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ENGLISH SONG AND BALLAD MUSIC. |
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An answer to the preceding Somersetshire ballad will be found in the Douce Collection, and to be sung to the same tune. It is " Hey for our town, but a fig for a Zommersetshire;" and commences—
" In winter time, when flow'rs do fade, Let lords and ladies play at cards, And birds forsake the tree, There's none so merry as we," &c.
The burden is " Under the holly-bush tree."
THE OLD LANCASHIRE HOENPIPE.
" There is a Lancashire Hornpipe in my throat; hark! how it tickles, with doodle, doodle, doodle."
Ford's The Witch of Edmonton.
At page 12 of an edition of The Dancing Master, the exact reference to which I have mislaid (perhaps in one of the volumes of Walsh's Oompleat Gauntry Dancing Master), this tune is entitled The Old Lancashire Hornpipe. In Apollo's Banquet, 1669, 1690, and 1693, it is called A Jigg, and has twelve divisions or variations. There were hornpipes of various descriptions; some being called jig-hornpipes, or hornpipe-jigs, others bagpipe-hornpipes. One of the former will be found in the first edition of Apollo's Banquet; and several of the latter in " An extraordinary Collection of pleasant and merry humours; containing Hornpipes, Jiggs, North-Country "Frisks, Morrises, Bagpipe-Hornpipes, and Bounds,"a &c. The hornpipe-jig in Apolh's Banquet (although not so barred) is in 3 time. About 1697, Thomas Marsden published a " Collection of original Lancashire Hornpipes; " but I have not been able to find a copy in any library, public or private.
In Vanbrugh's comedy of AEsop, act v., the trumpets were to sound a melancholy air till iEsop appeared, and then the violins and hautboys to " strike up a Lancashire Hornpipe."
The instrument called the hornpipe, from which the dance derived its name, was in use in England as late as the reign of Charles II., and perhaps later. It is, in all probability, the same as the pib-corn (which means horn-pipe) said to be still in use in Wales. , The pipe of the latter is of hollow wood, with holes for the fingers at regulated diststoces, and with horn at each end; a small piece for the mouth, and a larger for the escape of the sound.
Chaucer mentions the hornpipe as a Cornish instrument,—
" Controve he would, and foule faile, In Floites made he discordaunce, With Hornpipes of Cornwaile. And in his musike with misehaunce," &c.
Romaunt of the Hose.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the counties most famous for the dance of the hornpipe were Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire. Ben Jonson, in his Love's Welcome at Welbeck, says,—
" Your firk-hum jerk-hum to a dance, To wonder at the hornpipes here Shall fetch the fiddles out of France, Of Nottingham and Derbyshire;"
» There were three publications under this title, which printed by John Young, at the Dolphin and Crown, at the
I have not had the opportunity to compare. The first, West end of St. Paul's Church, without date. A copy of
mentioned by Bagford as having been printed by Daniel the last is in the possession of Mr. George Daniel, of
Wright in 1710 (small oblong of 35 pages); the second in Canonbury. the British Museum, a. 10.5, dated 1720; and the third |
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