The Rogue in English Folk Song

Why the Rogue Wins the Applause

English folk song is not much interested in virtue. Look through the ballads that have survived in the sung tradition and you will find a great many poachers, highwaymen, deserters, smugglers and cheerful liars — and in most of them the sympathy of the singer sits squarely with the criminal. This is not a lapse. It is the point. The rogue in these songs is the man or woman who refuses the terms on offer: a wage too low, a sentence too harsh, a magistrate far too fond of his own game birds. The tune is memorable, the narrative is quick, and the moral, when it arrives at all, is usually attached to the wrong person.

The Poacher and the Greenwood Economy

Poaching songs are the great body of English rural rebellion. "The Lincolnshire Poacher" is the best known — a jaunty, defiant chorus about going out on a shiny night "in the season of the year" — but it belongs to a large family: "The Bold Poachers", "The Poacher's Fate", and the many transportation ballads that begin "Come all you gallant poachers". The practical detail matters. These songs tell you about setting snares on the estate, about selling a hare at the back door, about the squire's keepers and the going rate for a pheasant. The law was savage — transportation or the gallows for a few rabbits — and the songs know it. They simply decline to agree.

Highwaymen: Charming, Polite and Doomed

Robin Hood is the founding figure of the tradition: an outlaw in the greenwood who robs the comfortable and passes the proceeds along, and the early ballads such as "A Gest of Robyn Hode" and "Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford" are blunt about the violence as well as the fellowship.

Later highwaymen songs keep the charm and quietly drop the redistribution. "Bold Nevison", the Yorkshire highwayman; "Turpin Hero"; "The Highwayman Outwitted" — there is a whole shelf of them. Note the formula: a courteous opening ("Stand and deliver, your money and your life"), a chase, a betrayal, and often an ending at the gallows with the hero taking a farewell of his family and a last drink. Note too who catches him. Highwaymen in these songs are undone by vanity, a horse or a woman — and they are sung about with admiration all the same.

Deserters, Drummer Boys and the Press Gang

Soldiers' songs are full of men leaving. "The Deserter" tells of a young man who takes the king's shilling, regrets it, walks off and is caught; "The Trooper Cut Down in His Prime" — ancestor of "The Unfortunate Rake" and "The Streets of Laredo" — is a dying soldier's warning to his comrades, sung with a candour about his disease that would embarrass a modern lyricist. Add the press gang songs, where the recruiting party is a gang of thugs and the pressed man is merely unlucky, and the desertion makes perfect sense: flogging, thin pay, foreign service, no leave. In these songs desertion is not cowardice. It is a man with somewhere better to be.

Smugglers, Fair Maids and Other Tricksters

The coastal counties produced a cheerful literature of the "free trade" — kegs landed at night, tubs carried inland, the riding officer always one step behind. Broadsides such as "The Smuggler's Boy", along with the many wrecking and smuggling songs, treat the trade as an ordinary part of the local economy, because very often it was.

The women of the tradition give as good as they get. "Sovay", often sung as "The Female Highwayman", has a girl dress as a robber to test her lover's courage. "The Female Drummer" and "The Handsome Cabin Boy" put women into male clothes and onto the march or the deck. "The Maid on the Shore" robs a sailor of his gold and his heart, and in "The Baffled Knight" a clever girl simply outmanoeuvres a would-be seducer. What is celebrated is the wit, not the chastity.

Where to Hear Them, and How to Sing Them

• Read the versions before you choose one. F.J. Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads", the manuscript collections of Cecil Sharp and Sabine Baring-Gould, and the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd will give you several texts of the same rogue song. Pick the one with the best narrative, not the tidiest.
• Keep the rough edges. Dialect words, trades and place-names are the whole flavour — a Lincolnshire poacher should not sound as though he has never seen a field.
• Let the story carry the tempo. These are narrative songs. The tune is a vehicle; the chorus is where the room joins in.
• Do not moralise at the end. The ballads rarely do, and a singer who tacks on a disapproving final verse loses the room.
• Listen to the revival singers — Ewan MacColl, A.L. Lloyd, Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, the Watersons, and in the current generation Eliza Carthy, Fay Hield, Jon Boden and Sam Lee — for how a character is voiced without being acted.

Best of all, go to a folk club or a local session and sing one yourself. The rogue tradition is not a museum exhibit; it is a set of songs that work precisely because a room full of people half-agrees with the man in the song. Choose a good one, keep your nerve, and let him get away with it.