The True Lovers (or Lord Lovel) - a folksong mentioning Kenton (possibly the Devon one?)

Kenton Church, Devon, 1982 - from John Salmon [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

"Lord Lovel he stood at his own castle gate,
Combing his milk-white steed,
When up came Lady Nancy Bell
To wish her lover good speed speed speed,
To wish her lover good speed.

" Where are you going, Lord Lovel ?" she said,
" Oh, where are you going ?" said she,
" I'm going my Lady Nancy Bell,
Strange countries for to see see see,
Strange countries for to see."

" When will you come back, Lord Lovel ?" she said,
" When will you come back to me ?"
"In a year or two, or three at most,
I'll return to my Lady Nancy cy cy,
I'll return to my Lady Nancy ?"

But he hadden been gone but a year and a day
Strange countries for to see,
When languishing thoughts came into his head
Lady Nancy Bell to see see see,
Lady Nancy Bell to see.

So he rode, and he rode on his milk-white steed,
Till he came to Kenton town,
When he heard St. Andrew's Church bells ring,
And the people all mourning around round round,
And the people all mourning around.

" Oh, what is the matter ?" Lord Lovel, he said,
"Oh, what is the matter ?" said he,
" A Lord's Lady is dead," an old woman said,
" And some call her the Lady Nancy cy cy,
And some call her the Lady Nancy."

So he ordered the grave to be opened wide,
And the shroud to be turned down,
And then he kissed her clay-cold lips,
Till the tears came trickling down down down,
Till the tears came trickling down.

Lady Nancy died as it might be to-day,

Lord Lovel he died as to-morrow,
Lady Nancy, she died out of pure, pure grief,
Lord Lovel, he died out of sorrow sorrow sorrow,
Lord Lovel he died out of sorrow.

Lady Nancy was laid in the cold churchyard,

Lord Lovel was laid in the choir ;
And out of her bosom there grew a red rose,
And out of his a sweet brier rier rier,
And out of his a sweet brier.

They grew and they grew to the church steeple top,

And then they could grow no higher,
So there they entwined in a true-lovers-knot,
For all true lovers to admire mire mire, 

For all true lovers to admire.

Sung by Mr. Ted Ward, at a harvest supper, September, 1893."

Hewett 1900

Map - Kenton

[Some tunes and words exists here, Roud No. 48, one from Sabine Baring-Gould's manuscripts, that looks the same.  It is also Child Ballads N° 75. A good rendition is found here, though 'Kenton Town' is now 'Fair London Town'.  The Kenton here could well be the Kenton in Devon, by Berry Pomeroy Castle, seeing as Hewett collected her stories in Devon, and especially in this area - However Kenton church is dedicated to All Saints, and not specifically to Saint Andrew - it could be the Kenton in London!]

Some Old Songs of Devonshire

Me playing fiddle - if you wish to use my photos please attribute this blog, thanks!

[I am a little uncertian what to do here - Please say if you think I have got it wrong.

Sarah Hewett includes a few Devonian folksongs in the end of her book.  I am uncertian whether to include them here. As this blog is mostly about the folklore of places, and most of the songs do not mention the place they are about I feel I should leave them out. Also including folk-songs takes us into huge territory, as a glance around the collections of EFDSS website will show. Most are not that unique to the place they where connected.

However, just because folklore appears in song form dosent meen it is not folklore!

It is a hard call to make for someone who has spent his life enraptured in the musical arms of folkmusic.

I think on this occasion, unless the song contains a reffrence to a specific West Country place I will simply list the song titles, and leave it at that. 

I am so slow at creating these posts I feel it would take to much time to include folksongs. Perhaps when I am in my 90's, and most of the folklore that is not in copyright is up here I will start on songs as well.

So here are the songs I am not detailing from Hewett 1900 - 

A SONG WRITEN ON THE OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY 1844

YOUNG ROGER OF THE VALLEY.

THE OLD MAN'S SONG.

DADDY FOX.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING, FAIR MAID ?

THE OLD MAN WHO LIVED IN A WOOD.

RAISING THE ANCHOR.

THE DEAR LITTLE LETTER.

CHILDREN'S SONG FOR ALL SOULS' DAY.

THE KNIGHT KILLED THE SQUIRE.

THE DEVIL AND THE TAILOR.

THE STAR IN THE CANDLE.

A ROBIN TAPPING AT THE WINDOW PANE.

The following songs do reference a place, so I will include them -

PURTY JANE.

THE TRUE LOVERS.

JAN POOK.

BARBARA ALLEN.

THE WEST COUNTRY MAN.

BARNSTAPLE FAIR.]

The Daisy in Devon

A Devon Daisy -  Bellis perennis- if you wish to use my pictures please attribute this blog!

"The daisy is popularly looked upon as the emblem of modesty. In the days of chivalry in Europe the daisy played an interesting part in many a love affair. When a knight was an accepted lover, his lady allowed him to engrave a daisy on his arms ; when he proposed and she would neither say "Yes" or "No," she wore a crown of field daisies, which meant " I'll think about it." Readers of Faust will remember how Margaret, as she walked in the garden, plucked off the petals of an aster, one after another, saying, half aloud " He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me not he loves me not he loves me !"

This old-world custom is still in vogue among the lasses of sunny Devon."

Hewett 1900

The Death of King Arthur

The Death of Arthur - The Boy's King Arthur: Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Edited for Boys by Sidney Lanier (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922). Scanned by Dave Pape.

"Near Camelford is the place where Arthur fell mortally wounded, and his treacherous nephew, Mordred, was also slain.

Here fell in that terrible battle the remaining Knights of the Round Table, dying with their lord - one only survived.

When all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the wintry sea,
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonness around their lord.
- TENNYSON.

Sloven Bridge was anciently called Slaughter Bridge, because it was choked with dead by that fatal battle.

Valentine (Undated)

Map - Slaughter Bridge

King Arthur at Tintagel

King Arthur being taken by Merlin - The Boy's King Arthur: Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Edited for Boys by Sidney Lanier (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922). Scanned by Dave Pape.

"Arthur was born in Tintagel, and kept his court in manhood here, at times, surrounded by his famous knights. Fuller gives us this quaint account of the King of British chivalry.

"King Arthur," he says, "son of Uther Pendragon, was born in Tintagel Castle, and proved afterwards monarch of Great Britain. He may fitly be termed the British Hercules in three respects : (1) for his doubtful birth; (2) painful life - one famous for his twelve labours, the other for his twelve victories against the Saxons, and both of them had been greater had they been made less, and the reports of them reduced within the compass of credibility. (3) Violent and woeful death: our Arthur's being as lamentable and more honourable, - not caused by feminine jealousy, but masculine treachery - being inurdured by Mordred near the place where he was born,-

'As if no other place on Britain's spacious earth
Were worthy of his end, but where he had his birth.'"

Valentine (Undated)

Map - Tintagel 

Castle Rock and the Black Monk - Part 2

Castle Rock - © Copyright Paul Jennings and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

"...The baron's cries summoned the affrighted servants, but when they reached his room they found their lord lying on the floor a blackened corpse. His only son, solemnly impressed by his father's fate, went on the Crusades and did many acts of valour against the infidels. But even to the Holy Land the black monk followed him, and never left him day or night. The unhappy man, driven nearly mad, sought to bury his trouble in drink. He grew a wild, dissolute gallant, and the mother and sister that he had left in the castle on the rock wept bitter tears over his fall, and were glad when death summoned them to the land where "the wicked cease from troubling."

Years afterwards the knight returned to his Devonshire home, and one Sunday morning, as he rode through the valley, he heard the church bells calling men to prayer. They reminded him of the days of his innocent childhood; of his mother's teachings, and lured him towards the house of prayer. The black monk sought to draw him back, with the whisper of false pleasures awaiting him; but as the sinner hesitated, scarcely able to wrest himself away from his evil associate, he saw in the church porch the forms of his mother and sister, clad in garments of light, and beckoning to him with their spirit hands. He tore himself from the grasp of the monk, rushed to the porch, and darting into the church, threw himself before the altar.

The black monk developed into a fiend, and stamping his foot there was an earthquake; the castle on the rock shook to its foundations and fell crashing into the valley; the rocks rolled over, the Ring was formed, and where a smiling vale had been there remained the Valley of Rocks. Was this an allegory? Did the black monk personify an evil habit, so difficult to break?"

Valentine (undated)

Map - Castle Rock

The Death of King Rufus - part 4

"...The sun sank; twilight fell on the forest, and still the Red King lay bleeding beneath the oak. A charcoal burner returning from his day's work found the body at last, and putting it into his cart took it to Winchester, where the slain monarch was finally buried.

Kingsley, in his quaint imitation of a ballad of the period, gives a somewhat different version of the story:-

THE RED KING. The king was drinking in Malwood Hall,
There came in a monk before them all;
He thrust by squire, he thrust by knight,
Stood over against the dais aright;
And "The word of the Lord, thou cruel Red King,
The word of the Lord to thee I bring.
A grimly sweven I dreamt yestreen;
I saw thee lie under the hollins green
And through thy heart an arrow been
And out of thy body a smoke did rise,
Which smirched the sunshine out of the skies.
So if thou God's anointed be,
I rede thee unto thy soul thou see:
For mitre and pall thou hast y'sold,
False knight to Christ, for gain and gold;
And for this thy forest were digged down, all
Steading and hamlet and churches tall;
And Christe's poor were ousten forth,
To beg their bread from south to north;
So tarry at home and fast and pray,
Lest fiends hunt thee in the judgment day."
The monk he vanished where he stood;
King William sterte up wroth and wod;
Quod he: "Fools' wits will jump together,
The Hampshire ale and the thunder weather
Have turned the brains of us both, I think;
And monks are curst when they fall to drink.
A lothly sweven I dreamt last night,
How there hoved anigh me a griesly knight,
Did smite me down to the pit of hell,
I shrieked and woke, so fast I fell.
There's Tyrrel as sour as I, perdie,
So he of you all shall hunt with me,
A grimly brace for a hart to see:" The Red King down from Malwood came,
His heart with wine was all aflame,
His eyne were shotten, red as blood,
He rated and swore wherever he rode. They roused a hart, that grimly brace,
A hart of ten, a hart of grease,
Fled over against the kinge's place.
The sun it blinded the kinge's ee,
A fathom beyond his hocks shot he;
"Shoot thou," quod he, "in the fiende's name!
To lose such a quarry were seven years shame!"
And he hove up his arm to mark the game
Tyrrel he shot full light, God wot;
For whether the saints they swerved the shot,
Or whether by treason men knowen not,
But under the arm, in a secret part,
The iron fled through the kinge's heart. Tyrrel he smiled full grim that day,
Quod "Shooting of kings is no bairn's play;"
And he smote in the spurs and fled fast away."

 Valentine (undated)
Map - Malwood Castle
Map - Winchester

Ugborough and the Bishop of Worcester

"There are two good brasses of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in this church [Harford Church].  The former is a knight in armour, Thomas Williams, Speaker of the house of Commons, the other a coloured brass to the Prideaux family, placed here by John Prideux, Bishop of Worcester, in 1639.

Of him it is told, that as a young man in Harford he competed for the post of parish clerk, in the neighboring parish of Ugborough, but failed to get the appointment. He went to Oxford, and worked in a menial position. Afterwards a patron kindly procured for him admittance to a college, where through his ability he rose from one position to another until he was made bishop of Worcester; and was wont to remark "If I could have been a parish clerk of Ugborough, I had never been the bishop of Worcester."

Cresswell 1921

Map - Harfod Church
Map - Ugborough

Dosemary Pool - part 3

'...Surrounded with all that is supposed to minister to the enjoyment of a sensual life, time passes on, and "Tregeagle ne'er notyc'd its flyghte." Yet we are told "he marked each day with some damnable deed." In the midst of his vicious career he is returning home through a violent storm, and he is accosted by a damsel on a white horse and a little page by her side, who craves his protection. Tregeagle takes this beautiful maiden to his castle. The page is made to tell the lady's story; she is called Goonhylda, and is the daughter of "Earl Cornwaill," living in Launceston, or, as it was then called, "Dunevyd Castle." Engaged in the pleasures of the hunt, the lady and her page are lost and overtaken by the storm. Tregeagle, as the storm rages savagely, makes them his "guests for the nyghte," promising to send a "quicke messenger" to inform her father of her whereabouts. At the same time --

"If that the countenance speaketh the mynde,
Dark deeds he revolved in hys breaste."

The earl hears nothing of his daughter; and having passed a miserable night, he sets forth in the morning, "wyth hys knyghtes, and esquyers, and serving-men all," in search of his child; and --

"At length to the plaine he emerged from the woode,
For a father, alas, what a syghte!
There lay her fayre garments all drenched in blood,
Her palfreye all torn in the dark crimson floode,
By the ravenous beasts of the nyghte."...' [cont.]

Hunt 1903

Notes on Tom, Jane and Jack the Tinker

'In some of the old geese dances (guise dances, from danse diguis!) the giant Blunderbuss and Tom performed a very active part. Blunderbuss was always a big-bellied fellow--his smoke-frock being well stuffed with straw. He fought with a tree, and the other giant with the wheel and axle. The giant is destroyed, as in the story, by falling on the axle. The tinker, of whom we have yet to tell, with his unfailing coat of darkness, comes in and beats Tom, until Jane comes out with the broom and beats the tinker; and then,--as in nearly all these rude plays,--St George and the Turkish knight come in; but they have no part in the real story of the drama.'

Hunt 1903

Bolster Day celebration, 2005

Final edit documenting the days events organised by the people of St.Agnes in Cornwall, UK on May 1st 2005. The locals dress up and perform a staged annual show on the cliffs near the town at Chapel Porth to relay a story about the giant 'Big Bad Bolster'. Legend tells he stalked the area and ate the locals. This footage was originallly filmed for Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's Folk Archive. This edit was put together by Matt Redman and burnt to DVD for the folk of St.Agnes and organisers of the event for keepsake and thanks. The Bolster story itself is copyright to the St.Agnes Bolster Committee.

[held under a Creative Commons license:Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs - please feel yourselves attributed!]