Nut-Brown Maid, The

DESCRIPTION: The man claims that women, given the chance, are never true. The woman cites the case of the Nut-brown Maid. They play through the story. The woman will follow her man, even to the greenwood, and will fight for him, etc. The ballad ends by praising women
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1537: Richard Arnold's "Chronicle" of c. 1521 (Chambers dates it c. 1503) and in Richard Hill's manuscript (Balliol Coll. Oxf. 354) before 1537; printed in 1707 in the Muses Mercury
KEYWORDS: infidelity love dialog outlaw MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (13 citations):
Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume III, pp. 174-186, "The nutt browne mayd" (2 texts, the Percy Folio version in the main text and the Hill Manuscript version in the notes)
Percy/Wheatley-ReliquesOfAncientEnglishPoetry II, pp. 31-47, "The Not-Browne Maid" (1 text)
Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland, pp. 14-28, "The Nut-Brown Maid" (1 text)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics XIX, pp. 34-48, "The Nutbrown Maid" (1 text)
Quiller-Couch-OxfordBookOfBallads 69, "The Nut-Brown Maid" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #467
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #761
ADDITIONAL: John Ashton, _A Century of Ballads_, Elliot Stock, London, 1887; reprinted 1968 by Singing Tree Press, pp. vi-xii, "(The Nut browne Mayde)" (1 text)
Katherine Briggs, _A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language_, Part A: Folk Narratives, 1970 (I use the 1971 Routledge paperback that combines volumes A.1 and A.2), volume A.2, pp. 450-451, "the Nut-Brown Maid" (1 summarized prose text, telling only the Maid's story without the enclosing dialog)
E. K. Chambers, editor, _The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse_, Oxford, 1932 (corrected edition, 1966), pp. 1-14, "The Nutbrown Maid" (1 text)
GArnett-IHearAmericaSinging/Gosse: Richard GArnett-IHearAmericaSinging and Edmund Gosse, _English Literature: An Illustrated Record_ four volumes, MacMillan, 1903-1904 (I used the 1935 edition published in two volumes), volume I, pp. 310-311 (1 partial text plus a facsimile of Arnold's printed edition)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSRichardHill}, The Richard Hill Manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354, folio 210
MANUSCRIPT: {MSPercyFolio}, The Percy Folio, London, British Library, MS. Additional 27879, page 420
ST OBB069 (Partial)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "A Jigge" (MSPercyFolio, page 294; Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume II, pp. 335-337, called by the editors a "sort of vulgar reproduction" of The Nut-Brown Maid)
NOTES [830 words]: Given its elaborate stanzaic structure, regular alternation of speakers, and elaborately formal language, it seems clear that this should be accounted a literary rather than a folk production. I know of no version in oral tradition, although Briggs, p. 451, notes a variety of partial parallels, such as "The Saucy Sailor," "Fair Annie" [Child 62], and "The Squire of Low Degree" (the latter itself, found in the Percy Folio among other places, being of dubious place in tradition; for a list of editions, see Rice, pp. 523-525).
Chambers, p. 120, reminds us, "The stanza-form of the poem is unusual. It is generally printed as in twelve lines. But two out of every three lines have internal rhymes, and on analysis it resolves itself into an eighteen-line variety of the rime couée, so beloved by popular singers, complicated by the use of two distinct refrains, which occur with very slight variation. The technical description is thus aa2b3cc2b3dd2b3ee2b3ff2g3hh2g3."
A parody of this song, "The New Nutbrowne Maid," occurs as early as 1520. Obviously this makes the original even older. The earliest date depends on the age of Arnold's Chronicle, which is undated. The latest date I have seen for it is the 1521 date cited above. Garnett/Gosse, which prints a facsimile, dates the Chronicle to 1502/3, and Briggs, p. 451, also says 1502. Moore, p. 182, dates it c. 1502 (and says that the piece "resists comparison qith the extant verse of the fifteenth century). Parker, p. 78, suggests a first edition of 1502 and an expanded edition of 1521. However, Dyboski, p. xxx, thinks that the Hill copy is the oldest copy although the very same page suggests that it was copied from Arnold! (There is good external evidence that Hill knew Arnold's book; later in Hill's volume is a London chronicle for 1414-1536, and Parker, p. 78, says that "the bulk of the borrowing" was from Arnold's Chronicle.. It is even possible that Hill knew Richard Arnold; in 1494, Arnold had a neighbor named "Richard Hyll" -- Parker, p. 85 -- although our Richard Hill was probably very young at that time.)
Whatever the date of the Arnold Chronicle, there was another early printing; John Skot issued a copy during the short period that he printed at Fauster Lane in St. Leonard's Parish in London (Plomer, p. 214). From another book printed at this address, we know Skot was active in Fauster Lane in 1537. It will perhaps tell you what sort of printer Skot was if I inform you that both of the complete early versions of the morality play "Everyman" come from his press. (There were earlier printings by Richard Pynson, but we have only fragments of those. The texts you see printed today are essentially Skot's.)
In addition, there is a Stationer's Register entry for "the nutbrowne mayde" in the 1550s (Rollins, p. 172, #1983, says Jno. King was fined for printing this in 1558-1559).
There is a possibility that Queen Elizabeth herself heard this piece; according to Holt, p. 140, one Robert Langham was present when Elizabeth heard an entertainment in July 1575 at the Earl of Leicester's palace of Kenilworth which featured the "The Nut Brown Maid."
GArnett-IHearAmericaSinging is also quite effusive about the merits of the piece, but adds that "One famous ballad stands out prominently from the rest as being, so far as is known, the invention of the anonymous writer. It is The Nut Brown Maid...." The only anonymous ballad? Uh-huh.
Percy's version, from what I can tell, appears to come from the Chronicle text, only with several of Percy's pet archaizing tricks (he did at least improve the punctuation to something resembling sense).
Skeat, one of the greatest scholars of Middle English of the nineteenth century, regards this as "almost certainly written by a woman" (p. 110; a statement I would consider a little strong -- there were medieval authors who were sympathetic to women, including Chaucer -- but likely enough), and then claims it to be the third-oldest surviving English writing by a woman, following "The Flower and the Leaf" and "The Assembly of Ladies." Pearsall, p. 3, says of "The Flower and the Leaf," "Whether the poem is actually by a woman is a question which no ingenuity, it seems, could solve," and p. 31 says of "The Assembly of Ladies, 'Whether the author was indeed a woman is a question impossible to prove either way," adding that, contrary to Skeat, there were female poets in the fifteenth century, and men did mask themselves as women -- and ultimately expressing the opinion that the author is not a woman. Garnett/Gosse, p. 174, call the author of the "Flower" "he," but they may be using the masculine pronoun generically; they show no interest in the author's gender even while praising him(?) as a relatively worthy successor to Chaucer. But if the "Flower" and the "Assembly" are by men, it raises the faint possibility that this is the oldest surviving literary work by a woman in English. I don't believe it, but I'll mention it. - RBW
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