "a skilled and subtle echoing of earlier ballad styles" (p. 255). This late dating would not explain how it is that Percy was already aware of "modern copies" using the name of Sir Andrew Wood. The date of composition is not, in any case, important to my argument. [Modern Philology, August 1970]
6 I have charted some of the proliferation in the Appendix to this article.
7 Chambers's version is longer, having thirty-four stanzas to I's twenty-nine, but it is a composite put together by Chambers himself "from that which was printed in Herd's Collection, with a few additional verses from those found in the publications of Sir Walter Scott, and Messrs Jamieson, Motherwell and Buchan" (p. 3). Child was justified in ignoring it; he prints all of Chambers's sources.
8 Chambers's own will to believe in the historicity of the ballad is demonstrated through his thinking it "extremely probable, that Sir Patrick Spens lived near the little port of Aberdour, on the north side of the Frith of Forth; which port, though now the most trifling imaginable, might then have been in use as a sort of haven for the town of Dunferm- line, from which it is not far distant." He calls attention to "an extremely fine tract of hard white sand to the east of Aberdour," and admits that "the imagination can hardly be restrained" from picturing Sir Patrick on that particular beach. He points out that it was formerly "considered impossible, or at least highly imprudent, to sail during winter" (p. 4), without noting how unlikely that, however protracted the nuptials, a midsummer departure would lead to a midwinter return.
9 As for the eight versions in Child which are shorter than A, one of them, D, has an obvious gap in the narrative between the fourth and fifth of its eight stanzas, while the others, L through R, are merely fragments involving details from other versions.
10 This climactic affirmation is played down in six of Child's versions (B, C, E, G, I, and J) through reversing the order and putting the more sentimental stanzas about the waiting woman at the end of the poem after the sea-floor stanza. Versions E and J, in addition, lose the whole point through reversing the position of the drowned men, putting the hero at the lords' feet--as does the four-stanza fragment P, in which the hero is Earl Patrick Graham. Version D neither makes nor reverses the point but simply loses it: "And there lies good Sir Andrew Wood, / And a' the Scottish fleet." Version K does the same: "An there it lies young Patrick Spens, / And mony bonnie boys him wi." Version F gives the information twice, contradicting itself: "There you will find young Patrick lye, / Wi his Scots lords at his head." Then, in the next and final stanza: "And there it lies Earl Patrick Spens, / His men all at his feet." Except for P, already mentioned, the fragments from L through R have no sea-floor stanzas. This leaves, of all Child's versions, only H which ends with the same climax of affirmation found in A.
11 The same laugh giving way to a tear appears, of course, in other ballads. One can only say that, whether it was original here or already traditional, it is used in "Sir Patrick Spence" with singular aptness. Compare, for example, its much less appropriate use in "Mary Hamilton" (Child, no. 173), where, with ample reason for the tear, there is no excuse for the laugh.
12 Percy prints it "this time o' the zeir," the z being his attempt to reproduce Middle English yogh.
13 I am sorry to say I have not been able to relocate this note, which I saw several years ago. There is no point in listing the editors who give "broad" as the meaning, but the following brief notices sample some of the other glosses in recent standard anthologies: "broad, official," Dean (1950); "broad, i.e. plainspoken," Spencer (1951); "full, long," Stallman and Watters (1954); "plain," Connolly (1955); "bold, straightforward," Adams (1963); "plain, clear," Zill- man (1966); "informal," MacQueen and Scott (1966); "clear," Calderwood and Toliver (1968); "braid letter: an open letter," Greenfield and Weatherhead (1968).
14 What may have led to the word's coming to have this meaning is not, of course, obvious. I would suggest that the connection might be found in "broad is the way that leadeth to destruction" (Matt. 7:13). Compare, for example, stanza 13 of "Thomas Rymer" (Child, no. 37): "And see not ye that braid, braid road, That lies across yon lillie leven? That is the path of wickedness, Tho some call it the road to heaven."
15. There is a possibly related form in The Winter's Tale. The "Clown," the younger shepherd, asks whether Auto- lycus has for sale "any braided wares" (IV, iv, 201). This the OED glosses as new, not shopworn, defining "unbraided wares" as "goods that have changed colour, tarnished, faded." Might not "braided" carry also the sense of fraudulent or de- ceptive, of appearance belying quality? "Unbraided wares" would then be items which were in fact as good as they looked.
16. The first version of "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" (Child, no. 81) was printed in 1658; it is only the G-version, collected by Motherwell in or after 1825, that includes the following stanza: His lady wrate a braid letter, And seald it wi her hand, And sent it off to Wee Messgrove, To come at her command. Similarly, in the version of "Johnie Scot" (Child, no. 99C) collected by Motherwell (some forty years later than the A-version), we find "she has wrote a braid letter, / And sealed it wi her hand," followed in the next stanza by: The first line of the letter he read, His heart was full of joy; But he had not read a line past two Till the salt tears blind his eye. In the L-version (collected ca. 1830): The king he wrote a letter broad And sealed it with his hands, And sent it down to Johnnie Scott, In Scotland where he stands. In N (ca. 1828 ?), the lady declares, "I will write a broad letter, / And seal it with my hand," and Lord John responds in the next stanza with laughter and tears. In Motherwell's version of "Lord Derwentwater" (Child, no. 208A), "Our king has wrote a lang letter" which again, two stanzas later, leads to the now expectable "first line... smile" and then "tears." This is a "broad letter" in C (collected around 1812), a "braid letter" in D (ca. 1826), followed by "The teir blinded his ee," and again a "broad letter" in F (ca. 1828). Further kings writing "braid," or "braed," lettersappear in the C-version of "James Hatley" (Child, no. 244), and the E-version of "Young Allen" (Child, no. 245), both collected in the 1820's, and the latter a particularly striking hodgepodge of elements from "Sir Patrick Spence." Other private, as opposed to royal, "broad" letters appear in the J-version of "The Earl of Aboyne" (Child, no. 235- Motherwell again), and in "Bonny Baby Livingston" (Child, no. 222), "The Duke of Gordon's Daughter" (Child, no. 237), and "Glenlogie, or, Jean o Bethelnie" (Child, no. 238). The last three are of particular interest because the phrase turns up in what Child considered the earliest versions. However, the A-version of "Bonny Baby Livingston" was collected in 1800; "Glenlogie," in 1802-3; and even "The Duke of Gordon's Daughter," though it comes from the Percy Papers, was presumably collected only some time after the first printing of "Sir Patrick Spence" in 1765. In this ballad the king is the recipient of the letter, not the writer:
Duke Gordon has wrote a broad letter, And sent it to the king...
One "broad letter" is written in "Glenlogie" A; two are written in E and F. The F-version is in fact the earliest collected of that ballad, having been sent to Percy in 1768. In the second stanza, "She [Jean of Bethelnie] writ a broad letter, and pennd it fou lang"; in the seventh:
Her father, king's chaplain, and one of great skill,
Did write a broad letter, and pennd it fou weel;
He as writ a broad letter, and pennd it fou lang,
And sent it Earl Ogie as fast as 't can gang.
The next stanza gives the usual response only after quoting the letter:
"Bonny Earl Ogie, be courteous and kind;
My daughter loves you; must she die in her prime?"
When he read the first lines, a loud laugh gave he;
But or he redd the middle, the tear filld his ee.
Of all the broad letters in the ballads, this is the only one which, by date and circumstance, seems a possible contender for priority with that in "Sir Patrick Spence." Not only is it early, but there is reason here for the laugh and the tear. However, it remains true that "Sir Patrick Spence" was already in print (and what its earlier history may have been we do not know) when "Glenlogie" F was collected; that "broad" appears to make sense only as a misunderstanding of "braid," meaning deceitful, which the chaplain's letter decided- ly is not; and that the laugh and the tear are a part of the gen- eral technique of implication in "Sir Patrick Spence," while they merely give Earl Ogie's response to a known situation in "Glenlogie" F. If "Sir Patrick Spence" is not, as I now assume, the original behind all this material, it is quite clearly the most successful in exploiting it.
17 Cork-soled shoes, called "pantofles," are discussed by M. Channing Linthicum in Costume in the Drama of Shake- speare and his Contemporaries (Oxford, 1936), pp. 250-55, and may or may not be what are mentioned here. "Since the panto- fle had a very high sole of cork, the wearer was elevated, and therefore proud; hence the expression 'to stand upon pan- tofles' indicated pride" (p. 253). The only references to corkheels of which I am aware outside of "Sir Patrick Spence" associate them with light or wanton women: "They [wives] weare so much Corke under their heeles they cannot choose but love to caper" (Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece [1609], ed. Allan Holaday, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 34, no. 3 [1950], lines 1580-81); and Hipollito to Infaelice in Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part 2 (printed 1630, known as early as 1608), "Oh who would trust your corcke- heeld sex? I thinke/ To sate your lust, you would love a Horse, a Beare,/ A croaking Toade, so your hot itching veines / Might have their bound..." (The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 2 [Cambridge, 1955], act 2, scene 1, lines 175-79).
18 This whole point is obscured in other versions of the ballad, which substitute more sentimental details for the for- eign-sardonic strain, putting babies in the ladies' arms, or switching from the wives of the lords to Sir Patrick's own wife and child. In the fragmentary M, the mourning ladies sound more like fish wives, "Wi their gown tails owre their crown."