Anne Briggs – vocals
Track 13 on the album The Bird in the Bush (1966)*
It fell about the Martinmas time
When snow lay on the borders,
There came a troop of soldiers here
To take up their winter quarters.
[Refrain repeated after each verse:]
With me-right-fol-lay-de-leedle-lyla-dah-dee-o,
With me-right-fol-lay-de-leedle-lah-ri.**
They rode up and they rode down
And they rode over the border.
There they met a fair pretty girl
And she was a farmer’s daughter.
They made her swear a solemn oath
With a salt tear in her eye, oh,
That she would call at their quarter gates
When no-one did her spy, oh.
So she goes to the barber shop,
To the barber shop went soon, oh.
She’s made him cut her fine yellow hair
As short as any dragoon, oh.
Then she goes to the tailor shop
And dresses in soldier’s clothes, oh.
A pair of pistols down by her side,
And a nice little boy was she, oh.
When she came to the quarter gates,
It’s loud, loud she did call, oh,
“There comes a troop of soldiers here
And we must have lodgings all, oh!”
The quartermaster he comes out,
He gives her half-a-crown, oh:
“Go and find lodgings for yourself,
For here there is no room, oh.”
But she drew nearer to the gates
And louder she did call, oh:
“Room, room, you gentlemen,
We must have lodgings all, oh!”
The quartermaster he comes out,
He gives her eighteen pence, oh:
“Go and find lodgings in the town
For tonight there comes a wench, oh.”
She’s pulled the garters from her legs,
The ribbons from her hair, oh.
She’s tied them ’round the quarter gates
As a token she’s been there, oh.
She drew a whistle from her side,
And blew it loud and shrill, oh:
“You’re all very free with your eighteen pence,
But you’re not for a girl at all, oh.”
And when they knew that it was her,
They tried to have her taken.
She’s clapped her spurs to her horse’s side
And she’s galloped home a maiden.
This ballad is numbered Roud 2173 and has a relatively modest 48 variants. The version here derives from a Scottish text titled “It Fell aboot the Mart’mas Time,” numbered LXXXIV in Gavin Grieg’s collection, Folk-Song in Buchan and Folk-Song of the North-East (1963). This version, described by Grieg as “popular beyond most of its class,” has four extra verses (inserted between verses #2 and #3 above) which Grieg himself notes are “not in the version one usually hears.”
The four missing verses indicate that the “weel-faur’d may” – “well-favoured [i.e., pretty] maid” – that the soldiers meet is a prosperous farmer’s wife and mother to his children. While this may suggest a further depth of depravity in the soldiers, it doesn’t quite accord with the powerful ending of the shortened ballad as it stands above. For here, its last word suggests that our heroine is a virgin who has kept her maidenhead and reputation intact by her own cunning and resourcefulness.
Commentators often half-dismiss this ballad as yet another of those with comic cross-dressing scenes, but I feel this narrative is deadly serious. This is a song that might have been taught by senior female relatives to their adolescent daughters or granddaughters as a matter of urgency. It’s about how young women should recognize and be able to defend themselves against male sexual predation. As such it has a similar theme to “Little Red Riding Hood,” though the wolf in that folk tale has been somewhat defanged in recent times.
Martinmas is the feast day of St. Martin of Tours and falls on 11 November. It was celebrated in England and Scotland – the border between them is the setting of this ballad – as marking the end of harvest and beginning of winter, a temporal boundary to match the geographical one. The ballad may have been collected from the Buchan area on the northeast tip of Aberdeenshire, but it’s set much further south in the Scottish Borders, an area of conflicted jurisdiction for centuries. The chilly setting is appropriate for the potentially chilling narrative.
English soldiers on their border patrol ride over into Scotland and there meet a pretty maid. They surround and intimidate her until she tearily swears a solemn oath to present herself secretly at the gate of their barracks. What they want from her isn’t spelled out, but it’s clear enough: she’ll be expected to service them – all of them – sexually after they settle into their winter quarters. And what she’s sworn cannot be retracted, according to the morality of traditional society where solemn oaths are considered absolutely binding. How can she extricate herself from this desperate plight?
Her stratagem is bold. She has her hair cut short and dresses herself as a dragoon (a mounted infantryman). Then she appears thus disguised at the gate of the soldiers’ barracks and demands lodging for herself and her (non-existent) troop. The quartermaster – the military officer in charge of the “quarters” or barracks – says there’s no room, and gives her half-a-crown (two shillings and sixpence, equal to 30 pence) to buy lodgings elsewhere. But she loudly insists that she must have lodgings. So the quartermaster gives her another 18 pence to go away, for “tonight there comes a wench,” the implication being that his soldiers don’t want to be disturbed by new arrivals while they’re being serviced by this wench. “Wench” of course is a degrading term for a reputedly promiscuous woman or prostitute, which our heroine is assuredly not.
Having earned a not inconsiderable 48 pence (four shillings) from the encounter, she ties her ribbons and garters to the barrack gates, to signify she’s fulfilled the terms of her oath. And then blowing her whistle to get the attention of the whole barracks, she declares loudly that, regardless of their ability to splash cash, the soldiers are “not for a girl at all.” Then she makes her escape on horseback, returning home “a maiden” rather than a soldiers’ whore.
As a Scottish ballad, this one undoubtedly added to Scots’ animus against the English. The latter confirm that they are, as the famous Scottish folk song puts it, a “parcel of rogues,” who take every opportunity to betray and defile their Northern neighbours.
A.L. Lloyd found this ballad in the Grieg collection and gave it, suitably abridged and adapted, to Anne Briggs. Was there ever any female folk singer who could have matched Briggs’s unaccompanied performance of this material? She had “no interest” in the folk-rock movement that was beginning in the mid-sixties, “None whatsoever. My heroes were the nameless people who recorded in the field. Their singing, their songs were recorded but rarely their names. But the singing struck a deep chord within me and I immediately felt, ‘that’s my music, that’s what I should be singing.’ I didn’t know it was called folk music, I just heard it and it was mine” – sleeve notes to Anne Briggs: A Collection (1999).
Anne Briggs, a wild child in her younger days, gave up recording in 1973 and last performed publicly in 1982, but her influence on female British folk singers was considerable. June Tabor heard Anne Briggs’s EP The Hazards of Love in 1965: “I was thunderstruck. I played it and played it again. And I thought ‘I’ve just discovered how to sing.’ I went and locked myself in the bathroom for a fortnight and drove my mother mad. I learned the songs on that EP note for note, twiddle for twiddle. That’s how I started singing. If I hadn’t heard her I’d have probably done something entirely different.” The older Briggs is interviewed and her achievement acknowledged in “Folk Routes, New Routes,” the second episode of the BBC TV documentary Folk Britannia (2006).
As for other performers of “Martinmas Time,” Andy Irvine and Paul Brady do a lively Irish version on their 1976 album, though this is properly a woman’s song. Emily Smith on A Different Life (2005) does a Scottish version with the “missing” four verses and instrumental backing, but it doesn’t have nearly the universal quality or the emotional punch of Briggs’s. Maddy Prior, accompanied by Giles Lewin on violin and Kit Haigh on guitar, was taped in October 2008 at Cecil Sharp House doing a version with lots of dramatic gestures, but she just doesn’t seem to acknowledge the grave implications of the narrative at all.
Anne Briggs channels the bold spirit of the heroine of the ballad, and brings an absolute authenticity to her performance. She sings in her own voice, her accent that of her native Nottinghamshire, with no attempt to convey the Scottishness of the ballad. It works, giving the song a universal quality that suits its universal theme of the male sexual exploitation of women.
*Subtitled Traditional Erotic Songs, this LP conceived by A.L. Lloyd contains fourteen mildly ribald folk songs. Anne Briggs contributes four of them, Frankie Armstrong two, and Lloyd himself the remainder.
**Apparently meaningless refrains are usually intended to encourage audience participation, as with the Fa la la la la, la la la la of the carol “Deck the Halls.” And so with this one, but with a difference: it’s quite complicated nonsense, so demands an unusual level of concentration from a singing-along audience. It took me a while to work out how to transliterate this refrain accurately, as other lyric resources don’t get it quite right. Its refrain, then, is another way this ballad asks you to take it seriously. Also, the refrain has the quality of a chant accompanying a military march, so slyly intensifies the ballad’s mockery of the English soldiers, who deserve it.
PS. I never saw Anne Briggs perform live, and I’ve never met anyone who had seen her. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard a recording by her, but it would definitely have been one of her unaccompanied pieces, possibly on the radio. She struck me right away as having the ideal female traditional folk voice. This was when Canadian record stores had folk sections dominated by Gordon Lightfoot and Ian and Sylvia, long before Amazon made everything everywhere instantly available. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that, on one of my annual trips to the UK, I bought her then recently released compilation CD, Anne Briggs: A Collection (1999), probably at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, London.
Holmström Ruddick 