Part 1 (1/2)
Yorks.h.i.+re Dialect Poems.
by F.W. Moorman.
Preface
Several anthologies of poems by Yorks.h.i.+remen, or about Yorks.h.i.+remen, have pa.s.sed through the press since Joseph Ritson published his Yorks.h.i.+re Garland in 1786. Most of these have included a number of dialect poems, but I believe that the volume which the reader now holds in his hand is the first which is made up entirely of poems written in ”broad Yorks.h.i.+re.” In my choice of poems I have been governed entirely by the literary quality and popular appeal of the material which lay at my disposal. This anthology has not been compiled for the philologist, but for those who have learnt to speak ”broad Yorks.h.i.+re” at their mother's knee, and have not wholly unlearnt it at their schoolmaster's desk. To such the variety and interest of these poems, no less than the considerable range of time over which their composition extends, will, I believe, come as a surprise.
It is in some ways a misfortune that there is no such thing as a standard Yorks.h.i.+re dialect. The speech of the North and East Ridings is far removed from that of the industrial south-west. The difference consists, not so much in idiom or vocabulary, as in p.r.o.nunciation--especially in the p.r.o.nunciation of the long vowels and diphthongs.(1) As a consequence of this, I have found it impossible, in bringing together dialect poems from all parts of the county, to reduce their forms to what might be called Standard Yorks.h.i.+re. Had I attempted to do this, I should have destroyed what was most characteristic. My purpose throughout has been to preserve the distinguis.h.i.+ng marks of dialect possessed by the poems, but to normalise the spelling of those writers who belong to one and the same dialect area.
The spelling of ”broad Yorks.h.i.+re” will always be one of the problems which the dialect-writer has to face. At best he can only hope for a broadly accurate representation of his mode of speech, but he can take comfort in the thought that most of those who read his verses know by habit how the words should be p.r.o.nounced far better than he can teach them by adopting strange phonetic devices. A recognition of this fact has guided me in fixing the text of this anthology, and every spelling device which seemed to me unnecessary, or clumsy, or pedantic, I have ruthlessly discarded. On the other hand, where the dialect-writer has chosen the Standard English spelling of any word, I have as a rule not thought fit to alter its form and spell it as it would be p.r.o.nounced in his dialect.
I am afraid I may have given offence to those whom I should most of all like to please--the living contributors to this anthology--by tampering in this way with the text of their poems. In defence of what I have done, I must put forward the plea of consistency. If I had preserved every poet's text as I found it, I should have reduced my readers to despair.
In conclusion, I should--like to thank the contributors to this volume, and also their publishers, for the permission to reproduce copyright work. Special thanks are due to Mr. Richard Blakeborough, who has placed Yorks.h.i.+remen under a debt, by the great service which he has rendered in recovering much of the traditional poetry of Yorks.h.i.+re and in giving it the permanence of the printed page. In compiling the so-called traditional poems at the end of this volume, I have largely drawn upon his Wit, Character, Folklore, and Customs of the North Riding.
F. W. Moorman
1. Thus in the south-west fool and soon are p.r.o.nounced fooil and sooin, in the north-east feeal and seean. Both the south-west and the north-east have a word praad--with a vowel--sound like the a in father--but whereas in the south- west it stands for proud, in the north-east it stands for pride,
Preface (To the Second Edition)
The demand for a second edition of this anthology of Yorks.h.i.+re dialect verse gives me an opportunity of correcting two rather serious error's which crept into the first edition. The poem ent.i.tled ”Hunting Song” on page 86, which I attributed to Mr. Richard Blakeborough, is the work of Mr. Malham-Dembleby”, whose poem, ”A Kuss,” immediately precedes it in the volume.
The poem on page 75, which in the first edition was marked Anonymous and ent.i.tled ”Parson Drew thro' Pudsey,” is the work of the late John Hartley; its proper' t.i.tle is ”T' First o' t' Sooar't,” and it includes eight introductory stanzas which are now added as Appendix II.
Through the kindness of: Fr W. A. Craigie, Dr. M. Denby, and Mr. E. G.
Bayford, I have also been able to make a few changes in the glossarial footnotes, The most important of these is the change from ”Ember's” to ”Floor” as the meaning of the word, ”Fleet” in the second line of ”A Lyke-wake Dirge.” The note which Dr. Craigie sen't me on this word is so interesting that I reproduce it here verbatim:
”The word fleet in the 'Lyke-wake Dirge' has been much misunderstood, but it is certain1y the same thing as flet-floor; see the O.E.D. and E.D.D.
under. FLET. The form is not necessarily 'erroneous,' as is said in the O.E.D., for it might represent ,the O.N. dative fleti, which must have been common in the phrase a fleti (cf. the first verse of 'Havamal').
The collocation with 'fire' occurs in 'Sir Gawayne' (l. 1653): 'Aboute the fyre upon flet.' 'Fire and fleet and candle-light' are a summary of the comforts of the house, which the dead person still enjoys for 'this ae night,' and then goes out into the dark and cold.”
F. W. Moorman
INTRODUCTION
The publication of an anthology of Yorks.h.i.+re dialect poetry seems to demand a brief introduction in which something shall be said of the history and general character of that poetry. It is hardly necessary to state that Yorks.h.i.+re has produced neither a Robert Burns, a William Barnes, nor even an Edwin Waugh. Its singers are as yet known only among their own folk; the names of John Castillo and Florence Tweddell are household words among the peasants of the Cleveland dales, as are those of Ben Preston and John Hartley among the artisans of the Aire and Calder valleys; but, outside of the county, they are almost unknown, except to those who are of Yorks.h.i.+re descent and who cherish the dialect because of its a.s.sociation with the homes of their childhood.
At the same time there is no body of dialect verse which better deserves the honour of an anthology. In volume and variety the dialect poetry of Yorks.h.i.+re surpa.s.ses that of all other English counties. Moreover, when the rise of the Standard English idiom crushed out our dialect literature, it was the Yorks.h.i.+re dialect which first rea.s.serted its claims upon the muse of poetry; hence, whereas the dialect literature of most of the English counties dates only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, that of Yorks.h.i.+re reaches back to the second half of the seventeenth.
In one sense it may be said that Yorks.h.i.+re dialect poetry dates, not from the seventeenth, but from the seventh century, and that the first Yorks.h.i.+re dialect poet was Caedmon, the neat-herd of Whitby Abbey. But to the ordinary person the reference to a dialect implies the existence of a standard mode of speech almost as certainly as odd implies even.
Accordingly, this is not the place to speak of that great heritage of song which Yorks.h.i.+re bequeathed to the nation between the seventh century and the fifteenth. After the Caedmonic poems, its chief glories are the religious lyrics of Richard Rolle, the mystic, and the great cycles of scriptural plays which are a.s.sociated with the trade-guilds of York and Wakefield. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the all-conquering Standard English spread like a mighty spring-tide over England and found no check to its progress till the Cheviots were reached. The new ”King's English” was of little avail in silencing dialect as a means of intercourse between man and man, but it checked for centuries the development of dialect literature. The old traditional ballads and songs, which were handed down orally from generation to generation in the speech of the district to which they belonged, escaped to some extent this movement towards uniformity; but the deliberate artificers of verse showed themselves eager above all things to get rid of their provincialisms and use only the language of the Court.
Shakespeare may introduce a few Warwicks.h.i.+re words into his plays, but his English is none the less the Standard English of his day, while Spenser is sharply brought to task by Ben Jonson for using archaisms and provincialisms in his poems. A notable song of the Elizabethan age is that ent.i.tled ”York, York, for my Monie,” which was first published in 1584; only a Yorks.h.i.+reman could have written it, and it was plainly intended for the gratification of Yorks.h.i.+re pride; yet its language is without trace of local colour, either in spelling or vocabulary. Again, there appeared in the year 1615 a poem by Richard Brathwaite, ent.i.tled, ”The Yorks.h.i.+re Cottoneers,” and addressed to ”all true-bred Northerne Sparks, of the generous society of the Cottoneers, who hold their High-roade by the Pinder of Wakefield, the Shoo-maker of Bradford, and the white Coate of Kendall”; but Brathwaite, though a Kendal man by birth, makes no attempt to win the hearts of his ”true-bred Northern Sparks” by addressing them in the dialect that was their daily wear. In a word, the use of the Yorks.h.i.+re dialect for literary purposes died out early in the Tudor period.
As already stated, its rebirth dates from the second half of the seventeenth century. That was an age of scientific investigation and antiquarian research. John Ray, the father of natural history, not content with his achievements in the cla.s.sification of plants, took up also the collection of outlandish words, and in the year 1674 he published a work ent.i.tled, A Collection of English Words, not generally used, with their Significations and Original, in two Alphabetical Catalogues, the one of such as are proper to the Northern, the other to the Southern Counties. Later he entered into correspondence with the Leeds antiquary, Ralph Th.o.r.esby, who, in a letter dated April 27, 1703, sends him a list of dialect words current in and about Leeds.(1)
Side by side with this new interest in the dialect vocabulary comes also the dialect poem. One year before the appearance of Ray's Collection of English Words the York printer, Stephen Bulkby, had issued, as a humble broadside without author's name, a poem which bore the following t.i.tle: A Yorks.h.i.+re Dialogue in Yorks.h.i.+re Dialect; Between an Awd Wife, a La.s.s, and a Butcher. This dialogue occupies the first place in our anthology, and it is, from several points of view, a significant work. It marks the beginning, not only of modern Yorks.h.i.+re, but also of modern English, dialect poetry. It appeared just a thousand years after Caedmon had sung the Creator's praise in Whitby Abbey, and its dialect is that of northeast Yorks.h.i.+re--in other words, the lineal descendant of that speech which was used by Caedmon in the seventh century, by Richard Rolle in the fourteenth, and which may be heard to this day in the streets of Whitby and among the hamlets of the Cleveland Hills.
The dialogue is a piece of boldest realism. Written in an age when cla.s.sic restraint and cla.s.sic elegance were in the ascendant, and when English poets were taking only too readily to heart the warning of Boileau against allowing shepherds to speak ”comme on parle au village,”
the author of this rustic dialogue flings to the winds every convention of poetic elegance. His lines ”baisent la terre” in a way that would have inexpressibly shocked Boileau and the Parisian salons. The poem reeks of the byre and the shambles; its theme is the misadventure which befalls an ox in its stall and its final despatch by the butcher's mallet! One might perhaps find something comparable to it in theme and treatment in the paintings of the contemporary school of Dutch realists, but in poetry it is unique. Yet, gross as is its realism, it cannot be called crude as a work of poetic art. In rhyme and rhythm it is quite regular, and the impression which it leaves upon the mind is that it was the work of an educated man, keenly interested in the unvarnished life of a Yorks.h.i.+re farm, keenly interested in the vocabulary and idioms of his district, and determined to produce a poem which should bid defiance to all the proprieties of the poetic art.