Clerk Saunders [Child 69]

DESCRIPTION: (Clerk Sanders) and his lady are determined to be wed despite the opposition of her seven brothers. Despite great pains to conceal their acts, they are found abed together. The brothers stab him to death and leave him in bed for his lady to find
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1802 (Scott)
KEYWORDS: courting death homicide family
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland)
REFERENCES (14 citations):
Child 69, "Clerk Saunders" (7 texts)
Bronson 69, "Clerk Saunders" (3 versions)
Bronson-SingingTraditionOfChildsPopularBallads 69, "Clerk Saunders" (2 versions: #1, #2)
Chambers-ScottishBallads, pp. 211-217, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text)
Lyle-Andrew-CrawfurdsCollectionVolume1 44, "The Ensign and the Lady Gay" (1 text)
Whitelaw-BookOfScottishBallads, pp. 69-73, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text plus 2 fragments)
Leach-TheBalladBook, pp. 234-236, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text)
Quiller-Couch-OxfordBookOfBallads 27, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text)
Friedman-Viking/PenguinBookOfFolkBallads, p. 94, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text)
Grigson-PenguinBookOfBallads 30, "Clark Sanders" (1 text)
Hodgart-FaberBookOfBallads, p. 56, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text)
Sedley/Carthy-WhoKilledCockRobin, pp 65-68, "Clerk Saunders" (1 text, 1 tune)
Morgan-MedievalBallads-ChivalryRomanceAndEverydayLife, pp. 35-37, "Clerk Sanders" (1 text)
DT 69, CLERKSAN
Roud #3855
NOTES [810 words]: Fowler, p. 193, suggests that "Clerk Saunders" [Child 69] and "Sweet William's Ghost" [Child 77] are fragments of a single long revenant ballad, pointing to one of David Herd's texts which contains both elements; he repeats this claim in Severs/Hartung, volume 6, p. 1798. But Child split them because both items exist separately (even Herd had versions which did not combine the two). At best, I think the matter remains open.
Fowler, p. 198, compares the plot to the story of Gareth and Lyonesse in Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, in which the engaged-but-not-yet-married couple are attacked while secretly visiting -- only a partial parallel, however, since Gareth survives, and his attackers are not Lyonesse's brothers.
In Severs/Hartung, Volume 6, p. 1758, Fowler (who wrote this section of Severs/Hartung) suggests that the Pastourelle "De Clerico et Puella" is "related perhaps to Clerk Sanders." Severs/Hartung, Volume 2, p. 727, reports, "The pastourelle appears in MS Harley 2253 [i.e. the Harley Lyrics] (early fourteenth century) and begins "My deþ y loue, my lyf ich hate, for a leuedy shene." ["My death I love, My life I hate, for a lady bright."] West Midland (Böddicker called it North Midland); late thirteenth or early fourteenth century; nine quatrains aaaa in a septenarius line, though some read as an eight line stanza with alternate line rimes in b and other occasional rimes." [Presumably this means double ballad stanzas.] The piece itself is summarized as follows:
"The Clerk is dying for love and growing pale; he praises his leman and asks her what help she has for him. She calls him fool and orders him away; shame will come to him if he remains in her bower. He pleads again; she answers that her father and all her kin watch to slay him. He reminds her that once in a window they kissed fifty times. Once, she remembers, she loved a clerk; again he asks for pity as a clerk from school, and she yields to him (or recognizes him as her former lover?)."
The final incident is called a "possibility" of a recognition scene, but no more (Moore, p. 71, omits any mention of a recognition while stressing that the girl's father and other relatives are guarding her); Severs/Hartung do compare it to the ballad, and mention a similarity to "The Nut-Brown Maid." (A connection also made by Moore,, who calls them both "unclassifiable" pieces and also brings in "Robene and Makyne.")
"De Clerico et Puella" is #24 in Brook (pp. 62-63); it really does scan like a ballad (that is, those seven-foot lines really do mostly feel as if they break into shorter lines of four and three feet), except that there are four lines that use the same rhyme rather than just two. It doesn't feel much like "Clerk Saunders" to me, though.
The various tricks the lovers use in the ballad, e.g. of using the sword rather than her hands to open the door, and covering her eyes when he comes in so she can say she has not seen him, are reminiscent of a trick in many versions of the Tristan legend: Isolde, on trial, crosses a brook carried on the shoulders of a beggar (who is actually Tristan in disguise). She then declares her fidelity by vowing that no man has ever come between her legs except the man who carried her across the stream.
I thought of that latter link on my own, but Fowler, on p. 1799 of Severs/Hartung, points it out too. In fact, he lists an amazing number of folklore parallels, in both halves of what he considers a single ballad. In the first half ("Clerk Saunders"), he perceives:
- The aforementioned link to the story of Sir Gareth
- The "saving of one's oath" as found in the Tristan story, "notably the 'ordeal by iron' in Béroul"
- The seven brothers, such as are found in "Earl Brand" [Child 7], who "are much more functional than the brothers who appear briefly" in "Fair Margaret and Sweet William" [Child 71]. "Margaret's vow of austerities is at least as old as The Squire of Low Degree (c. 1500)"
For the second half ("Sweet William's Ghost") Fowler mentions several stories about life after death, with the first one that has a true revenant being The Awntyrs of Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, which features Guinevere's mother appearing to her daughter and Gawain
- "Another metrical piece, The Child of Bristowe, has a revenant, the child's father, who demands the return of a troth."
- He also sees "a Boethiean theme of consolation reminiscent of the Middle English Pearl, and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess.
I don't really think any of those parallels are strong. The first few are common folklore. And while it is true that both Pearl, and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess try to console someone who is grieving the dead, in Pearl it is a dead child, not a dead lover, and White (Blanche of Lancaster) in the Book of the Duchess died after years of marriage, with no promises unfulfilled.- RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.8
File: C069

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2024 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.