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The Keach I' the Creel (Roud 120, Child 281), also known as The Ride in the Creel or The Wee Toun Clerk, is an English-language folk song, originating from England and Scotland sometime in the early 1800s. [1]
A young woman tells a man that her parents keep her too close for them to meet. The man has his brother make a ladder and a pulley to hoist a basket (creel) down the chimney; the ladder takes him to the chimney, and riding in the large creel he is lowered into her bedroom. Her mother guesses there is a man in the daughter's bed and sends the father. She hides her lover and persuades her father she was praying. Her mother, still suspicious, goes herself. She trips and is caught ("keach" being catch, "keach i' the creel" being "the catch in the basket" - usually referring to fish caught and stored in a basket slung from the fisherman's hip or shoulder) in the creel and tossed all about in it; the father professes that he's fed up with all of them, for he's had no rest all the night with the goings-on.
This ballad has been recorded by:
"Matty Groves", also known as "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" or "Little Musgrave", is a ballad probably originating in Northern England that describes an adulterous tryst between a young man and a noblewoman that is ended when the woman's husband discovers and kills them. It is listed as Child ballad number 81 and number 52 in the Roud Folk Song Index. This song exists in many textual variants and has several variant names. The song dates to at least 1613, and under the title Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard is one of the Child ballads collected by 19th-century American scholar Francis James Child.
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The Famous Flower of Serving-Men or The Lady Turned Serving-Man is a traditional English language folk song and murder ballad. Child considered it as closely related to the ballad "The Lament of the Border Widow" or "The Border Widow's Lament".
"Unusually, it is possible to give a precise date and authorship to this ballad. It was written by the prolific balladeer, Laurence Price, and published in July 1656, under the title of The famous Flower of Serving-Men. Or, The Lady turn'd Serving-Man. It lasted in the mouths of ordinary people for three hundred years: what a tribute to the work of any writer, leave alone the obscure Laurence Price. Oral tradition, however, has made changes. The original has twenty-eight verses and a fairy-tale ending: “And then for fear of further strife, / he took Sweet William to be his Wife: / The like before was never seen, / A Serving-man to be a Queen”. – Roy Palmer, A Book of British Ballads
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"The Wee Wee Man" is an Anglo-Scottish border ballad, existing in several variants.
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"The Twa Magicians", "The Two Magicians", "The Lady and the Blacksmith", or "The Coal Black Smith" is a British folk song. It first appears in print in 1828 in two sources, Peter Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland and John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae #40. It was later published as number 44 of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. During the 20th century, versions of it have been recorded by a number of folk and popular musicians.
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Willie and Lady Maisry, also known as William and Lady Marjorie, is an English-language traditional folk song, likely originating in Scotland. In the liner notes to folk musician Joe Rae's recording of this song, Rod Stradling writes that "Joe believes that the ballad is set in the area around Selkirk—possibly at Thirlstane Castle, in Lauderdale, to the north-east of Selkirk."
"The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter" is an English ballad, collected by Francis James Child as Child Ballad 110 and listed as number 67 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
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The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie is an Anglo-Scottish border ballad, existing in several variants, some of them fragmentary.
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"Wee Cooper O'Fife" is a Scottish folk song about a cooper who has "a braw new wife" who will not cook, clean, and sew in case she "spoil her comely hue". A town in Fife is called Cupar; this is a pun.
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