Canny Miller and His Wife, The

DESCRIPTION: When the miller returns home his wife hides her lover. Claiming illness she sends the miller out to buy gin as a cure. He puts on the lover's trousers, discovers fifty pounds, confronts his wife and decides he could not have made as much money milling.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1908 (Greig/Duncan7)
KEYWORDS: adultery clothes money drink humorous husband lover wife miller disease
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland(Aber))
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Greig/Duncan7 1459, "O Poor Man the Miller" (4 texts, 2 tunes)
Logan-APedlarsPack, pp. 388-392, "The Canny Miller and His Wife" (1 text)
ST GrD71459 (Partial)
Roud #7152
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Little Dicky Wigburn" (theme: wife sends husband away so she can have her lover come to the house)
NOTES [130 words]: Logan-APedlarsPack [1869]: "'The Canny Miller and his Wife' has ostensibly been written to records a local event in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, seemingly about fifty years ago." Logan's version of 25 verses seems "literary" when compared to the Greig/Duncan7 11 verse text. The outlines of the story are preserved in Greig/Duncan7 along with six lines of text, three lines that are close, and isolated references to the lover as "spark" and the lover's watch. In Logan the wife claims to have bought the trousers for him at auction and the miller seems to accept her explanation ["with his wife he is content"] while in Greig/Duncan7 he says the trousers are "Spark's as that ye know And after him ye'll tramp and go." "Spark" refers to the lover and is sometimes his name. - BS
Last updated in version 2.6
File: GrD71459

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