We Be Soldiers Three

DESCRIPTION: "We be soldiers three, Pardona moy, je vous an pree, Lately come forth from the low country, With never a penny of money." The soldiers drink to their hearers, or beg their listeners to give a drink to the men who fought for them
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1609 (Ravenscroft, Deuteromelia)
KEYWORDS: soldier home drink
FOUND IN: Britain(England(South))
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Chappell-PopularMusicOfTheOldenTime, p. 77, "We Be Soldiers Three" (1 text, 1 tune)
Chappell/Wooldridge-OldEnglishPopularMusic I, p. 133, "We Be Soldiers Three" (1 text, 1 tune)
Dallas-TheCruelWars-100SoldiersSongs, pp. 144-145, "We Be Soldiers Three" (1 text, 1 tune)
Kinsey-SongsOfTheSea, p. 108, "Sailors Three" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: (no author listed), _Selections from the Works of Thomas Ravenscroft; A Musical Composer of the Time of King James the First_, Roxburgh Club, 1822, (available on Google Books) No. III/p. 3, "We Be Souldiers Three" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #8340
NOTES [181 words]: Just barely traditional, if traditional at all (there is a field collection, but I wonder if it wasn't influenced by print), but it's old, and the tune is excellent, so I've indexed it.
Kinsey-SongsOfTheSea's "Sailors Three" strikes me as very dubious. On its face, it is a version of this in which the three soldiers are made into sailors, and the "low countries" changed to the "West Country, and any verses specific to soldiers simply omitted. Otherwise, it's almost verbatim from Chappell. What are the odds of such a thing? I doubt the result was ever traditional (Kinsey, after all, lists no source); even if Kinsey collected it rather than rewriting it himself, the informant must have seen a printed text.
Chappell-PopularMusicOfTheOldenTime, p. 506, has a piece "There Were Three Travellers," with the verse, "There were three travellers, travellers three, With a hey down, ho down, lang tree down derry, And they would travel the north country, Without ever a stiver of money." The tune is not exactly the same, but obviously there is some sort of influence between the two. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.7
File: DalC144

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