No. 96. The Twelve Days of Christmas
This song consists of twenty-three verses, and is sung in the following way. The second verse begins:
my true Love sent to me
Eleven bulls a-beating, etc.,
and so on till the twelfth verse, as given in the text. The process is then reversed, the verses being gradually increased in length, so that the thirteenth verse is:
my true Love sent to me
Two turtle doves
One goldie ring,
And the part of a June apple-tree.
In this way the twenty-third verse is triumphantly reached, and that, except for the last line, is the same as the first verse.
Another way to sing the song is to begin with “On the first day of Christmas,” etc., and to continue to the “twelfth day,” when the song concludes.
“June Apple-Tree” may or may not be a corruption of “Juniper-Tree,” but the singer explained it by saying that it meant a tree whose fruit kept sound and good till the following June.
For the third gift, the singer sang “Three Britten Chains,” which she said were “sea-birds with golden chains round their necks.” All the other singers I have heard sang “Three French Hens,” and, as this is the usual reading in printed copies, I have so given it in the text. “Britten Chains” may be a corruption of “Bréton hens.”
The “twelve days” are, of course, those between Christmas Day and Epiphany, or Twelfth Day.
For other versions, see Mr. Baring-Gould's note to “The jolly Goss-hawk (Songs of the West, No. 71); Chambers’s Popular Songs of Scotland (p. 42); Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes (pp. 63 and 73); and Northumbrian Minstrelsy (p. 129), where the song is described as “one of the quaintest of Christmas carols now relegated to the nursery as a forfeit game, where each child in succession has to repeat the gifts of the day and incurs a forfeit for every error.” In this last version also given in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes, p.73, and Husk’s Songs of the Nativity), the first gift is “a partridge on a pear tree,” and this I have heard several times in country villages. One singer who gave it to me volunteered the statement that it was only another way of singing “part of a Juniper-tree,” of which, of course, it may be a corruption.
These words are also used as a Children’s Game. One of Halliwell’s versions (p. 63) is still used by children in Somerset, and Lady Gomme (Dictionary of British Folk-Lore, volume i, p. 315), besides reprinting three of the forms given above, gives a London variant. In a note to the game, Lady Gomme points out that the festival of the twelve days, the great midwinter feast of Yule, was a very important one, and that in this game may, perhaps, be discerned the relic of certain customs and ceremonies and the penalties or forfeits incurred by those who omitted religiously to carry them out; and she adds that it was a very general practice for work of all kinds to be put entirely aside before Christmas and not resumed until after Twelfth Day.
Country singers are very fond of accumulative songs of this type, regarding them as tests of endurance and memory, and sometimes of sobriety!
No. 97. The Ten Commandments
This song is very common in Somerset and over the whole of the West of England. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould has published a version in Songs of the West, and there are two versions in English County Songs. Both of these publications contain notes respecting the origin, distribution, and meaning of this curious song.
It will be seen that the words of many of the verses are corrupt; so corrupt, indeed, that in some cases we can do little more than guess at their original meaning. The variants that I have recovered in Somerset are as follows:
- All versions agree in this line, which obviously refers to God Almighty.
- “Two of these are lizaie both, clothed all in green, O!” Mr. Baring-Gould suggests that
