This is very much like the version given in the text, the first two lines of the refrain running:
Oh the briers, prickly briers,
Come prick my heart so sore.
The Rev. S. Baring-Gould, in the appendix to Henderson’s Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England (p. 333, ed. 1866), gives a Yorkshire story, “The Golden Ball,” which concludes with verses very similar to those of “The Briery Bush.” A man gives a ball to each of two maidens, with the condition that if either of them loses the ball, she is to be hanged. The younger, while playing, tosses her ball over a park-paling; the ball rolls away over the grass into a house and is seen no more. She is condemned to be hanged, and calls upon her father, mother, etc., for assistance, her lover finally procuring her release by producing the lost ball.
Child quotes a Cornish variant of the same story, communicated to him by Mr. Baring-Gould.
That the ballad is a very ancient one may be inferred from the peculiar form of its construction—sometimes called the “climax of relatives.” The same scheme is used in the latter half of “Lord Rendal” (No. 18), and is one that lends itself very readily to improvisation.
No. 18. Lord Rendal
This ballad is sung very finely from one end of the island to the other, and I have taken it down at least twenty times.
The words given in the text have been compiled from different sets, but none of them have been altered.
One of the earliest printed versions of this ballad is in Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) under the heading “Lord Ronald my Son;” and that is a fragment only. The “Willy Doo” in Buchan’s Ancient Ballads (1828) is the same song; see also “Portmore” in the same volume.
Sir Walter Scott, in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1828), calls it “Lord Randal,” and thinks it not impossible “that the ballad may have originally referred to the death of Thomas Randolph, or Randal, Earl of Murray, nephew to Robert Bruce and governor of Scotland. This great warrior died at Musselburgh, 1332, at the moment when his services were most needed by his country, already threatened by an English army. For this sole reason, perhaps, our historians obstinately impute his death to poison,” But, of course, Sir Walter did not know how many countries have the ballad.
A nursery version of the ballad is quoted in Whitelaw’s Book of Scottish Ballads, under the title, “The Croodlin Doo” (Cooing Dove). Jamieson gives a Suffolk variant, and also a translation of the German version of the same song, called “Grossmutter Schlangenkoechin” that is, Grandmother Adder-cook. The German version is like ours in that it attributes the poisoning to snakes, not toads, which is the Scottish tradition. Kinloch remarks: “Might not the Scots proverbial phrase, ‘To gie one frogs instead of fish,’ as meaning to substitute what is bad or disagreeable, for expected good, be viewed as allied to the idea of the venomous quality of the toad?” Sir Walter Scott quotes from a manuscript Chronicle of England which describes in quaint language how King John was poisoned by a conconction of toads: “Tho went the monke into a gardene, and fonde a tode therin; and toke her upp, and put hyr in a cuppe, and filled it with good ale, and pryked hyr in every place, in the cuppe, till the venom came out in every place; and brought hitt befor the kynge, and knelyd, and said, ‘Sir, wassayle; for never in your lyfe dranck ye of such a cuppe.’ ”
A very beautiful version of the song is given in A Garland of Country Song No. 38. In the note, Mr. Baring-Gould remarks that, not only is the ballad popularly known in England and Ireland, but it has also been noted down in Italy, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Bohemia, and Iceland. The ballad is exhaustively dealt with by Child.
The West Country expression “spickit and sparkit” means “speckled and blotched.”
For other versions with tunes, see the Journal
