Chapter V: The Differencing Elements of Communal Poetry (4)

That the record of these refrains is so meagre and baffling need cause no surprise. The histories of national literature are disappointing to the student of beginnings, for the reason that they almost invariably[638] study these beginnings as conditioned by the habits of authorship in modern times; they are always looking for original composition, for expression of individual feeling, for a story, and therefore turn aside from these stretched metres of an antique song. But the story, and the expression of personal emotion, are precisely what one seldom if ever finds at the beginning of a literature; one finds there, when one finds anything, the chorus or its deputy the refrain. The refrain was a constant element in early Greek song, “an essential mint-mark”;[639] not only the early melic verse, but a study of the chorus[640] in dramatic survival, proves this beyond doubt, and one is amazed to find Rosières, in the essay quoted above, saying that the ancients, particularly the Greeks, had no need of the refrain, and hardly used it at all. How important, on the contrary, this refrain must have been, how it works back through the alternate strains of chorus and solo to the throng of communal singers and dancers, could be shown for classical poetry, and can be proved by mediæval and modern refrains, some already noted under the _vocero_, and others presently to be considered in songs of labour and of the harvest. True, the records are scanty; and the unwary historian of English poetry in the early stage, reviewing his material, announces that, with the exception of some insignificant charms, there is just one poem with a refrain, the “Consolation” of Deor, the king’s minstrel out of place,—taking, that is, a lyric of individual and artistic reflection as the only example of that part of poetry which above all belongs to the communal and spontaneous expression of the throng. Recorded poetry has here a poor tale to tell, and even that is usually marred in the telling. Where, then, is the old refrain of the English folk, and where was the chorus? Had they no dances, no ballads, no communal singing? If the evidence of ethnology from tribes and communities of men in every degree of culture is to be accepted, it is certain that Englishmen of that early day had dance, ballad, chorus, and refrain. We know that their old heathen hymns went with the dance; and the dance means a strophic arrangement. What, then, has become of this refrain? So far as the old English poetry has found record at the hands of the monk, it is in a fixed alliterative metre, without strophes,[641] suited to epic and narrative purposes, suited to recitation and a sort of chant, but not, in its literary shape, suited to refrain and chorus.[642] One does not dance an epic, or sing it; it is chanted or recited; and even Anglo-Saxon lyric, barring that little song of Déor, is elegiac and highly reflective. The refrain, says Dr. R. M. Meyer,[643] is to be assumed for oldest Germanic poetry, although it was thrown out by the recited alliterative verse, only to come again into recorded literature with the introduction of rime; but no one supposes that Englishmen ceased in that interval to dance and sing. It is a defect of the record. The chorals and refrains, even the ballads of which William of Malmesbury speaks as crumbling to pieces with the lapse of time, were simply deemed useless if not harmful, and had no claim whatever to the life beyond life. Nor is this chorus, this refrain, simply assumed for oldest Germanic poetry; it is proved, and nowhere proved so well as in Müllenhoff’s essay.[644] Many conclusions of this sturdy and often too intolerant scholar have been rejected by later investigation; but his assertion in regard to choral poetry as the foundation of every literature remains an article of faith among those who deal at first hand with the material involved, and writers since his day who have undertaken to describe the different kinds of Germanic choral song have done little more than follow in his steps.[645] There is no need, then, to rehearse this proof of the existence of refrain and chorus as main form[646] of poetry among the ancient Germans; it is in order simply to trace these and other choral songs in the later fragments and the surviving refrains, whether sung at the solemn procession round the fields, or sung to the festal dance at harvest-home, or in whatever survivals they may be found, and to compare them with kindred refrains and kindred customs elsewhere. From this point of view, even the blackness of thick darkness which broods over Anglo-Saxon communal song, that darkness of superstitious fear felt by monks who knew these customs and these songs to be of the devil himself, and would not write them down, is lifted a little. We look, then, at refrains of labour, refrains of actual work, too trivial usually for record, and at those refrains and chorals of the harvest feasts, of plantings, sowings, reapings, which had the taint of heathendom upon them, and so were either left in silence or coaxed into a harmless formula; we look, too, at refrains and chorus of the dance, the sunnier side of life, and still more provocative than labour as an occasion of communal song. For the refrains of war, and even for the choral raised by a whole army as it marched to battle, an occasion which Müllenhoff calls the supreme moment of all Germanic life, the fierce and clamorous words needing no leader,[647] and the wild rhythm asking no aid from trumpet or drum, there is ample evidence; and indeed these war chorals might be connected by easy stages with the ridiculous marching songs already noted above. From the _barditus_ to “ma poule a fait un poulet” were a pretty journey; but we will keep to the ways of peace, and the _saure wochen, frohe feste_ of everyday life will yield material enough in regard to this communal refrain.

Songs of labour are found everywhere; but there is a great chasm between the actual refrains, the survivals of communal or even solitary song which come from the real scene of labour and from the real labourers, and those songs which are made for the labourer. Nowhere is the difference between _volkspoesie_ and _volksthümliche poesie_ so evident; and we have here no concern with poetry, however successful, which has been written for the edification of “honest toil.”[648] It is the song of actual labour to which we now turn, as it has abounded in all the activities of life, and which, like the ballad, is fast vanishing from the scene. Sometimes the labour was solitary, and the song was a plaintive little lyric when it was made by the lonely maiden grinding at her hand-mill:

Alone I ground, alone I sang,
Alone I turned the mill....[649]

but often even this grinding of the mill was social, as in Poland, where it was the manner of the women to repeat a word in chorus.[650] Plutarch has preserved an old Greek “song of the millstone,”[651] which he heard a woman sing; from the older Scandinavian literature[652] comes a lay, sung by two maidens, Menja and Fenja, as they grind out King Frodi’s fortune, which may hold bits of the actual refrain of labour, and has, too, its touch of folklore, explaining “how the sea became salt”; but the real and primitive choral of such labour is sufficiently attested by those women in Poland, and by a similar case among the Basuto tribe,[653] where, as Cassilis says, to relieve the fatigue of solitary grinding, “the women come together and grind in unison, by singing an air which blends perfectly with the cadenced clinking of the rings upon their arms.” There is plenty of evidence for this choral of the grinding women in places and times so widely sundered as to forbid all idea of borrowing, and to leave the conditions of communal labour and communal consent as the only explanation. Originally there was a spontaneous chorus or refrain[654]—in the strictly choral sense, that is, and not in the technical meaning presently to be considered—suggested by the movements, cadence, and sounds of the work itself; improvisation added words at will, until at last art seized upon the material and gave now a song like that of Fenja and Menja, now even a jolly refrain such as one finds in an audacious song of Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Maid of the Mill_.[655] Everywhere labour had its refrain and song, and even the scanty remains of Hellenic communal poetry tell of songs for reaper, thresher, miller, for the vintage, spinning, weaving, for the drawers of water, oarsmen, rope-makers, watchmen, shepherds, and for the common labourers marching out to their work. Rome itself, in the old silent period, has something of this song for the attentive ear;[656] and allusions scattered throughout the Bible show that the Hebrews sang at their work in house and in field. A few echoes of such singing come from Egypt; while darker and darkest Africa, along with savage tribes over the world, shows yet more elementary, and hence more insistent and necessary[657] connection between work and song. With the breaking up of communal conditions, with the advance of individual and initiative art, these songs of labour, like the ballad, like all communal poetry, tend to disappear or yield to alien verse. Often the individual works in silence, when his labour demands intelligent thought, but where labour is automatic or monotonous, wherever it is collective, the labourer sings, and always will do so; the important fact is that he now ceases to sing the old refrain or song of the labour itself, born, as Bücher[658] shows so plainly, of the very movements and sounds which it called forth. For good reason, _andere zeiten, andere lieder_. Neus[659] noted that the Esthonians, a century ago, sang their own songs, and sang always as they worked in the fields or came together for festal occasions; now,—and “now” is fifty years ago—he says that either the song is silent, or else it is changed for an imported German ditty. All the more need, then, to collect and study such survivals of the refrains of labour as can be found. Speaking of the decline of folksong in Germany, not only of the making but even of the singing, Professor E. H. Meyer[660] remarks that collective labour still has some power here and there to stir the old instinct into a fitful activity. Now it is in the spinning-room,—where Böckel[661] a few years ago could hear Hessian folksongs in the making—now at the berry-picking in Nassau, at the flax-breaking, and elsewhere in cases where companies of peasants still ply the monotonous tasks of their forefathers. And in all these cases, as in the beginning, so in the end, women are the mainstay of communal song.[662]

Of particular trades and callings, perhaps sailors, oarsmen, and watermen generally, would furnish more refrains than could be found in any one industry of the land. Sailors’ chanteys are still heard in every ship;[663] but they are now apt to echo those songs of the street and the dance-hall which have been picked up at port, and they have seldom a traditional interest. Here and there, however, the genuine refrain is clear enough, and attests itself by its power to withstand the _discrimina rerum_ and the changes of time; it is said that modern Greek sailors, when reefing sails, have nearly the same melodious calls as those preserved in a play of Aristophanes.[664] Negro roustabouts on the Mississippi sing interminable refrains, while a capable leader improvises stanzas on the work in hand or on current events; a process which is matched by refrains and songs of manual labour in every part of the world. A well-known passage in the _Complaynt of Scotland_[665] gives the cries and songs both of weighing anchor,—where a leader sings and the rest answer “as it had bene ecco in an hou heuch,” like the echo in a hollow ravine, mainly in repetitions,—and of hoisting sail, with iteration of short running phrases such as:—

Grit and smal, grit and smal,
Ane and al, ane and al,—

and not stopping here, undertakes to set down the “chorus” of guns heavy and light as a spirited sea-fight begins. In the old play _Common Conditions_ occurs a pirates’ song, the stanzas in quatrains, with a jolly refrain or chorus:—

Lustely, lustely, lustely let us saile forthe,
The wind trim doth serve us, it blows from the north.

Hoisting, pulling, however, and work of the sort on shipboard, yield in importance, so far as refrains are concerned, to the regular cadence of the oar, where voices have kept tune and oars have kept time from earliest days. Not only in the classical period, where actual song and music came to take the place of the refrain,[666] but with Egyptians, Africans, Tonga Islanders, wherever rowing is practised, these refrains are known; the Maoris, for example, “row in time with a melody which is sung by a chorus sitting in canoes.” The same thing is told of the Indians of Alaska.[667] A refrain already noted seems to have served in England both for hoisting and for rowing; Skelton mentions it:—

Holde up the helme, loke up, and lete god stere,
I wolde be mery, what wynde that ever blowe,
_Heve and how, rombelow, row the bote, Norman, rowe_!

and D’Israeli says that sailors at Newcastle in heaving anchor still have their _Heave and ho, rumbelow_; while it is recorded that in 1453, Norman, Lord Mayor of London, chose to row rather than ride to Westminster, and the watermen made this roundel or song:—

Rowe the bote, Norman,
Rowe to thy Lemman,—[668]

so that two refrains are confused in the laureate’s account, and the exquisite reason, with a Lord Mayor in the case, is no more probable than such stories of origins are wont to be. For example, Cnut is credited[669] with a little song, which he is said to have composed as he rowed by Ely and heard the chanting of the monks; “ordering the rowers to pull gently, and calling his retinue about him, he asked them to join him ... in singing a ballad which he composed in English and which begins in this way:—

“Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely,
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.

“Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,
And herë we thes muneches sang.”

Several things here are noteworthy; both Grundtvig and Rosenberg have pointed out[670] that this song is composed in a two-line ballad strophe of four accents to the verse, the kind afterward so common in Scandinavia and in England; and whatever Cnut’s share in the making of it, it is at least of the eleventh century, and is the first recorded piece of verse to break away from the regular stichic metre of our oldest poetry. Moreover, it is said that Cnut improvised the song, and that he called on the others to join him; the lines quoted then, so Grundtvig infers, are the burden or chorus of the song itself; and it is interesting to know that in the days of the chronicler, say about the middle of the twelfth century, this refrain as well as the song was sung in the choral dances of the English folk. Doubtless it was sung to the oar itself; and that may have been the first of it, with royalty as an afterthought.[671]

Coming to land, one would think that the blacksmith, rhythmic as his work may be, must have little breath to spare for song; and, indeed, Bücher could find but one specimen which seemed to hold the genuine rhythm of the anvil. Had he looked to the English, however, he would have met more; an old “Satire on the Blacksmiths”[672] preserves a refrain probably sung to the work itself, or, at worst, imitated from its cadence:—

Thei gnaven and gnacchen, thei gronys togydere....
Stark strokes thei stryken on a stelyd stokke,
_Lus! bus! Las! das!_ rowten be rowe,
Swych dolful a dreme the devyl it todryve!
The mayster longith a lityll, and lascheth a lesse,
Twineth him tweyn and towcheth a treble,
_Tik! tab! hic! hac! tiket! taket! tyk! tak!
Lus! bus! Las! das!_ swych lyf thei ledyn.

St. Clement is the patron of blacksmiths, and while Brand’s account of the festivities gives no refrain, but only poor doggerel and mimicry, it is clear that processions, songs, and dances were a feature of the saint’s day,[673] once regarded as the beginning of winter; so that communal origins may even lurk in the traditional anvil song, quoted by Dickens,[674] “that imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name”:—

Hammer, boys, round—Old Clem,
With a thump and a sound—Old Clem.

Again, there is the tinker with his catches, which moved Overbury[675] to a theory of origins; “from his art was music first invented, and therefore is he alwaies furnished with a song,” to which his hammer keeps time. Of course, the only point of interest in these songs of the trades is the survival of a refrain which carries the sound and cadence of the work itself. Thus in the old play of _Tom Tiler and his Wife_, it is probable that an actual refrain has crept into the lively song of which Dame Strife sings the first staff, with its

Tom Tiler, Tom Tiler,
More morter for Tom Tiler, ...

clearly an echo from the roof. But there is more of the communal strain in spinning-songs;[676] for here is the home of balladry, a city of refuge even to this day,[677] and here the women make as well as sing the song. Echoes of the wheel itself[678] are not infrequent; perhaps they are too close to art in that pretty song of sewing, knitting, and spinning, sung by three women in the first act of _Roister Doister_:—

Pipe mery Annot, _etc._
Trilla, trilla, trillarie,
Worke Tibet, knitte Annot, spinne Margerie:[679]
Let us see who shall winne the victorie....

although, what with incremental repetition in other stanzas, and the audible whir of the wheel, this is like the songs which still move women to emulation under like circumstances in the spinning-rooms of Europe. “In Northamptonshire, when girls are knitting in company, they say”—surely sing?—

“Needle to needle, and stitch to stitch,
Pull the old woman out of the ditch;
If you ain’t out by the time I’m in,
I’ll rap your knuckles with my knitting-pin.

The ‘old woman,’ ‘out,’ and ‘in’ are the arrangements of the wool over and under the knitting-pins.”[680] The same authority gives other rimes of this sort, more or less suggested by the movements of the work; for instance, a song of Cumberland wool-carders:—

Tāary woo’, tāary woo’, tāary woo’ is ill to spin,
Card it well, card it well, card it well ere you begin.

Slightly different is the song of Peterborough workhouse girls in procession, where the refrain is quite primitive in form:[681]—

And a-spinning we will go, will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.

Bell[682] records what seems to be a real refrain of the spinning-wheel in the Greenside Wakes Song:—

Tread the wheel, tread the wheel, dan, don, dell O.

The flyting that goes with this refrain is negligible,—a man and a woman on horseback with spinning-wheels before them, singing alternate stanzas in the midst of the fair, with its dancing and merriment, a sort of side-show; but the refrain may well be old.

Songs of the crafts, however, are less likely to hold the festal, gregarious, communal note than those old refrains which took their cadence from the movements of workers in the field. An agricultural community, whether in its rudest stages, a horde that lives in fertile river bottoms as distinguished from the nomadic, predatory bands of the plain, or in the civilization of feudal Europe, always tends to homogeneous conditions and always fosters communal song. Where these conditions survive, this song in some degree survives with them. Corsican labourers in the field, says Ortoli,[683] still sing so at their work; the Styrian threshers, eight together, make their flails chorus thus:—

Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,
Hiwer, hawer, hawerhaggl,

while Silesians, with two, three, four, five, six, hear as many different refrains made by the strokes of the flail;[684] and Bladé[685] prints a song of Gascon peasants which seems to give again all the stages in the culture of the vine,—a stanza or two may follow for example of the repetition and the refrain:—

Plante qui plante,
Voici la belle plante;
Plante qui plante,
Voici la belle plante
Plantons, _plantin_,
Plantons le bon vin.
Voici la belle plante en vin,
Voici la belle plante en vin.

De plante en taille,
Voici la belle taille;
De plante en taille,
Voici la belle taille.
Taillons, _taillin_,
Taillons le bon vin.
Taillons la belle taille en vin.
Taillons la belle taille en vin.[686]

Early English drama was evidently fond of songs not unlike this, and in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_ Nash brings harvesters on the scene singing what appears to be a song of harvest-home, if one may judge by the refrain of _Hooky, Hooky_, said by a Dodsley editor[687] to be heard still in some parts of the kingdom. “Enter Harvest,” run the directions, “with a scythe on his neck, and all his reapers with sickles, and a great black bowl with a posset in it, come before him; they come in singing:—

Merry, merry, merry, cheary, cheary, cheary,
Trowl the black bowl to me;
Hey, derry, derry, with a poup and a lerry,
I’ll trowl it again to thee.
_Hooky, hooky,[688] we have shorn,
And we have bound,
And we have brought Harvest
Home to town.”_

The tendency to put popular and traditional songs into a play was common everywhere. Hans Sachs[689] used a May-song for the ring-dance which is clearly made in its turn out of a lusty old refrain:—

Der Mei, der Mei,
Der bringt uns blümlein vil.

Best of all, however, George Peele, who in his _Old Wives’ Tale_ gives tryst to countless waifs of folklore and popular stories, makes room there for a pretty song of harvesters. “Ten to one,” cries Madge, when they first enter upon the stage, “they sing a song of mowing,” but they are sowing, it seems; and once again they come in, this time with a song of harvest. The present writer has ventured[690] to change the first song so as to make it agree with the second, not an audacious feat when one considers the case. The songs, with an interval between, would then run as follows:—

Lo, here we come a-sowing, a-sowing,
And sow sweet fruits of love.
All that lovers be, pray you for me,—
In your sweethearts well may it prove.

Lo, here[691] we come a-reaping, a-reaping,
To reap our harvest fruit;
And thus we pass the year so long,
And never be we mute.

The refrain is easy to detach from the rest; and it is clear, too, that actual imitation of sowing, reaping, binding, often went with the song, probably in this case a combination of gesture and word known still in games of modern children.

These songs, particularly the Gascon vintage chorus, are simply a festal recapitulation of the rustic year, with more or less echo of actual refrain sung to the labour in its various stages. From the moment when communal labour began to sow the seed—in Japan[692] the peasants still plant their rice in cadence with a chorus, and in Cashmere[693] the onions are sown with accompaniment of “a long-drawn, melancholy song,”—through process after process, down to the picking,[694] reaping, harvesting, and so to the festal imitations just noted, even to the ritual of priestly thanksgiving, every stage is marked by communal singing, except that in the function last named the community turns passive, the guild replaces the throng, and art has begun its course. Hence it is that most of the survivals of song and refrain come down to our day with more or less magic in the case. Rites are performed by the head of a family, and are even transferred from the field to the home; as when[695] at flax-planting a German wife springs about the hearth and cries, “Heads as big as my head, leaves as big as my apron, and stalks as thick as my leg!” In Silesia,[696] again, husband and wife sing together a song with the refrain,—

Om Floxe, om Floxe, om Floxe!

Even in the field itself, song is mingled with these symbolical and even religious rites; incantations, such as that Anglo-Saxon charm[697] for making barren or bewitched land bear again, are strongly tinged with clerical lore, and in this case involve a visit to the church altar. The Romans, too, had spells and charms for restoring fields to fertility when other spells and charms had bewitched them; harmful rites of this sort were forbidden in the laws of the twelve tables.[698] Corruption is rife in these things; but in a charm[699] for the old English peasant to get back his strayed or stolen cattle, amid the hocus-pocus of Herod and Judas and the holy rood and scraps of Latin, a few lines echo the old repetition, but have no refrain:—

find the fee[700] and drive the fee,
and have the fee and hold the fee,
and drive home the fee.

A thousand things of the sort survive, but seldom touch the refrain; perhaps the charm to make butter come from the churn, common in 1655,[701] had a choral element:—

Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate
Waiting for a butter’d cake,—
Come, butter, come!

We turn back to the actual labour of the fields, and the songs and refrains that went with it. A refrain[702] has come down to us from the harvesters of ancient Hellas,—“Sing the sheaf-song, the sheaf-song, the song of the sheaf,” which is not unlike the type just considered in George Peele’s “Lo, here we come a-reaping”; while that waif of Germanic myth,[703] the story of Scéaf, where the “sheaf” is made the name of an agricultural god, or culture-hero, as one will, reminds us of Phrygian countryfolk who at their reaping sang “in mournful wise” the song of Lityerses, itself said to be the outcome of an old refrain, lapsing into a _vocero_ for the hero’s death. Burlesque laid unholy hands upon the custom and the myth; the story growing out of the song passed into a tradition which coldly furnished forth the satire and comedy of a later day; since any song of the harvest-field or the threshing-floor came to be called a Lityerses,[704] the name was seized upon for certain comic features, and grew to be a symbol of an insatiable eater. Yet dramatic allusions and uses of more serious nature, like the song recorded by Peele, were doubtless common in Greece and throughout the Orient. It has been said already, in speaking of the _vocero_, that the song of Maneros was sung by Egyptian reapers, just as they sang on the threshing-floor the song of the oxen treading out the corn; while at the harvest-home Greek husbandmen, if Mannhardt’s surmise[705] is right, sang a variant of the Maneros; and Homer is witness for the singing of the Linos at the time of vintage.[706] If, now, one seeks for similar songs in the fields of modern Europe, one finds, to be sure, hints in plenty, descriptions by this and that traveller, and fragments of actual verse; but conditions of religious ceremonial have broken up the old refrains and barred any handing down of a Germanic Linos or Lityerses. Customs, too, have changed; and few are the places where folk at harvest-home do as their forbears did, when “the whole family sat down at the same table, and conversed, danced, and sang together during the entire night without difference or distinction of any kind” as between master and man, mistress and maid.[707] Add to the case that great transfer of vital interests upon which economists lay such stress, from open-air life to home-life, from the throng with its indiscriminate dance and merriment, often, too, its indiscriminate morals, its communal habit of thought and expression, to the individual responsibility, the sober pleasures and the stricter morals of the fireside, from the delight in movement, noise, cadence of many voices, to lamplight and the printed page and meditation: add this to the account, and one sees how ill it must have fared with the communal refrain of work, feast, and ceremonial rite. Reactions come, of course, and no one denies a constant market for cakes and ale; but what is a church fair, even a camp-meeting, to the old vigil? The wife of Bath is still with us, but she has to make shift with an afternoon tea. Disintegration, due to the lapse of communal feeling, has either broken up the traditional refrains, leaving only _Hooky, hooky_,[708] and unmeaning things of the kind, or else has favoured the making of doggerel which may or may not mean something, and which in any case threatens the student with perils of a too curious interpretation of chops and tomato-sauce. Even where there is neither corruption nor distortion, there is unblushing if often innocent substitution of modern mawkishness. Precisely as one boggles, when reading Herd’s _Scottish Songs_, to find under the title “I wish my Love were in a Myre” the familiar translation of Sappho’s “Blest as the Immortal Gods,”—so, in coming to the “Cornish Midsummer Bonfire Song,” in Bell’s collection, a title to make any student of communal poetry get out a fresh pen, and in reading, too, that here “fishermen and others dance about the fire and sing appropriate songs,” one pulls up with a rude shock at—

Hail! lovely nymphs, be not too coy,
But freely yield your charms,[709]

which, while appropriate in sentiment, has not the note of simplicity that one expects from Cornish fishermen dancing round the bonfire of heathen tradition. True, this is a very bad counterfeit; but many a verse quite as alien at heart, if not on the face, has been foisted upon communal and traditional song.

The best survivals come from the harvest field, and mingle refrain with improvisation. Very common in old times and in new is the note of ridicule, particularly for the wayfaring man, converted temporarily into a fool, who passes by the labourers; such a man even now gets rude handling as well as rude rimes, and this was the case in Hellas.[710] In an often-quoted Idyll of Ausonius there is reference to the exchange of abusive lyric compliments between workers in the field and the boatmen on the Moselle; while any one can note how this instinct for a flyting between labourers in a band and the _spectator ab extra_, alone or in company, holds always and everywhere, while, on the other hand, the solitary labourer and the solitary wanderer are wont to pass the time of day with full courtesy and often with an inexplicably kindly feeling. German peasants breaking flax in the fields still sing to the rhythm of their strokes; as in the old days, a stranger who passes by them is sure to be hailed in improvised verses not of a complimentary kind. Particularly if the stranger be a young gentleman, a possible suitor for one of the daughters at the great house, sarcastic song greets him from twenty or thirty throats, mainly a refrain, and that partly of an imitative character, with derisive lines like:—

Too fat is he quite,
And he isn’t polite,

with the refrain for conclusion,—

Hurrah, let him go![711]

All this, of course, to the exact time of the work in hand. When no stranger offers, mutual flytings will serve. Near Soest all the young people shout and sing throughout the entire process of preparing flax,—“unsung flax,” they say, “is good for nothing,”—and songs are improvised in satire of one another, with a refrain _rummel dumm dum_ or _rem sen jo jo_. Travelling in Wales, by the bye, had once these chances of satire, and Aubrey tells about them, thinking doubtless of his favourite time “before the civil warres.” For in Wales there were not only “rymers ... that upon any subject given would versify extempore halfe an hour together,” but “the vulgar sort of people ... have a humour of singing extempore upon occasion: _e.g._ a certain gentleman coming to ——, the woemen that were washing at ye river fell all a singing in Welsh, wʰ was a description of ye men and their horses.”[712] How facile the black fellows of Australia, Africans, and savages everywhere, can be with this improvised ridicule, mainly practised on the march, or at some sort of labour, all travellers testify. Samoans sing instead of talking “as they walk along the road, or paddle the canoe, or do any other piece of work. These songs often contain sarcastic remarks, and in passing the house or village of parties with whom they are displeased, they strike up a chant embodying some offensive ideas.”[713]

We must keep to the harvest fields. Wordsworth’s solitary reaper called forth an exquisite lyric; but there is material more attractive for the student of refrains, however it lack poetic merit, in Boswell’s and Johnson’s stories of a Highland harvest, and one would be glad indeed if the doctor, who had all of Wordsworth’s curiosity on this point, could have made the reapers tell him what they sang.[714] He was coming close to Rasay in a boat, while, as Boswell says, the boatmen “sang with great spirit,” and Johnson remarked that “naval music was very ancient”;[715] then the men were silent, and from the near fields was heard the song of reapers, “_who seemed to shout as much as to sing_, while they worked with a _bounding activity_.” Johnson’s own account[716] of reaping on Rasay may refer to this or to another occasion. “I saw,” he says, “the harvest of a small field. The women reaped the corn, and the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle were timed by the modulations of the harvest-song in which all their voices were united. They accompany in the Highlands every action which can be done in equal time with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, not much meaning;[717] but its effects are regularity and cheerfulness.” These hints from the Highlands are of peculiar importance because of the undoubted homogeneous conditions of life in the clans, keeping songs of this sort in an almost primitive state. Significant is the rhythm of shouts, significant the preponderance of the refrain. Lady Rasay showed Johnson “the operation of _wawking_ cloth. Here it is performed by women who kneel upon the ground and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse song all the time.” Boswell speaks of their “loud and wild howl”; and Dr. Hill[718] quotes Lockhart that women at this work screamed “all the while in a sort of chorus. At a distance the sound was wild and sweet enough, but rather discordant” at close quarters.

The Lowlands of Scotland, too, had their _kirn_,[719] and the English harvest-home, practically the same thing, had merry songs and refrains down to living memory. What must these songs have been, when, if Professor Skeat[720] is right in his estimate and inference, on one estate of two hundred acres in Suffolk no less than five hundred and fifty-three persons were assembled for harvest? At almost any period of English country life one finds the rural philosopher looking back, like the Rev. Dr. Jessopp now,[721] to kindlier and more communal times, greater harvests, keener jollity, a wider and deeper social sense; so Overbury’s franklin felt that he held a brief for the _tempus actum_. “He allows of honest pastime, and thinkes not the bones of the dead anything bruised, or the worse for it, though the country lasses dance in the churchyard after even-song. Rocke Monday, and the wake in summer, shrovings, the wakefull ketches on Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake, these he yearly keepes.” Of this festal round harvest-home was culmination, since it knitted the bond between labour and rest, and was the pledge of plenty, the high tide of the agricultural year. Three elements may be noted in this harvest-home so far as the refrain is concerned; first, the shouting, the choral cries and songs of the labourers in the field as the last sheaf is cut and bound; secondly, the march homeward with the hock-cart to the cadence of loud refrains and songs, with the thrice-repeated procession about barn and yard; and thirdly, the more elaborate ceremonial of those gatherings which marked the safe accomplishment of harvest. Moreover, in any of these cases a progress may be noted from the rude but cadenced shouts, the refrains and chorals, through definite songs of harvest, up to all manner of offshoots and distortions,—fixed rites, speeches, sermons, pantomime, beggings, what not; but even in the last and worse estate of the communal harvest-song there is everywhere echo of the refrain, everywhere echo of the dance. The breaking up of communal labour has left mainly the songs and cries of working folk on any given farm or estate; but the songs of a common festival for harvested crops still linger in customs of the village,—now a traditional march of the elder folk, now some half-understood dance and walk of the maidens, such as Hardy describes in his _Tess_, and now a mere song of village children coming in a band from the search for berries, as in the Black Forest:—

Holla, holla, reera,
Mer kumme us d’Beere.[722]

Lithuanians coming back from the field, or in any communal gathering, when they have sung through their traditional stock of songs, call for a new ditty; amid jest and jollity some one strikes up a _daina_ of his own, composing as he sings; the rest repeat in chorus, correct the words, add to them,—and so a new song is made, and, if it finds favour, is handed down, and even passed to the neighbour villages. This custom, however, is fast going out of date.[723]

In some places the day when harvest begins is still a time of communal and ritual importance; Würtemberg reapers, men and women, gather in the early dawn and sing a choral for blessing on their work.[724] As they go to the field, the throng still sing choruses, improvised verses, and traditional ballads; and when they march home at dusk to their village, they sing songs, often modern enough, but, as Pfannenschmid points out, substitutes for older and doubtless far more communal singing, which indeed lingers in the unintelligible refrain. In many places, however, chorus, refrain and song, whether communal or alien, to be sung at harvest and threshing, are dying out or dead; in Normandy, says Beaurepaire,[725] at the _fête de la gerbe_, when the last of the wheat is threshed, no song of any sort is heard, though elsewhere the festival is loud with chorus. A scrap of the refrain sung in another part of France—

Ho! batteux, battons la gerbe,
Battons-la joyeusement, ...

Beaurepaire heard, to be sure, here and there in Normandy; but it was no longer a refrain of labour, and was attached to a love-song.[726]

The main ceremony, of course, is at the end of harvest. In many places a custom still prevails, that when the last sheaf is to be cut, a portion of grain is left standing, and the reapers now dance about it with repeated cries, sometimes of vague mythological tradition like “Wold, Wold, Wold,” and with songs; now bare their heads, and pour food and drink upon the spot; now let the “bonniest lass” cut this remnant, dress it, and bring it home as the “corn-baby”; now throw their sickles at it to see who can cut it down;[727] and so on, in variety of form, but all to the same purpose. In Flanders they sing, when the last load is taken from the field,

Keriole, keriole, al in!
’t loaste voer goat in.
Keriole, Keriole, al in![728]

There is every reason to think that some rite of this sort, accompanied with communal refrain and song, was once universal in agricultural life.[729] The corn-baby just described as decked in silk and ribbons and brought home with singing, is also known as the kirn-baby, the ivy-girl, and the maiden; so that harvest-home is here and there called the maiden-feast.[730] The songs belong primarily on the field and with the homeward faring cart; but customs change. In Suffolk at harvest suppers some one is crowned with a pillow and the folk all sing _I am the Duke of Norfolk_,[731] though elsewhere in the country the old note remains. Still farther from the field, Hertfordshire countrymen sing _The Barley Mow_ in alehouses after their day’s labour; but in another part of Suffolk this is a festal song chanted at the harvest-supper “when the stack, rick, or mow of barley is finished.” It is a song of repetitions, and holds an old refrain.[732] For this song at the harvest-home supper, its variations, corruptions, survivals, its refrains, and its choruses, one would need a book; a description or two of recent doings must suffice. “At the harvest suppers up to some twenty years ago,” say Broadwood and Maitland, “while the other guests were still seated at the table, a labourer carrying a jug or can of beer or cider filled a horn for every two men, one on each side of the table; as they drank, this old harvest-song was sung and the chorus repeated, until the man with the beer had reached the end of the long table, involving sometimes thirty repetitions of the first verse. After this, the second verse was sung in the same manner.” The chorus—from Wiltshire—ran thus:—

So drink, boys, drink, and see that you do not spill,
For if you do, you shall drink two, for ’tis our master’s will.

What is left here of communal song is the fact of the chorus and the infinite repetition; the song has a poor mixture of the bucolic with the buckish. The older collection of Dixon gives a better song:—

Our oats they are howed and our barley’s reaped,
Our hay is mowed and our hovels heaped,
Harvest Home! Harvest Home!
We’ll merrily roar out Harvest Home!
Harvest Home! Harvest Home!
We’ll ...

with another repetition of the line.[733] The men who sang this chorus were still in thrall to an old custom at the barley harvest. On putting up the last sheaf, which is called the craw, or crow sheaf, the man who has it cries out,—

I have it, I have it, I have it!

Another asks,—

What hav’ee, what hav’ee, what hav’ee?

And the answer comes,—

A craw, a craw, a craw!

Then wild cheering, and off they go to the supper, where they sing a well-known cumulative song about the brown bowl, the quarter-pint, the half-pint, and so on.

These repeated cries, however, take us back to the field. In Devon, as Brand relates, they still cried “the neck”; a little bundle was made from the best ears of the sheaves, and when the last field was reaped, all gathered about the person who had this neck, who first stooped and held it near the ground. All the men doffed their hats and held them likewise and then cried, in a very prolonged and harmonious tone, _The Neck_, at the same time raising themselves upright, and elevating arms and hats above their heads, the holder of the neck doing likewise. This was done thrice; after which they changed their cry to _wee yen_,[734] _way yen_, prolonged as before, and also sounded thrice; then boisterous laughter, amidst which they break up and hurry to the farmhouse,—a maimed rite, indeed, but of interest when compared with kindred doings. For the words are surely wreckage of an old refrain, full of repetitions, like that song Montanus rescued from the rites of midsummer-eve along the Rhine. Under the “crown,” boys, girls, and their elders dance in a ring and sing as they dance a sort of refrain which is made of incremental repetitions into a description of the game they are playing; meantime one person stands in the midst of the ring until he has played his part to the choral suggestion, a common element in other games of children. In these and kindred ceremonies it is clear that a concerted shouting was the main feature, but the shouts were rhythmical and went with the communal dance, not with a disintegrated, howling mob. At Hitchin farmers drove furiously home with the last load of harvest, while the people rushed madly after, shouting and dashing bowls of water on the corn; but this is chaotic, for old Tusser[735] knew a better way:—

Come home lord singing,
Come home corn bringing.

In Germany the last load of grain is brought home with throwing of water and singing of traditional songs and shouts for the master. So too in English “youling,” when cider is thrown on the apple trees, at each cup “the company sets up a shout.”[736] Doubtless the elaborate chorus of the Arval brothers had once its wild but cadenced shout of the whole festal throng, as they “beat the ground” in communal consent of voice and step; and this primitive shout recurs in all folksong, not only in the _schnaderhüpfl_, in the _jodel_ which ends a stanza, but in those cries at the dance which have crept into the ballad itself. But the cadenced shout, the refrain, the infinite repetition of a traditional song, pass with the dance that timed them, and decorous reapers may now depute one of their number to act as spokesman; hence, as in Mecklenburg, the recited poem, or the little speech, or even, as in Hanover, a figure made of the stalks is furnished with a letter to be read aloud for the behoof of neighbours; and there are other infamies of the sort. So passes the old Harvest-home.

Of vast importance for agricultural life, and resonant with refrain and song, were those processions about the field, about parish boundaries, to sacred wells,[737] to woods and groves to bring in the May, and for a hundred other purposes to a hundred other resorts. The solemn procession of a community, along with the festal dance, forms the oldest known source of poetry; and Kögel points out that in German even now the proper word for celebrating a festal occasion is _begehen_, while the corresponding noun is used in a mediæval gloss for _ritus_ and _cultus_. The song of the Arval brothers had its origin in such a procession about the fields; and Vergil’s advice[738] to the farmer shows that this rite was no monopoly of priests, or even of the man skilled in incantations, but a communal affair,—marching round the young crops, and dance and song at harvest:—

... thrice for luck
Around the young corn let the victim go,
And all the choir, a joyful company,
Attend it, and with shouts bid Ceres come
To be their house-mate; and let no man dare
Put sickle to the ripened ears until,
With woven oak his temples chapleted,
He foot the rugged dance and chant the lay.[739]

There can be no question of borrowing in these songs and dances, even in the simpler forms of ritual, which are found wherever rudest agriculture has begun. Doubtless only a change of religion deprives us of those songs, or some echo of them, which were sung in the famous procession of Nerthus,[740] the _terra mater_, goddess of fertility and peace among the Germanic tribes who lived by the northern oceans two thousand years ago. These people, so Tacitus[741] records the rite, “believe that she enters into human activity, and travels among them.” Drawn by cows, she is accompanied in her mysterious wagon by a priest; “those are joyful times and places which the goddess honours with her presence, and her visit makes holiday.”[742]

Tacitus was interested in the mysteries of the rite; would that he had heard and transmitted the songs that rang out in honour of this German Demeter, and had described the dances of the folk about their fields![743] For, as Kögel points out, the later procession to bless crops and to ban all things hostile to their thriving, a custom still common in certain parts of Europe, is only a repetition of this old progress. Half-way between the time of Nerthus and the present occurs that Anglo-Saxon charm for making barren or bewitched land bear fruit; amid its excrescences of ritual, and under the alien matter, still lingers a hint of the old communal procession, the old communal song and dance; and perhaps Nerthus is dimly remembered in the cries of,—

Erce, Erce, Erce, earth’s mother,

which has a repetition familiar from many survivals,[744] and in the lines:—

Hail to thee, Earth, all men’s mother,
Be thou growing in God’s protection,
Filled with food for feeding of men!

Again, one has the extremes of shouts, communal cadenced cries, and songs which are often quite irrelevant; thus in Brandenburg on Easter Monday girls march by long rows, hand in hand, over the young corn of each field, singing Easter songs, while the young men ring the church bells;[745] but one learns that Wends of the fifteenth century greeted the early corn as they ran round it in wild procession, and hailed it “with loud shouting.”[746]

About the year 1133, and along the lower Rhine, a procession was in vogue which may have been a survival of the worship of that goddess recorded by Tacitus and called Isis because her symbol was a ship; for in the mediæval rite such a ship was placed on wheels and carried about the country, followed by shouting bands and hailed at every halt with song and dance.[747] The songs, _turpia cantica et religioni Christianae indigna concinentium_, were condemned by clericals,[748] and the dances of scantily clad women, not unlike the festal dances of savage women in many places at this season of the year, were doubtless not only intrinsically objectionable, but pointed back to the heathen doings from which our Germanic folk were so slowly converted. A glimpse at this older worship is given by Gregory in his often-quoted story of the Langobards who offered a goat’s head to their “devil,” running about in a circle and singing impious songs.[749] A survival of some such heathen rite, with ridiculous perversion of Christian legend, is the feast of the ass, the festival of fools, on Christmas or on St. Stephen’s day, when during mass the priest brays thrice and the congregation respond in kind; here and there, as in France, a hymn is sung, with refrain from the throng:[750]—

Hez, Sir Ane, hez!—

and ending in what Hampson oddly calls “an imitation of the noisy Bacchanalian cry of _Evohe!_”—

Hez va! Hez va! Hez-va-he!
Bialz, Sire Asnes, carallez
Belle bouche car chantez,—

a very far cry, indeed. After service, crowds marched through the streets, sang Fescennine songs, danced, and ended by “dashing pails of water over the precentor’s head.” It is needless to follow this degenerate choral over Europe, as it blends thus with rites of the church, passes into the song of the waits, and lingers in degraded form with the beggars or children who parade the countryside at Martinmas or in Christmas week, singing refrains that echo older and better song and doggerel that echoes nothing.

A soule-cake, a soule-cake,

was the refrain which Aubrey heard; but in modern Cheshire it is—

A soul! A soul! A soul-cake!
Please good Missis, a soul-cake![751]

printed here with full apologies to all outraged friends of the immensities and the eternities, who sought nobler stuff in a book on the beginnings of poetry. On Palm Sunday, near Bielefeld in Germany, the children go about with branches of willow and sing “all day long”—

Palm’n, Palm’n, Påsken,
Låt’t den Kukkuk kråsken,
Låt’t dei Viögel singen,
Låt’t den Kukkuk springen![752]