Ye Ken Pretty Well What I Mean, O

DESCRIPTION: In an woman's house "you get your fill" with a "bonny servant lassie for to carry it all." A soldier asks for ale and takes the lass to bed. They name their genitals. His plump stallion falls in her well and comes out like "a half-drowned rat"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1707 (_Pills to Purge Melancholy_, v.iii p. 55, according to Farmer)
KEYWORDS: sex bawdy servant soldier mother
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland(Aber))
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Greig/Duncan1 50, "Green Leaves So Green" (3 fragments, 2 tunes)
ADDITIONAL: John Stephen Farmer, editor, Merry Songs and Ballads, Prior to the Year 1800 (1897), Vol I, pp. 192-193, "The Trooper Watering His Nagg"
Roud #3807
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Trooper Watering His Nag" (lyrics, style)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Steggie
NOTES [159 words]: Greig/Duncan1 fragments have none of the bawdy verses. John Mehlberg's immortalia.com site has a text as "Ye Ken Pretty Well What I Mean, O" that - Hamish Henderson reports - Arthur Argo got "from an elderly relative." That text is the basis of the description.
In the Farmer text the old woman "had a Daughter her name was Siss ... She kept her at Home, for to welcome her Guests." "And when Night came unto Bed they went ... It was with the Mother's own consent."
Perhaps Opie/Opie-OxfordDictionaryOfNurseryRhymes 541, "There Was an Old Woman Lived Under a Hill" is just a fragment of this ballad, censored, like the Greig/Duncan1 fragments. - BS
I'm tempted to lump this with "The Trooper Watering His Nag" -- the lyric and sly tone are obviously quite close. But Roud and Ben Schwartz both leave them separate, so I am very tentatively doing the same. Editors, however, show enough confusion between the two that you had better check both entries. - RBW
Last updated in version 2.5
File: GrD1050

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