Crow and Pie [Child 111]

DESCRIPTION: The singer woos a maid encountered in a forest. She spurns him, repeating with each refusal "the crowe shall byte yew". He takes her by force, then taunts "the pye hath peckyd yew." He refuses to marry, give money, or tell his name. All maids take warning
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 16th century (MS. Bodleian Rawlinson C.813)
KEYWORDS: courting virtue rape bird
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Child 111, "Crow and Pie" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, _I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric_, Four Courts Press, 2002, pp. 90-93 "(No title)" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson C.813, folio 27
Roud #3975
NOTES [547 words]: According to Boklund-Lagopolou, p. 90, the manuscript which contains this, Bodleian Rawlinson C.813, opens with an "amateur collection of lyrics from the sixteenth century. Love poetry predominated." This is item #44 in the manuscript, which does not give it a title. Boklund-Lagopolou, p. 92, compares it to the Holly-and-Ivy competition songs.
David C. Fowler, on p. 1773 of volume 6 of Severs/Hartung, describes the source as "A somewhat neglected manuscript containing pieces adapted from the works of Chaucer and various fifteenth-century poets, as well as a few courtly lyrics of the Tudor period. The manuscript itself is dated 1530-1540 [i.e. the reign of Henry VIII], and the entire corpus of 51 songs was printed by F. M. Padelford in Anglia 31.309 in 1908.... Several love lyrics show the influence of Chaucer, and one is taken practically verbatim from various passages in Troilus and Criseyde (Padelford. no. 30). Others represented in the collection are Stephen Hawes..., several poems by Lydgate and by Richard Rood, and anonymous pieces like The Adulterous Falmouth Squire, from which is reproduced the lament of a soul in torment... Two other texts in this manuscript (Pdelford, nos. 42 and 43) are composed in a similar spirit, and might well have been included by Child." However, no other items in the manuscript were cited by Child, or by anyone else known to me; "The Adulterous Falmouth Squire" is the only thing that seems to have had any chance of being traditional (it shows up, e.g., in the manuscripts containing "Robin Hood and the Monk" [Child 119] and "Robin Hood and the Potter" [Child 121]) -- but it's only excerpted in the Rawlinson MS., clearly from a written source.
Fpwler, on p. 1758 of Volume 6 of Severs/Hartung, sees a similarity between this ballad (and also, to a lesser extent, "The Carnal and the Crane" [Child 55] and "Robyn and Gandeleyn" [Child 115]) and an early modern English piece, "The Fermorar and His Dochter" ("The Farmer and His Daughter"). Severs/Hartung, Volume III, pp. 734-735, describe the latter.
"The Fermorar is found in a manuscript at Wemyss Castle which also contains Wyntoun's Chronicle, and which is to be dated in the first half of the fifteenth century. Our poem, however, is written on a flay leaf, and is dated by one authority 'not later than c. 1542.' It is in eight stanzas ababbcc, with three lines missing from stanza six, and begins with the usual chanson d'aventure opening 'As I did walk onys be ane medo side' [As I did walk once by a meadow side]. A lively and spirited dialog between a rich farmer and his daughter on the subject of her marriage. He wishes her to marry one of the three sons of Symkin her neighbor, but she refuses to live a slave to farm wok like her mother, and wants a lusty gentleman, along with a silken gown, a French hood, shoes of velvet, fine hose, and the company of ladies. Her final determination is such that she may have got her own way. Though preceding married, the poem essentially recalls the chanson de mal mariée tradition."
It will be evident that the similarity, if any, is in form, not plot.
It's interesting (to me, at least) that the two birds referred to in the song, crow and magpie, are probably the two most intelligent types in Britain. - RBW
Bibliography

Boklund-Lagopolou: Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric, Four Courts Press, 2002
Severs/Hartung: J. Burke Severs and Albert Hartung, editors, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500, in ten volumes with continuous page numbering; Volume 3 (edited by Hartung), Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972; Volume 6 (edited by Hartung), Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980

Last updated in version 6.5
File: C111

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