The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5) — John Shaqi
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
=Danish.= Eight unprinted MS. copies of the seventeenth century and a
flying sheet of the date 1719. The ballad will be No 472 of Danmarks
gamle Folkeviser.[14] A fragment of five stanzas (of dialogue relative
to the gloved hand) is given by Kristensen, Jyske Folkeminder, X, 331,
No 82.
It will be observed that the ravisher is king of Novgorod in Swedish
=A=, as in one of the Russian epics, and that he is the brother of King
David in the Norwegian ballad as he is of King Solomon in the Russian
prose tale. The sleeping-draught, burial, and digging up are in the
Servian tale, and something of them in the Little Russian tale, as also
in the earlier German poem.
For the boon of blowing the horn see No 123, ‘Robin Hood and the Curtal
Friar,’ and No 140, ‘Robin Hood rescuing Three Squires,’ III, 122, 177,
ff.; also Heiðreks Saga, Rafn, Fornaldar Sögur, I, 458-61 (14), 529 f.
(9); Vesselofsky, in the Slavic Archiv, VI, 404 f.; and Wollner’s note,
Abschiedblasen, Brugman’s Litauische Märchen, p. 552.
August 1, 1586, there was allowed to Yarrat James as one of six ballads
‘A merrie jest of John Tomson and Jakaman his wife,’ Arber, Stationers’
Registers, II, 450. This ballad is preserved in the Roxburghe
collection, I, 254, 255, Ballad Society’s edition, II, 136, and, so far
as I have observed, there only. It is subscribed M. L., initials which
Mr Chappell was unable to identify, and it was imprinted at London for
Edward Wright. The Roxburghe copy was reprinted by R. H. Evans, Old
Ballads, 1810, I, 187. The title is
‘A merry Iest of Iohn Tomson and Jakaman his wife,
Whose jealousie was justly the cause of all their strife.’
It is dated in the Museum catalogue 1635?. This is an extremely vapid
piece, and has no manner of connection with ‘John Thomson and the
Turk.’ In Halliwell’s Notices of Popular English Histories, p. 91,
Percy Society, vol. xxiii, there is one, No 108, of ‘John Thompson’s
Man, or a short survey of the difficulties and disturbances that may
attend a married life,’ etc., 24 pp., 12°. There is a copy in the
Abbotsford Library.
‘To be John Thomson’s man’[15] is a Scottish proverb signifying to be
submissive to a wife, or, more generally, to be complaisant. “John
Thomson’s men” are “still ruled by their wives:” Colville’s Whig’s
Supplication, or, The Scotch Hudibras, cited by Motherwell. “Samson was
the greatest fool that ever was born, for he revealed his secrets to a
daft hussie. Samson, you may well call him Fool Thompson, for of all
the John Thomson’s men that ever was he was the foolest:” The Scotch
Presbyterian Eloquence, etc., London, 1692 (cited by Motherwell, from
the edition of 1768, in a MS. note, Appendix, p. x, in a copy of the
Minstrelsy which belonged to Mr R. A. Ramsay.) Some begging verses of
Dunbar to the King have the refrain, ‘God gif ye war Johne Thomsoneis
man.’ (Other quotations in Leyden, p. 370, Motherwell, Appendix, p.
ix.)[16]
A
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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