Content uploaded by Una McIlvenna
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Una McIlvenna on Aug 15, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
Pp. –. © by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. - | - -. All rights
reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of Pennsylvania Press
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/about/permissions.html.
| . , .
A London ’Prentice ruined is our theme,
Drawn from the fam’d old song that bears his name.
We hope your taste is not so high to scorn
A moral tale esteem’d ere you were born;
Which, for a century of rolling years,
Has fill’d a thousand thousand eyes with tears.
—Prologue to The London Merchant
- The London Merchant claimed to be
based on a “fam’d old song” with “a moral tale esteem’d . . . for a century of rolling
years.” This essay reveals that the song and the tale were even older, and that they were
integrally associated with a specific melody, a ballad tune that for its sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century listener-singers conjured up a cluster of associations around the
. George Lillo, The London Merchant, ed. William H. McBurney (Lincoln, Neb., ).
The Rich Merchant Man,
or, What the Punishment of Greed Sounded
Like in Early Modern English Ballads
Una McIlvenna
This essay explores how the ballad melody of the “Rich Merchant
Man” was fundamentally linked to a drive to educate the serving classes and
apprentices of seventeenth-century England in the expectations for the ever-
growing merchant class that they hoped to join. They were taught to be charitable
and to shun greed primarily through negative exemplars, who were punished in
these ballads. The essay offers a case study of the multimedia methods by which
the moral lessons of frugality and even charity—so seemingly out of character for
a merchant class that defined itself by the accumulation of wealth—could be
inculcated in the youth it was attempting to train. : reuse of tunes in
ballads; morality lessons for apprentices; seventeenth-century conceptions of
charity; execution ballads; Lillo’s The London Merchant
themes of greed and punishment. This tune, “The Rich Merchant Man” (fig. ) was
used for at least twenty-six known seventeenth-century ballads and can be traced back
to a ballad by Thomas Deloney, “A Most Sweet Song of an English Merchant Born in
Chichester,” about an English merchant sentenced to be executed in Emden, Ger-
many.That ballad was licensed in , but may well have been much older.Many of
the ballads set to the melody indicate the tune with a variant of that original title—
“The Merchant,” “The Merchant Man,” or “The Merchant of Emden,” for example—
but Claude M. Simpson’s nomenclature “The Rich Merchant Man” will be used here.
c
. Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music(New Brunswick, N.J., ),
–.
. See the appendix for ballads to this tune; all ballads discussed here with an EBBA identification
num ber can be listened to via the English Broadside Ballad Archive website, http://ebba.english
.ucsb.edu.
. For the ways in which ballads were regularly marketed to servants and apprentices, see Patricia
Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England(Chicago,
), . On the disposable income of servants and apprentices, see Paul Griffiths, Youth and
Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, ).
If we examine the themes of the ballads set to this tune, we see a striking continu-
ity: with few exceptions, they concern the interrelated themes of punishment, repen-
tance, greed, and desperation, with a particular focus on material wealth, the sins that
it could drive people to commit, and the subsequent punishments. While ten of the
twenty-six ballads deal with accounts of crimes and their state-sanctioned punish-
ments, the others depict retribution in supernatural or divine form, or instead encour-
age their listener-singers to repent, employing millenarian language that foresees such
divine punishments as imminent.These themes were inspired by the typical audience
for such ballads: the servant or apprentice class that made up a large part of the market
for broadside ballads in seventeenth-century England.While some of the ballads tell
stories about servants or apprentices, others address them directly with advice on how
to conduct themselves. This essay explores how the melody of the “Rich Merchant
Man” was fundamentally linked to a drive to educate the serving classes and appren-
tices of seventeenth-century England in the expectations for appropriate behavior
among the ever-growing merchant class, via a negative model of punitive retribution
that stressed the need to be charitable and to shun greed for material wealth. In so
. “The Rich Merchant Man” from Simpson, TheBritish Broadside Ballad, .
doing, it offers a case study of the multimedia methods by which the moral lessons of
frugality and even charity—so seemingly out of character for a merchant class that
defined itself by the accumulation of wealth—could be inculcated in the youth the
merchant class was attempting to train.
The “Rich Merchant Man” tune comprises a four-line stanza known as a “poul-
ter’s-measure quatrain,” with iambic feet of , , , and stresses, and rhyming second
and fourth lines. This was an extremely popular measure for both balladry and poetry
from the Elizabethan era onward, and made the melody simple to sing and thereby
may have helped it become well known. I have written elsewhere about the signifi-
cance of certain melodies for the transmission of meaning in ballads.By reusing
familiar tunes, a technique known as contrafactum, ballad writers exploited the cul-
tural and emotional associations that listener-singers brought to that melody and to its
textual reworkings. Researching the various ballad texts set to a particular tune is key
to understanding the overlapping and intertextual meanings that they carried for their
audience, and the “Rich Merchant Man” is a good example of the rich matrix of
melody, moral lesson, and class commentary that the multimedia early modern ballad
could transmit.
The melody itself has an interesting feature which has potential ramifications
for the text’s meaning when performed. It is in the major key of B♭, so the tonic, or
main chord, of the melody is B♭and the dominant, or second most common chord, is
F. The melody starts in the tonic (B♭) before shifting up to the dominant (F). On the
last long note of the second line of verse, it then drops to F♯. In the next phrase the
melody returns to the tonic of the original key.This dissonant use of F♯draws the lis-
tener’s attention more strongly to the final word of the second line of verse, which,
given the abab rhyme scheme, rhymes with the last word of the stanza. This empha-
sizes the stress on the two words already created by the rhyme and also offers perform-
ers the option of drawing out the note on particularly significant or emotive lyrics.
Take, for example, a verse from the ballad “The Unfaithful Servant,” about a servant
who conspires to murder her mistress, recently delivered of a child:
Strong poyson we contriv’d
this was our hanious Sin,
That she of Life might be depriv’d
poor Soul when she lay in.
. Una McIlvenna, “The Power of Music: The Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads,”
Past & Present , no. (November ): –. See also Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in
Early Modern England(Cambridge, ), –; Kate van Orden, “Female Complaintes: Laments
of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France,” Renaissance Quarterly ,
no. (Autumn, ): –; Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass., ), –; Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as
Propaganda in the German Reformation(Aldershot, U.K., ); Grove Music Online, s.v. “Contra -
factum (.After ),” by Martin Picker, and s.v. “Parody,” by Michael Tilmouth and Richard Sherr,
accessed November , , http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/.
. I would like to thank Matthew Ingleby for his assistance with the music theory.
. “The Unfaithful Servant; and The Cruel Husband. Being a perfect and true account of one
Judith Brown, who together with her Master Iohn Cupper, conspired the Death of her Mistris, his
The drop to F♯focuses the listener’s attention on the word “Sin,” a potent term that
becomes even more emotive when it is juxtaposed with the rhyming “lay in.” Thus, in
this particular ballad the melody helps to increase the emotional impact of the shock-
ing news of the murder of a woman who has only just given birth. This ability of the
“Rich Merchant Man” melody to guide its listeners in the appropriate emotional
response may explain its use in so many ballads that preach a message of repentance
for the sin of greed. While early modern ballad tunes are often quite versatile, being
used for ballads on a range of topics and in a range of moods, this particular tune was
associated from its origins with a didactic message about the punishment of greed.
The plot of the original “Rich Merchant Man” ballad, “A Most Sweet Song,”
depicts for its audience the model repentant sinner. After killing a man “through quar-
rels,” a rich merchant from Chichester is sentenced to be executed in Emden, Ger-
many. He represents the ideal successful merchant both in appearance and behavior.
Dressed “all in Velvet black as jet,”
Bare-headed was he brought,
his hands were bound before
A Cambrick Ruff about his neck
as white as milk he wore,
His Stockings were of silk
as fine as fine might be,
Of person and of Countenance,
a proper man was he[.]
That the ballad devotes two-and-a-half stanzas to the merchant’s dress alerts us to its
significance for the audience. The merchant appears in black velvet with a white
c
Wife, which accordingly they did accomplish in the time of Child-bed, when she lay in with two Chil-
dren, by mixing of her Drink with cruel Poyson; for which Fact she received due Sentence of Death at
the late Assizes in the County of Salop, to be Burned; which was accordingly Executed upon the Old
Heath near Shrewsbury, on Thursday the Twenty-first day of August, ” (), Pepys Library,
Magdalene College, Cambridge (hereafter PL), Pepys ., EBBA .
. Christopher Marsh gives several examples of ballads whose tunes seem, to a modern ear, incon-
gruous with the topic of the song; Marsh, Music and Society, –.
. “A Most Sweet Song of an English Merchant Born in Chichester. To an Excellent New Tune”
(–), University of Glasgow Library (hereafter UGL), Euing , EBBA .
. The woodcut—the same on all extant versions of this broadside ballad—matches the narrative
remarkably well: the condemned prisoner on the gallows is stepping down to take the hand of a lady as
if her offer has released him; he is bareheaded and wearing an extremely fine, detailed ruff. He even
appears to be showing us his fine stockings as he steps down. The clothing shown in the woodcut,
which matches that described in the ballad, especially the cambric ruff, was out of fashion by the s,
the earliest printing dates that we have for any extant broadsides. However, we know the song was reg-
istered as early as . While it is impossible to make a definitive argument that the woodcut was orig-
inally custom-carved for earlier, non-extant editions of the ballad, the details suggest that the woodcut
was strongly associated with this ballad in printers’ minds and probably in the minds of the public as
well, and that the appearance of the merchant was of significance. I thank Megan E. Palmer of EBBA
for her assistance in my investigation of the woodcut.
cambric ruff and silk stockings, luxury items and fabrics that would have distinguished
him as wealthy, and yet his choice of colors would have muted claims of ostentation or
extravagance (fig. ). In this period, as Ulinka Rublack reminds us, “black denoted
constancy and sombreness; white symbolised faith and humility.” Our first impres-
sion of the merchant is therefore—despite his conviction for murder—overwhelm-
ingly positive. This is notable because of the potentially problematic role of merchants
in the developing seventeenth-century English economy. Between and the
population of England doubled, producing inflation along with what has been called
“the steady pressure of a prolific population on inelastic resources.” The need for
expanded trade, both internal and international, in order to feed and clothe the popu-
lace meant that merchants were in a position both to help and to exploit their fellow
citizens. Such power could be viewed with suspicion: the contemporary economist
and politician Charles Davenant noted that trade was “in its nature a pernicious thing,”
creating excessive luxury and corruption. A positive depiction of a merchant—one
who, given the German location, is clearly an international merchant—therefore
implied a lesson for those who were themselves merchants and for the apprentices they
were training.
. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, ), . The
choice of colors would also have suggested that the merchant was Protestant; see Graeme Murdock,
“Dressed to Repress?: Protestant Clerical Dress and the Regulation of Morality in Early Modern
Europe,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture , no. (May ): –.
. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700
(New York, ), .
. Quoted in Paul Slack, “Material Progress and the Challenge of Affluence in Seventeenth-
Century England,” Economic History Review , no. (): – at .
. “A Most Sweet Song of an English Merchant” (–). Euing , EBBA . By permis-
sion of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections. Note the detailed dress of the protagonists
in the woodcut.
This portrayal is reinforced by the actions of the other merchants of the town,
who offer “a thousand pound” to set him free. The condemned merchant refuses these
gifts to secure his liberty, however, accepting his execution as just. Totally repentant of
the murder, which he depicts as rash and unintentional (“sore against my will”), he
bemoans the fate of the dead man’s widow and children, bequeathing them “a hundred
pound a piece / their comforts to restore.” His only request is that “They will speak well
of Englishmen / though I have done amisse,” a request that would have made him an
endearing figure to English listeners. Then, inspired by the popular belief that were a
virgin to offer herself in marriage to a condemned man he would be pardoned, multi-
ple women come forth to offer him their hands in marriage; he refuses all their offers,
instead giving them a thousand pounds in gold to share equally. Finally, at the very
moment at which the executioner steps forward to decapitate the merchant, a damsel
steps forward and offers up her life for him:
I’le dye within thy arms,
if thou wilt dye (quoth she)
Yet live or dye sweet English-man,
i’le live and dye with thee[.]
This selfless act impresses the merchant enough to accept her offer and, to the crowd’s
delight, he is pardoned and released to marry her “that day.” The ballad offers a model
of spectacular selflessness, in the actions of both the merchant, who refuses all previ-
ous offers to spare his life, and the damsel, who is prepared to sacrifice herself for true
love—notably, after he has given his wealth away. The merchant is endowed with
characteristics and traits associated with the ideal aristocrat: immaculate appearance,
bravery in the face of death, and great wealth wisely managed. His claim that “your
Country Law is such, / It takes but hold upon my life, / my goods it cannot touch” re -
minds us of the theme of material wealth that runs throughout the ballad. What the
merchant does with his wealth is central to the ballad’s moral lesson: he refuses mone-
tary gifts to save his life and willingly gives his money to the most vulnerable of the
community.
c
. In Germany, where the ballad is set, this popular belief survived until the nineteenth century,
although it had no legal status; see Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in
Early Modern Germany, trans. Elisabeth Neu (Cambridge, ), –. The belief was also strongly
held in Britain: Andrea McKenzie relates that in , six or seven “young women dressed in white and
carrying white wands carried a petition to St. James’s, promising one of them would marry the con-
demned robber John Hartly if his life were spared; the petition was unsuccessful”; McKenzie, Tyburn’s
Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (London, ), .
. This claim that German law was unable to seize the merchant’s property seems to be included
as a plot device, allowing the merchant to demonstrate his generosity. The claim has no basis in fact:
although the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (often referred to as the “Carolina”) mandated a
unified criminal law for the Holy Roman Empire, laws were not universally enforced across the
German lands in the early modern period. For more on the German penal system, see Richard Evans,
Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1660–1987 (Oxford, ); and van Dülmen,
Theatre of Horror.
Although it is about an execution, “A Most Sweet Song” does not follow the
structure of a traditional execution ballad. It neither details the crimes of the con-
demned nor portrays him as a wicked sinner who has led a life of wickedness leading
up to the crime for which he is to be executed.Moreover, it supplies no identifying
dates or names and instead presents itself as a general exemplar of positive behavior in
the guise of total selflessness. Specifically, it depicts a model of ideal conduct of the
merchant class. Although the ballad’s plot is centered around punishment, there is
implied redemption through charity: the merchant is pardoned after he demonstrates
concern for the now-impoverished widow and children of his victim.
Teaching Charity through Song
This concern for the poor is a theme that runs through many of the ballads set to the
“Rich Merchant Man” tune. Several employ a narrative that was common across early
modern Europe, characterized by what Tom Cheesman calls “the hard-heartedness
motif.” In his study of German balladry, Cheesman identifies thirty-six distinct chap-
book-ballad versions of this theme. In these songs, a poor person is driven to beg for
food in the form of corn, flour, or bread in order to feed numerous small children at
home. The poor person is rebuffed by a wealthier citizen, who can be a merchant,
farmer, or member of the nobility but who is often a family member, usually an in-law.
This greedy person is inevitably punished in a supernatural manner, while the poor
parent is miraculously given the means to feed the hungry children. Such ballads may
reflect nostalgia for an earlier, less commercial time: Joyce Appleby notes that the
Tudor statutes regarding food production had envisioned the growing of corn, the
milling of flour, and the baking of bread as principally social activities rather than eco-
nomic ones; such social underpinnings were shaken by the economic crises of the
early s, which forced the government to buy grain abroad and allowed merchants
to manipulate the market. We find elements of the dissatisfaction with mercantile
greed in “The Kentish Miracle,” a ballad whose protagonist is a widow with seven chil-
dren; she sells her coat and gown at market but has her purse stolen before she is able to
buy any food. Her brother-in-law, a corn merchant, refuses her even “a peck of corn”
and scolds her for being foolish. But she is aided by a baker’s boy who out of charity
gives her a burnt loaf, which miraculously goes on to feed her family for seven weeks.
While the poor family is delighted with their spartan meal of bread, apples, and water,
. Sandra Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England(Houndmills,
U.K., ), chap. ; V. A. C. Gattrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868
(Oxford, ), –.
. Tom Cheesman, The Shocking Ballad Picture Show: German Popular Literature and Cultural
History (Oxford, ), –.
. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England
(Princeton, N.J., ), –.
. “The Kentish Miracle: or, A Strange and Miraculous work of Gods Providence, shewed to a
poor distressed Widow, and her Seven small Fatherless Children, who lived by a burnt sixpenny Loaf
of Bread, and a little Water, for above seven Weeks, in the wild of Kent, to the Praise and Glory of
Almighty God” (–?), National Library of Scotland, Crawford.EB., EBBA .
the thief who stole the widow’s purse breaks his neck before spending her money, and
the brother-in-law’s crops are destroyed in a flood. In the end, kindly “Gentlemen”
who witness the miracle give the widow material gifts such “that ner more wanted she.”
The biblical overtones of the song, particularly the parallels with the New Testament
miracle of feeding the five thousand with loaves and fishes, are a reminder of God’s
generosity to those who are faithful.The family’s great delight in and gratitude for
the frugal meal stands in direct contrast to the greed of the cutpurse and the corn mer-
chant, who represent the negative aspects of the country’s new economic restructuring
and are punished accordingly.
In another “poverty” ballad to the same tune, “A New Ballad, Shewing the Great
Misery Sustained by a Poore Man in Essex,” a poor father’s desperation to feed his
starving family drives him, after being refused by hardhearted farmers, to accept a bag
of gold from a man who is the devil in disguise. He is barely rescued from betraying
his entire family to damnation by the charity of “the chiefest man, / that in the Parish
dwelt,” who “With meat and mony thither came, / which liberally he dealt.” Again and
again the ballads depict poverty leading desperate people to betray (or almost betray)
their families and depict generosity as the only antidote to evil.
Even the non-narrative ballads to the “Rich Merchant Man” tune—those that
are simply didactic and moralizing—continue this theme of generosity toward the
poor. These songs, with titles such as “A Warning-Piece for All Wickd Livers,” explic-
itly warn that divine punishments will ensue if their listener-singers mistreat the
needy. The refrain to “A Warning-Piece” offers a generic moral lesson, advising repen-
tance to all social groups:
Then fear God and Repent,
spend not your time in waste,
For old and young, both rich and poor,
must yield to Death at last.
However, the verses of the ballad are much more specific about the kinds of behavior it
seeks to root out, most of which involve greed for financial wealth. Although other
sins, such as pride, blasphemy, vanity, idleness, and drunkenness, are mentioned in the
ballad, listener-singers are encouraged to focus their energies on greed, eradicating
such sinfulness through charity to the vulnerable in society:
c
. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, ); Brodie Waddell,
God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, U.K., ), esp. chap. ,
“Judgement, Providence and the Prayers of the Poor.”
. “A New Ballad, Shewing the Great Misery Sustained by a Poore Man in Essex, his Wife / and
Children: with other strange things done by the Devill” (–?), British Library (hereafter BL),
Roxburghe .-, EBBA .
. Thomas Lanfiere, “A Warning-Piece for All Wickd Livers, or, A Caviet for all People to remem-
ber their Latter End. Being very good instructions for Old and young, Rich and Poor, to amend their
Lives, and repent before it be too late” (–?), National Library of Scotland, Crawford.EB.,
EBBA .
Pray Love the Fatherless,
to the Widdow be a Friend,
Relieve those that are in distress,
then God will thee defend:
. . . . . . .
A Covetous mind don’t bear,
if thou art blest with store,
But spare some part of what thou hast,
for the help of the poor:
Although that wealth thou hast,
yet it is but lent to thee,
Then comfort and give alms to those
that are in misery.
However, it appears that the ballad’s author, Thomas Lanfiere, had little confi-
dence in his audience’s willingness to act on his call to charity. In the final section of the
ballad, in which he specifically encourages “Young people” to have respect for their
parents and warns them against “Idleness and Sloth,” he reminds them to
Indeavour and get in Youth,
to keep you when you are old
For if Poverty doth come you’l find,
that Charity will be cold.
Although the Poor Law had been in place since , and there were systems es -
tablished for the social welfare of those most vulnerable in society, these ballads
incessantly preach the need for charity and bemoan the ill-treatment of the poor. They
testify both to the popular belief that charity should begin at home, rather than with
the state, and to the fear that it was all too often absent in the community. As the
seventeenth century saw a gradual movement from open, indiscriminate philanthropy
to a more selective concern for the “respectable” poor, the truly needy could be left
behind. Ballads to the tune of the “Rich Merchant Man” are repeatedly eloquent in
their support for the most vulnerable, and the popular melody thus became associated
with the necessity of sharing one’s material wealth with those most in need, especially
members of one’s family.
“A Warning-Piece for All Wickd Livers” promises only a lack of charity and
eventual death for those who ignore its warnings. Evidence of more spectacular super-
natural punishment for mistreating the poor, however, can be found in the ballad—
also to the tune of “The Rich Merchant Man”—about Dorothy Winterbottom, better
. Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, 1550–1750
(Oxford, ).
. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, ), esp. chap. , “The
Growth of Social Welfare,” –.
known to her friends (and enemies) in Southwark as “Dirty Doll.” Already “notorious”
for her many vices, such as drinking, begging, and cursing, Winterbottom was most
despised for exploiting the poor by lending out money “upon the Tally” (offering high
interest loans; the records of debtors were kept on a “tally,” or register). This exploita-
tion of the poor at their most vulnerable moment is criticized in the verse:
Extortion is a thing
by Heaven is quite forbid;
And often doth to ruin bring;
such sins will not lye hid.
Winterbottom was an early modern loan shark, whose thin patience with her debtors
eventually led to her threatening to imprison them and invoking the devil as her wit-
ness. This was a rash gesture, especially in the world of broadside ballads: on August
or , , the devil (or devils, depending on the account) entered her home and phys-
ically assaulted her, leaving her arm “as black as jet” and “her Thumb almost pinched
off.” Gangrene quickly set in and killed her only a week later, on August , . Her
funeral, the ballad tells us, was attended by crowds of rejoicing spectators. Dirty Doll’s
lack of repentance is made explicit in the ballad, and the singer fears that she is there-
fore doomed:
So that at last she dy’d
a sinfull Soul I fear,
Not one do give her a good word
that I do come a near.
Dirty Doll therefore stands as the antithesis of the original English merchant in
Emden, whose wealth had come from honest dealings and who happily shared that
wealth with those less fortunate. Doll is offered as a counterexample of how not to con-
duct oneself in business, a cautionary tale reinforced by the chorus, “For cursed Cheats
and false Deceits / do never prosper long.”
c
. “Dirty Dolls Farewel. Being an account of a certain Woman, known by the Name of Dirty Doll,
once living near Horslydown in Southwark, who was in her Life-time so notorious for several mis -
demeanours, that it is said, The Devil about the th, or th, of August . appeared to her, between
whom there hapened a terrible Combat, in which Dirty Doll was much bruised, so that one of her
Arms was as black as a Cole, and her Thumb almost pinched off: She dyed on the th. of the same
month, and was buried the th. Being accomodated to the Grave with whooting and hallowing, in a
strange manner” (), PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
. The story is discussed in Waddell, God, Duty and Community, –. Dirty Doll’s story is also
told in the ballad “Sad and Dreadful News from Horsly-Down, in the Parish of St. Mary Magdalen
Bermondset; or, A Warning to Brokers, Tally-men, and such like unconscionable Carter-pillars; by the
sad Example of Dorothy Winter-bottom, Alias Dirty-Doll, late of Horsly-Down, who according to her
own Report, as ’tis Credibly attested, by contending with the Devil, received such mortal Bruises, as
occasioned her death, she dying on the th. of August, and war buried at St. Olives Southwark, on the
th. of the same month, ” (), PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
“Dirty Doll’s Farewel” warned its listener-singers about the potential super -
natural—and thus inescapable—nature of punishment for greed, and thus resembles
the hardheartedness ballads discussed above. But the song about Dirty Doll and her
punishment is also linked to the genre of execution ballad, even though her death was
the result of divine retribution rather than a sanctioned state execution. While execu-
tion ballads addressed the punishment of a broad range of crimes and motives, the
execution ballads set to the tune of “The Rich Merchant Man” conspicuously deal
with crimes originating from material greed. Thus “The Golden Farmer’s Last Fare-
weel,” a ballad about William Davis (or Davies), a highwayman and robber, better
known as the “Golden Farmer” because of his habit of taking only gold coins from his
victims, lists some of the many violent ways in which he and his gang extorted money
from victims:
We always gagg’d and bound
most of the Family,
That we might search until we found
their hidden Treasury;
Which if we could not find,
a Pistol cock’d streightway,
Presented at their Breast, to make
them shew us where it lay.
Unlike contemporary ballads that romanticized the deeds of highwaymen, Davis’s exe-
cution ballad follows the pattern of ballads set to the “Rich Merchant Man” tune in
excoriating Davis’s evil ways and presenting him as remorseful and repentant:
I solemnly declare,
who am to Justice brought,
All kind of wicked Sins that are,
I eagerly have wrought;
No Villains are more rife,
than those which I have bred;
And thus a most perfidious Life
I in this world have led.
It would appear that the choice of the “Rich Merchant Man” melody required portray-
ing Davis in a repentant posture. To depict him as a traditional “game” outlaw would
have been incongruous to listeners familiar with the tune and its associated themes. By
comparison, the portrait of the highwayman Claude Du Val in the ballad “Devol’s Last
. “The Golden Farmer’s Last Fareweel Who was arraigned and found Guilty of wilful
Murther,and likewise many notorious Robberies; for which he received a due Sentance of Death,
and was accordingly Executed on the d. of December, in Fleetstreet” (), PL, Pepys .,
EBBA .
Farewel,” set to the tune “Upon the Change,” is full of accounts of his dashing appear-
ance and bold adventures, a romanticization of his criminal exploits as “frolicksom
Intreigues”:
When I was mounted on my Steed,
I thought myself a Man indeed;
With Pistol cockd and glittering Sword,
Stand and deliver, was the word,
Which makes me now lament and say,
pity the Fall of great Devol,
Well-a-day, well-a-day.
Such a “frolicksom” account of crimes is eschewed in the execution ballads set to the
“Rich Merchant Man” tune, which without exception portray the crimes as heinous
and the condemned as remorseful.
Training the “Young People” through Melody
The same is true for the ballad “The Unfaithful Servant; and The Cruel Husband”
(fig. ) which relates the crimes of Judith Brown, a maidservant convicted in of
conspiring with her master to murder his wife:
Young Maidens all beware,
that sees my Dismal state,
Endeavour now to shun the Snare,
before it is too late.
I was a Servant Maid,
and liv’d most happily,
Until at last I was betray’d,
to this Debauchery.
. . . . . . .
Then with my Master I,
did take the cause in hand,
Resolv’d my Mistris she should dye
by our most cruel hand.
. . . . . . .
Strong poyson we contriv’d
this was our hanious Sin,
That she of Life might be depriv’d
poor Soul when she lay in.
c
. Devol’s Last Farewel: Containing an Account of many frolicksom Intreigues and notorious
Robberies, which he committed: Concluding vvith his mournful Lamentation, on the Day of his
Death” (–?), UGL, Euing , EBBA .
. “The Unfaithful Servant; and The Cruel Husband” (). Pepys ., EBBA . By per-
mission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge.
. . . . . .
To you that come to see,
a woful sinners fall,
O let those cruel flames now be,
a warning to you all.
The ballad is in the voice of the condemned criminal herself, who sings to “Young
Maidens” of her slide from virtue into vice, first giving into her master’s lustful desires
and then conspiring with him to poison his wife. It closes with her expressions of
dread at the thought of her punishment by burning and a final warning to spectators
at the execution to learn from her example and turn away from sin. Significantly, the
long detailed title offers much more information than the song itself: the singer’s name
and that of her master, the location of the assizes court where she was prosecuted, and
the exact date and location of the execution (see note ). It is important that these
details were reserved for the title, because although it is possible for us to read the
broadside and so locate this event in time and space, many members of its early mod-
ern audience would never have read the ballad, either because they were not literate or
because they only heard it sung. Although establishing literacy rates in early modern
England is problematic and the source of endless scholarly dispute, we can be confi-
dent that the group of people least likely to have been literate in seventeenth-century
London was female servants. If they only heard the ballad sung, they may never have
learned anything more about the tale than that a maidservant conspired with her mas-
ter to replace her mistress and was burned to death for it. The ballad in its purely aural
reception therefore becomes an interwoven group of moral imperatives applicable to
any young woman in service: avoid amorous relations with your master, respect your
mistress, and above all avoid the temptation to get ideas above your station that will
lead you to ruin.
Offering a contrasting depiction to the ballad version was a prose account of
the event: A Just Account of the Horrid Contrivance of John Cupper, and Judith Brown
his Servant, In Poysoning his Wife, by William Smith, rector of Bitterley. This six-page
account provides more detailed information about the case than the ballad. The
pamphlet focuses much more on the husband, John Cupper, whose punishment is
elided in the ballad (the pamphlet’s title page tells us he was “hang’d in chains”).
c
. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England
(Cambridge, ); Eve Rachel Sanders and Margaret W. Ferguson, “Literacies in Early Modern Eng-
land,” Critical Survey , no. (): –; Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern
England,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford, ), –.
. For the interplay between oral and written culture as it relates to early modern balladry, see
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, ), esp. chap. , “Ballads and
Libels.”
. A Just Account of the Horrid Contrivance of John Cupper, and Judith Brown his Servant, In
Poysoning his Wife (London, ).
. M. Rebecca Livingstone, “Unsettled Households: Domestic Homicide in Seventeenth-Century
England” (PhD diss., Tulane University, ), –.
Smith’s pamphlet also features a Latin inscription on its title page, which explicitly
markets its contents to those most likely to have an understanding of the language:
educated men of the upper classes. The inscription “Hippomanes carmenque loquar,
coctumque venenum, uxorique datum?,” which translates as “Why tell of love potions
and incantations, of poisons brewed and administered to wives?,” is a modification of
a quote from Juvenal’s Satire , “Hippomanes carmenque loquar, coctumque vene -
num, privignoque datum?” ( . . . administered to stepsons? [by murderous stepmoth-
ers]).The adaptation of one of the most famously misogynist works of the classical
period alerted its readers to the pamphlet’s themes: Judith Brown is referred to on the
first page as “a Notorious Strumpet,” and the central message appears to be about the
need for husbands to protect their wives from dangerous female servants. The prose
pamphlet is therefore directed at elite men and offers them a very different version of
the news events than the ballad, which may include the elite among its audience but is
directed at young women both explicitly, in its opening address to “young maidens”
and implicitly, by virtue of its aural nature and by its first-person voice, which would
have enabled a more acute identification with the condemned by its young female
singers. The ballad, set to a tune now firmly associated with the chastisement of greed,
“The Rich Merchant Man,” presents the story of Judith Brown as a didactic exemplar
of the righteous and inevitable punishment of the misplaced ambitions of lowly maid-
servants.
The pitfalls of failing to live by the expectations of one’s social class were also the
focus in what was arguably the most popular ballad set to the “Rich Merchant Man”
melody, “An Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel, an Apprentice in London,” a ballad
found in almost every major English ballad collection today. It was such a popular
contrafact that “George Barnwel” became another widely used name for the melody,
and so, for example, the song about Judith Brown gives its tune indication as “To the
tune of, The Rich Merchant-man: Or, George Barnwel.” The ballad, which opens “All
Youths of fair England,” tells the story of an apprentice who, out of greed for money to
lavish on the prostitute with whom he is besotted, murders his rich uncle. When the
money runs out, she informs on him to the authorities, whereupon he escapes but then
writes a confession implicating them both. They are both executed, and the final lines
offer the summary of the moral lesson:
Lo heres the end of wilful youth,
that after Harlots haunt,
. Juvenal, The Satires, trans. Niall Rudd, ed. William Barr (Oxford, ), .
. For studies of the representations of “dangerous” female domestic staff in early modern Eng-
land, see Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England,
1550–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., ); and Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street
Literature of Early Modern England and Germany(Charlottesville, Va., ).
. “An Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel, an Apprentice of London, who was undone by a
Strumpet, who having thrice robbed his Master, and murdered his Uncle in Ludlow, was hanged in
Chains in Polonia, and by the means of a Letter sent from his own hand to the Mayor of London, she
was hang’d at Ludlow” (–), BL, Roxburghe .-, EBBA .
Who in the spoyl of other men,
about the streets do flaunt.
The choice of antihero and the specific address to youth make it clear that the ballad’s
primary intended audience was apprentices. This group was seen as particularly vul-
nerable to influence and in need of moral guidance. In his examination of seventeenth-
century London apprentices, Steven Smith identifies them as “a separate order or
subculture” populated predominantly by males in their teens and early twenties.
Apprenticeship was
a transitory period between “the morality learned by the child, and the
ethics to be developed by the adult.” The large number of ethical warning
pieces testifies to this and the ballads and stories of riotous apprentices
show that many learned ethical behavior through “role experimentation”
and adult punishment.
Although there were numerous ballads and stories about apprentices, as well as con-
duct literature to guide them through this transitory period, the ballad of George
Barnwel in particular was thought so instructive that it was often included in their
induction rituals. Its popularity led to it becoming the inspiration for the play The
London Merchant (Or the History of George Barnwell) by George Lillo. First per-
formed in , The London Merchant was based directly on the events of the ballad,
even using the same names and locations as the song. The manager of the theater in
which it was performed, Theophilus Cibber, who also acted the part of Barnwell in the
play, remarked on the audience’s awareness of the play’s source:
The old ballad of George Barnwell (on which the story was founded) was
on this occasion reprinted and many thousands sold in one day. Many
gaily-disposed spirits brought the ballad with them to the play, intending
to make their pleasant remarks (as some afterwards owned) and ludi-
crous comparisons between the ancient ditty and the modern play. . . .
But the play was very carefully got up, and universally allowed to be well
performed . . . [and] in general, spoke so much to the heart, that the gay
persons before mentioned confessed, they were drawn in to drop their
ballads, and pull out their handkerchiefs.
The play was instantly popular, so much so that by the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury it had become the customary offering on the Lord Mayor’s Day and Shrove Tues-
c
. Steven Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents,” Past & Present
(): – at –.
. Ibid., .
. Lillo, The London Merchant, ed. McBurney.
. Quoted in McBurney, introduction to Lillo, The London Merchant, xii.
day, when it was traditional for apprentices to go to the theater. Until this point,
apprentices had usually been offered The London Cuckolds by Edward Ravenscroft, the
story of apprentices cuckolding their masters. By contrast The London Merchant was
“judged a proper entertainment for the apprentices, &c. as being a more instructive,
moral, and cautionary drama, than many pieces that had usually been exhibited on
those days with little but farce and ribaldry to recommend them.” The play’s message
of edification for apprentices meant that it became “the centerpiece of a theatre for
aspiring young men.” The punishment of George Barnwell was felt to be, like his
counterpart’s execution in the ballad, a powerful deterrent and didactic tool for a
riotous and volatile group that was perceived as a potential threat to social order.
The power of the repentance voiced by Barnwell for the sins motivated by his
greed was so enduring that the novelist Charles Dickens would use him as a plot device
in Great Expectations. When Pip, on the eve of his apprenticeship, meets the aspiring
actor Mr. Wopsle in the street, “Mr. Wopsle had in his hand the affecting tragedy of
George Barnwell,” and “he appeared to consider that a special Providence had put a
’prentice in his way to be read at.” When Wopsle forces Pip to act out the part of Barn-
well, Pip is shocked by his own reaction:
What stung me, was the identification of the whole affair with my
unoffending self. When Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I
feltpositively apologetic, Pumblechook’s indignant stare so taxed me
with it.
As Dickens’s novel centers on a young apprentice’s ambition to achieve the trappings of
a higher social class, his choice of George Barnwell as a cautionary figure who warns of
the potential pitfalls of striving for material wealth demonstrates that the original
moralistic message of the ballad had endured. Indeed, the observation in the prologue
to Lillo’s play, that the ballad had for “a century of rolling years . . . fill’d a thousand thou-
sand eyes with tears” turns out to have been an underestimate. Dickens’s contemporary
readers were clearly still familiar with the story and would have recognized in Pip’s
fruitless pursuit of Estella, the beautiful, wealthy, and unattainable woman, an echo of
Barnwell’s pursuit of Sara Millwood the prostitute, which caused him to sink deeper
and deeper into debt in order to maintain a lifestyle that is out of his reach. Of course,
. It would go on to be translated into several languages; see Lawrence Marsden Price, “George
Barnwell Abroad,” Comparative Literature , no. (Spring ): –.
. The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cam-
bridge, ), .
. McBurney, introduction to Lillo, The London Merchant, xiii.
. Lucinda Cole, “The London Merchant and the Institution of Apprenticeship,” Criticism , no.
(): – at . Cole credits Samuel Richardson’s Vade Mecum, an apprenticeship manual pub-
lished three years after the initial production of The London Merchant, with promoting this new kind
of didactic theater for apprentices.
. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Margaret Cardwell and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
(Oxford, ), .
Dickens’s nineteenth-century bildungsroman allows a development of character and
social mobility that the seventeenth-century execution ballad simply could not. Never-
theless, ambition in the novel is still seen to be problematic, and in Pip’s case is built on
a base of crime and punishment, his benefactor being a convicted murderer.
Throughout its trajectory, the “Rich Merchant Man” melody accrued firm and
enduring associations with ideas of appropriate behavior for the merchant classes and
the young people who served them and trained with them. Moral imperatives of char-
ity and of satisfaction with one’s social place and income, and the threat of awful pun-
ishments that would ensue were one to ignore those imperatives, were closely linked
with a tune that was known to all classes of society for centuries. Although economic
historians have argued for increasing levels of prosperity through the seventeenth cen-
tury, the ballads set to the “Rich Merchant Man” melody offer a contradictory view-
point, in which poverty is prevalent, charity must be repeatedly encouraged, and the
only way for the serving classes to avoid the temptations and pitfalls of financial
avarice is to “know their place.” At a moment in English history when affluence was on
the rise yet perceived as increasingly problematic, the “Rich Merchant Man” melody
acted—in all its versions—as an aural warning of the perils of the unequal distribution
of wealth. As the English market economy developed through widening global trade,
giving rise both to an increasingly complex relationship between workers and goods
and to fears of market manipulation and greed, the ballads also appear to have trans-
formed over time, from providing exemplars of noble behavior in the merchant classes
to offering monitory visions of greedy and criminal behavior punished. That their
lyrics and format addressed an audience of young, impressionable servants and
apprentices as well as merchants themselves resulted in a powerful conjunction of
melody, market, and moral lesson. For ballads set to the “Rich Merchant Man” tune,
the recycling of the melody reinforced the ballad’s didactic potency by aurally remind-
ing its listeners of the cautionary tales it had told before.
c is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of
Kent. Her research into the early modern tradition of singing the news has resulted
in articles in Past & Present and Media History. She is also the author of Scandal
and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici ().
c
Appendix: Ballads Written to the Tune of “The Rich Merchant Man,”
by Dominant Theme
Execution/Punishment
“A Warning to All Priests and Jesuites, by the example of two Masse-priests, which for seducing
and stealing away the hearts of the Kings Loyall Subjects, were hangd, drawne, and quartered:
whose execution was on Friday, being the . day of January, . To the Tune of, A Rich
Marchant Man.” . Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ashm. H (), Bod.
“An Excellent Ballad of George Barnwel an Apprentice in London, who was undone by a Strum-
pet, who thrice Robbed his Master, and Murdered his Uncle in Ludlow.” –. Pepys Library,
Magdalene College, Cambridge (hereafter PL), Pepys .- , EBBA .
“Dirty Dolls Farewel. Being an account of a certain Woman, known by the Name of Dirty Doll,
once living near Horslydown in Southwark, who was in her Life-time so notorious for several mis-
demeanours, that it is said, The Devil about the th, or th, of August . appeared to her,
between whom there hapened a terrible Combat, in which Dirty Doll was much bruised, so that
one of her Arms was as black as a Cole, and her Thumb almost pinched off: She dyed on the th.
of the same month, and was buried the th. Being accomodated to the Grave with whooting and
hallowing, in a strange manner.” . PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
“The Golden Farmer’s Last Fareweel Who was arraigned and found Guilty of wilful Murther, and
likewise many notorious Robberies; for which he received a due Sentance of Death, and was
accordingly Executed on the d. of December, in Fleetstreet.” . PL, Pepys ., EBBA
.
“The Unfaithful Servant; and The Cruel Husband. Being a perfect and true account of one Judith
Brown, who together with her Master Iohn Cupper, conspired the Death of her Mistris, his Wife,
which accordingly they did accomplish in the time of Child-bed, when she lay in with two Chil-
dren, by mixing of her Drink with cruel Poyson; for which Fact she received due Sentence of
Death at the late Assizes in the County of Salop, to be Burned; which was accordingly Executed
upon the Old Heath near Shrewsbury, on Thursday the Twenty-first day of August, .” .
PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
“The Arrainement Condemnation and Execution of the Grand [Cutpurse] Iohn Selman who was
executed at White-hall vppon Twesday the seuenth of Ianuary. .” . PL, Pepys ., EBBA
.
“The Cucking of a Scould. To the tune of, The Merchant of Emden.” ? PL, Pepys ., EBBA
.
“The Merchant-Man and the Fidlers Wife: Discovering a pretty conceit how a Fidler, in hope of
gain (and trusting too much to his Wifes honesty) was made a Cuckold by the Merchant; and lost
his Fiddle to boot. He laid his Fiddle to a Ship, In hopes for to be made But Peggy let the Merchant
flip, and Robin he was betray’d. To a Pleasant Northen Tune, by J. P.” –. PL, Pepys .,
EBBA .
“The Fearefull Judgement of Almighty God, shewed vpon two sonnes who most unnaturallye
murthered their naturall father. To the tune of The Marchant of Emden or Crimson Velvet.” Shir-
burn Castle, Oxfordshire, Shirburn North Library D, fol. v. Transcribed in The Shirburn
Ballads, 1585–1616, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, ), –.
“The Unnatural Mother: Being a true Relation of one Jane Lawson, once living at East-Barnet, in
Middlesex; who Quarreling with her Husband, urged him to strike her, and thereupon the same
night, being the first of Sept. . Drowned her self and two poor Babes in a Well. The Tune is,
There was a Rich Merchant Man.” . PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
“The Wofull Lamentation of William Purcas, who for murtherin his Mother at Thax ted in Essex
was executed at Chelmsford. To the tune of, The rich Merchant.” British Library (hereafter BL),
Roxburghe .-, EBBA .
“The Ungrateful Son; or, An Example of God’s Justice upon the abusefull Disobedience of a False-
hearted and cruel Son to his Aged Father. To the Tune of Kentish miracle.” National Library of
Scotland (hereafter NLS), Crawford.EB., EBBA .
“Treason Justly Punished: or, A full relation of the condemnation and execution of Mr. William
Staley who was found guilty of high treason, at the Kings-bench-barr at Westminster, on Thurs-
day the st. of Nov. . For speaking dangerous, and treasonable words against his most Sacred
Majesty the King. For which he was sentenced to be drawn, hang’d, and quartered. And was
accordingly executed upon Tuesday the th. of this instant Nov. . at Tyburn. Tune of, The
rich merchant-man &c. With allowance.” []. Houghton Library (hereafter HL), Harvard Uni-
versity, p EBB, Wing TA.
Noble Exemplar
“A Godly Ballad of the Just Man Job. Wherein his great patience he doth declare, His plagues and
his miseries, and yet did not despair. The Tune is, The Merchant.” –. NLS, Crawford.EB.,
EBBA .
“A most sweet Song of an English Merchant born in Chichester. To an Excellent new Tune.”
–. University of Glasgow Library Euing , EBBA .
Poverty
“A New Ballad, Shewing the Great Misery Sustained by a Poore Man in Essex, his Wife
and Children: with other strange things done by the Devill. To the tune of, The rich Merchant
man.” –? BL, Roxburghe .-, EBBA .
“A True Sence of Sorrow: or The Poor York-shire-Man protected by Providence, in the greatest
time of trouble. When Grief and Care, almost Dispair, does seem to overthrow; Men in Distress
and heaviness, the Lord can kindness show.” –? PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
“The Kentish Miracle: or, A Strange and Miraculous work of Gods Providence, shewed to a poor
distressed Widow, and her Seven small Fatherless Children, who lived by a burnt sixpenny Loaf of
Bread, and a little Water, for above seven Weeks, in the wild of Kent, to the Praise and Glory of
Almighty God.” –? NLS, Crawford.EB., EBBA .
c
Repentance
“A Warning-Piece for All Wickd Livers, or, A Caviet for all People to remember their Latter End.
Being very good instructions for Old and young, Rich and Poor, to amend their Lives, and repent
before it be too late.” –. NLS, Crawford.EB., EBBA .
“Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem; or, A Caveat for England to call to God for mercy, lest we be
plagued for our contempt and Wickedness. –. PL, Pepys ., EBBA .
“Friendly Advice to Extravagants Shewing the Vanity of those, Who to themselves are cruel foes,
By their delays for to prepare, grim Death he will not long forbear But unawares will give the blow,
They’l mourn when they do find it so.” –. NLS, Crawford.EB., EBBA .
“The Doleful Dance, and Song of Death; Intituled, Dance after my Pipe.” –? PL, Pepys .,
EBBA .
“A Dittie Most Excelent for Euerie Man to Reade/that doth intend for to amende & to repent with
speede.” Tune: “a rich marchant man or John come kiss me now.” Before . BL MS Add. ,
fols. –.
“The Cruel Lover: or, The credulous maid. Being an account of a young man near London, who,
after he had courted a young maid, and gain’d her consent to lie with him, cruelly murder’d her,
and afterwards threw her into Ann-is-so-clear, near Shore-ditch, &c. Tune: George Barnwell.”
Ca. . HL, p EB PC no., ESTC N.
“Strange Newes from Brotherton in Yorke-shire, being a true Relation of the raining of Wheat on
Easter day last, to the great amaizment of all the Inhabitants. It hath rained Wheate more or lesse
every day since, witnessed by divers persons of good ranke and quality, as the Lady Ramsden who
gathered some her selfe, some of it was sent to Judge Green, and M. Hurst dwelling at the Foun-
taine Taverne in Saint Anns Lane neere Aldersgate in London. To the tune of The rich Merchant
Man.” ? Manchester Central Library, II, , Wing SA. Transcribed in Henry Rollins, The
Pack of Autolycus(Cambridge, Mass., ), –.
