Water of Tyne, The

DESCRIPTION: "I cannot get to my love, if I would dee, The waters of Tyne stand between him and me, And here I must stand with a tear in my e'e, Both sighing and sickly my true love to see." She begs for a boatman to carry her across the river
AUTHOR: unknown (see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: 1812 (Bell)
KEYWORDS: love separation river
FOUND IN: Britain(England(North))
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Stokoe/Reay-SongsAndBalladsOfNorthernEngland, pp. 30-31, "The Waters of Tyne" (1 text, 1 tune)
Broadwood/Maitland-EnglishCountySongs, p. 3, "The Water of Tyne" (1 text, 1 tune)
Palmer-EnglishCountrySongbook, #81, "The Water of Tyne" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, WATRTYNE*
ADDITIONAL: [Cuthbert Sharp], _The Bishopric Garland, A Collection of Legends, Songs, Ballads, &c Belonging to the County of Durham_, 1834 (references are to the 1969 reprint), p. 55, "The Water of Tyne" (1 text)
T. Thompson, J Shield, W. Midford, H. Robson, and others, _A Collection of Songs, Comic, Satirical, and Descriptive, Chiefly in the Newcastle Dialect: And Illustrative of the Language and Manners of the Common People on the Banks of the Tyne and Neighbourhood_, (John Marshall, Newcastle, 1827), p. 42, "The Waters of Tyne" (1 text)
Roud #1364
NOTES [282 words]: Thompson et al list this as by John Lennard -- but I note that most of the pieces in Thompson were contributed to the book by their authors, and this song was printed fifteen years before Thompson.
I've never seen this mentioned as an explanation for this song, but for much of history the Tyne, not the Tweed, marked the eastern boundary between Scotland and England -- Hadrian's Wall ended at the Tyne, and the border still stood there into the second millennium C.E. (with the complication that the independent kingdoms of Northumbria for a long time stood between what would become England and what would become Scotland, occupying what we would now call the Scottish lowlands, Cumbria, Northumbria, and even as far down as Yorkshire; see e.g. the map in Brooke, p. 85).
The boundary was particularly fluid in the time of William the Conqueror (Douglas, p. 226), in no small part because there weren't enough Normans to really garrison the north. The city of Newcastle, in fact, was founded in the reign of William the Conqueror (1066-1087) as the New Castle on the Tyne after Northumbria was claimed by Malcolm III Canmore of Scotland (Magnusson, p. 66). The site was selected by the Conqueror's son Robert Curthose (Douglas, p. 241); Newcastle was a strong position far enough south that William could be confident of holding it.
The current Solway-to-Tweed border was finally settled in the reign of Alexander II in the first half of the thirteenth century (Magnusson, pp. 90-92). From that time on, the Tyne no longer divided nations. Obviously this song cannot have existed in its present form at that time. But perhaps it's just possible that this represents a memory of that time. - RBW
Bibliography

Brooke: Christopher Brooke, The Saxon and Norman Kings, 1963 (I use the 1975 Fontana edition)
Douglas: David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror, University of California Press, 1964
Magnusson: Magnus Magnusson, Scotland: The Story of a Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000

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