And so to another version of The Cruel Mother, this time collected from Elizabeth Wharton, a gypsy, in Shropshire, by C.S. Burne, on the 13th of July, 1885. This is again taken from the “Songs of the Midlands” book edited by Roy Palmer.

Palmer offers the following notes:

The clerk in the ballad was no doubt a cleric, and therefore not marriageable, in addition to the fact that he is the social inferior of the woman. The oak or thorn tree against which the woman leans to bear the children (itself an ancient practice) often occur in a supernatural context. The guilty bloodstains will not wash off, as in Macbeth. The curious metamorphoses of the mother’s spirit (given more fully in [Cecilia Costello's version], together with the other ancient beliefs in the ballad, argue an origin of some antiquity.

But for all the tragic content, this version has rather a jolly tune, which makes it all the more unsettling, I think. I’ve played the accompaniment on my Jeffries Duet concertina.

Download The Cruel Mother (Elizabeth Wharton’s version) - 3.6MB

The text for this version is:

THE CRUEL MOTHER

There was a lady, a lady of York
Ri-fol i diddle i gee wo
She fell a-courting in her own father’s park
Down by the greenwood side-o

She leaned her back against the stile
There she had two pretty babes born

And she had nothing to lap them in
But she had a penknife sharp and keen

………. [line missing]
There she stabbed them right through the heart*

She wiped the penknife in the sludge
The more she wiped it, the more the blood showed

As she was walking in her own father’s park,
She saw two pretty babes playing with a ball

“Pretty babes, pretty babes, if you were mine,
I’d dress you up in silks so fine.”

“Dear mother, dear mother, when we were thine
You dressed us not in silks so fine.”

“Here we go to the heavens so high,
You’ll go to bad when you do die.”

* - omitted from this recording