Cecil Sharp's Note 21 (1916)

No. 21. The Duke of Bedford

The singer of this ballad, a native of Sheffield, told me that he learned it from his father, who, in turn, had derived it from his father, and that it was regarded by his relatives as a “family relic” and sung at weddings and other important gatherings. The earlier stanzas of the song are undoubtedly traditional, but some of the later ones (omitted in the text) were, I suspect, added by a recent member of the singer’s family, or, possibly, derived from a broadside.

The tune, which is in the Æolian mode, has some affinities with the second strain of “The Cuckoo” (No. 35), an air which is often sung to “High Germany.” See also the tune of No. 92 of Joyce’s Ancient Irish Music.

Three Lincolnshire variants collected by Percy Grainger are printed in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume iii, pp. 170–179); while the version in the text is given, with all the words, in the fifth volume of the same publication (p. 79).

Very full notes have been added to these by Miss Lucy Broadwood in an attempt to throw light on the origin of the historical incident upon which the ballad story is founded. Two other versions have been published in Longman’s Magazine (volume xvii, p. 217, ed. 1890), and in the Ballad Society’s edition of the Roxburghe Ballads (part xv, volume v, ed. 1885).

Professor Child reprinted the first of these in a note upon “The Death of Queen Jane,” observing that “one half seemed a plagiarism upon that old ballad,” and that the remainder of “The Duke of Bedford” was so “trivial” that he had not attempted to identify this Duke—“any other Duke would probably answer as well.” Miss Broadwood has not reached a definite conclusion, but she inclines to the theory that the Duke of the ballad was William De la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450). She admits, however, that there is a good deal of evidence in favor of the Duke of Grafton, son of Charles II, an account of whose death was printed on a broadside, licensed in 1690. She thinks that the ballad given here is probably a mixture of two separate ballads, the more modern of the two (describing hunting) referring to the death of the son of the fourth Duke of Bedford, born in 1739, who was killed by a fall from his horse in 1767. Woburn only came into the possession of the Bedford family after the accession of Edward VI.

The last stanza refers to the popular superstition that the flowing of certain streams, known as “woe-waters,” was the presage of coming disaster.