Earl Crawford [Child 229]

DESCRIPTION: Lady Crawford marries the Earl at a young age, and soon bears a son. She thinks Crawford loves the child more than he loves her. They quarrel and separate. Both wish to reconcile, both think the other has refused to do so, both die for love
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1828 (Buchan, Ballads of the North, according to Whitelaw-BookOfScottishBallads {Child 229B})
KEYWORDS: love separation children jealousy death
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland)
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Child 229, "Earl Crawford" (2 texts)
Bronson 229, "Earl Crawford" (2 versions)
Bronson-SingingTraditionOfChildsPopularBallads 229, "Earl Crawford" (2 versions: #1, #2)
Leach-TheBalladBook, pp. 589-592, "Earl Crawford" (1 text)
Whitelaw-BookOfScottishBallads, pp. 147-149, "Earl Crawford" (1 text)
DT, CRAWFRD*
Roud #3880
NOTES [714 words]: It has been suggested that this ballad is about David Lindsay (1547?-1607), 11th Earl of Crawford, and his first wife Lilias Drummond.
There is a short biography of Crawford in Hamilton, pp. 208-209. This appears to derive largely, if not entirely, from DNB.
The Crawfords had a bad reputation at this time; the 8th Earl had been known as "The wicked Master of Crawford." Willson, p. 98, calls the 11th Earl "luxurious and lawless."
"David, eleventh earl, inherited the prodigality of his father and grandfather and was, if anything, even more lawless than they." (Hamilton, p. 208). He succeeded to the Earldom in 1574. He feuded with, and very likely murdered, the 8th Lord Glamis, though he was formally acquitted of the crime. He spent 1578-1581 in France along with the Earl of Huntly (the man who slaughtered the Bonnie Earl of Murray), then returned to Scotland and became an important supporter of James VI. Somewhere in there, he turned Catholic; he and Huntly briefly rebelled in 1589, plotting to bring in a Spanish army to enforce Catholicism (Willson, pp. 81, 101-102). was convicted of treason, went to France again, returned to Scotland, and apparently stayed out of trouble after that; he served on the governing council from then until his death in 1607.
"The earl married twice: first to Lilias, daughter of David, Lord Drummond, and secondly to Grizel, daughter of John fourth Earl of Atholl. His marriage to his first wife, which was brief, inspired a ballad" (Hamilton, p. 209). Hamilton does not list any children by this marriage. By his second, he had three sons and a daughter. Two of the sons died young; the third, another David, "surpassed even his predecessors in wickedness"; his relatives had him confined to keep him from forfeiture, and the earldom then passed to an uncle. His daughter eloped with a man of lower status. All in all, not a savory bunch.
The DNB article says of his first marriage, "He was married first to Lilias, one of 'seven bonnie sisters,' daughters of David, lord Drummond, and secondly to Griselda, daughter of John, fourth earl of Atholl. A manuscript genealogy states that he had by his first wife a son who died young, and according to the old ballad of 'Earl Crawford,' he separated from her on account of a light jest of hers in reference to the paternity of the child. The ballad goes on to recount that she died of grief at the separation, and that the earl died the same night from grief at her loss, but the earl's second marriage disposes of the latter statement."
But is the 11th Earl really the subject of the song? The name "Crawford" fits, and so does that of his wife, and the fact that she was one of seven sisters, and so does the fact that they quarreled, but few of the other details are appropriate to their situation.
Of course, the earliest text of the ballad is from two centuries after the events it supposedly describes. And that text (Child's B) is from Peter Buchan, and has a suspicious number of ballad commonplaces. Child's A is much shorter, if not much more accurate, but later. It sounds more like an actual traditional ballad, rather than a hack job, but it's from Christie, who has his own problems with adjusting his sources (though Child's version A is described as a conflation of two sources). Bronson has two tunes; one, from the Blaikie manuscript, has no text; the other is from "the nurse of Christie's children."
Steve Gardham has suggested (private communication, after I complained about the ballad) that the Buchan text is Buchan's own creation (and the probability that he at least modified it seems extraordinarily high), and that Christie abetted the process with his own modifications. Certainly the whole thing seems suspicious -- and very Buchan-like in its emphasis on the young wife and the peculiar died-for-love ending when the two did not in fact die for love. Yet it can hardly be about anyone other than this particular Earl of Crawford and his wife, since Buchan's text uses the name "Lillie." I might be tempted to think that Buchan had a scrap about Crawford and Lillie which he expanded into a complete (but bogus) ballad; I am inclined to agree with Gardham that most of what we have here contains a lot more Buchan (and maybe Christie) than actual tradition. - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.7
File: C229

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