100  Luke Huttons Lamentation: which he wrote the day before his death, being/ condemned to be hanged at Yorke for his robberies and trespasses committed/ there-about [Euing 189]

Luke Hutton was an infamous highway robber, imprisoned in London and subsequently executed at York during the late 1590s. The ballad was almost certainly not composed by Hutton himself, despite the claim made in its title, but the young criminal certainly did publish two other works during his confinement in Newgate (see Related texts).

Hutton’s sudden literary flowering is probably sufficient to account for his celebrity but later authors added a new element to the highwayman’s story by alleging a family connection with Matthew Hutton, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1595. Over half a century later, John Harington claimed that Luke was in fact the Archbishop’s son, but Thomas Fuller soon revised this view, arguing instead that the criminal’s father was ‘Dr. Hutton’, a prebendary of Durham. It seems likely that this individual was Matthew Hutton’s brother, Robert, making the highwayman the Archbishop’s nephew.

This is all very interesting but the evidence is confusing. On the one hand, there are snippets that might support the suggestion of a link between the criminal and the clergymen. For example, one of Luke’s two published works was dedicated to Henry, Earl of Huntingdon (see Thoresby), who also happened to be a close associate of the Archbishop. Similarly, a Luke Hutton matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1582, and Matthew Hutton’s family certainly had a strong connection with this institution.

On the other hand, the date of this matriculation does not fit comfortably into the family histories of either the Archbishop or his brother (Robert Hutton, for example, seems to have fathered children in the 1590s). And genealogists who have worked on the clerical Huttons have not found that any of them produced a son named Luke (see Raine). The student of 1582 may have been the future criminal, and his failure to graduate is at least consistent with the probable career-trajectory of a highwayman-in-the making. It is not clear, however, that he was part of the Archbishop’s family. If Luke had been closely related to Matthew Hutton, it seems likely that this fact would have been mentioned in some of the publications of the 1590s. Harington later commended Archbishop Hutton for resisting the temptation to pull strings in order to save Luke from the gallows but the explanation for this restraint perhaps lies not in the clergyman’s laudable ‘constancy and severity’ but in the lack of any family connection.

Unfortunately, our efforts to place the ill-fated young criminal in a more plausible family have so far proved unsuccessful. Ballad-makers treated the ‘truth’ with considerable creativity; perhaps this is why we have been unable to find an individual with the right name who was born – as the song says -  on St. Luke’s day, presumably in Yorkshire, and who, in c. 1596, was aged around twenty-three.

The success of Luke Huttons Lamentation is reflected in fairly regular editions between the 1590s and the 1680s. The earliest extant version dates from c. 1598 but the ballad was registered well before this, on 22 December 1595. Given that Hutton, already a prisoner, seems certain to have been alive into 1596, this suggests that the ballad-makers were thinking some way ahead. Their commercial antennae had perhaps been aroused by the publication of the lost work, Luke Huttons repentance, probably late in 1595 (it was registered on 3 November). It also seems possible that they registered the ballad but did not actually publish it until Luke Hutton had been executed, on an unknown date between 1596 and 1598.

It is remarkable that a song about a particular criminal of the 1590s should still have been popular almost one hundred years later (there are at least seven surviving copies of the edition that was issued in 1681-84, a high figure for such an ephemeral form of literature). The song’s long-term success might be thought of in a number of ways. First, ‘rogue’ literature and tales of highwaymen were clearly highly marketable in the seventeenth century, and the fact that Luke Hutton also wrote a successful book called The blacke dogge of Newgate must also have helped to maintain his profile (see Related texts).

Second, the ballad includes some compelling lines (for example, ‘Good sir, quoth I, I had rather stay,/ I have no heart to ride that way’) and some distinctive stylistic features. The triple refrain, in lines 2, 4 and 7-8 of each verse, is particularly unusual. It is a shame that we do not have the tune and so cannot assess the effect of this device in performance. The last of these refrains also endows the song with a degree of repetitive religiosity that is not so strong in other execution ballads.

Third, Hutton is characterised by the ballad-makers in at least three different ways, establishing the kind of interpretative tension that was clearly a trait of many successful songs. At one level, he is a self-pitying melancholic, repeatedly wailing ‘ah wo is me, wo is me’. Simultaneously, however, he is a deeply repentant sinner, expressing heartfelt remorse and turning to his saviour in a plea for mercy. The profundity of his sorrow is such that he eventually achieves a measure of confidence regarding his fate. Despite his crimes, he advises listeners, ‘When on the ladder you doe me view/ Thinke I am nearer heaven than you’. Hutton’s final persona is that of a criminal hero who tells his story with considerable bravado and a certain manly pride. He steals without fear and is eager to ‘lighten the load’ of the super-wealthy. He becomes a ‘famous theife’, talked about by ‘All men in Yorkeshire’. He is aided by ‘twelve yeomen tall/ Which I did my twelve Apostles call’, though he also takes pride in the fact that neither he nor his crew ever killed anyone. Hutton therefore displays several of the characteristics of the highwayman-hero, a figure whose romantic appeal was on the increase during the early modern period.

The tensions between these aspects of Hutton’s ballad-self are notably recorded in the lines, ‘And when my heart was in woefull case,/ I drunke to my friends with a smiling face’.

Christopher Marsh

References

Broadside ballads from the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

English Short Title Catalogue.

Thomas Fuller, The church history of Britain (1655), pp. 38-39.

John Harington, A briefe view of the state of the Church of England as it stood in Q. Elizabeths and King James his reigne, to the yeere 1608 (1653), p. 192.

A V. Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan underworld (1930), pp. 506-08.

Lena Liapi, Roguery in print. Crime and culture in early modern London (Woodbridge, 2019).

James Raine, ‘Marske in Swaledale’, Yorkshire archaeological and topographical journal 6 (1881), pp. 172-286 (at pp. 237-41).

Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1924; Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967), nos. 1604 and 1605.

Cathy Shrank, ‘Hutton, Luke (d. 1598)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography.

Stationers’ Register online: https://stationersregister.online/entry/SRO3789

Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis (1715), p. 532, no. 131.

Ralph Thoresby, Vicaria Leodiensis (1724), p. 140.

J. A. Venn (ed.), Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part 1 (Cambridge, 1922), vol. 2, p. 442.

Luke Hutton, while imprisoned in Newgate during the mid-1590s, wrote and published two books (the ballad was almost certainly not his work). The first of these, Luke Huttons repentance, is now lost but its title probably tells us what we need to know about its contents. We can be sure that it was printed because Hutton says so in his second work (see below). We also know that, in 1724, the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby possessed a manuscript version of the piece, dedicated to the Earl of Huntingdon. Sadly, this too has gone missing. Given that the ballad was registered within a few weeks of the book, late in 1595, it seems likely that the song-writers were endeavouring to capitalise on the success of the lengthier work.

More famously, Hutton wrote The black dogge of Newgate in c 1596. This remains well known as an early exposé of the appalling conditions in one of London’s notorious prisons. The ‘black dog’ is an embodiment of the Newgate regime, and Hutton charges this forbidding beast with all manner of abuses and corrupt practices. The author skilfully appropriates and manipulates two existing phenomena: an old tale about a supernatural creature that haunted Newgate; and the fashionable ‘coney-catching’ literature of the late sixteenth century. This literature claimed to lift the lid on England’s criminal underworld, and Hutton responded by claiming that the real criminals were the prison officers.

The book evidently did well and also gave rise to a play of the same name, now lost. Not surprisingly, The black dogge of Newgate seems unrelated to the ballad (which may not even have been printed by the date of the book’s composition), and the repetitive use of ‘wo is me’ or ‘Woes me’ in both works is probably coincidental.

Christopher Marsh

Texts (in chronological order)

Luke Hutton, Luke Huttons repentance (lost text; c. 1595).

Anon, Luke Huttons Lamentation... To the Tune of, wandring and wavering (registered 1595 and probably printed soon afterwards).

Luke Hutton, The black dogge of Newgate: both pithie and profitable for all Readers (c. 1596). A revised edition was issued in 1612 and 1638 as The discovery of a London monster, called, the black dog of Newgate. This dropped all reference to Hutton’s name.

The black dog of Newgate (lost play, c. 1602).

References

Lena Liapi, Roguery in print. Crime and culture in early modern London (Woodbridge, 2019).

Lost plays database: https://lostplays.folger.edu/ (search for ‘Black dog’).

Stationers’ Register online: https://stationersregister.online/entry/SRO3789

Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis (1715), p. 532, no. 131.

Ralph Thoresby, Vicaria Leodiensis (1724), p. 140.