"The Maid and the Palmer" (a.k.a. "The Maid of Coldingham" and "The Well Below The Valley") (Roud 2335, Child ballad 21) is an English language medieval murder ballad with supernatural/religious overtones. Because of its dark lyrics (implying murder and, in some versions, incest), the song was often avoided by folk singers.Planxty, 1973: Liner notes to "The Well Below The Valley", Polydor 2383-232 Considered by scholars to be a "debased" version of a work more completely known in European sources as the Ballad of the Magdalene, the ballad was believed lost in the oral tradition in the British Isles from the time of Sir Walter Scott, who noted a fragment of it having heard it sung in the early years of the nineteenth century, until it was discovered in the repertoire of a living Irish singer, John Reilly, from whom it was collected in the 1960s, although subsequently other versions have surfaced from Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s; an additional full text, collected and notated in around 1818, was also recently published in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads under the title "The Maid of Coldingham", having remained in manuscript form in the intervening time. Based on a tape of Reilly's performance provided by the collector Tom Munnelly, the singer Christy Moore popularised the song under its alternate title "The Well Below the Valley" with the Irish folk band Planxty and later solo performances/recordings, this song providing the title of that group's second album released in 1973; the song has subsequently been recorded by a number of more recent "folk revival" acts.
Synopsis A palmer (pilgrim or holy man) begs a cup from a maid who is washing at the well, so that he could drink from it since he is thirsty. She says she has none. He says that she would have, if her lover came. She swears she has never had a lover. He says that she has borne nine babies (or in different versions, other numbers such as seven or five) and tells her where she buried the bodies. She begs some penance from him. He tells her that she will be transformed into a stepping-stone for seven years, a bell-clapper for seven, and spend seven years in hell.
In some variants, the children were incestuously conceived. Also in at least one version collected in Ireland, and more so in European variants, the palmer is identified as God or Jesus.
Commentary This ballad combines themes from the Biblical stories of the Samaritan woman at the well, and Mary Magdalene. In several foreign variants, the palmer is in fact Jesus. Mary Diane McCabe, cited below, says that John Reilly was reportedly aware that the story concerned Mary Magdalene (McCabe, chapter 10, note 25, citing "A letter to me from Tom Munnelly dated 12 April 1978"), although whether this was before or following a suggestion by Munnelly is not recorded, while other sources cite Munnelly reporting that John Reilly also identified the palmer (termed "a gentleman" in his version) as Christ;T. Munnelly, quoted in David Atkinson, 2017, "The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice", Taylor & Francis e-book, another (thus far) unique, additional Irish variant collected by Munnelly from Willie A. Reilly, another traveller, specifically identifies the stranger as Christ: "Oh, for I am the Lord that rules on high / Green grows the lily-O / Oh, I am the Lord that rules on high / In the well below the valley-O" (McCabe, listed as version E, stanza 5).
A Breton variant of the song is called "Mari Kelenn" (also "Mari Gelan"; French: "Marie Quelenn" or "Gelen"); in this version, the element of meeting at the well is missing, and there is more emphasis on the penance that must be performed by the woman, plus the method of her ultimate absolution.
Child, 1882 discusses the history of this ballad in detail over 4+ pages (pp. 228–232 of the printed version). By analogy with its European counterparts, it seems clear that Child 21 is a British "Magdalene ballad",Harris, Joseph (1971). "'Maiden in the Mor lay' and the Medieval Magdalene Tradition". Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1: 59-87. Available via https://www.academia.edu/11379372/Maiden_in_the_mor_lay_and_the_medieval_Magdalene_tradition although the identity of the protagonist has been lost. Mary Diane McCabe, who corresponded extensively with the Irish collector Tom Munnelly regarding this and other ballads, regarded it as such and wrote:McCabe, Mary Diane (1980). A critical study of some traditional religious ballads. M.A. Thesis, University of Durham, 471 pp. Available at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7804/1/7804_4801.PDF.
Joseph Harris of Harvard, 1971, speculated that the evolution of the ballad followed 3 stages (his "Forms I–III"): in Form I (originating in Catalonia and the Romance region), Mary Magdalene has sinned, meets Jesus who gives her a penance of seven years in the wilderness, after which she is received in heaven; in Form II, also in Catalonia, the narrative acquires elements of the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, in which the woman does not at first recognise Jesus but he surprises her with his detailed knowledge of her sins; and in his Form III, interpreted as arising in Scandinavia, the new motif of child murders is introduced (possibly from Child no. 20, "The Cruel Mother"), and it is this form that then spread through the English and Scottish, Scandinavian (with Finland), and Slavic ballad areas.
A more extensive account of the European (specifically: Finnish) counterpart/s of the song and its apparent history is contained in a 1992 thesis by Ann-Mari Häggman entitled "Magdalena på källebro : en studie i finlandsvensk vistradition med utgångspunkt i visan om Maria Magdalena" ("Magdalena at the wellspring: a study in the Finnish-Swedish song tradition based on the poem about Maria Magdalena") and in the Finnish Folklore Atlas.Finnish Folklore Atlas, Ethnic Culture of Finland 2 Translated from Finnish by Annira Silver. Helsinki, 2009. Available at https://moam.info/finnish-folklore-atlas_5a1c3ba41723dd7c327408e3.html
Writing in 1984, David C. Fowler presents an analysis of various aspects of the ballad, suggesting that the well at which the action is located may be a derivation from Jacob's Well, scene of the biblical conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, that the inclusion of the figure of the palmer (archaic by the time of Percy) lends considerable antiquity to the text, and that the "Lillumwham" and other apparent nonsense lines in the Percy version appear to be later, and highly incongruous, grafts to the original verses.Fowler, David C. (1984). The Bible in Middle English Literature. University of Washington Press, Seattle & London, 326 pp. He also is of the opinion—in contrast to that of other scholars, who emphasise the "redemptive" potential of the penances—that the proposed penances could actually be intended to be ironic (along the lines of "when hell freezes over", etc.), in which case redemption would likely be never attainable for the protagonist.
Within the UK/Irish versions collected, the "incest" element is most apparent in the longer version collected by Munnelly from John Reilly, in which the latter (in this version there are five murdered children) sings "Two of them by your father dear, Two more of them came by your uncle Dan, Another one by your brother John."
A different ballad "The Cruel Mother", Child ballad 20, exists in a number of variants, in some of which there are verses where the dead children tell the mother she will suffer a number of penances each lasting seven years; those verses properly belong in "The Maid and the Palmer". (see also "Notes".)
The Welsh scholar and poet Tony Conran expressed the view that the version in Percy (and thus the basis for Child's main entry) did not have the correct ring of authenticity, but was instead an "Elizabethan anti-catholic burlesque of a lost earlier version".Conran, 1997, quoted in liner notes to Frankie Armstrong, "Till the Grass O'ergrew the Corn", Fellside Recordings FECD116, 1997.
Survival and publication history For this ballad, Child had access to only two English text versions without tunes (although he also quotes from translations of Continental equivalents), one longer one with 15 verses stated as being from p. 461 of the Percy Manuscript dating from the mid seventeenth century, plus another fragment with 3 verses only, recalled by none other than Sir Walter Scott, the latter dating from early decades of the nineteenth century. In Percy it appears under the name "Lillumwham", a possible nonsense word that appears in Percy's (and thus Child's) interpolated refrain for each verse: (line 2:) "Lillumwham, lillumwham! (line 4:) Whatt then? what then? (lines 7–9): Grandam boy, grandam boy, heye! Leg a derry, leg a merry, met, mer, whoope, whir! Driuance, larumben, grandam boy, heye!".Google Books: Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript. Ballads and Romances, Volume 4: query=Lillumwham In an article "Songs connected with customs" published in 1915, A. G. Gilchrist, Lucy Broadwood and Frank Kidson suggested that these words may be related to the turning of a spinning wheel,A. G. Gilchrist, Lucy E. Broadwood and Frank Kidson (1915). "Songs connected with customs". Journal of the Folk-Song Society, vol. 5, no. 19 (June 1915), 204–220 while Richard Firth Green in 2004 suggested that they may relate to a ploughboy or carter's calls.Green, Richard Firth, 2004. "F.J. Child and Mikail Bakhtin." In Philip E. Bennett, Richard Firth Green, eds: The Singer and the Scribe, pp. 123–133. Brill. In either scenario, or any other not yet suggested, when Percy's manuscript collection was transcribed by Furnivall for publication, the ballad was included (somewhat incongruously) in the latter's section comprising "Loose and Humorous Songs", accompanied by a comparison with other ballads that humorously suggest methods by which a woman who has lost her virginity might regain it by some clearly unworkable means, presumably a reference to the last verse of the Percy version: "When thou hast thy penance done / Then thoust come a mayden home."
The fragment quoted by Child originating from Sir Walter Scott does not have the "Lillumwham" nonsense-style chorus but instead had a first refrain line that Scott did not recall, followed by a second, "And I the fair maiden of Gowden-gane". Unbeknown to Child, what appears to be a complete text of possibly the same version, with the refrain "The primrose o' the wood wants a name"/"I am the fair maid of Coldingham" (lines 2/4) had been collected at a similar time by the Reverend Robert Scott, minister of the parish of Glenbuchat in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, set down about 1818, under the name "The Maid of Coldingham", however this version remained in manuscript form and was not published until almost two centuries later, first appearing in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads compilation (as no. 32 in that collection)Lyle, Emily (ed) (1994). Scottish Ballads. Canongate, Edinburgh. and then again in 2007 in The Glenbuchat Ballads by David Buchan and James Moreira, the latter work being a full transcription of the collection made by the Reverend Scott in the early part of the nineteenth century.David Buchan and James Moreira (eds) (2007). The Glenbuchat Ballads. University Press of Mississippi (in association with the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, Scotland), Jackson, Miss., 304 pp. Google Books: The Glenbuchat Ballads, vol. 2, p. 89