The Fleur Of Northumberland: A Song History
Ballad scholars know this song as "The Fair Flower of Northumberland," number 9 in Francis James Child's canon of English and Scottish popular ballads and number 25 in the Roud index.[1] Its plot turns on betrayal: a captured Scot persuades his jailer's daughter to set him free on the promise of marriage, then, once they have crossed into Scotland, says he already has a wife and sends her home, where her mother consoles her.[1] The oldest known text sits in Thomas Deloney's 1597 prose narrative Jack of Newbery, where a group of young women at work sing it, two carrying the verses while the others answer with the refrain.[2] Whether Deloney composed the piece or reworked a song already in circulation is an open question, and the editors of the Traditional Ballad Index allow for either.[1]
John Varley, Bamborough Castle from the Northeast, with Holy Island in the Distance, watercolor and graphite with scratching out, 1827. Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast, shown for the ballad's heroine of Northumberland; the watercolor has no connection to the song.
The ballad outlived its English beginnings mainly in Scotland, where several nineteenth-century collectors, among them Kinloch, Buchan and Motherwell, printed it, and a version Gavin Greig took down early in the twentieth century from a woman in Kininmonth later became the basis of the Exiles' recording.[2] Bertrand Bronson judged the ballad a slander on the Scots, while observing that singers in Scotland had reshaped it into a backhanded compliment to their countrymen.[2] John Jacob Niles published versions he said came from American informants, but the Ballad Index knows of no other American texts and treats his as doubtful.[1] Revival performers have kept it alive on record, from the Exiles in 1967 and Dick Gaughan on No More Forever in 1972 to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in 1982.[2]
Under the spelling "The Fleur of Northumberland," Deborah Hamouris sets it in DAD tuning in Indian Summer, an 86-page mix of her own compositions and older tunes for standard mountain dulcimer that also offers her reflections on practicing, performing and composing.[3]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Fair Flower of Northumberland, The [Child 9]".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Fair Flower of Northumberland".
- Deborah Hamouris: "Indian Summer".
- Image: John Varley, Bamborough Castle from the Northeast, with Holy Island in the Distance, watercolor and graphite with scratching out, 1827. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.