The Maid Peept Out At The Window, or The Friar In The Well: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

The tune was first printed in 1651 in John Playford's The English Dancing Master, already carrying both of its names, "The Maid Peept out at the Window" and "The Frier in the Well."[1][2] The Playfords kept the tune in the book through the eighth edition of 1690, where the title had become "The Maid Peep'd out of the Window."[1][3] Sources differ on its mode: William Chappell's 1859 Popular Music of the Olden Time gives it in G Dorian, while Cecil Sharp and later dance editors print it in G Mixolydian.[1] Sharp included it in the tenth set of his Country Dance Tunes, published by Novello.[4]

Painting of a woman in a dark dress and white collar seated at a stone window holding an apple

Gabriël Metsu, A Woman Seated at a Window, oil on wood, early 1660s. A woman at a window, painted a decade after the dance was first printed; it has no connection to the tune.

The second title points to "The Friar in the Well" (Child 276, Roud 116), a ballad in which a friar pays a girl in advance, only to end up in a well when she warns that her father is coming.[5][6] The Traditional Tune Archive describes the song as ribald and anti-Catholic.[1] A song titled "Fryer in the Well" appeared in William Thackeray's broadside catalog by 1690, though the earliest text the Traditional Ballad Index records dates from 1719.[5] Notes gathered by Mainly Norfolk quote Frank Purslow and John Pearse as saying the ballad was already mentioned in the early sixteenth century, and report that Henry and Robert Hammond collected it from two Dorset singers in 1906.[6] A. L. Lloyd recorded it in 1956 as "The Parson and the Maid," to a tune he described as Scottish in origin, and Martin Carthy recorded it in 1982.[6]

Dulcimer players will find it, listed under both of its titles, in Mark Gilston's English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1, a downloadable book of old English dance tunes arranged for dulcimer that Gilston publishes himself, with a companion second volume.[7]

Our book that contains the song "The Maid Peept Out At The Window, or The Friar In The Well"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Maid Peeped Out at the Window (The)".
  2. CDSS, The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium: "Maid Peept out at the Window, The, or The Frier in the Well" (1651).
  3. CDSS, The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium: "Maid Peep'd out of the Window, The, or The Frier in the Well" (1690).
  4. IMSLP: "Country Dance Tunes (Sharp, Cecil)".
  5. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Friar in the Well, The [Child 276]".
  6. Mainly Norfolk: "The Friar in the Well / The Parson and the Maid".
  7. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1".
  8. Image: Gabriël Metsu, A Woman Seated at a Window, oil on wood, early 1660s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song