Textual to Oral: the Impact of Transmission on Narrative Word-Art

Textual to Oral:
the Impact of Transmission on Narrative Word-Art
Tom Petlitt
This paper will undertake an approach to ‚the oral history of the Middle
Ages‘ which is indirect in at least three ways. In the first instance it studies recent
oral tradition rather than medieval texts directly, in this reflecting the general
thrust of the writer’s research, which has characteristically sought to supplement
direct approaches to medieval and Renaissance Iiterature and culture by the
indirect (and philologically less challenging) one of exploring whether folk
traditions of the last two centuries or so, be they songs, legends or customs, may
preserve something of, or otherwise cast light on, their Iate-rnedieval and earlymodem
antecedents. This is done in the spirit of Peter Burke’s ‚regressive
method ‚,1 moving cautiously from better-documented recent tradition to worsedocumented
early tradition, rather than that of much earlier (and some recent)
research, which, on the assumption that folklore preserves a primitive, prehistoric
culture, can assume a massive continuity in tradition.2 Secondly, while one
imagines that for most historians, the orality that most concerns them pertains to
the phase that comes before textualization, that is the eye-witness reports, the
rumours, the legends, etc. that intervene between an event and the making of the
surviving written record of the event (and which significantly affect the validity
and accuracy ofthat record)/ this study is of an orality that follows textualization,
when a written (here more strictly a printed) text is memorized and later retrieved
from memory in performance, memorized by others from such performance and
reproduced by them in performatice in turn, and so on, in what mutates and
bifurcates into the verbal instability and polytextuality endemic to folk tradition.
And lastly, rather than dealing with conventional historical (i.e. functionally
utilitarian) texts like legal, financial or administrative documents, this study will
1 Pcter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe ( 1 978; rcpr. London: Temple Smith,
1979), pp. 8 1 -87.
2 For some vigorous animadversions against thc survivalist approach sce Georgina Boyes,
„Cultural Survivals Theory and Traditional Customs. An Examination of the Effects of
Privi1eging on the Form and Perccption of Some Eng1ish Calendar Customs“, Folk L ife, 26
(! 987-8), pp. 5-1 1 ; for an instance of its resurgence sec Linda Woodbridge, „B1ack and White
and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress Amongst the Ndembu,“, Renaissance Quarterly, 40
( ! 987), pp. 247-297.
3 As discussed in Joseph J. Vansina’s classic Oral Tradition. A Srudy in Historical Methodology
[orig. Brusse1s, 1961], trans. H.M. Wright (London, 1965; repr. Harmondsorth: Penguin,
1973).
20 TOM PETIITT
examine song texts, that is to say consciously constructed verbal artefacts,
examples of what my title designates as ‚word-art‘, by way of proffering a term
suitable for covering both the written (and printed) works for which ‚literature‘ is
strictly appropriate, and the oral traditions for which ‚oral literature‘ is somewhat
awkward.
It can be hoped, however, that despite or even because of these indirections
the approach illustrated in what follows can be of more general historical interest
and significance, in addition to its intrinsic merits (such as they are) in the study of
traditional narrative song. The advantage of studying recent traditions is of course
that they are better documented than their genuinely medieval antecedents. The
compensatory disadvantage is change over time, so that (in Peter Burke’s words)
the regressive method ‚does not consist of taking descriptions of relatively recent
situations and cheerfully assuming that they apply equally weil to earlier periods‘.5
In the present instance, however, change over time – alterations in a narrative over
decades or centuries – is precisely the phenomenon to be investigated, rather than
an obstacle complicating the investigation: The changes are interesting and
significant in their own right, rather than a regrettable distortion of the original
text. The investigation to follow earns its ticket to a symposium and a publication
on oral history by offering a methodology that provides unusually reliable insights
into the nature of oral tradition and precisely what it does to a verbal artefact subjected
to its preserving and re-shaping processes.
The difference between post-textual and pre-textual tradition, meanwhile,
need not be exaggerated. Once it loses touch with the original, post-textual
Iransmission is as oral and aural as pre-textual. And by involving both visual
word-art (texts) and aural (performances) at the same time, this present investigation
is in some ways closer to medieval traditions, which characteristically
involve a close and complex interaction between written and oral transmission,
than either investigations of more strictly (if never completely) illiterate traditions,
among (for want o f a better term) less ‚developed‘ cultures, or investigations of
the processes of memory and recall within our modern, overwhelmingly literate,
culture.6
Finally, the difference between a consciously crafted (e.g. ballad) narrative of
an event and, say, an eye-witness report of the same occurrence, is a matter of
degree rather than kind. There has been a ‚literary turn‘ in historical studies which
acknowledges that even the most apparently factual reports are shaped by formal
constraints, or tend towards conformity with an existing paradigmatic (or almost
4 This term also offers the opportunity of distinguishing between visual word-art (i.e. literature)
which is read by the eye, and aural word-art which is heard by the ear.
5 Burke, Popular Culture, p. 83.
6 For an excellent instance of the former categpry, see the work of Karl Reicht, for instance his
Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions. Forms, Poetic Stmcture (New York: Garland, 1992); and
ofthe latter Wanda T. Wallace and David C. Rubin, ‚“The Wreck ofthe Old 97‘: A real event
remernbered in song,“ in Remembering reconsidered: Ecologica/ and traditional approaches
to the study of memo1y, eds. Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1 988), pp. 283-310.
TEXTVAL TO ORAL 21
‚generic‘) model for their kind.7 And as it happens most of the ballads studied in
the project behind this paper (like the specific instance it analyses) are ‚historical‘
in the sense of claiming to report events that really did happen, and which can
sometimes be documented in more conventional historical records (or rather
which have been recorded in the narrative mode typical of historical narratives
other than the ballad) such as court reports and newspapers.8
The latter part of this introductory apologia is occasioned by the simple
circumstance that this paper derives from a project which is designed to contribute
to the study of English literary history rather than history in the more conventional
sense (and not to be confused with a historieist fashion of literary interpretation).
Early English aural word-art has by definition virtually disappeared, leaving only
a few, visual, traces, but oral transmission is a significant or even decisive factor
for two fields within the conventional literary canon: Elizabethan drama (including
the plays of Shakespeare) and the traditional (or ‚popular‘) ballad. While
it is hard to imagine an author more central to the literary canon than Shakespeare,
it is increasingly appreciated that the theatrical dimension of his plays is not merely
an aspect of their background to which occasional lip-service may be paid, but a
decisive force in the shaping and reshaping of the very texts on which critical
endeavour is based. That theatrical context includes a significant oral element in
the memorizing of the text by the players and its repeated reconstruction from
memory in perforrnance, plus the possibility of some kind of recording from oral
tradition in the ‚memorial reconstruction‘ of ‚reported‘ Shakespearean texts (the
notorious ‚bad‘ quartos).9 Elizabethan drama will correspondingly be accorded a
passing glance below: the bulk of this paper will, however, be devoted to the
ballad.
000
‚Ballad‘, not least in Medieval Studies, is an awkward terrn with numerous
meanings, best distinguished by some kind of modification. Thus the Middle
English lyric genre of French origins, the ba/lade, even though it may be a distant
ancestor of ‚the ballad‘ in one or more of its other senses, 10 is best distinguished
by italics and French spelling. At the other extreme ‚ballad‘ in the modern sense of
a pop-song with slow tune and sentimental content is best forgotten altogether,
1 The most striking instance of this approach for the present writer has been Natalie Zernon
Davis’s Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and rheir Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Poliry Press, I 988).
8 For a fascinating exploration of how both songs and newspapers shape events into conformity
with pre-existing narrative paradigms see Anne 8. Cohen, Poor Pearl, Poor Girl! The
Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Bailad and Newspaper (Austin: Univ. ofTexas Press, 1981).
9 Now subjected to an intense analysis in Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts. The
10 ‚Bad‘ Quartos and Their Contexis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I 996).
Albert Friedman, The Bailad Revival. Studies in the lnfluence of Popular on Sophisticated
Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I 96 I), eh. II, and „The Late Medieval Ballade
and the Origi n of Broadside Balladry,“ Medium …Evum, 27 (1958), pp. 96-110.
22 ToM PErriTT
whatever the ultimate connections. This effectively restricts the meaning of
‚ballad‘ in literary history (in English) to a popular narrative song: ‚popular‘ in the
sense of being known and appreciated by many people who do not need special
qualifications (e.g. wealth or education) to do so; ’song‘ in the sense of being
performed to a tune, whose repetitions, combined with the words they accompany,
divide the song into stanzas, and whose melodic structures (reinforced by verbal
rhymes) divide those stanzas into two or (more often) four lines. 1 1
But among songs termed ballads it is conventional, and entirely proper, at
least in the first instance, to distinguish two major traditions: the ‚broadside
ballad‘ (which is what most early-modern references to ‚ballads‘ designate), and
what will here be called the ‚traditional ballad‘. The latter, in the definitive
English scholarly edition, is designated the ‚popular ballad‘, 12 but in the century or
more which has passed since its publication ‚popular‘ has come to be associated
more emphatically with the mass culture of the modern media, of which the
‚broadside bailad‘ was indeed itself a significant forerunner. As the name implies,
broadside ballads were printed and distributed on single sheets of paper, 1 and
they were written (to fit existing popular tunes) by hack-writers in the employ of
the publishers, produced in !arge numbers and sold at stalls or by itinerant balladpeddlars.
In contrast the ‚traditional ballad‘ is often associated with ‚tradition‘ in
the sense of oral transmission and performance, but the connection is not
definitive: some texts of ‚traditional ballads‘ have actually appeared on broadsides,
while conversely some songs, even narrative songs, retrieved from oral
tradition are not considered ‚ballads‘. And with regard to the Middle Ages of
course there are ballads, preserved in manuscripts, which chronologically did not
have the option of being broadside ballads, but whose relationship to oral tradition
is not empirically documented.
The traditional bailad is best defined in the first instance not in terms of its
transmission or format but by internal, verbal features, effectively by the way it
tells its story within the constraints of the stanzaic form. 14 There are only a few
surviving medieval English texts which display this ‚balladic‘ narrative mode, but
they do so convincingly, and one of the best examples is ‚St Stephen and Herod‘,
1 1 B.H. Bronson, ed., The Singing Tradition ofChild’s Popular Ballads (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1 976), p. xxvii.
12 Francis James Chi1d, ed., The English and Scottish Popu/ar Bal/ads, 10 vo1s. (Boston, 1892-8;
repr. in 5 vols. New York: Dover Books, 1965).
13 Technically the paper was a broadsheet, the name ofthe song-type indicating it was printed on
one side only ofthis. There is a final terminological twist in the circumstance that not all songs
published in this formal were narrative, but it is not significant enough to be madc an issue of
in the present context. See Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature (Tavistock: David
and Charles, 1 973), for a c1ear historica1 review.
14 Standard reviews of bailad form are provided in G.H. Gerould, The Bailad of Tradition (Oxford,
1932; repr. New York: Gordian Press, 1 974), and Flemming G. Andersen, et al., The Bailad
as Narrative. Studies in the Bailad Traditions of England, Scotland, Germany and Denmark
(Odense: Odense University Press, 1982).
TEXTUAL TO ORAL 23
from a mid-fifteenth-century MS (here in modemized spelling and orthography,
and with typographical markings to be explained below):
I. Saint Stephen was a clerk
in King Herod’s hall
And served him ofbread and cloth
as every king befall.
2. Stephen out ofkitchen carne,
with boar’s bead o n hand;
He saw a star was fair and bright
over Bethlehem stand.
3. He cast adown the boar’s head
and went into the hall:
‚I forsake thee, King Herod,
and thy works all.‘
4. ‚I forsake the. King Herod,
and thy works all;
There is a child in Bethlehem bom
is better than we all.‘
5. ‚What ails thee. Stephen?
What is thee befall?
Lacked thee either meat or drink
in King Herod’s Hatn‘
6. ‚Lacked me neither meat nor drink
in King Herod’s hall;
There is a child i n Bethlehem bom
is better than we all.‘
7. ‚What ails thee. Stephen?
art thou wood [mad] or begin to breed [brood]
Lacked thee either gold or fee,
or any rich weed [ clothes]?‘
8. ‚Lacked me neither gold nor fee
nor no rich weed;
There is a child in Bethlehem bom
shall help us at our need. ‚
9. ‚That is all so sooth, Stephen,
all so sooth iwis [certainly)
As this capon [cock] crow shall
that lies here in my dish.‘
I 0. That word was not so soon said,
that word in that hall,
The capon crew, ‚Christus natus est!‘
arnong the Iords all.
I I . ‚Rise up my tormentors,
by two and all by one
And Iead Stephen out oftbis town,
and stone him with stone!‘
24 TOM PETI!TT
12. Took they Stephen,
and stoned him in the way
And therefore is his eve
on Christ’s own day.15
This is quite on a par with the ‚classic‘ ballads of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Scotland which were paradigmatic in establishing the perceived
characteristics of the genre16 (or even with the analogous ballads – folkeviser
– of seventeenth-century Denmark) i n displaying balladic characteristics
such as narrative economy (e.g. the minimal setting of the scene and the absence
of descriptions of persons and places), impersonality (little comment or explanation
by the narrator – here confined to the last two lines) and dramatic
qualities: seven and a half of the song’s twelve stanzas comprise direct speech,
most of them providing the dialogue for the intense one to one confontation
between St Stephen and King Herod. In this the song also displays the
characteristic disjointed narrative progress (measured in events per stanza) of the
ballad, ‚leaping ‚ from the beginning into that dialogue (and later on to the
stoning), ‚lingering ‚ over the central scene (essentially stanzas 3 to I I , inclusive).
This lingering, in turn, is caused by a striking concentration of the repetitions
which characterize the ballad’s verbal style (the words concerned underlined i n
the text above). And taken a s a whole, this song displays a goodly range of the
bailad genre’s various types of verbal repetition: in terms of quantity there are
balances (between two stanzas or lines) and triads (sequences of three similar
units); in terms of quality there is simple repetition between adjacent stanzas (e.g.
3.3-4 : 4 . 1 -2), the repetition in an answer of the formulation of the question to
which it responds (e.g. 5.3-4 : 6.1-2; 7.3-4 : 8 . 1 -2), and in the narrating of an
action of the instruction to do it ( 1 1 .4 : 1 2.2); two similar events (Herod’s two
questions and Stephen’s two answers; 5-6 : 7-8) are rendered i n near identicial
phrases, some of which also participate in Stephen’s triad of exclamations that
‚There is a child in Bethlehem born‘ (4.3 : 6.3 : 8.3).
What i s barder to document is the form ulaic diction which is equally
characteristic of the balladic style, any given bailad sharing many phrases, lines,
half or even whole stanzas with other ballads, not as a result of the direct influence
this would normally be a sytpptom of in literary works, but because these formulas
or ‚commonplaces‘ are common to the tradition as a whole. Or rather to the local
tradition as a whole, for there is likely to be some variation in the corpus of
formulas between regional traditions and within traditions over time. There are not
really enough early English ballads surviviog (and they may survive from different
regions) to make formula-hunting a viable exercise, but as sometimes happens the
formulaic status of a particular formulation can be demonstrated by its reccurrence
within a single text in a way which is not caused by the structural repetitions just
discussed. I would suggest this is the case with ‚in King Herod’s hall‘ (italicized
15 The English and Scottish Popular Bal/ads, ed. Child, #22 [modernized TP].
16 Thomas Pettitt, „Mrs Brown’s ‚Lass of Roch Royal‘ and the Golden Age of Scottish Balladry,“
Jahrbuchfür Volksliedforschung, 29 ( 1 984), pp. 13-3 1 .
TEXTUAL TO ORAL 25
in the text above): the repetition between 5.4 and 6.2 is structural (formulation of
question repeated in formulation of answer), but that in 1 .2 is not. (In other songs,
of course, ‚Herod‘ would be replaced by other names or pronouns.) Otherwise
useful ‚filler‘ phrases such as ‚as every king befall‘ (1 .4), ‚all so sooth iwis‘ (9.2),
‚among the Iords all‘ ( 10.4), and ‚by two and all by one‘ ( 1 1 .2), along with phrases
for common actions or situations like ‚and went into the .. . ‚ (3.2), ‚with … on
band‘ (2.2), and ‚That word was not so soon said‘ ( 1 0 . 1 ) are also likely to have
formulaic status.
It would be fair to say that in the schalarship they have prompted over more
than two centuries (effectively since the publication of Bisbop Thomas Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1 767) the bailad question has been, directly
or indirectly, just how this balladic narrative mode came about. Amidst the
disagreements there has been a general consensus that, firstly, it is not a matter of
deliberate choice on the part of individual poets composing ballads and, secondly,
that it has some connection with the ballads‘ traditional, oral, context.
Early on there was a somewhat romantic theory of ‚communal composition‘
which saw ballads as deriving from an extremely primitive cultural context,
produced collectively in the frenzy of a ceremonial or celebratory tribal dance.
Most features of the balladic mode were tbe marks left by this process, but their
occurrence and intensity in a given bailad declined over the centuries as it was
subject to the interventions of individual singers 1 7 The communal origins theory
was pretty thoroughly shaken by Louise Pound, who questioned both its basic
premises and its empirical documentation,1 3 and indeed it is implicitly disproved
in the project this paper reflects, which shows precisely that in the trajectory of a
given song balladic features increase rather than decrease the Ionger it has been in
tradition. More recently, following a smaller scale effort by James H. Jones,19 and
deploying the insi􀇖hts of the ‚oral formulaic‘ approach of Milman Parry and
Albert Bates Lord,2 David Buchan prompted a fierce but fruitful controversy with
bis theory that most balladic features were symptomatic of the songs being
recreated at each singing by an improvisational process rather than reproduced (at
least in intention) verbatim from memory. In the process Buchan produced an
extremely insightful analysis of the nature of these balladic characteristics, and a
fascinating contextual history of the bailad tradition in North East Scotland, but
his central thesis has by and large not been accepted/1 and again the textual
17 Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Bailad (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907).
18 Louise Pound, Poetic Origins and the Bailad (New York: Russell & Russell, 1921).
19 James H. Jones, „Commonplace and Memorization in the Oral Tradition of the English and
Scottish Popular Ballads,“ Journal of American Folklore, 74 (1961), 97-1 12.
20 The classic work is of course Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960;
repr. New York: Atheneum, 1974).
21 David Buchan, The Bailad and the Folk (London: RKP, 1972). For the Opposition see A.B.
Friedman, “The Formulaic Improvisation Theory of Bailad Tradition – a Counterstatement,“
Journal of American Folklore, 74 (1961), pp. 133-2 1 5 and „The Oral-Formulaic Theory of
Balladry – a Re-rcbuttal,“ in The Bailad Image. Essays Presented to Bertrand Harris Bronson,
cd. James Porter (Los Angel es: Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore & Mythology,
26 TOM PETirrT
analyses under the auspices of the present project are an implicit refutation, in
suggesting memorization rather than improvisation as the basic process involved.
That project, in turn, offers and seeks to document the thesis, first propounded
(if rather in passing) by Phillips Barry, that the central features of the
balladic narrative mode are produced, within the individual song, in the course of
its Iransmission in oral tradition.22 I would further suggest that the shaping forces
of this tradition are both retrieval of the text from memory, and its performance
under social (i.e. noisy, difficult) auspices, by skilled but essentially amateur performers.
Again following Barry, the project documents its thesis by juxtaposing
the original text of a song – invariably in the form of a broadside bailad – with its
derivatives recorded from oral tradition (within the social and amateur auspices
just specified) decades or even centuries later (typically from England, Scotland or
North America in the last decades of the 1 9’h century or the opening decades of the
20’h century). Such a performance tradition is a ‚ballad machine‘ generating, over
time, balladic narrative features in what started out as mere narrative songs. While
the original has few balladic features (it is a ‚ballad‘ only in the strictly contextual
sense of ‚broadside bailad ‚, and is characterized rather by the style of popular
joumalism), the oral derivatives have many more: they are on the way to becoming
‚ballads‘ in the generic sense (i.e. ‚traditional ballads‘) used in literary
anthologies.23
That this project may be of interest to bistorians as weil as folklorists and
literary critics is due to the circumstance already mentioned that it examines songs
which recount ‚historical‘ events in the sense of recent, authentic, and newsworthy
occurrences, typically violent crimes and their judicial aftermath (trials and
executions). In relation to methodology this is an almost inevitable consequence
University of California, 1983 ), pp. 173-91; Flemming G. Andcrsen & Thomas Pettitt, „Mrs.
22 Brown ofFalkland: A Singer ofTales?“ Joumal of American Folklore, 92 ( 1979), pp. 1 -24.
Phillips Barry, „The Part of the Folk Singer in the Making of Folk Balladry,“ in The Critics
and the Ba/lad, eds. M. Leach and Tristram P. Coffin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Uni versity Press, 1961 ), pp. 59-76.
23 The following publications by the present writer derive from this project: [with Flemming G.
Andersen.] „‚The Murder of Maria Marten: ‚ The Birth of a Ballad?“ in Narrative Folksong:
New Directions. Essays in Honour of W Edson Richmond, eds. Carol Edwards and Kathleen
Manley (Los Angeles: Trickster Press, 1985), pp. 132-178; ‚“Worn by the Friction of Time:‘
Oral Tradition and the Generation of the Balladic Narrative Mode“ [on the ‚Berkshire
Tragedy’/’Crue1 Miller‘], in Contexis of Pre-Nove/ Narrative. The European Tradition, ed.
Roy Eriksen (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1 994), pp. 341-372; „Ballad Singers
and Bailad Style: The Case of the Murdered Sweethearts“ [on ‚William Grismond‘], in The
Entertainer in Medieval and Traditional Cu/lure: A Symposium, eds. Flemming G. Andersen
et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1 997), pp. 101-13 1 ; „The Bailad of Tradition: In
Pursuit of a Vernacular Aesthetic“ [on ‚James Harris’/’The Daemon Lover‘], in Ba/lads imo
Books: The Legacies of Francis James Chi/d, eds. Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts
(Bem: Peter Lang, 1 997), pp. 1 1 1-123. My current views on oral tradition more gcnerally are
offered in „! See a Voice: Oral Perspectives on Early European Verbal Culture,“ lntroduction
to Jnclinat􀉆 Aurem, Proceedings of a Symposium organized by Center for Medieval Studies,
University of Southern Dcrunark, Odense, November 1998, forthcoming from Odense University
Press (200 I).
TEXTVAL TO ORAL 27
of the requirement that the point of departure for textual comparison be precisely
the original text of a new song. For while many English folksongs, including
narrative songs, survive on broadsides published much earlier than they were
recorded from oral tradition, it cannot be ruled out that the oral version represents
a tradition antedating the printed one. But with (broadside) news-ballads there is a
likelihood verging on (a sometimes verifiable) certitude that the text we have was
either issued shortly after the events it describes, or is a near verbatim reprint of
one that did, and that any later oral versions are indeed derivative from it.24 And
by virtue of being news-ballads these songs also qualify as historical sources for
the events they narrate, and may therefore be of significance for historians
interested in the textualization of history (and in the detextualization and
retextualization involved when the song is changed in transmission and subsequently
recorded).
000
The results of these experiments are indeed not particularly surprising; they
were predictable and have often been asserted, but the approach reported and
illustrated here allows such assertations to be made with much greater confidence.
Thus in oral tradition these news ballads tend typically to shed the features –
circumstantial, moralizing, sentimental, melodramatic · – characteristic of the
popular joumalistic mode. This is in turn an aspect of the first major process
involved, the subtraction of material inessential to the progress of the narrative or
the rendition of the dramatic confrontations ofwhich the narrative is built up. This
is matched however by the secend process, the addition of new material of a
traditional nature, either from specific songs within the oral tradition, or more
often in the form of features characteristic of that tradition as a whole. And this
material can range from a narrative motif to formulaic lines or clusters of Iines of
the kind discussed above. These two processes, subtraction and addition, can
sometimes occur simultaneously, producing the third process, substitution. 25
Taken together these processes produce many of the balladic qualities listed, as
weil as making the song sound, on a !arger or smaller scale, more traditional. The
ballad ’s characteristic repetition pattems are mainly produced, however, by the
adjustment of verbal material within the song itself (if at any given phase of its
textual evolution), typically by a process of intemal ‚contamination‘ in which two
points linked in terms of content (e.g. question and answer; joumey out, joumey
home) but expressed in differing formulations, approach or achieve verbal identity
by the formulation at one point shifting closer to that at the other. There were, of
course, no broadside ballads in the Middle Ages to be reshaped, in oral trans-
24 One of the publications listed above, „The Ballad of Tradition: ln Pursuit of a Vemacular
Aesthetic,“ is an exception, in being based on a non-joumalistic broadside bailad whose
anterior dating is ascertainable by its explicit atttibution to a known author.
25 I deploy the simple but effective systematic terminology of Tom Bums, „A Model for Textual
Variation in Folksong,“ Folklore Forum, 3 ( 1 970), pp. 49-56.
28 TOM PETIITI
mssion, into traditional ballads, but there were other narrative songs, i n otherthan-
balladic narrative modes, from other than skilled arnateur auspices (minstrel
romances and saints‘ Jives, for example) which might enter and be processed by
the ‚ballad ·machine‘.26 This project would suggest that medieval ballads, like ‚St
Stephen and Herod ‚, are created by this process, rather than being originally composed
in the form that we know them with the balladic qualities fully developed.
000
And while, in the case of songs, and Iaken together, these processes introduce
specifically balladic features, some of these features of what I have termed the
‚vernacular aesthetic‘ of tradition-borne textual material have a more generat
relevance as symptoms of oral transmission and can therefore be assigned a
diagnostic function in other areas. That is to say a text of unknown provenance
which displays features like verbal formulae and the traditional (as opposed to the
deliberately rhetorical) varieties of verbal repetition is very likely to have been
through an oral phase. Similarly, when confronted with two texts of the same
work, the one that displays more of these features is most likely to derive, via oral
transmission, from the other. It is this aspect of the project’s results which has
implications for Elizabethan drama.
That some of these processes do indeed occur in dramatic texts reproduced
from memory was demonstrated in a fascinating experiment reported by Betty
Shapin in 1944, since oddly neglected in work on Shakespearean texts.27 In connection
with the performance of a (modern) play by the Columbia University
Theatre Associates, Shapin asked an actress, who had played a small part, to
reconstruct three scenes of the play from memory. The circumstances were close
to the proposed Elizabethan context for any memorial reconstruction as may have
occurred in the sense that the play concerned was unpublished, and the actress
involved had bad access only to manuscript pages containing her own part. r give
below extracts from the original text of the first passage and the memorial
reconstruction in parallel.28 Repetitions are indicated by underlining, and in some
instances enhanced by realigment of the text:
Original Reconstruction
B. All gone, boy? B. All gone, boy?
N. lt’s all gone.
N. Tis the last ofthe peary. There be no more peary.
26 I have explored what might be an instance of this phenomenon in „‚Bold Sir Rylas‘ and the
Struggle for Bailad Form,“ Lore and Language, 3.6 (January, 1 982), 45-60.
27 Betty Shapin, „An Experiment in Memorial Reconstruction,“ MLR, 39 ( 1 944), pp. 9-17, not
invoked by Magtlire in Shakespearean Suspect Texls. My thanks to Professor Maria Dobozy
for bringing this study to my attention.
28 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
It was a bad year for pears.
N.29 Mistress do not allow that,
Goodman Burroughs.
The drink what you end on
must be the same as.
what you begin on.
B. And be l to sit with emptv tankard?
The pemy is weak like water.
The cider do be no better.
N. Mistress Morton? (exit)
B. And be I to sit with empty tankard!
I be an Englishman, I be. (exit)
(enter N.followed by E.)
E. What is’t, Nathaniel?
N. That Goodman Burroughs!
E. Tell him I would speak with him.
B. (entering) Here I be mistress.
E. Goodman,
Tis your last drink here today
in the Golden Lioness,
and it will cost you four tim es
its usual price.
E. If you do leave here drunk,
! lose my licence.
TEXTUAL TO ORAL
‚Twas a bad year for pears.
N. No. You do know that
Mistress Morton says that
the drink that you end with
must be the same as
The drink that you begin with.
B. The peary be weak like water
and the cider be no better.
N. Mistress Morton! Mistress Morton!
B. Be I to sit with an empty tankard?
l be an Englishman, I be. (exit)
(enter N. followed by E.)
E. What is’t, Nathaniel?
N. lt be that that Goodman Burroughs again.
E. Tell him I would speak with him.
(enter Burroughs)
E. Goodman Bun·oughs,
You know ifyou do get drunk
I do lose my licence.
That drink will cost you twice
its usual cost
and it is your last drink
at the Golden Lioness today.
29
While it must be acknowledged (as can sometimes happen in ballads) that the
oral process has destroyed the original ’s one major verbal repetition, the reiteration
of B. ’s angry rhetorical question, ‚And be I to sit with empty tankard‘ ( 1 3 :
1 7), this is more than compensated for by the smaller but numerous repetitions of
word or phrase which have been generated by ‚intemal contamination‘ in the
reconstructed text. 30
This experiment with drama confirms the indication provided by the study of
narrative song, that when such repetitions are encountered in a ‚bad‘ Shakespearean
(or Marlovian) quarto, as they sometimes are, the generation of that text
has in one way or another involved a passage though oral transmission.31 As a
brief illustration we may take a few moments from the end of the ghost scene in
Harnlet where the Prince urges his companions not to speak of what they have
29 Thus in original: presumably in perforrnance some action or gesture intervenes between N’s
two speeches.
30 The phenomenon is, strangely, not noted by Shapin.
31 For a preliminmy application ofthe results reported in the present study to Elizabethan drama,
see my „The Living Text: The Play, the Players, and Folk Tradition,“ in Porci ante Margaritam:
Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross, eds. S. Carpenter, P. King and P. Meredith
(Leeds: University of Leeds School ofEnglish, 2001), pp. 4 1 3-429.
30 TOM PETIITT
seen, and then to leave with him. In re-generating the first Folio text, not printed
until 1 623 but close to what Shakespeare wrote, the ‚bad‘ quarto of 1 603, while
also spoiling one original repetition pattern, manages to produce two others
through intemal contamination:
Fl (1623)
837 Neuer make known
what you haue seene to night
850 Neuer to speake
of this that you haue seene
856 Neuer to speake
of this that you haue heard
883 … Iet vs goe in tagether
887 Nay, come let’s go Iogether
Ql (1603)
60 I Neuer make knowne
what you haue seene to night
6 1 2 Neuer to speake
what vou haue seene to night
6 1 7 neuer to speake
ofthat which you haue seene.
643 Nav come let’s go tagether
647 Nav come lett’s go togcther.32
000
It remains to be seen to what degree if any this methodology contradicts
Andrew Taylor’s pessimistic remark, in a broader, medieval, context, that ’no test
will ever be able to establish that a particular written text is the direct and uncontaminated
transcription of a single oral perforrnance‘ ,33 and the value both of this
potential contribution to Shakespearean philology and of any other application of
these insights will stand or fall on the validity of the thesis asserted here on what
oral Iransmission does to texts. But this in turn, in best scientific fashion, is
eminently subject to confirrnation, refutation or adjustment through repeating the
experiment concerned: comparing derivative oral song texts with their broadside
original. And by way of illustration a conveniently Straightforward (and conveniently
short) instance is provided by an English song conceming the sorry fate
ofa certain W. Wamer, T. Ward and T. Williams, who were executed for highway
robbery following their trial at Warwick, on 1 4 July 1 8 1 8 . That this experiment
can be undertaken is due entirely to the good work and generosity of Mike Yates,
who both uneavered this material and kindly sanctioned my use and reproduction
of it here. 34
This case indeed is one for which we have multiple sources of information, in
that the trial was also reported in The WG!wick Advertiser from August 1 8 1 8 (this
delay may exp1ain why the title ofthe broadside, inaccurately, gives the date ofthe
execution as 14 August). lndeed the range of document-types is increased by the
32 The Three-1’ext Harntet: Parallel Texts ofthe First and Second Quartos and First Folio, eds.
Paul Bertram and Bemice Kliman (New York: AMS Press, 1991 ). My thanks to Lene Buhl
Petersen for bringing this instance to my attention.
33 Andrew Taylor, „Was There a Song ofRo1aod?“ Specul11m, 76 (2001), pp. 28-65, p. 63, n.
149.
34 For the circurnstances of the discovery, and the texts involved, see Mike Yates, „‚Three
Brothers in Fair Warwickshire‘: A Bailad and its Story,“ English Dance and Song, 45 ( 1983),
pp. 2-4.
TEXTUAL TO ORAL 3 1
fact that one o f the reports includes ( one presumes verbatim) a judicial record
(unlikely to survive elsewhere) in the form of a confession made to a magistrate by
one of the robbers, and so narrating the events from his perspective – if with the
usual reservations about ‚fiction in the archives‘. It would be an interestin􀀤
historiographical project to compare the broadside with these alternative sources/
and as a small contribution to that end, and by way of introducing the story, I give
here firstly the opening of the account in the Warwiek Advertizer (which probably
reproduces the wording of the indictment), secondly part of the confession (of
William Warner) mentioned above, and thirdly part of the evidence given to the
trial (also as reported in the Warwiek Advertizer) by the victim of the robbery, here
(in accordance with the legal technicalities of the time) referred to as the
‚Prosecutor‘:
# I William Wamer, alias Hard-hearing baby (aged 20); Thos. Ward, alias Jasper (aged 18);
and Thos. Williams, alias Stadger (aged 19); were indicted for a violent assau1t upon the person
of George Greenway, on the King’s highway, and taking from his person, a silver watch, value
.f5, a gold chain, value .f8, two gold seals, value .f6, a silver snuff box, value 2 Guineas, and
several Country Banknotes, value .f26, on the Ist of July last in the parish of Nuneaton. The
Prisoners pleaded guilty . …
#2 [William Wamer confesses] !hat when they had arrived within a mile of Nuneaton, they
saw a person approaching them on horseback, whom they immediately agreed to stop and rob;
that the man, called Stodger, caught hold of the bridle, and with a !arge stick struck him and
knocked him off his horse; that Thomas Ward then took from the person’s pockets, some bank
notes, of which examinant thinks three were of the value of one pound each, and two of five
pounds each; that examinant caught hold of his watch chain, and drew his watch out of his
pocket; that they then proceeded across the country ….
#3 On the Ist of July, he [George Greenway] went to Hinckley, upon professional business,
and left that place, on horse-back, as the chimes of the parish church played nine. He had passed
the Harrow lnn, and proceeded about two miles
.
beyond the turnpike gate, which is but a short
distance from Nuneaton, when he saw three men on the right hand side ofthe road. He was then
riding at his usual pace of about 4 112 miles an hour; and the night was remarkable light. The
men, on perceiving the Prosecutor, crossed the road, and on his coming up within a few paces of
the spot whcre they stood, they separated. and made up to him in three different directions. One
of them instantly aimed a blow at Mr. Greenway’s head; it fell upon his left temple, and
occasioned a very copious discharge of blood. The three ruffians instantly seized the Prosecutor,
who was nearly insensible, from the effects ofthe violent blow he had received, and dragged him
from his horse. When they had got him upon the ground, one of them knelt upon his ehest, while
the other two, one on each side, rifled his pockets. Thcy took from him the several articles
mentioned in the indictment, and to the value of about .f50. Mr. Greenway, who was fearful !hat
they would do him some serious injury, entreated them to spare his life, as they got all the property
he had about him. Thcy soon after left him ….
It is a striking illustration of the different poetics and purposes of even
joumalistic broadside nan·ative that these detailed and circumstantial accounts are
covered by only two stanzas (3-4: see the text below), which select as significant
the blow on the head, and the theft of the watch. Unlike the legal process (in
35 See the study on ‚Maria Marlen‘ cited above for an analogous case.
32 TOM PETirrT
which it may have detennined whether the offence was capital) the broadside is
not interested in the value of the money and property stolen, but it does (perhaps
because of the human interest factor) share a concem with the ages of the
offenders, which are reported accurately, and which qualify them as ‚three young
men‘ (st. 1 .2). Otherwise (taking the sources as a whole) the broadside also
specifies places (Nuneaton for the crime; Warwiek for the trial and execution), the
name of the victim, and the plea of guilty (although it omits the Judge’s strenuous
exertions to get the prisoners to change their plea).
But for reasons explained earlier the present article will focus on a further
stage in the trajectory of this narrative, and compare the original song with a
version recorded from oral tradition a century and a half later. For by one of those
small miracles of folkloristics, Mike Yates encountered in Gloucester a gypsy,
Danny Brazil, from whom he recorded a version ofthis song on 1 9 February 1978;
this is apparently the first time the song has been recorded from tradition after the
publication of the original broadside in 1 8 1 8. Parallel complete texts of the two
versions follow, the underlining signaHing repetition pattems featuring in
subsequent discussion:36
PRINTED ORIGINAL
The Lamentation of W. Warn er T. Ward
& T. Williams, who were executed at
Warwick, August 14, 1818,
for higltway robbery.
Broadside. T. Bloomer, Birmingham
[prob. 1 8 1 8)
I. lt’s melancholy to relate
Ofthree young men who met their fate
Cut of[sic] just in the bloom of day,
For robbing in the king’s highway.
2. At Nuneaton in Warwickshire
We lived as you soon shall hear,
But in our station not content,
To rob and plunder we were bent,
3. Mr. Greenway was the first we met,
And by us he was soon beset
With a dreadul blow upon the head,
ORAL DERIVATIVE
‚Three Brothers in Fair Warwickshire‘
Recorded by Mike Yates from the singing
ofDanny Brazil, Gloucester, 19.2.78.
I . All for three brothers in fair Warwickshire
Tirree daring brothcrs you all shall hear
To rob and plundcr was their intent
To go robbing along the highway they went.
2. The first they met it was Lord Granuvale
With his coach and four therc they did rebay
The heavy blow struck him on the head
36 The extracts from the Warwiek Advertizer, thc broadside and the oral version are all printcd in
Yates, ‚Three Brothers in Fair Warwickshire: A Bailad and its Story‘. The original of the
broad􀇀ide text is in the Cccil Sharp Scrapbook of Songs and Ballads (p. 1 93), Vaughan Williams
Memorial Library, London, and is reproduced herc with the kind permission of the
English Folk Dance and Song Society through the good offices of thcir Librarian, Maleolm
Taylor. I have introduced the conventional stanza divisions which are not signalled in the
original, but which are confirmed in the other broadside printings (see bclow) and by the oral
version.
TEXTVAL TO ORAL 33
W e left him as we thought for dead.
4. His money and his watch also
We took, which proved our overthrow,
And then we ran away with speed,
And left him on the road to bleed.
5. But for the crime we soon were ta’en
And sent to Warwiek for the same;
To be confined in prison strong.
Till the Assizes did come on.
6. When at the bar we did appear,
We pleaded guilty as you shall hear,
The jury all the same did cry,
And we were condemned to die.
7. As for the ages of all three,
ls eighteen, nincteen and twenty;
lt must be aw ful for to see,
Such young men at the fatal tree.
8. All you that come to see us die,
Upon the gallows tree so high,
Shun every vice and take good ways,
Then you may all see happy days.
9. We hope none will reflect upon
And they left him on the highway for dead.
3. Thev took his watch and his money too
So soon they proved his sad overthrow
Thev run away its with all their speed
And they Jeft him on the highway to bleed.
4. Now they were taken all for the same
Thev were put in prison ‚till the trials came
Thev were put in prison bound in iron strong
Unril the Assize it did come on.
5. Now at the Bar these three young men ‚peared
Thcv was pleadi!!g guilty as you all shall hear
The Judge and Jurymen all did say
For its they are cast and condemned to die.
6. ‚The names. the names have you young men three
Yo ur names.y our names you come teil to me
My name’s Will Atkins from once l came
Y es and many a time I have heard your name.‘
7. ‚The age. the age have you young men three
Y our age. your age you can teil to me‘
‚One eighteen, nineteen and other twenty‘
lsn ‚t it a shocking and a sight to see
Three clever young men on the gallows tree.
8. Now at the Bar their poor mother ‚peared
She was wringi!!g of her tender hands
tearing out her hair
Saying ‚Judge and Jurymen spare their lives
For they are my sons and my heart’s delig!Jt.‘
9. ‚lt’sg o you home dearest woman dear
Y ou have come too late for the time is near
Tomorrow moming at the hour of three
You can claim their bodies from
the gallows tree.‘
10. ‚lt’s go you home dearest woman dear
You have come too late for our time its near
Tomorrow moming that is the day
From all our friends we must die away.‘
I I . Come all you people that is standing by
• That have come here for to see us die
Y ou shun bad company take to good ways
That’s the way to live and see happy days.
34 TOMPETIITI
Our friends when we are dead and gone
For ifthey do they’re much to blame,
Since we have suffered for the samc.
Comparison of these two texts largely conftrms the assertions offered earlier,
if, as always, with some not altogether expected features which may prompt refinement
ofthe thesis. And the changes may be assumed to represent the impact of
transmission: while the broadside text may have been reprinted (pretty weil verbatim)
on later occasions (potentially shortening the length of Iransmission producing
our oral version) there are no signs (as is sometimes the case with broadsides
originally printed in the seventeenth century4 of a later, revised broadside
which may be responsible for some ofthe changes.3
The juxtaposition shows clearly enough that there has been some subtraction:
it amounts to only two stanzas, but this is significant given that the original has
only nine stanzas. lt is also striking that the stanzas omitted are the first and last,
comprising (most of) the dassie broadside packaging of the narrative with an
opening comment by the narrator and a concluding, admonitory valediction to the
reader/listener in the mouth(s) of the condemned criminal(s). The fact that the
seven stanzas of the original which do survive do so in their original order
indicates that the transmission has largely been based on memory, although
substantial alteration at the sub-stanzaic Ievel has occurred along the way.
The most striking feature here is the extent ofthe additions to the song which
have occurred in the course oftransmission, no less than four ofthe oral version’s
eleven stanzas having no equivalent in the original. This is a far from universal
occurrence in the songs studied in this project, some of which exclusively (at the
stanzaic Ievel) display subtraction, and this is the first time I have encountered an
oral derivitive which is actually Ionger than the printed originaL On the other hand
addition has been discemed in other songs, and this song conforms to the thesis in
the sense that all the material added is in itself traditional, andlor generated by
traditional processes.
With regard to the latter, for example, the first ’new‘ stanza of the oral
version (st. 6, ‚The names, the names .. .‘) introduced between the original’s
stanzas 6 and 7, is clearly generated out of the latter stanza by repetition-withvariation
(the result is often referred to as ‚incremental repetition‘ in bailad
studies): the judge’s question about the ages of the condemned men is now
matched by an analogaus question about their names, with a closely parallel
formulation:
37 The Cecil Sharp Scapbook of Songs and Ballads at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library,
Cecil Sharp House, London, contains three versions of this song on broadsides, one (at p. 193)
together with another song, ‚Hodge & Katc’s Courtship‘, another (at p. 194), also printed by T.
Bloomer of Birmingham (with only insignificant verbal corrections, for example ‚off for ‚of
in 1 .3) printed together with ‚Dick the Joiner‘; thc third (at p. 261) is identical with the first,
and was printed Iogether with ‚The Girl I adore‘. This does suggest however that we might not
be dcaling here with the very first printing, which is more likely, in view of the song’s
newsworthiness, to have bcen without an accompanying song.
TEXTUAL TO ORAL
The names, the names
The age, the age
Y our names, your names
Your age, your age
have you young men three
have you young men three
you come tell to me
you can tell to me.
35
lt will also be noticed that the original question about the ages has itself
bifurcated into two lines, its repetition matching, perhaps even prompted by the
’new‘ and repeated question about he names: a hankering after traditional structures
evidently strong enough to tolerate a five-line stanza.
The other major addition combines the insertion of traditional material with
the generation of new material by traditional means. The intervention in a trial of a
relative pleading for the life of the condemned criminal is a familiar feature in
popular narrative song (which is evidently where she comes from: there is no sign
of any intervention in the newspaper accounts). Within the corpus of traditional
balladry the closest analogue to the present case is probably ‚Geordie‘ (No. 209 in
Child’s canonical collection), one version of which, recorded from oral delivery in
Somerset in 1 908, parallels the specific detail of the intervention (in this case, by
the sweetheart) coming ‚too late‘ to help the condemned person (here a poacher):
The judge looked over his left shoulder,
And said, ‚l’m sorry for thee.
My pretty fair maid, you come too late,
For hc’s condemned already.38
The addition of this intervention produces a more (and more traditionally)
structured narrative, with a balance between two major scenes, the robbery and the
mother’s plea, linked by the intervening condemnation. The original reaches an
early climax with the robbery, and then · tapers ofT with a brief evocation of the
trial and its aftermath.
It is worth noting in passing that logically the insertion in our song of this
plea by ‚their poor mother‘ cannot have taken place before, or may have triggered,
a change towards the traditional elsewhere in the text which transforrned the
historical W. Wamer, T. Ward and T. Williams into the ‚three brothers‘ endemic
to folk tradition ( 1 . 1 ). Then at some point, before, during or after the process o f
insertion, the reply i n which the Mother i s told her plea is ‚too late‘ bifurcated into
two, just like (and providing a parallel to) the Judge’s question(s) just discussed,
with replies by, respectively, the Judge and the condemned men, producing
another case of irreremental repetition, with the first two and a half lines duplicated
verbatim:
38 Collected by Cecil Sharp rrom the singing of Charles Nevill of East Coker, Somerset, 1 908;
The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, eds. R Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd ( 1 959;
repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 ), p. 42. See also „The Clerk’s Twa Sons 0 Owsenford,“
in The English and Scollish Popular Ballads, ed. Child, #72A9-10, C29-30.
36 TOMPEIT!Tf
It’s go you horne dearest woman dear
Y ou have corne too late for the time is near
Tornorrow moming … (9/10)
and the last line and a half varying (providing an increment):
… at the hour of three
You can claim their bodies from the gallows tree (9)
… that is the day
From all our friends we must die away (I 0)
Inspected more closely, the stanza narrating and quoting the mother’s plea
(st. 8) is itself a microcosm of this mixture of processes. It is built up partly of
phrases repeated from st. 5 – ‚Now at the Bar their poor mother ‚peared I She was
… -ing‘ (8. 1 -2, cf. 5 . 1 -2: ‚Now at the Bar these three young men appeared I Tbey
was … -ing‘), ‚Judge and Jurymen‘ (8.3, cf. 5.3), and ‚For they are .. .‘ (8.4, cf. 5.4)
– as a result of which these two stanzas are now linked by verbal repetition, partly
by phrases introduced from outside the text, some of which are almost certainly
forrnulaic within this genre of song, e.g. ‚Wringing of her tender bands tearing out
her hair‘ (8.2i9 and ‚my heart’s delight‘ (8.4).
This brings us to the two verbal features whicb characterize the style of the
oral version, and which conforrn to the model of change posited above, the
presence of forrnulaic phraseology, and the generation of repetition pattems. With
regard to the forrner, I would anticipate that, in addition to the lines just mentioned,
the following phrases, new to the oral version, might prove to be formulaic: ‚ .. .
was their intent‘ ( 1 .4), ‚The first they met .. . ‚ (2. 1 ), ‚bound in iron strong‘ (4.3), ‚ .. .
you come tel! to me‘ (6.2), ‚on the gallows tree‘ (7.5), ‚the time is near‘ (9.2), and
of course, ‚Come all you … ‚ ( 1 1 . 1 ). With regard to repetition pattems several of
the more striking instances have been mentioned already, others are indicated by
underlinings in the text above. Perhaps the smallest, but still, I think significant, is
the way two quite similar phrases in the original (2.2 : 6.2) achieve identity in the
oral version ( 1 .2 : 5.2):
… you soon shall hear,
… you shall hear,
… you all shall hear
… you all shall hear.
The reference to ‚the [king’s) highway‘ which was lost with the subtraction
of st. l reappears twice in the derivative, providing a repetition between what are
now sts. 1 and 2, and the phrase ‚three young men‘ lost under the same circumstances
produces phrasal repetitions by finding refuge in stanzas 5, 6 and 7. In a
39 Tearing thc hair is of course a forrnulaic gesture of the distraught mether in many narrative
traditions: it is resorted to (’sparsisque crinibus‘) by the mether of a boy run over by a cart,
later miraculously restered by the intcrvention Saint Richard of Chichester, in a thirteenthcentury
account cited in the paper tabled at the conference by Michael Goodich (‚The Use of
Direct Quotation from Canonization Hearing to Hagiographical Vita et Miracula‘).
TEXTUAL TO ÜRAL 37
somewhat similar fashion ‚the gallows tree‘ lost as the original’s stanza 8 became
the derivative stanza 1 1 reappears both in a retained stanza (7.5, replacing the
‚ fatal tree‘ of7.4) and in an added stanza (9.4).
Some changes, finally, seem designed to help the text fit more comfortably
into the four-line framewerk constituted by the melodic structure. The oral derivative,
reflecting the practicalities of performance, operates much more emphatically
with one-line units, and almost systematically demolishes the enjambement
which occurs in the original, whose composition was more under the constraint of
the rhyme scheme, which facilitated two-line sense-units:
2. At Nuneaton in Warwickshire
We lived as you soon shall hear,
I . All for three brothers in fair Warwickshire
Three daring brothers you all shall hear
4. His money and his watch also 3. They took his watch and his money too
We took, which proved our overthrow, So soon they proved his sad overthrow
7. As for the ages of all three,
Is eighteen, nineteen and twenty;
7. ‚The age, the age have you young men three
Y our age, your age you can tell to me‘
‚One eighteen, nineteen and other twenty‘
Such detailed verbal analysis may fascinate the philologically inclined, but
historians may be more interested in those additions, subtractions and
substitutions which in a more generat sense transmute this joumalistic account of
a specific event into a more ‚traditional‘ narrative of a personal tragedy. The firstperson
statement typical of the ‚goodnight‘ genre of the condemned criminal’s
confession and lament has modulated (except for the truncated closing valediction)
into a third person narrative. And this is now altogether more dramatic:
while the original has no direct speech the derivative converts its statement (st. 7)
about the ages of the men into a question and answer (st. 7), duplicated in the
analogous question and answer (st. 6) about their names. Similarly the added
scene with the traditional relative’s plea is also traditionally dramatic in that two
and a half of its three stanzas comprise direct speech. Over a third of the oral
version is therefore in dialogue.
This is matched by a drift from the specific to the traditional in empirical
information. Thus while we retain Warwickshire it is now the more poetical ‚fair
Warwickshire‘, and we lose Nuneaton. We also lose the individual names of the
criminals, as already mentioned, as part ofthe process by which they become three
brothers (and their deaths therefore a more stark, indeed ballad-like, family
tragedy). That the tragedy is reinforced by their youth (underlined by the appearance
of their mother to plead for their Jives) probably explains why their specific
ages, in contrast, are retained. But while still young they are more heroic: not
merely three brothers but three ‚daring‘ brothers ( 1 .2) for whom to rob and
p lunder ‚was their intent‘, a narrative role more than a symptom (as in the
original) of social discontent (2.3). Danny Brazil’s stanza six may show the song
poised on the brink of another shift away from the historical towards the
traditional. It focusses on a single figure (only one robber gives his name, and it is
38 TOM PETriTI
not one ofthe original names) apparently with an established notoriety: ‚and many
a time have I heard your name‘ says the Judge (6.4). The name specified, ‚Will
Atkins‘, may indeed hav e had some currency in popular eighteenth-century
tradition on robbers and renegades: it was used by Daniel Defoe for the most
bloodthirsty of the mutineers who at the end of Robinson Crusoe ( 1 7 1 9) are
abandonned on the desert island.40 There is a corresponding shift in the identity
and character of their victim: the real and rather prosaic ‚Mr. Greenway‘ (3 . 1 )
becomes a figure better qualified as the antagonist of highway robbers, ‚Lord
Granuvale‘ (2. 1 ) who is even supplied with a dashing ‚coach and four‘ (2.2) not
mentioned in the original and which far outdoes the historical Mr. Greenway’s
locomotion on horseback ‚riding at his usual pace of about 4 l/2 miles an hour‘.
000
For a literary historian (and for a rather old-fashioned folklorist) the results of
this experiment and the others which preceded it are altogether positive: it is
widely agreed that in aesthetic terrns most broadside ballads are ‚trash,‘ but their
traditional derivatives, as the above discussion may have indicated, tend more
closely towards the simple but stark directness of the traditional bailad which has
generally been much appreciated. But for a historian of events there are grounds
for concern. lf ‚oral tradition‘ can do what we have just seen it do to a historical
narrative which was already textualized, and whose narrative and textual stability,
at least for a while, will have been supported by the availability of printed texts,
what – by way of addition, subtraction and substitution, and conforrnity to existing
paradigms – could not a medieval oral history achieve, less disciplined by
textuality and literacy, and in the full flood of religious enthusiasm, superstitious
terror or patriotic zeal?
40 Daniel Defoe, The Lift and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. by Angus Ross, Penguin
English Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1 965; repr. 1 976), esp. p. 264; the same
character, reformed and industrious, reappears in Defoe’s sequel, The Further Adventures of
Robinson Cmsoe (also 1 7 1 9).
ORAL HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES
THE SPOKEN WORD IN CONTEXT
Edited by Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter
MEDIUM AEVUM QUOTIDIANUM
SONDERBAND XII
=
CEU MEDIEV ALIA
VOLU1vfE 3
Oral History of the Middle Ages
The Spoken W ord in Context
Edited by Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter
Krems and Budapest 200 1
GEDRUCKT MIT UNTERSTÜTZUNG DER ABTEILUNG
KULTUR UND WISSENSCHAFT DES AMTES
DER NIEDERÖSTERREICIDSCHEN LANDESREGIERUNG
niederästerreich kultur
copy editor: Judith Rasson
Cover illustration: The wife of Potiphar covets Joseph: “ … erat autem Joseph pulchra facie et
decorus apectu: post multos itaque dies iecit domina oculos suis in Ioseph et ait donni mecum.“
(“ … And Joseph was (a] goodly fperson], and weil favoured. And it came to pass after these
things, that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me. „), Gen. 39:
6-7 (KJV). Concordantiae Caritatis, c. 1350. Cistercian abbey of Lilienfeld (Lower Austria), ms
151, fol. 244v (detail). Photo: Institut fiir Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit
(Krems an der Donau).
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, without the permission of the Publishers.
Published by:
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– ISBN 963 9241 64 4 (Budapest)
-ISSN 1587-6470 CEU MEDIEVALIA
Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Gesellschaft zur Erforschung
der materiellen Kultur des Mittelalters, Körnermarkt 13, A-
3500 Krems. Austria,
Department ofMedieval Studies, Centrat European University,
Nador utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary.
Printed by Printself, Budapest.
Table of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ……………………….. 7
Michael RICHTER, Beyond Goody and Grundmann ………. . . . . . . ………. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I I
Tom PETTIIT, Textual to Oral: the Impact ofTransmission
on Narrative Word-Art …………………………………………………………………….. 1 9
Elöd NEMER!<.ENYI, Fictive Audience. The Second Person Singular in the Deliberatio ofBishop Gerard of Csanäd …………………………………………….. 3 9 Katalin SZENDE, Testaments and Testimonies. Orality and Literacy in Composing Last Wills in Late Medieval Hungary ……………………………. 49 Anna ADAMSKA, The Kingdom of Po land versus the Teutonic Knights: Oral Traditions and Literale Behaviour in the Later Middle Ages …………… 67 Giedre MICKÜNAITE, Ruler, Protector, and a Fairy Prince: the Everlasting Deeds of Grand Duke Vytautas as Related by the Lithuanian Tatars and Karaites ………………………………… 79 Yurij Zazuliak, Oral Tradition, Land Disputes, and the Noble Community in Galician Rus‘ from the 1440s to the 1 460s ……………………………………… 88 Nada ZECEVIC, Ai􀃭tc; yA.uKeia. The Importance ofthe Spoken Word in the Public Affairs ofCarlo Tocco (from the Anonymous Chronaca dei Tocco di Cefalonia) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . 108 lohn A. NICHOLS, A Heated Conversation: Who was Isabel de Aubigny, Countess of Arundel? …………………………… 1 1 7 Tracey L. BILADO, Rhetorical Strategies and Legal Arguments: ‚Evil Customs‘ and Saint-Florent de Saumur, 979- 1 0 1 1 …………………….. 1 28 Detlev KRAACK, Traces of Orality in Written Contexts. Legal Proceedings and Consultations at the Royal Court as Reflected in Documentary Sources from l21h-century Germany ……… 1 42 6 Maria DOBOZY, From Oral Custom to Written Law: The German Sachsenspiegel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Martha KEIL, Rituals of Repentance and Testimonies at Rabbinical Courts in the 151h Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 64 Michael GOODICH, The Use of Direct Quotation from Canonization Hearing to Hagiographical Vita et Miracula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 77 Sylvia ScHEIN, Bemard of Clairvaux ’s Preaching of the Third Crusade and Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ….. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Michael BRAUER, Obstades to Oral Communication in tbe Mission offriar William ofRubruck among the Mongois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 Elena LEMENEVA, From Oral to Written and Back: A Sermon Case Study . . . . . . . . 203 Albrecht CLASSEN, Travel, Orality, and the Literary Discourse: Travels in the Past and Literary Travels at the Crossroad of the Oral and the Literary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 217 Ulrich MÜLLER and Margarete SPRJNGETH, “Do not Shut Your Eyes ifYou Will See Musical Notes:“ German Heroie Poetry („Nibelungenlied“), Music, and Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Jolanta SZPILEWSKA, Evoking Auditory Imagination: On the Poetics of Voice Production in The Story ofThe Glorious Resurrection ofOur Lord (c. 1580) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Jens T. WOLLESEN, SpokenWords and Images in Late Medieval Italian Painting . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . 257 Gerhard JARTTZ, Images and the Power of the Spoken Word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Preface Oral culture played an instrumental role in medieval society.1 Due to the Iack of any direct source evidence, however, research into the functions and importance of oral communication in the Middle Ages must confront a number of significant problems. Only indrect traces offer the opportunity to analyze phenomena that were based on or connected with the spoken word. The ‚oral history‘ of the Middle Ages requires the application of different approaches than dealing with the 201h or 2 151 century. For some decades Medieval Studies have been interested in questions of orality and literacy, their relationship and the substitution of the spoken by the written word2 Oral and literate culture were not exclusive and certainly not opposed to each other.3 The ‚art of writing‘ was part of the ‚ars rhetorica‘ and writing makes no sense without speech.4 Any existing written Statement should also be seen as a spoken one, although, clearly, not every oral Statement as a written one. Authors regularly wrote with oral delivery in mind. ‚Speaking‘ and ‚writing‘ are not antonyms. It is also obvious that „the use of oral conununication in medieval society should not be evaluated … as a function of culture populaire vis-a-vis culture savante but, rather, of thc communication habits and the tendency of medieval man 1 For the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, cf. Willern Frijhoff, „Communication et vie quotidienne i1 Ia fin du moyen äge et a l’epoque moderne: reflexions de theorie et de methode,“ in Kommunialion und Alltag in Spätmillefalter und fniher Neuzeit, ed. Helmut Hundsbichler (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992), p. 24: „La plupart de gens vivait encore pour l’essentiel dans une culture orale et !es procedes d’appropriation des idCes passaient de prefcrence par Ia parolc dite et ecoutee, quand bien memc on ctait capable d’une Ieelure visuelle plus ou moins rudimentaire.“ 2 See Marco Mostert, „New Approaches to Medieval Communication?“ in New Approaches to Medieval Communication. ed. Marco Mostert (Tumhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 15-37; Michael Richter, “Die Entdeckung der ‚Oralität‘ der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft durch die neuere Mediävistik,“ in Die Aktualität des Miue/alters, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz (Bochum: D. Winkler, 2000), pp. 273-287. 3 Peter Burke calls the constrnct of „oral versus literate“ useful but at the same time dangerous: idem, „Mündliche Kultur und >Druckkultur< im spätmittelalterlichen Italien,“ in Volkskultur des europäischen Spätmittelalters, eds. Peter Dinzelbacher and Hans-Dieter Mück (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1987), p. 60. 4 Michael Clanchy, „lntroduction,“ in New Approaches to Medieval Communication. ed. Marco Mostert (Tumhout: Brepols, 1999), p. 6. 8 to share his intellectual experiences in the corporate framework.“5 Oral delivery was not „the sole prerogative of any socioeconomic class. „6 For all these reasons, it is important to analyze the extent of and context, in which ’speech acts,‘ auditive effects, and oral tradition occur in medieval sources .7 Research into the use of the spoken word or references to it in texts and images provides new insight into various, mainly social, rules and pattems of the communication system. 1t opens up additional approaches to the organization and complexity of different, but indispensably related, media in medieval society, and their comparative analysis.8 The spoken word is connected with the physical presence of its ’sender.‘ Speech may represent the authenticity of the given message in a more obvious way than written texts or images. Therefore, the use of ’speech acts‘ in written or visual evidence also has to be seen in context with the attempt to create, construct, or prove authenticity. Moreover, spoken messages contribute to and increase the lifelikeness of their contents, which may influence their perception by the receiver, their efficacy and success. Being aware of such a situation will have led to the explicit and intended use and application of the spoken word in written texts and images- to increase their authenticity and importance, too. lf one operates with a model of ‚closeness‘ and ‚distance‘ of communication with regard to the Ievel of relation of ’senders‘ and ‚receivers,‘ then the ’speech acts‘ or their representation have to be seen as contributors to a ‚closer‘ connection among the participants of the communication process.9 At the same time, however, Speech might be evaluated as less official. One regularly comes across ‚oral space‘ 5 Sophia Menache, The Vox Dei. Commwzication in the Middle Ages (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 19. 6 Ibidem, p. 21. Cf. also Jan-Dirk Müller, „Zwischen mündlicher Anweisung und schrifilicher Sicherung von Tradition. Zur Kommunikationsstruktur spätmittelalterlicher Fechtbücher,“ in Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Helmut Hundsbichler (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992), p. 400: „Offensichtlich sind schriftliche und nichtschriftliche Tradierung von Wissen weiterhin relativ unabhängig voneinander, nachdem die Schrift längst dazu angesetzt hat, lnseln der Mündlichkeil oder praktisch-enaktiver Wissensvermittlung zu erobem. Die Gedächtnisstütze kann die Erfahrung nicht ersetzen, sendem allenfalls reaktivieren. Sie ist sogar nur verständlich, wo sie auf anderweitig vermittelte Vorkenntnisse stößt.“ 7 􀆿f. W.F.H. Nicolaisen, ed., Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995). 8 See, esp., Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild. K ultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995), passim. 9 See also Siefan Sonderegger, „>Gesprochen oder nur geschrieben?< Mündlichkeil in mittelalterlichen
Texten als direkter Zugang zum Menschen,“ in Homo Medietas. Aufsätze zu Religiosität,
Literatur und Denkformen des Menschen vom Mittelalter bis in die Neuzeit. Festschrift
for Alois Maria Haas zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Claudia Brinker-von der Heyde and
Niklaus Largier (Bem e\ al.: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 665: „Jedenfalls darf man sich bewußt bleiben,
daß auch in den Texten des deutschen Mittelalters die Reflexe gesprochener Sprache eine
bedeutende Schicht ausmachen, die besonders dann immer wieder hervortritt, wenn es um
einen direkten Zugang zum Menschen geht, um einVerstehen aus unmittelbarer Partnerschaft
heraus … “
9
that has become institutionalized or more official by the application of ‚written
space.‘ 10 Simultanous employment of such different Ievels and qualities of
messages must often have had considerable influence on their efficacy.11
The papers in this volume are the outcome of an international workshop that
was held in February, 2001, at the Department ofMedieval Studies, Central European
University, Budapest. Participants concentrated on problems of the occurrence,
usage, and pattems of the spoken word in written and visual sources of the
Middle Ages. They dealt with the roJe and contents of direct and indirect speech in
textual evidence or in relation to it, such as chronicles, travel descriptions, court
and canonization protocols, sermons, testaments, law-books, literary sources,
drama, etc. They also tried to analyze the function of oral expression in connection
with late medieval images.
The audiovisuality of medieval communication processes12 has proved to be
evident and, thus, important for any kind of further comparative analysis of the
various Ievels of the ‚oral-visual-literate,‘ i.e. multimedia culture of the Middle
Ages. Particular emphasis has to be put on methodological problems, such as the
necessity of interdisciplinary approaches,13 or the question of the extent to which
we are, generally, able to comprehend and to decode the communication systems
of the past.14 Moreover, the medievalist does not come across any types of sources
in which oral communication represents the main concem.15 lnstead, she or he is
confronted, at first glance, with a great variety of ‚casual‘ and ‚marginal‘ evidence.
We would like to thank all the contributors to the workshop and to this
volume. Their cooperation made it possible to publish the results of the meeting in
the same year in which it took place. This can be seen as a rare exception, at least
in the world of the historical disciplines. The head, faculty, staff, and students of
the Department of Medieval Studies of CentTal European University offered
various help and support. Special thanks go to Judith Rasson, the copy editor of
10 This, e.g., could be weil shown in a case study on thc pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela:
Friederike Hassauer, „Schriftlichkeit und Mündlichkeil im Alltag des Pilgers am Beispiel der
Wallfahrt nach Santiago de Compostela,“ in Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und früher
Neuzeit, eds. Gerhard Jaritz and Barbara Schuh (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 1992), pp. 277-316.
11 Cf. Bob Scribner, „Mündliche Kommunikation und Strategien der Macht in Deutschland im
16. Jahrhundert,“ in Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed.
Helmut Hundsbichler (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
1992), pp. 183-197.
12 Wenzel, Hören rmd Sehen, p. 292.
13 Cf. Ursula Schaefer, „Zum Problem der Mündlichkeit,“ in Modernes Miuelalter. Neue Bilder
einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel Verlag,
1994), pp. 374 f.
14 Frijhoff, „Communication et vie quotidienne,“ p. 25: „Sommes-nous encore en mesure de
communiquer avec Ja communication de jadis?“
1􀅄 Michael Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen zur mündlichen
Kommunikation in England von der Mit te des elften bis zu Beginn des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts
(Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1979), p. 22.
10
this volume, who took particluar care with the texts of the many non-native
speakers fighting with the pitfalls of the English language.
Budapest, Krems, and Constance
December 200 I
Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter