Cecil Sharp's Note 15 (1916)

No. 15. Lord Thomas of Winesberry

I have had to omit some of the words which the singer of this version gave me, and to supplement the rest with extracts from the three other variants I have collected. All the tunes that I have noted are of the same straightforward type.

The ballad is very nearly identical with the Scottish ballad of “Lord Thomas of Winesberry,” and that is my excuse for appropriating that title. Scottish versions are printed in Buchan’s Ancient Ballads of the North of Scotland (volume ii, p. 212), and in Kinloch’s Ancient Scottish Ballads (p. 89). Kinloch makes an attempt to connect the subject of the ballad with “the secret expedition of James V to France, in 1536, in search of a wife,” which seems more ingenious than probable. In Buchan’s version Thomas is chamberlain to the daughter of the King of France, who wanted none of her riches, as he had

⁠. . . thirty ploughs and three:
⁠And four an’ twenty bonny breast mills,
⁠All on the water of Dee.

Under the heading of “Willie o’ Winsbury,” Child treats the ballad very exhaustively (English and Scottish Ballads, No, 100). He gives a version from Motherwell’s MS., in which the curious line, “But a fig for all your land,” occurs. Shakespere uses the same expression, “A fig for Peter” (2 Henry VI, Act ii, Sc. 3).

Five verses of this ballad are given in Notes and Queries (Series 5, volume vii, p. 387), “as heard sung years ago by a West Country fisherman.” As the late Mr. Hammond noted down more than one version in Dorset, the song has evidently taken root in the West of England, where all my versions were collected.