Cecil Sharp's Note 06 (1916)

No. 6. Lord Bateman

This, again, is a very popular ballad with English folksingers, and I have noted down nineteen different versions of it. The singer of the Æolian tune given in the text was the old man who gave me “Robin Hood and the Tanner,” and here again he constantly varied his phrases in the several verses of the song (see English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, p. 22). The words that he sang were virtually the same as those printed on broadsides by Pitts, Jackson, and others.

For versions of this ballad, with tunes, see English County Songs (p. 62); Mr. Kidson’s Traditional Tunes (p. 32); Northumbrian Minstrelsy (p. 64); the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume i, p. 240; volume iii, pp. 192–200); Sussex Songs (p. 43); Kinloch’s Ancient Scottish Ballads (p. 260 and appendix); English Folk Songs for Schools (No. 11); and George Cruikshank’s Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman.

For words only, see Jamieson’s Popular Ballads (volume ii, p. 17); Garret’s Newcastle Garlands (volume i); and the broadsides above mentioned. The ballad is exhaustively analyzed in Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (“Lord Beichan,” No. 53).

The story of Lord Bateman, Beichan, or Bekie, is very similar to the well-known and ancient legend concerning Gilbert Becket, father of Saint Thomas the Martyr. This has suggested to some the derivation of the ballad from the legend; but Child thinks that this is not so, although he admits that the ballad has not come down to us unaffected by the legend. He points out that there is a similar story in the Gesta Romanorum (No. 5, Bohn ed.), of about the same age as the Becket legend; that there are beautiful repetitions of the story in the ballads of other nations; and that it has secondary affinities with “Hind Horn.” The hero’s name, allowing for different spellings and corruptions, is always the same; but the name of the heroine varies. In ten of the twelve copies of the ballad that Child gives she is Susan Pye; in two, Isbel or Essels; and in the remaining two, Sophia, as in the text.