Norma Waterson – vocals
Eliza Carthy – fiddle
Martin Carthy – guitar
Tim van Eyken – melodeon
Track 4 on the album A Dark Light (2002)
“Well, an outlandish knight from the northern lands came,
He came wooing of me;
He told me he’d take me up to the north lands,
There he would marry me.”
“Go fetch me some of your father’s gold,
Some of your mother’s fee,
And two of the best of your father’s horses,
There stands thirty and three.”
She’s fetched him some of her father’s gold,
Some of her mother’s fee,
And two of the best of her father’s horses,
There stands thirty and three.
Then she’s mounted on her milk-white steed,
He’s rode the dapple grey.
They rode till they came to the broad riverside,
Three hours before it was day.
“Light down, light down, my pretty fair maid,
Light down, light down,” cried he,
“Six pretty maidens I’ve drowned here,
And the seventh one you shall be.
“Pull off, pull off your silken gown,
Deliver it over to me,
For it is too fine and much too fair
To rot in the salt water sea.”
“Go get me a sickle to crop off the thistle
That grows beneath the brim,
It will not mingle with my curly locks
Or mangle my glittering skin.”
He’s got the sickle to crop off the thistle
That grows beneath the brim,
She’s caught him round by his middle so small,
Tumbled him into the stream.
Sometimes he sank, sometimes he swam,
Down to the bank came he.
“Oh help me, oh help me, my pretty fair maid,
Or drowned I shall be.”
“Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man,
Lie there instead of me,
Six pretty maidens you’ve drowned here,
But the seventh one has drowned thee.”
She’s mounted on her milk-white steed,
And led the dapple grey,
She rode till she came to her father’s door
An hour before it was day.
But the parrot was up in his window so high;
On hearing the lady, did say,
“I was afraid that some ruffians had done you harm,
You’ve tarried so long before day.”
“Don’t prittle, don’t prattle, my pretty Polly,
Don’t tell no tales of me,
Your cage shall be made of the glistening gold,
And your perch of the best ivory.”
But her father was up in the bedroom so high,
Hearing the parrot, did say,
“What is the matter, my pretty Polly,
You’ve cried so long before day?”
“Oh, there came an old cat in my window high,
To take my life away,
And I was just calling my young mistress,
To scare that old pussy away.”
The knight is not a native of the young woman’s region – the literal meaning of “outlandish” – but he’s also outlandish in another sense – weird, creepy, “off.” A red flag is flying from the start, but the maiden, flattered by the attentions of what may be her first wooer, is too naïve to see it. The knight promises to sweep her off and marry her, but first she must give him some of her parents’ wealth and two of their many horses. (Doesn’t a knight usually possess his own horses?) Her parents know nothing about this deal, and though she doesn’t hear it, an alarm bell should be ringing loudly … as indeed it is, in the shape of her beloved pet parrot.
They ride away to the waterside by night, where he demands that she strip off her clothes before he drowns her, just as he did with his six previous victims. How can she save herself from this serial killer? In some variants she demands that he turn his back to her as it isn’t right that he should see a naked woman. In this one she asks him to cut down the thistles at the water’s edge so they don’t scratch her delicate skin. As he busies himself with this task, she acts, violently and unmercifully as she must, rather than passively accepting her fate. She shoves him into the water, where he drowns after she ignores his cries for help. Who can blame her?
Then she returns with both horses to her father’s hall, just before daybreak. The business with the parrot seems itself rather outlandish, but the bird is present in many of the longer versions of this ballad, and for a reason. The maiden’s pet has been crying out in alarm during the night, worried about its* mistress. Returning, the maiden bribes Polly not to reveal her absence by promising it an ivory perch and a golden cage. So when her father asks the parrot why it’s been squawking for hours, Polly pretends that it was threatened by a cat and was calling to its mistress to save it. Polly will keep its mistress’s secret, and this dark, two-hour episode in the young woman’s life, which began in folly and ended with manslaughter, will remain unknown to her parents, as it probably should.
This ballad-type (Child 4) is known by a variety of titles: “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” is Child’s name for the group, and variants include “The Water o Wearie’s Well,” “False Sir John/May Colvin,” “False Lover John,” “The False Knight Outwitted,” as well as “The Outlandish Knight.” It’s #21 in the Roud catalogue, where an astonishing 1,131 variants are listed. A.L. Lloyd noted that “Cecil Sharp believed this to be the widest circulated of all our folk ballads.” The version sung by Norma Waterson is a blend of a couple of Child 4 variants with minor changes. The ballad on first encounter may seem as outlandish as its title suggests. How do we make sense of it?
There’s an enormous group of European folk tales about a male serial killer of women. The best-known variant is French, Charles Perrault’s “La Barbe bleue” (i.e., “Bluebeard”), while the closest English equivalent is “Mr. Fox.” Taking advantage of nubile but inexperienced young women’s attraction to men of high status and presumed wealth, the male villain, who may be presented as inhuman – e.g., elvish – or unnatural – blue-bearded – courts and often marries women, then murders and sometimes dismembers them. Bluebeard notoriously preserves their corpses in a bloody chamber in his castle. For years he gets away with this behaviour, until his latest wife – the seventh is the magic number, as it is in this ballad – summons up enough initiative to alert her brothers, who intervene just in time to rescue her and kill the monster.
These gruesome tales are deadly serious. They’re intended to warn young women that some men who offer themselves as suitors may be violent misogynists. If they are wealthy and powerful, patriarchal society may turn a blind eye to their crimes, especially if the women are bound by the marriage tie. That’s because in traditional society a wife is her husband’s possession, and if he’s entitled enough by wealth and power he may feel that he can dispose of her as he chooses.
However, there are usually warning signs given off by such wooers that young women should heed before giving themselves away. If they fail to read these signs, they’re in serious trouble. They’ll need to summon male protectors to save them, as Bluebeard’s seventh wife does. If they’re in no position to do so, like the heroine of this ballad, they’ll need to be devious and ruthless if they are to save themselves.
This ballad derives from the same impulse driving the Bluebeard folk tales. It’s a more whimsical, outdoorsy version of the claustrophobic Perrault tale. The episode it recounts is confessed in retrospect by the former maiden, whose voice we hear in the first verse as well as in two later ones. So the ballad is best performed by a mature woman, a voice of experience admonishing her daughters not to make the same sort of foolish decision that she once did, when she delivered herself, albeit briefly, into the hands of a monster.
A.L. Lloyd’s unaccompanied 1956 rendition of “The Outlandish Knight,” reissued on Bramble, Briars, and Beams of the Sun (2011), is a collector’s item and almost certainly the lyrical basis for the Waterson version. But as I’ve suggested, this song isn’t really suited to a male performer, not even Lloyd. The same problem afflicts Nic Jones on Ballads and Songs (1970), and his phrasing is awkward, which Norma Waterson’s never is. Kate Rusby on Ghost (2014) uses the same version as Nic Jones, but ends abruptly before the heroine’s return to her father’s house and the parrot episode. This omission suggests that Rusby isn’t fully attuned to the spirit of the ballad (see PS. below). There are dozens of other recordings, some of whose lyrics differ considerably from the one above. Steeleye Span’s version, “The Elf-Knight” on the album Time (1996), for example, is encumbered with a lengthy refrain which dilutes the impact of the much more direct narrative favoured by Norma Waterson. Hers is definitely the preferable version as far as lyrics are concerned.
Norma Waterson (1939-2022) was the matriarch of the first family of British folk. She began singing with The Watersons, a folk group orginally consisting of herself, her brother Mike and sister Lal (Elaine). In 1972 she married Martin Carthy, and their daughter Eliza was born in 1975. In the 1990s, Norma, Martin, and Eliza started performing together as Waterson:Carthy.** Altogether Norma made ten albums with the Watersons, six with Waterson:Carthy including A Dark Light, and five solo albums.
Norma’s voice is completely natural, her accent that of Hull, Yorkshire where she and her siblings, orphaned at a young age, were brought up by their grandmother. In his obituary of Norma Waterson in KLOF Magazine, Alex Gallacher wrote: “on stage, she always came across as a very down to earth woman, building an instant rapport with the audience, interspersing her songs with stories topped off by a voice that held a mountain of passion; she could melt the heart of any … there has always been an intense intimacy at the very core of Norma’s voice.” It’s these qualities, as well as her maturity as a performer, that make hers a superlative performance of this outlandish ballad.
*”Pretty Polly” suggests a female parrot, but the line, “But the parrot was up in his window so high,” ambiguates the pronomial issue. So I refer to Polly by the neuter pronoun that English helpfully provides when we need to speak of one of our fellow creatures whose sex we cannot determine.
**Ken Russell’s eccentric and often cringeworthy documentary In Search of the English Folk Song (1998) is not recommended as a serious examination of its purported subject. But it does include a lively a cappella performance of “Stars in My Crown” by Waterson:Carthy, as well as other pieces by June Tabor, Fairport Convention, and the Albion Band.
PS. Ah yes, the parrot! Some will assume that this episode is a modern interpolation, but I can assure them that it isn’t. Parrots have been prized pets of the European nobility for centuries, and the young woman in this ballad is definitely of the upper crust. (Some variants, e.g., Child 4B: “The Water o Wearie’s Well,” refer to her father as a King.) Parrots appear in many Old Master paintings, beginning with Jan van Eyck’s “Virgin and Child” (1436) in which the Madonna has a green parrot on her lap that is being caressed by the infant Jesus. Albrecht Durer (“Adam and Eve,” 1504), Pieter Paul Rubens (“Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and One of Their Children,” 1635) and Frans van Mieris (“Young Woman Feeding a Parrot,” 1663), portrayed parrots and their owners, while Dutch masters frequently included the birds in still life paintings. An early British painting with a parrot is “William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham, and His Family” (1567) by the Master of the Countess of Warwick, in which a parrot sits on the dining table in front of the children of this aristocratic family. More specifically, in “Portrait of a Lady with a Parrot” (1592) by an unknown painter, a grey parrot sits on the wrist of a lady dressed in full Elizabethan finery. This painting might serve as a perfect illustration of this ballad.
Shakespeare mentions parrots a number of times: “As one result of the many voyages of discovery in his day, both in the Old and the New World, the PARROT had become a familiar bird in England. Its loud and harsh clamour, its docility, its clever imitation of human speech, but at the best, the paucity of its vocabulary, are duly noted by our dramatist” (Sir Archibald Geikie, The Birds of Shakespeare, 1916). Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, in an epigram of 1616, may be responsible for the attribution of “Polly” as a pet name for parrots.
The appeal of parrots to those who could afford them is obvious. They are highly intelligent, affectionate, long-lived birds, and their ability to mimic human speech adds an extra dimension to their appeal. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the parrot in this ballad would in reality cry out in alarm if it unexpectedly missed its mistress. Of course no parrot could actually conduct a verbal bargain with its mistress and tell that lie to her father at the end of the ballad, but folklore is full of talking animals, and what animal can talk better than a parrot?
Holmström Ruddick 
