Textual variants and analysis
The song has been found in England, Scotland, Canada, the US and, to a lesser extent, Ireland. [3] [lower-alpha 2] It was still popular in the early 19th century.
There is an Anglo-Norman ballad (medieval French), likely composed while Henry III was still alive and probably with knowledge of the city of Lincoln. [4] [lower-alpha 3] This version may contain the main elements of the original English song, many of which were lost in the later versions, which were written down in the 18th century and later. It is possible to relate elements in the older versions to the medieval stories; attempts to reconstruct the probable content of the original have been made. [5] [lower-alpha 4]
Paris has a Latin fragment of the ballad in his Chronicle. Thomas Percy's Reliques (1783) has a version from Scotland. David Herd (1776) had a version, and so did Robert Jameison (1806). McCabe says that the "earliest texts of Sir Hugh are Scottish … [and] preserve the medieval saint's legend in its most coherent form." [7]
The song may also incorporate elements of other medieval anti-semitic texts, particularly a miracle story also drawn on by Chaucer in the Prioress' Tale that features Jews murdering a child, often a school child, that habitually sings an anthem near where they live, and throw the body into their privy. These elements occur in some of the early versions of Sir Hugh. [8]
The known versions have lost many of the elements of the original story, or have simplified them over time. For instance, the original takes place near a castle, while this becomes a castle belonging to a Jew. The well near a castle becomes a private well set in the castle gardens. The location, "Merry Lincoln" becomes garbled, and dropped. [lower-alpha 5] The game becomes a ball game. The element of crucifixion is lost. The timing of the events is sometimes preserved as midsummer, sometimes altered to Easter. The role of the mother in warning against associating with the Jews, and later accusing the Jews, is simplified and dropped. (In some versions she becomes a disciplinarian figure, and eventually, even becomes the murderess. [10] ) Miraculous elements such as bells ringing without hands are dropped. The funeral element disappears, and the number of characters reduced. [11]
New elements, such as rain or mist, are added, some including references to Scotland, implying that the ballad may have travelled back into England from Scotland. Stanzas from Robin Hood's Death are incorporated. [12] Some of the later versions, particularly the American texts known as The Jew's Garden, incorporate elements of another song about child murder, Lamkin . [13]
Nevertheless, McCabe concludes that the most persistent element in Sir Hugh is the anti-semitic element: "despite the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 … with its consequence that many ballad singers knew no Jews, reference to a Jewish murderess is almost always preserved." [14]
Roud and Bishop make a similar point:
The subject matter … is disturbing, and reminds us that folklore is not always nice and cosy. Indeed, racists, xenophobes, political zealots and religious fundamentalists have always used legends, rumours, songs, jokes and other lore to support and spread their beliefs and to indoctrinate their young, and in particular to denigrate and stereotype outsiders and the victims of their bigotry. [3]
Karl Heinz Göller gives a different view of the origins and resonances of the ballad. Like McCabe, he traces changes showing that the form of the elements are simplified. For Göller, one side of the ballad is a fairy tale, onto which anti-semitic elements have been added, and at later dates, dropped and forgotten. Thus Sir Hugh is in his opinion a "symbolic story", of temptation and sexual deflowering. [15] He details how the anti-semitic elements are largely dropped in the American versions, and even the violence is removed, as the ballad in some cases becomes a nursery rhyme. He speculates that a version existed prior to its merger with the Hugh of Lincoln story, which "must have been similar to the Frog Prince tale in respect to love and the introduction to its mysteries". [16] [lower-alpha 6]
Göller points to James Joyce as a figure who recognised the tension between the symbolic story and the anti-Semitic tale. In Ulysses , Stephen and his host debate an Irish version of the song. Stephen "regards the ballad as a parable of human fate. Hugh challenges his fate once through carelessness, twice through premeditation. Fate appears in the person of the Jewish girl, who, as an incarnation of Hope and Youth, allures him into a secret chamber, and kills him like a sacrificial animal." [17] On the other hand, his host remembers the accusations of ritual murder, "the incitation of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulis". [18]
Given the tension between the story of Hugh, murdered by Jews, and the symbolic story that Göller describes, he concludes that the "introduction of details from the Hugh of Lincoln story is thus in all probability a secondary phenomenon. It is very difficult to say when the amalgamation took place. Events such as the discovery of the bones of the murdered little boy in Lincoln Minster could have been a catalyst. But it is more likely that the anti-Semitism of a part of the ballads and the localization in Lincoln is a kind of euhemerist contamination similar to the Prioress's Tale, which gave rise to associations with the Hugh of Lincoln story through the similarity of its subject matter. Most of these anti-Semitic details have disappeared in the course of oral tradition, because they were no longer understood." [16]
Other parallels
Some of the ideas in the extant versions have parallels elsewhere. For instance, the idea of a corpse speaking (sending thoughts) to the living occurs in the ballad The Murder of Maria Marten , The Cruel Mother (Child 20) and in The Unquiet Grave (Child 78). Gruesome killings are quite common in Child ballads. [19]
Controversy
Victorian collectors were surprised to find evidence of a ballad featuring a blood libel, and two wrote books on the subject. James Orchard Halliwell wrote Ballads and Poems Respecting Hugh of Lincoln in 1849. [20] In the same year, and unknown to Halliwell, Abraham Hume wrote the book Sir Hugh of Lincoln, or, an Examination of a Curious Tradition respecting the Jews, with a notice of the Popular Poetry connected with it. [21]
One of the earliest professional recordings of the song was by A. L. Lloyd on "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol 2" in 1956, produced by Kenneth Goldstein, himself a Jew. Another interpreter of the song, Ewan MacColl, described the ballad as "the barbaric functioning of medieval thinking". [19]
It is still a controversial topic as to whether it is something that should be performed or recorded; and if it is, whether it is reasonable to remove the anti-Semitic elements. [lower-alpha 7] The 1975 version recorded by Steeleye Span, for instance, removes these references entirely.
