Maddy Prior – vocals
Tim Hart – dulcimer
Track 8 on the album Folk Songs of Old England Vol. 1 (1968)
It’s of a brisk young butcher as I have heard them say,
He started out of London town all on a certain day.
Says he, “A frolic I will have, my fortune for to try;
I will go into Leicestershire some cattle for to buy.”
When he arrived at Leicester town he came into an inn,
He called for an ostler* and boldly he walked in.
He called for liquors of the best, he being a roving blade,
And quickly fixed his eyes upon the lovely chambermaid.
When she took up a candle to light him up to bed,
And when she came into the room, these words to her he said:
“One sovereign I will give to you all to enjoy your charms,
And this fair maid all night to sleep all in the butcher’s arms.”
’Twas early the next morning he prepared to go away,
The landlord said, “Your reckoning, sir, you have forgot to pay.”
“Oh no,” the butcher did reply, “pray do not think it strange,
One sovereign I gave your maid and I haven’t got the change.”
They straightway called the chambermaid and charged her with the same,
The golden sovereign she laid down, prepared she’d get the blame.
The butcher he then went home, well pleased with what was passed,
And soon this pretty chambermaid grew thick about the waist.
’Twas in a twelve month after, he came to town again,
And then as he had done before he stopped at that same inn.
’Twas then the buxom chambermaid she chanced him for to see,
She brought a babe just three months old and placed him on his knee.
The butcher sat like one amazed and at the child did stare,
But when the joke he did find out, how he did stamp and swear.
She said, “Kind sir, it is your own, pray do not think it strange:
One sovereign you gave to me and here I’ve brought your change.”
So come all you brisk and lively blades, I pray be ruled by me,
Look well into your bargains before your money pay.
Or soon perhaps your folly will give you cause to range,
If ever you sport with pretty maids you’re sure to get your change.
*Someone employed to tend to the horses of guests at an inn.
Tim Hart (1948-2009), born in Lincoln, was the son of an Anglican vicar, while Madeleine Edith (Maddy) Prior (b. 1947), born in Blackpool, is the daughter of the distinguished TV scriptwriter Allan Prior. They met in St. Albans and started performing folk songs together in 1966.
On the sleeve notes of the Mooncrest reissue of Folk Songs of Old England, Vol. 1 (1990), Tim Hart recalled: “We developed a repertoire of traditional songs … We dug deep – the idea was to perform songs nobody else was doing, from the library at Cecil Sharp House (the headquarters of the English Folk Dance & Song Society on the fringe of Regent’s Park) and from people like Geoff Woods in Leeds and Fred Hamer in Bedford, who were collectors, and Bert Lloyd gave us some.” It took a mere three hours to record their first LP, Folk Songs of Old England, for a tiny obscure label at a studio in Putney. The existence of the album meant their performance fee went up from £10 to £15 a night. Prior and multi-instrumentalist Hart would be two of the founders of the folk rock band Steeleye Span the following year, and Prior would soon emerge as their chief vocalist.
“The Brisk Butcher” is a nineteenth-century broadside or broadsheet ballad. That is, its score and lyrics were printed on single sheets of paper that sold very cheaply – typically for a penny – so that most people with any musical talent could afford them. This ballad is #167 in the Roud inventory, which lists 74 broadside versions printed in 16 different places in the UK as well as in two places each in Ireland and Canada, revealing its erstwhile popularity. Roud’s master title is “The Brisk Young Butcher,” and it’s also known as “The Butcher and the Chambermaid,” “The Copshawholme Butcher,” and (in Canada) “The Ten Dollar Bill.”
The place names in versions of this ballad vary depending upon where the piece was composed and printed. Hart and Prior found their version, entitled “The Leicester Chamber Maid,” in the Nottingham University Library Collection. As the butcher isn’t a pleasant person, we can assume that part of the ballad’s intention is to disparage his place of origin: in this case, London. This version of the ballad is tinged with resentment of the wealthy capital and its sharp metropolitan dealings, a feeling still quite evident in provincial England today.
The trio Finest Kind sang a Canadianized version, in which a ten-dollar bill serves as the equivalent of the sovereign, on their album Silks & Spices (2003). They noted: “The matter-of-fact (if indirectly expressed) sexual subject matter and never-fail punchline once gave Chapeau [Quebec] singer Loy Gavan a bit of trouble: a local woman criticized him – perhaps in jest – for singing such a ‘dirty’ song. Stung, the gallant old bachelor replied, and insisted thereafter, that ‘there isn’t a word in it to offend a lady.’”
The young Londoner is “brisk,” i.e., lively, energetic, business-like, by implication horny, and above all ruthless (he is a butcher). He arrives at the inn in Leicester and immediately catches sight of the lovely chambermaid. He offers her a gold sovereign to sleep with him for the night, and she agrees. After all, he’s young, affluent, charming, very sure of himself, and a gold sovereign was a lot of money back then. But in the morning the butcher pulls one on her, a trick he’s probably played before. When asked by the landlord of the inn to settle his bill, he says he’s already paid it … to the chambermaid. And she, too ashamed to reveal that she’s been doing a little whoring on the side, yields up the sovereign to her boss. The butcher smirks as he leaves. He’s had her for nothing.
Well, not quite. The butcher, too brisk to care about contraception, has got her pregnant. Fast forward one year. The butcher returns to the same inn where he had such a satisfactory “frolic,” only to find the buxom chambermaid still working there. It seems that the Leicester way of dealing with unmarried mothers was ahead of its time; she’s kept her job, rather than been relegated to the workhouse as a fallen woman. And she has a three-month-old baby, which she places on its daddy’s knee, uttering the immortal comeback, “One sovereign you gave to me and here I’ve brought your change.”
The butcher is furious but cannot deny his paternal responsibility, undoubtedly because the employees of the inn stand around him menacingly. The ballad ends with a warning to “brisk and lively blades” – there’ll be consequences if you sport irresponsibly with pretty maids. Flash Harry from the Big Smoke (as provincial Brits might phrase it) won’t be quite so brisk in future.
This may not be an ancient ballad, but it’s a classic one. It speaks for the common people and ignores the prevalent “Victorian values” of the bourgeoisie. Instead of condemning the chambermaid for sleeping with a rich man for money, it blames him for using and cheating her. As in “Martinmas Time,” we have a young woman whose strength of character, evident in her final retort, allows her to rise above unpromising circumstances.
But there’s an important difference. In “Martinmas Time” the heroine acts entirely alone. In “The Brisk Butcher,” she’s dependent on her fellow workers to support her, an unmarried mother, which they do, because they must value her and sympathize with her predicament. This ballad suggests, without spelling it out, that working people – here, the employees of the inn – must show solidarity if they are not to be exploited by the wealthy. If this ballad has a weakness, it’s that final verse, a typical piece of nineteenth-century spelling-things-out. Better to end on that splendid punchline.
Hart and Prior did some of their best work on their two Folk Songs of Old England albums, their research into dusty archives paying off with the resurrection of some wonderful old songs. And a third album from the pair, Summer Solstice (1971), recorded with modest instrumental backing after the start of their Steeleye Span career, has 13 delightful tracks, almost all of which are traditional ballads. Heydays: The Solo Recordings 1968-1976 (2003) is a compilation of all three of the duo’s albums. In it, Tim Hart, who died too young of lung cancer, is revealed as a top folk singer in his own right.
Holmström Ruddick 