Gone Medieval - Ballads of Love and Death

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

In this enchanting episode, Dr. Eleanor Janega dissolves the boundaries between history, folklore, and music to explore the haunting world of medieval ballads. Joined by author Amy Jeffs, illustrator Gwen Burns and composer/singer Natalie Brice, Eleanor uncovers the timeless stories sung around firesides and passed from voice to voice for centuries.From fairy queens and dragon-tenders to the chilling archetype of the “sinful woman”, these songs reveal how ordinary people in medieval Britain grappled with questions of morality, identity, and the supernatural.MOREEdward the Confessor & New Year SaintsSupernatural Medieval IrelandGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

we delve into the rebellions, plots and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. In this episode of Gone Medieval, we're going to dissolve the boundaries between history, myth, and melody. Because we are talking about ballads, ancient story songs that were passed from fireside to fireside, from nurse to child. songs that were rooted in the lived experience of ordinary people. In their verses, we can catch a glimpse of both of the extraordinary and the everyday. The hopes, fears, and dreams that occupied medieval minds. Our good friend Amy Jeffs, who we've been catching up with throughout the year on Gone medieval to talk about saints,

has just published old songs, stories of love and death from traditional ballads. It's beautifully illustrated by Gwen Byrne Byr. In it, they invite us to wander through the enchanted landscapes of Britain, guided by stories that have been sung, whispered, and reimagined for centuries. A whole cast of unforgettable characters are brought to life in these songs. Some familiar, others shrouded in the mists of time. From fairy haunted hills where Elf Queen's kidnapped poets to the shadowed forests of Northumberland, where a girl, tends to a dragon who was once her brother, where golden-masted ships are captained by the devil himself, and boys are wed before their voices break. And as an extra special treat today,

Amy is joined to give us a musical taste of some of these ballads by Natalie Bryce, as well as her illustrator Gwen Burns. Natalie is a self-proclaimed fierce songwriter. Love it, girl, yes. Amy, Natalie, and Gwen, welcome to gone medieval. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. I am so excited for this today. I've been really looking forward to it for weeks now. And I think this is going to be a really exciting one for everyone because I think the term ballad is one that everyone's heard. Everyone kind of understands the idea that there is a ballad out there. But before we get into all of that, I'm going to make us eat our vegetables and be a historian and define our terms. So how do we

define a ballad? What makes it a specific thing as opposed to just, you know, a folk song or a troubadour poem? You know, what makes that ballad a ballad? So a ballad in literary terms can be defined as a, it's a narrative poem, often written in quadrines, so lines, stanzas of lines of four, with an A, B, C, B, rhyme pattern. So I'm trying to think of a good example. I even think like, if I was to leave my husband dear and my two babes also, oh, what have you to take me to if I with you should go? So the dear is the first line, which doesn't rhyme with the third line, which ends with two, but babes also and I should go do rhyme. So that's an example of a standard ballad form. But in reality, it often disobeys those rules. and maybe it's more helpful to think of them just as story songs.

Okay. So I like this. So we've got a song that's got a plot. Maybe it rhymes in a particular way. This is the thing, right? I'm sitting here being an academic, and I'm trying to get you to trap something that's really poetic and rooted, I guess, in kind of an oral traditions.

The term ballad is late. Yeah. You know, it's, I think, pre-19th century, it referred to a dance form. So that's also makes it trickier. It's trying to attach our compulsion to taxonomize to something that was born before that compulsion. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Which is such a historian thing that we love to do. You know, we're always putting a term on something that didn't exist, trying to categorize a time period in a way that nobody thought.

Yeah, it's the same as grammar. You know, it's like we can make paradigms and tables, but, you know, when something has emerged organically, And as part of a living tradition, it will fall outside of the parameters we set. And I mean, I suppose that we could say that you've gone about approaching them outside of these parameters, which is one of the reasons why we're going to get to do so many cool things to see. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've been approaching them outside of the academic framework as a result? Well, I mean, I think it's so interesting, isn't it, how when you're researching medieval text and artworks, you know, it's inspiring. And one of my favorite medieval personalities is Marie de France, which I'm sure is the same for you.

Of course. And, you know, her whole opus really rests on this idea she had of spinning stories from Breton-Lays, which were essentially story songs, you know, the minstrelsy of Brittany. And so her narratives are kind of expansions of these stories, as I understand it. And I don't think the stories, the songs themselves survive. but her stories give us a glimpse of what they might have been. At least that's what she claims she's doing, isn't it? It might be that she's just sort of pointing to an authority.

So the idea behind this book is taking 10 traditional ballad lyrics and reimagining them as short stories, following up with historical commentaries. And the story bit, I feel like, is rooted in inspiration from Marie de France. That's my authority. I'm going to her. But the way it sort of fall maybe outside of the usual pattern, is that it was actually born as a project of three threads with pictures, words and music. And it was our intention from the get-go that all three threads of the project should sort of happen

simultaneously and emerge together and influence each other. Yeah, I mean, me and Amy, we were talking about work and I said I wanted to make it like an anthology of folk, it was folk song actually. It wasn't necessarily ballad, but whatever the difference is to illustrate it. I wanted to illustrate an anthology of folk song. And then we quickly realized that we would like to do something together. Because I'd been reading Arthur Quiller Couch's collection of anthology of ballads for quite a few years as bedtime stories and just loving the stories and digging down into them and enjoying sort of learning the dialects that they were written in as well. And so when Gwen said, yeah, my dream, my absolute dream gig would be to illustrate a compendium of folk songs.

I was like, well, I don't know about a compendium, but what about something like this? But Nat and I had been in touch for a couple of years prior to that point and sort of looking for an excuse to work together as well, and that's a composer. So, yeah, I think it was actually a children's birthday. Yeah, I think it was your daughter's second or third birthday. We got together and had a feverish, intense conversation about how this would be our dream project. Yeah. So the novelist Max Porter, who's a friend of mine, he's sometimes.

times does projects where an artist will produce a series of illustrations or artworks and he will respond with a text. And so the text doesn't necessarily have supremacy. And I really thought as such an inspiring idea. And so I said to Gwen and that, let's each take the lyrics of a traditional ballad. Let's go away and produce kind of sketches in our various media, come back and compare what we've done and see what has emerged as particularly exciting or interesting for each of us and try and find a line of best fit through those three responses so that it's a real unity. So the printed edition is suffused with Gwen's illustrations and the audio book is illustrated with Nat's musical dramatizations of excerpts from the ballads. But they are all with the text

a single sort of creation, I suppose. I love this because it is quite medieval in its own way. You know, this getting together at, you know, community events like birthday parties, having all of these, you know, dreams and exciting things and just doing it by word of mouth and coming in to bring it together. I absolutely love that. And the collaboration via WhatsApp, we were all in our respective hermitages kind of working on our thing. And then, but actually then we'd meet once or twice, you know, every couple of months we'd meet at the pub and we'd be like, like, we'd talk about the feelings behind the stories. So, you know, in the demon lover where a kind of an old flame, very, very attractive and roguish old flame

appears on her doorstep. She's now married with children and says to her, you know, I thought you were waiting for me. You know, I've got a fleet of ships. So the greatest of the ships has a mast of gold and taffeta sails. You know, come away with me, I'll show you the world.

In some ways, although it's a very supernatural and kind of extreme situation she's in, we were finding our own life experiences informing how we related to the story. And I felt like also readers would find that as well, that roguish old flame just appearing and being like, let's run away, let's run away. You can't bring that up and not sing it for me now.

Can we hear a little bit of the demon lover? So one of the things I loved about this ballad, I mean, it's actually collected fairly late, but the way it describes the lover's ship with the golden mast and the silk or taffeta sails. And it's kind of, once she gets on it in some versions, there's no mariners. He's promised there was going to be 24 mariners to wait on her hand and foot, but then she gets on there's no one.

It's deserted. So who's sailing this ship? It's quite evocative of Yuzma, Maui de France's narrative where he finds this ghostly ships just floating in a harbour and it too has gotten sails. It's got ebony rails. It's got a bed in the middle. And there's a kind of, I think, a fossil of that kind of storytelling tradition in this. we're going to come in to the point where she has decided to run away from her family

you know just set aside all of her duties and obligations and just go for it and so it's that moment of of stepping onto the ship what hills are yon that the sun shines sweet oh yon are the hills of heaven he said where you will never Oh, okay, I love it. I guess my question about this is you mentioned that this is mirroring in a way or having some callbacks to some of Marie Defence's work. How did these ballads actually survive for you to dig them out like this?

Are they published somewhere? Like, are you getting these from word of mouth? Like, how did we? So I think, I mean, there isn't obviously, and I know that you weren't implying this with your sort of precy, but there isn't a direct link back to Marie de France. And what's interesting is how motifs and tropes kind of travel through time

and across things like the Reformation. And when I was reading Arthur Quiller Couches 1929, I think edited volume of ballads, I was reading it as a medievalist. And the same thing I remember thinking as a teenager reading Catherine Briggs collection of British folk tales, which is, oh, I really hope this is super old.

This just feels like super, super, super old. I really want it to be. And so part of this project for me as a historian was trying to find some instances where we can say with certainty, this is medieval. And where sometimes, I mean, there's one or two instances, for instance, the Thomas Lerimer, where you can say this definitely is a medieval ballad

or a medieval narrative at least that's being turned into a ballad. It's wonderful to see the motifs and traits going right back to the classical period, right across Europe and beyond. And so our primary source for this choice of ballads was Francis James Child. So he's a 19th century Harvard scholar, American, who collected across five volumes,

hundreds and hundreds of ballads. And he worked across, I think it was 13 languages. He collects every version he could find of each ballad. And then he, in that wonderful Victorian antiquarian, way where someone's definitely washing all his clothes and cooking all his meals because he's just poured himself into this for years, provided kind of every, like a commentary, an introduction procedures, each collection of versions, which takes the reader through every analogue he can find, either in related ballad traditions, like Scandinavian ballad traditions or German or elsewhere,

but then also into literature. So going back to Ovid's metamorphoses or medieval text. like Thomas the Rimer. And so it was just incredible. I mean, I remember when I worked in the British Museum, we would sometimes work with a Victorian antiquarian called Sindhren Hope, his notes on museum objects. They were always just so meticulously researched. And it feels like this with Francis James Child too.

So that's all but one of the ballads is from Francis James Child. The stories may pick up on motifs from more than one version. but it will be in the back of the book we've put versions of each of the ballads and then put footnotes so that readers can kind of trace the plot. Well, speaking of, can I get you to sing some more for me? Yeah, just I suppose I'm not quite sure which one you'd like to perform next. I had it down that we'd maybe do The Maid in the Palmer,

but up to you, what you'd like to go on to? Well, I think what would be really nice, while we're with the demon love it, and looking at the kind of persistence or legacy of certain medieval narrative worlds, I suppose, is that there's one part of, one version of the ballad where she has been at CUN now for two weeks or three weeks, and she sees two landscapes either side of, they're sort of going through a channel between two lands. And it's very evocative. There are otherworldly landscapes that she can see, and it's really reminiscent of, but other world narrators,

so the Voyager St. Brendan and going into the earthly paradise, but also then the dream vision of pearl where he sees the heavenly landscape. And I think these two verses are, for me, among the most kind of chilling and moving of the whole corpus of traditional ballads. So we'll just do another bit of the demon lover so you can hear, hear those. What hill the sun shines? Oh, yon are the hills of heaven, he said, where you will never Oh, yon is the mountain of hell he cried where you and I will go. Oh, I love this. Okay, I guess that you've mentioned now, this has echoes of things that we see in other medieval stories like Marie de France or in vision narratives like we see in the Pearl poem.

But can we talk a little bit about the themes in it? So, for example, we've got this runaway wife, you know, the kind of sinful woman who's running back to her ex. Is that something that we see a lot in ballads? The earliest recorded ballad in English, and I mean recorders is in written down, is in a 30th century manuscript, which is now in Trinity College, Cambridge, in the Ren Library. And obviously, there's no notation. So this is inferred to be a ballad from its form and the other aspects of its literary qualities. So it's based on a narrative from Coptic Gospels of the Twelve Apostles, which is an eighth century manuscript, just one eight-century manuscript that survives in.

But this story tells us about Judas. He's walking to Jerusalem and he's going to the market and he's got a satchel with 30 silver plates in it. And he meets what the Middle English tells us is a swicklewomen on the road to Jerusalem. And it says that she's his sister, but I think that's a kind of sister in quotation marks. And she takes him off to a high place and does what women constantly do in ballads. She puts his head on her knee. This is like an extremely powerful and dangerous thing to do to a man in the world of balladry. Who amongst us can resist the charms of having our head on a woman's knee?

Wow. Okay. And things happen. So he falls asleep on her knee. and then when he wakes up the silver plates have gone and she says to him oh you know you're you've got this master Jesus Christ you talk so much of it you like him so much

but if you went into Jerusalem now and gave him up to this man called Pontius Pilate he'd pay you back for the 30 silver plates you've lost he'd pay you enough for you to compensate you for that theft and so then Judas goes into Jerusalem betrays Christ and so the whole betrayal that kicks starts the whole kind of crucifixion, resurrection, everything narrative of the Gospels, is pinned on the actions of this woman, this swickler woman, in the earliest English ballad.

Oh, well, you know, I'm sure that somehow there was a way to blame a woman for everything. You know, other than just Eve, I guess, which is what made it necessary in the first place. But I guess here we've, again, we're kind of seeing this idea. You've got this woman who's beautiful, right? This is the beautiful woman who convinces this man to come put his head on her knee, et cetera. And so you've got this kind of pretty woman who is like secretly awful on the inside. Is that something that we see a lot in terms of ballads? Yeah, the use of biblical narratives is kind of a jumping off point for a ballad narrative.

So there's a slightly later, or ballad that's collected slightly later called The Maid and the Palmer. and it's about a woman who is washing linens or clothes at a well and a palmer or a pilgrim comes to her and asks for a drink and she refuses him the drink and then he says well if it had been your lover who had come from Rome you would have given him a drink and she says oh I've never had a lover and he says you peace fair maid you are for sworn nine children you have born and then it's in the way that the ballad

So describes her, it says, the maid she went to the well, the wash, and the dew fell off her lily white flesh, as all this very images of washing and of purity and of innocence. But as the ballad progresses and the pilgrim reveals his knowledge of her crimes, you realize that potentially she's an infanticidal maniac. Or it's more complex and subtle. I don't know.

It's interesting how, I mean, that maybe you went to, You became quite close to this valid in your exploration graphically. Yes. I mean, sorry, I'm just throwing you right in there. No, I mean, we spoke about the whole idea that maybe she has postpartum psychosis, you know, if we're going to read it within a more modern forgiving context. And whilst I was pouring through the Bronson book, I think there were quite a few possibilities for that particular one.

But I ended up making it quite dissonant. and dark to really bring to light the themes within the ballad. And to complicate her character, she's not, in our sort of treatment of her, maybe it's not so, she's not such a clear-cut villain as in the medieval version. This ballad has relations in Scandinavia, in which she is quite clearly Mary Magdalene, she's cast as Mary Magdalene. But actually the biblical model it derives from is the Gospel of John, and it's based on the story of the woman at the well.

So I'm sure some listeners will have thought of that as I was relating the story in which Jesus meets us a Samaritan woman. So the Samaritans are kind of, there's like a hostility between the Jewish communities and the Samaritan communities in this historical setting. But he has a conversation with her, which is really shocking. And he asks her for a drink,

just as the Palmer does in the ballad. And he says that the water in the well will only slake her bodily thirst, but the living water of God will ensure she's never thirsty again. And she asks for some of this living water and he says she should fetch her husband. And she says she hasn't got a husband. And he says, no, you're right. You've had five husbands.

But the man you live with now is not your husband. Oh. So it's, and then she ends up becoming a kind of evangelist for Jesus' teachings within her community. But you can see how, I think it's fascinating how this ballad, the maid and the part, has taken sort of aspects of that story, but really caricatured them and also brought in this particular, I mean, you really feel the landscape of

maybe a north-western European well with that darkness and the way, I mean, there's one surviving version of this ballad from Ireland, which I think is more better known, the well below the value that goes. Green grow the lilies, oh, down among the bushes, Oh, if you're a man of noble fame, you tell me who is father to them in the well below their valley, oh, green grow the lilies, oh, down among the bushes, oh. And there's, I think there's a darkness which is taking us out of the Middle East. I also did want to say, while we're on this theme of kind of things coming out of Gospels or out of the Coptic Gospels or the Apostles, there's also the Cherry Tree Carol, which we don't. feature as a story in this book, but which derives from a much earlier apocryphal gospel narrative

from the gospel of Pseudomathew about the Virgin travelling to Bethlehem with Joseph and she's heavily pregnant and she sees a date palm covered in fruit and she wants to pick the dates but she can't reach and she asks Joseph and he refuses. And so then the date palm kind of senses the deity in her womb and bends down to her and she's able to pick her fill. And this in the Entown plays, which is early 15th century text, of mystery plays. We have that story reworked as Mary on the road to Bethlehem in midwinter, in a snowy landscape, and a cherry tree miraculously burst into fruit before her. She asks Joseph to pick her some cherries, and he says, let the one who got you with child

pick the cherries. So, of course, the cherry tree then bends down, and he looks like a right wally. But that endures as a ballad into the post-medieval period and beyond to the present day. I think that's really fascinating how more local landscapes come to kind of really transform the aesthetic of these narratives. Yeah, that's a really interesting one as well because we've been talking about all of these ballads that involve women behaving badly. Oh, she's pretty, but she's a slag. you know, over and over again. And then here you have Mary, who outwardly you could, in theory, think that she's done something wrong, but really her husband's being the jerk in this one.

So it's a nice little inversion. I mean, it's also very funny, like this idea of Joseph as a baddie or a wrongman. Yeah, or just a bit grumpy, as cantankerous Joseph. Yeah. quite get past the fact that it's not, you know, that is God's child, not his. It's just not a characterization I'm used to seeing for Joseph. But I guess that this is one of these things. It's taking these biblical stories and making them sort of every day and common. You know, these are the sort of behaviors that you might know from people in your actual communal circle as opposed to from, you know, the Bible. I guess that's the thing is we've got a lot of kind of biblical messages or stories that are being brought to the fore in terms of these ballots.

So who's delivering these? I mean, you were saying that you see echoes of Marie de France. Like, are we seeing women being like, yeah, we're all slags except Mary? Or is this something that we would expect more from a male tradition? Yeah, I mean, it's a really tricky question because I think it's basically very little. evidence, but especially of what was happening in rural communities. One of the earliest big collections of ballads is from, I want to say, 18th century Aberdeenshire, collected by a woman called Anna Brown, nay Anna Gordon. She learned them from her mother, her aunt and her nurse. And her aunt,

Mrs. Farquharson, had been living in rural Aberdeenshire in the region of Brymard. And so it's thought that she learned her repertoire from the, she was a vicar's wife, I think, so she was kind of in the community. So it's three women teaching Anna Brown, what then goes into this manuscript that she gets published via her father's connections, I think, in the University of Aberdeen. But from an urban perspective, it's clearer that women are playing a significant role. So in the post-medieval period with rising urbanisation, driven by women moving into cities to go into roles in domestic service. You also get a surge of urban poor and especially women who have become pregnant and haven't then been able to secure marriage and are then, you know, in quite a desperate

situation. And one of the ways in which they could earn money was to take sheafs of pamphlets from printers within the city, which bore ballad lyrics, sing the ballads at street corners and sell the lyrics to passers by and take a cut. You know, there's a strong emphasis in some of these, you get quite a few traditional ballads within these broadside ballad pamphlets, but also ones that are about recent events or histories or kind of strange natural phenomena. A lot of like scaffold side confessions of contrite women who've killed their husbands. You know, one of the major themes is infanticide. And it's sort of interesting that you would have had presumably quite a lot of women with babies

standing on street corners, singing these songs. And there was even a suspicion that people were renting out babies for these women to hold. to make them look more sort of, you know, sympathetic or to evoke the sympathies of passes by. And I just, maybe, and this is just a complete maybe, but there's a touch of humour about a woman singing a song about a terrifying infanticidal mother while she's there rocking a baby and she's like, come on, give me some money. You know, I don't know. There's, I think it's wanting to see in the past a kind of nuance and, like, a subtlety of meaning

that allows these women more agency and personality than being simply victims or simply Madonna's a whole. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I suppose there's also something here where we're getting these stories about these terrible women, very bad mommies who killed their children. And, you know, to be fair, in medieval life, infanticide is much higher than it is now because there's no kind of very useful forms of contraception

and that sort of a thing. And so I guess we're also offering this juxtaposition. It's like, well, you know, I'm sure we could all agree that infanticide is bad. And here I'm actually nice mommy. So, yeah, okay. Maybe I'm a fallen woman, but oh, it could be so much worse. And it will be worse if you don't give me money right now. I think it would be while we're on the subject of the Virgin,

I think that's a really interesting aspect of the Thomas the Rheimer ballad. Ah, can we hear of that? Yes, yes. It's so brilliant for this particular podcast because it's thought to date from the 14th century the romance of Thomas the Reimer, which I think it's Victoria Flood suggests that it was based, that the romance, the middle English romance we have of Thomas the Reimer from the 14th century may have actually been spun out of a ballad, which doesn't survive, possibly. But then a ballad survives from the later period, which seems to draw on the romance. So the kind of exchange of genre is going on, which is perpetuating this story. It's about the political prophet, who's known as Thomas the Rhymer or Thomas of Erkel Dune, who lived on the borderlands and in the 13th century, who's a historical figure, and is said to have prophesied a great deal about the wars, the coming wars, between the English and the Scots.

And in some versions, the prophecies are quite pro-English, in other versions, This prophecy is quite pro-Skottish. But the ballad is like an introduction to the prophecies. The prophecies are very lengthy and cryptic. But the ballad was this like, warm you up. Or the romance is likewise. They're kind of warming you up for how did he receive the gift of prophecy to make these ballads? And it's all about him lying under a tree called the Eildon Oak.

And next to Eildon Hill near Elston and near, the Melrose you can see from that hill and the fairy queen emerges from the hillside and comes to him and what's interesting is because the ballad survives in the post-Reformation period and yet in the ballad he still mistakes her for the Virgin Mary

and speaks to her in very reverent terms as you might expect from a pre-Reformation Christian he's lying on Huntley Bank under the Eilden tree and he sees this beautiful woman riding towards him. And it says her shirt was of the grass green silk, her mantle of velvet fine, and every tress of her horse's mane was hung with 50 silver bells and nine. True Thomas he bowed off his cap and by peer on never did see. And then she says, oh no, no, Thomas, she said, that name does not belong to me. I am but the queen of Fair Elfland.

that I'm hither come to visit thee. We would love to sing a little bit more if that's all right, because the lyrics to this ballad are, I mean, it's so haunting. And what's amazing is how much these lyrics relate to the medieval romance version as well. She takes him through the hill into the other world, but it's a long journey. And the first thing, they stand on a kind of cliff and look out over the landscape. And there are multiple roads leading off, and she can see, she says see ye not your narrow road so thick beset with thorns and briars that is the path of righteousness

though after it but few inquire which i think is so fascinating it's not that the path to righteousness is narrow because it's always been narrow it's because it's overgrown it's because not enough people walk it which i think is a really beautiful subtle distinction between the different ways that that road is described and then she says and see ye not that broad broad road that lies across that lily leaven that meadow of That is the path of wickedness, though some call it the road to heaven. And then... And see not ye that what is the... Where thou and this night must go.

So the reason that she's taken him into the hill at all is because in the medieval version, it's quite clear that he rapes her seven times. As you quite a big plot incident. In the ballad's versions, it's a less clear-cut moment. It seems, in this one it's definitely, she says to him, Harp and carp, Thomas, she said, harp and carp along with me. And if you dare to kiss my lips shore of your body, I will be. So she's telling him, don't touch her.

But then he says, soon he has kissed her rosy lips all underneath the eilden tree. And she says, now are you on go with me? Now you're like, now we're off. So they then are travelling through Elfland. She warns him that he mustn't speak ever, or he will never go home again. And they wade through a river. And this river is not an ordinary river. So we'll just sing this first.

It was murk, muck night and no starlight. They waited for a... Runs through that country. So she goes, she takes him to Elfland. And in this version of the ballad, she gives him an apple from a tree that will, and makes him eat it and it will give him a tongue that will never lie. And so then when she sends him back, he's able to speak the truth. It's more complex in the medieval ballad narrative.

But the final verse is, He has gotten a coat of even cloth and a pair of shoes off until seven years. True Thomas on earth was never. This is such an interesting one to me because it combine so many medieval traditions that I'm used to, you know, like stories of the other world, ideas about what happens in, you know, fairy, the other world, what have you. But we're using it in this context of the border wars, and we're using it to kind of make a justification for

who should rule whom. So we've got the other world here showing us that there are like varying political structures in places or, I mean, what are we doing here with this? You know, like, it's clearly we're trying to make a political point. But who are the fairies and who's the wronged party? You know, because I don't know, I'm afraid that I'm a hopelessly 21st century person and I'm like, did you sexually assault that woman? Are you, and you're the hero? Like, what's happening here, you know?

Yeah, I think it's this idea. I mean, it's interesting, even in the medieval romance, trying to work out. the fairy queen's motivations in relation to Thomas. And is she punishing him or is she giving him a gift? You know, what is going on? And if she's giving him a gift, why? He's attacked her seven times. It's really baffling. But I think that lifting it out in a way, she's the fairy queen. You know, she's a really big deal. And for me, the way I could see through this story and identify with her as a character is that she just stops giving a damn about him. She realizes he doesn't matter. And she realizes, so what we've got in the medieval romance, and what also happens in the ballad of Tamlin, is that the very queen has to pay a tithe to hell every seven years, which implies to me that Elfland is a subject state of hell. It's paying tribute, which is what the Scottish kings would have to do if Edward I first becomes their overlord. There's a sovereignty theme running through here. And I thought,

that maybe, I mean, I became more interested in the stories reimagining from this ballad, the fairy queen suddenly wanting to rebel. Because actually, when you read about what fairies do and why, rebellion, turning things upside down, turning over the table is just, that's what their role is. And so maybe she wants to shake things up politically in the land of the living. And so she throws Thomas back with a tongue that can never lie. And she's like, okay, let's see how you deal with truth, you bunch of weirdos. Oh, I love that. There's also something here because we already immediately have a kind of topsy-turvy society

when we're presented with the other world, right? Because we've got this, here's the fairy queen who leads the society. And she's out doing her thing, like walking around on her very fine horse and, you know, trying to just have a nice life, which you don't get to see ordinarily for queens in the world of humans. So is this a way of getting some catharsis for women, do you think? Or is this just another way of highlighting the fact that the other world is strange? Oh, you never know. A woman might have agency.

Well, and I think it's also a fantasy that you go somewhere where she's powerful, but she's in some ways like she's not a real world threat because she's beyond the veil. But she's also very beautiful and somehow sexually available in a way, as long as she's, you are willing to risk your immortal soul. Well, who amongst us, you know? Yeah. The other thing that's sort of, I think, intriguing about the sovereignty issue. I thought initially maybe she's planning to give Thomas the Reimer in tithes to hell.

And then what if the reason she throws them back to the land of the living is because she decides she doesn't want to pay the hell tithe anymore. That it's somehow contradicts the very essence of fairy and elf land to be a subject state. And that was, I mean, just at a completely pedantic level, medieval Christianity probably created this idea of Elfland as a subject state of hell to deal with fairy belief and to accommodate it in some way. And that probably there was a point at which it was its own independent state and imaginations of the populace. So maybe that was a way of bringing that into the fiction to kind of test that theory. Yeah, that makes sense because how do you explain what this third space that is neither subject to ordinary society, ordinary Christian society, nor is it necessarily evil? It's just this other thing. It is incredibly complex, especially as you get further into the medieval period and, gosh, into the early modern period, when things really solidify in terms of belief. I guess that makes sense. You've got to, adding the political structure on top is so interesting. Because, I mean, the impetus to try to explain how fairy can exist is very funny to me. Like, oh, yeah, we've got to have an intellectual framework for why the other world is, you know. Yeah.

I mean, what you're saying about how solidified it gets. I mean, we talk about this early on in the book with the trial of Bessie Dunlop, the accused witch, who said her newborn child was sick, her husband was sick. And a sort of large woman appears in her cottage door and tells her her baby's going to die. but her husband will recover and then leaves again. And then it's followed up by her visits, followed up by the visit of a man who calls himself Tom Reed, who says he died at the Battle of Pinky, which was 1547, so 29 years earlier,

he had died in the Battle of Pinky. And he says he's been living in Elfland ever since. He says that the woman had been the fairy queen, and he gives Bessie some green thread, which she then uses as part of her work as a healer and midwife in her community. But when she gets taken to trial, she describes this encounter's, this is how we know about it. And she's tortured with incisions around her mouth and strangled to death in the end.

And that's, I think, indicative of how dangerous these beliefs were perceived, not just as figments of her imagination as she was calling up devils. So the kind of transition from story to reality and the distinctions between the two historically are, I think, fascinating and very terrifying. Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating point because we see as we get more and more into the modern period that there is less room for the sort of imaginative play with the third space. And there is much more

of an idea that the supernatural is malignant. It's something malign that is coming for people. And again, this increased association of femininity with those evil and malign spirits, you know, like, oh, the fairy queen, she was tithing to hell. oh, so she's the kind of bad one, right? Not the man who assaults her. You know, this woman who's in an impossible situation

and just wants to kind of do her best for people, oh, that's very bad because that guy is from hell. But it also has this interesting way of sort of letting these male presences off the hook. You know, it's like it's a male dead demon fairy something. You know, it's like you have this man who follows the fairy queen and then does something bad. But, oh, they're not really the issue here, are they? It's how women work.

Yeah, she's the predator. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we did prepare a verse of Tamlin, if you want to hear that. Oh, I'd love to hear it, yeah. Actually, I will just say before we dive into that, the melody you just heard of Thomas the Rhymer was collected in, what is it, 1578? Yeah. Wow.

With Thomas the Rhymer, it was really, really lovely because I turned to the page and there were only two melodies to choose from. And normally there's about 60 to 100. So I thought, oh, great, this is going to be an easy, an easy one to do. So there was one from 1578 and I think the other was 1830 something. And of course, I'm trying to go for the earliest ones possible. So it was obvious which one to go for. And there's something really beautiful about these very early melodies

in that they aren't obviously major or minor. they're sort of set apart from the obvious keys that we now use. So there's this ambiguity ever present in them which I really enjoy. I guess I've got one question about that as well. The presence of so many different melodies that you can find for varying ballads. I suppose that this is just indicative of how popular these are as a story form, as an art form going down through time. Because it's a lot easier to just say, oh, well, no, we're sticking with. with the one, or if a tradition peters out, you're just going to have that.

But if you've got, you know, 30 versions of a song, that means that people are digging it, no? Yeah, it's absolutely mad. You've got versions hailing from Aberdeen in the 1800s and then right the way through to Virginia in the 1940s. And you can just see the various incarnations that have happened along the way to travel. And I think presumably that the mobility of the broadside pamphlet as a way of conveying the lyrics, and I guess, this is just a guess, but more likely to find people that can read

text than can read notation, perhaps, and that melodies being transmitted, because in some case of a broadside ballads, it'll say sung to the tune of Welladay. So there's a popular melody that everyone knows, and that lyrics, it happens still, and I was raised in the Anglican tradition, and you've got your hymns old and new, and it's like, song to the traditional melody of, and it's just rewritten, you know, different lyrics. We've been working on this book, but completely unrelated. I was out at her pub and I was with some people who were singing and someone just started singing one of the songs that we've covered in this book.

It just felt like really perfect end to it all because they're still being sang. She wasn't like, this is a nice old song. She just sang the song. Yeah, and actually on the Thomas the Rimer front, where were you? Ah, yeah, yeah, and earlier in the summer I was at like a festival, Jack in the Green Festival in Bradford-on-Avon and I was chatting to a nice older lady

Morris Dancer and we were talking about ballads and she just started singing Thomas the Rhymer at me and I recorded what she was singing and when that sent what she'd recorded it was 1578

Yeah it was the same tune pretty much the same tune and she just kind of reeled it off in the middle of this festival so they're still very much alive these songs Gwen, we've heard a lot about how we find inspiration from a textual standpoint or a musical standpoint. When you're doing the illustration, what is it that you draw from in order to get your point across here?

So very varied inspiration and just talking about Thomas the Rimer, for one, it's got, to me, I had this really medieval kind of feeling to it anyway, it's obviously being such an old valetian. So I took loads of inspiration for, for instance, broigal paintings. One of the artworks is basically just lifted from a collection of boigel paintings that I looked at and kind of mashed together in my own illustration. And it's really obviously that's obviously a copy of broigle paintings. But also just my own love of fantasy illustration from the late 90s, 30th, 20th century of fairies. and the idea of trying to paint Fairyland as well was difficult.

I looked at a lot of very old paintings, but I also looked at surrealist arts, Leonora Carrington, and tried to sort of mix it all up into one coherent. Beautiful book. It's so beautiful. And I feel it's so nice to be able to say that because I'm so proud of knowing Gwen and the work that you've done on the printed edition and equally the musical work that Natalie's done.

I really went to ask Gwen about the worm because there's... Oh. Yeah. The ballad of Alison Gross features a young man being transformed into a worm. And I think this word worm to mean dragon in folklore is so intriguing and then the challenge of illustrating that. Gwen, from a fantasy perspective, are there any works that you have in the book that really hit the angle of the fantastic? Are there any creatures that you particularly like? like. Yeah, in the ballad of Alison Gross, there is enormous, ferocious worm that I had to

paint. And thinking of the worm sort of in the classical, I guess, sense that it's a dragon, but I also, it's a man that turns into a worm. And in the song, this man is naked a lot of the time. I felt like the worm should represent that naked man as well. So it's a very kind of peachy, fleshy flaccid worm Get him It's quite disgusting I really enjoyed painting it I think I love

fantasy art and my father actually has painted a lot of dragons He's done a lot of work as a fantasy illustrator And his dragons are really Scaly classic dragons So I really wanted to make a dragon that I hadn't seen before so that's why I did a peachy

A peachy worm I love this because a whole new take on Would You Still Love Me if I was a worm Also, I think you've really, because he's so hideous and he's got these prongy sort of anglerfish-style teeth but in the ballad he's also a really pathetic character and here you've got this young woman combing his hair I mean this is another challenge of the ballad that says his sister comes every Saturday

to comb his hair you're like She wants to love him if he was a worm Yeah, I got his sister sort of leaning against a tree and he's laid his head on her, his massive wormhead on her lap. I tried to show where her feet are, where his flesh is quite kind of saggy around her feet. And he's looking up with a sort of, he's looking up at her, but he looks kind of sad and fed up,

but he's also got these horrible spiky teeth and sparse hairs on his head. Yeah, he's got about three, you know, like a proper comb over. that she's trying to go. It's a really big theme. The laps, Alison Gross is structured around these laps and the lap of the witch, the lap of his sister, the fairy queen.

And then also throughout the corpus that we've selected. The ten we have chosen and not indicative of the whole corpus of balladry. Like we haven't got any histories, we haven't got any Arthur ones, that kind of thing. Having a man's head on your lap, after we'd been talking about that,

I had a go. And I just encourage anyone who has like a male partner or husband or whatever, just put his head on your lap and see how you feel. Because I think it does feel a little bit powerful. I think he could do something bad. Look, I want you to know that I use my powers of having a man's head on his lap for good, personally. But, you know, that's just... There are actually, like, I remember.

I remember reading, you know, the publication in the week years ago, I remember reading about it become a really big fad in Japan to buy extremely realistic feeling female lap cushions. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that men were buying them up, businessmen were buying, like, man, I'm not surprised. There's nothing new under the sun, I'm telling you. It's, I guess that really says a lot, right? Because we have you all doing this really interesting work to kind of reclaim these ballads. you know, think about the characters in it in different ways. But we definitely still have this tradition, right? You can just run into a woman and she'll be like, oh, Thomas the rhymer. Here it is, you know. When can run into a woman and she'll say, oh, Thomas the rhymer. Yeah, you know, it's amazing. You know, so as much as, you know, you have 30 to 60 versions of a song and a melody, I guess we still have this residence now. You know, this is still a tradition that's ongoing and that you all are part of. Yeah, I mean, I've been quite cautious to say that I'm coming to this as a medievalist and that my offering rests on my kind of training as a medievalist and then have the fun of hearing back from people like Gwen

who are very much engaged in contemporary British folk culture and sort of Morris dancing and traditional folk singing and sort of them being a conversation. I think this is so interesting like the relationship between what we call folk culture and maybe academia because I think there can sometimes be, a sort of friction and rightly so given how some academics have behaved through the 20th century in relationship. But I think actually it's quite interesting to see how much like discussion and consensus and collective storytelling is part of both worlds. There's a lovely bit at the end

of Tamlin where the fairy queen is really crossed with him and she says, well, we'll sing it, but what she says evoked in my mind memory of Burkhard of Vum's penitential. which is 11th century. He's got a whole section on the sins committed by women and what they're... Oh boy, oh boy, does he? And one of the things he accuses women of is he says, if you believe that you, when you're snuggled up next to your husband in bed, can fly off without leaving your bed and go through closed doors

and fly off around the world with other women and kill people who are baptized and then take out their hearts and replace them with straw and bring them back to life for a bit, then two weeks on bread and water and 70 years penance. I love it. It's like, yeah, a normal thing. Like, yeah, I'm always lying in my bed imagining. I'm just flying off around the world with Nat and Gwen. Like genuinely.

Anyway, so what the fairy queen threatens Tamlin with at the end of the ballad where she's really angry with him. Yes, this was collected in 1792. But had I known Tamlin, she says, what knows? Now this night I see Would have taken out thy two gray eyes And put into eyes of tree Oh, I love it. Come on, justice for the fairy queen.

Let's go, girl. You know, finally, finally something for the ladies. You know, no wonder these songs still kind of have a resonance today. No wonder we're still singing them and collecting them. because it's almost as though you want to circle back to these stories and get some justice for the people who are involved. You want to kind of make a case for them or put them into our own context.

I think there's something so human about them that really makes us still connect to them. Yeah. I think when you just scroll through, I don't know, the drama is available on the BBC, for instance. You're seeing the same themes, the kind of murder, sex, birth. betrayal, like revenge. And it's really, this is just putting those stories into a world that's

especially the traditional ballads with their kind of forests and the seas and rivers and other world. I mean, the secondary world universe is completely entrancing. This has been absolutely fascinating and I don't want to stop doing it. But perhaps could you all sing us out on something? Because I don't ever want you to stop. Lady Isabel. Lady Isabel. Oh, yeah. That's a bit. That's a banger. Let's have that. A high-impact tune. And all she wrestled and all she... Yes, okay, so we're going to sing...

So there was... Behind Arthur's seat in Edinburgh, there's a loch, and there are some pools, which are now partially destroyed because of the Victorian railway. But they were known as the Wells Are Weary. And I think they appear on an early 19th century map called the Wells Are Weary. There's also a records of a... witch trial in which a accused witch called Janet Boyman describes summoning an sort of elfish apparition from a pool behind Arthur's seat in order to kind of get advice on how to heal someone. And this ballad was collected pre-19th century, talks about a sort of elfin knight

kidnapping a girl entirely, she's completely consensual, that's the first, taking her to the weiries well, the wells are weary, and encouraging her to walk into the waters. And she gets increasingly unsure of whether or not she wants to do that as he encourages her. It turns into a really moving story of her vanquishing him. And I won't describe all of it, but the final verse is when she's been victorious and she's come out of this terrifying encounter alive. and if we were going to get any merch maids for this book

the first half of the line and I she wrestled and I she swam it's just gorgeous okay and I she wrestled and she swam and she swam to dry she found the danger

she overcame Yay! I love to end on a high note yeah come on Lady Isabel I'll get him. Who amongst us does not love to vanquish a kind of bad boyfriend? It's still true today. He's a really bad boyfriend. One of the worst. My thanks again to Amy Jeff's, Natalie Bryce, and Gwen Burns, and to you for listening to God Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV

documentaries, including my recent film, Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You could follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've Gone Medieval. Until next time. Oh, yon are the hills of heaven, he said,

where you... What in a mountain is yon, she said, All so dreary with frost and snow Oh yon is the mountain of hell he cried Where are you