municated them to the "Notes and Queries" column of The Evesham Journal, edited by Mr. E. A. B. Barnard (see Notes and Queries concerning Evesham and the Four Shires, 1911, Vol I, p. 217). Mr. Gibbs, a cobbler by trade, told me that he learned the verses from a little girl who used, from time to time, to bring him her shoes to be mended, and who, in return for the service rendered, taught him the carol.
I have collected two other variants, from Buckland (Gloucestershire) and Shipston-on-Stour (Worcestershire). Neither singer could give me more than the words of the last stanza, the Worcestershire singer telling me that that stanza was sung as a refrain after every verse of the song. Mr. Gibbs's words are printed without alteration.
The origin of the legend, upon which this curious carol is based, has attracted a great deal of attention from ballad students during the last few years, and has been exhaustively debated in the pages of The Folk-Song Society's Journal (II, pp. 205, 300–4; IV, pp. 29–47) where six traditional tunes are printed, together with several versions of the text.
The Bitter Withy has obviously been affected by the ballad Little Sir Hugh of Lincoln. The two have certain points in common. Both open with the same incident—a child asking his mother's permission to go out and play at ball—and both lead up to a tragedy. The opening stanzas of the two songs are, in some versions, nearly identical. This coincidence accounts, no doubt, for the intrusion into the text of the Bitter Withy of the line "Then up Lincull and down Lincull", and of a similar line "It was upling scorn and downling scorn" in a version quoted by Mr. Frank Sidgwick (More Ancient Carols, Stratford-on-Avon, 1906, p. 7). It is clear that both lines are merely corruptions of "Up Lincoln and down Lincoln" (cf. "American Corn" for "Merry Lincoln" in Folk-Songs from Somerset, No. 68).
The Bitter Withy is also very closely connected with another ballad, The Holy Well. The first part of the story in both ballads is identical, although their conclusions are very different. In the Holy Well, for instance, when the children, scorning His lowly birth, refuse to play with Him, Jesus returns home and tells His mother what has happened. Whereupon Mary says:—
Sweet Jesus, go down to yonder town,
As far as the Holy Well,
And take away those sinful souls,
And dip them deep in hell.
Nay, nay, sweet Jesus said,
Nay, nay, that may not be,
For there are too many sinful souls
Crying out for the help of me.
The Holy Well has been a popular ballad with folk-singers; for Mr. Harris Cowper quotes a version from a chap-book printed at Birmingham, circa 1843; and I have in my possession two Birmingham broadsides by Russell, and Bloomer, from the former of which the above stanzas have been copied.
Although there are several incidents in the Apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy which bear upon the story of The Bitter Withy, not one of them is identical with it. In the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, for instance, the Lord Jesus, going out into the streets to play, follows some boys who, in order to
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