Enthusiasms No 34 A collection of shorter pieces on subjects of interest, outrage or enthusiasm ...

Perhaps the most underused resource for contemporary historical details of traditional music, dance and song, prior to Cecil Sharp and his cohort's recording activity of a century ago, is the regional local newspaper.  During the course of recent research a good number of items detailing singers, songs and ballad sellers have surfaced.  Jackson's Oxford Journal for 30 August 1856 (page 8), for instance, contains the following piece relating to a small village in Gloucestershire:

Northleach
Died - Aug. 21, at Sherborne Mill, near this town, Mrs. Elizabeth Cross, aged 94 years.  This venerable lady, up to a very short time before her decease, was in the possession of all her faculties, and would sometimes, to please her friends, sing them an old English song in excellent style.  Two sons and four daughters, all single, have been residing with her, and their united ages, including that of the mother, amount to upwards of four hundred years.

Of course, we must be wary of misinterpretation (Dibden and Chappell leap immediately to mind), but 'old English song' sounds suspiciously like what we would consider, both as defined in print by Sharp and others during the first folk song revival, and also during these more enlightened days, to be traditional.

And yet, as revealed by the 1851 census for Sherborne (schedule 15), she was no 'peasant' or wife of a landless labourer:

  Elizabeth CROSS    [widow] 88  Miller       born Farmington
  George                     58  Farm Manager born Sherborne
  Hannah                     56               born Sherborne
  Margaret                   54               born Sherborne
  Alice                      45               born Sherborne
  Miriam                     36               born Sherborne
  John MUNK        [servant] 22  Carter       born Sherborne
  Joseph MEDLICOTT [servant] 52  Shepherd     born Windrush

In a recently-published article *, C J Bearman has analysed the social status of Sharp's Somerset song informants and concluded that a great many of them do not conform to Sharp's narrow and rather rigid definition of 'peasant'.  It appears that here, at a much earlier date, we have another singer who stands outside that stereotype, giving us further cause for consideration as to who the song carriers actually were.

Keith Chandler - 6.1.03

* C J Bearman, 'Who were the folk? The demography of Cecil Sharp's Somerset folk singers', The Historical Journal 43, no.3 (2000), 751-775.