Cecil Sharp's Note 17 (1916)
No. 17. The Briery Bush
The lines printed in the text are as the singer of this version sang them, with the exception of the last stanza, which I have borrowed from a variant collected elsewhere. For other versions with tunes, see English County Songs (p. 112); and the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume v, pp. 328-235), with a long and exhaustive note.
Under the heading of “The Maid freed from the Gallows,” Child (English and Scottish Ballads, No. 95) gives several versions and shows that the ballad is very generally known throughout Northern and Southern Europe—nearly fifty versions have been collected in Finland. In the foreign forms of the ballad, the victim usually falls into the hands of corsairs or pirates, who demand ransom, but none of the English versions account in any way for the situation.
Child also quotes another English variant communicated by Dr. Birkbeck Hill in 1890, “as learned forty years before from a schoolfellow who came from the North of Somerset.” 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.