An excellent Ballad was composed by Thomas Deloney, probably in the 1590s. Deloney was arguably the most successful ballad-writer of his age, and seven of his songs appear on our list of hits (no other writer matches this figure). Remarkably, they all feature women very prominently (see Marsh). The ballad also appeared in The garland of good will, a collection of Deloney’s songs that was printed regularly from c. 1593 onwards (the first extant edition dates from 1628).
From the late 1580s onwards, Deloney worked to develop his remarkable talent as a ballad-maker, and he used it to supplement his income during the economic difficulties of the next decade. He was a silk-weaver by training, and he remained active in this trade, even as he diversified. Deloney also played an important role in defending the interests of native weavers against foreign competitors during the last decade of the sixteenth century and, in 1595, he even spent time in Newgate prison for his efforts.
Nor was this Deloney’s only brush with controversy, for in 1596 he wrote a controversial ballad – now lost - in which he imagined Elizabeth I speaking up for England’s poor people in their misery. This appropriation of the royal voice angered the Mayor of London, who reported Deloney to the Queen’s Privy Council. The Mayor tried to arrest Deloney but was unable to track him down. He died in c. 1600 and, in recent times, has been more famous for his prose works than for his ballads.
An excellent Ballad was clearly popular throughout the seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth. It is occasionally mentioned in other literary works of the period (see Wallis, for example), and collections of ballads that were published after 1700 sometimes included the song (see Philips and Ritson). For some reason, the years 1700-01 produced a curious concentration of surviving copies of the broadside: the English Short Titles Catalogue lists six editions in this short period. This is difficult to explain, unless an old ballad about an Anglo-French royal romance somehow felt topical in the interlude between the Nine Years War (1688-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), both of which saw England and France in opposition. The peace, like the romance, failed to endure.
The ballad’s popularity in the seventeenth century might be considered from a variety of perspectives. The complexities of male-female relations were clearly in play, and surviving copies of the broadside suggest a strange tussle for the limelight. The title and the woodcuts put the prince first and suggest his leading role in the courtship. The princess, however, is clearly the star of the story: she is present throughout, unlike the prince, who dies before the halfway point; more than once, she is named as the party who does the ‘wooing’; and overall she delivers forty of the sixty-three lines of spoken text in the ballad (63%). Furthermore, she is brave and endlessly resourceful, negotiating her way with great aplomb through a series of most unfortunate events. Admittedly, her life story is framed by men – her father, her sweetheart and her husband – but she nevertheless shines throughout.
Perhaps she thus represents a socially elevated role model for ballad-consuming women in their own daily engagements with patriarchy. Deloney seems to have possessed and developed an instinct for appealing to female audience members, though the song was also amenable, of course, to an interpretation that emphasised the woman’s dependence on men. The phase during which the princess is without a male guide is also her point of maximum anguish.
Deloney’s song also connects with a range of other highly successful ballad themes. The obstruction of true love by cynically motivated parents was always marketable, and the same is true of disguise, romantic tragedy, royalty and history. The ballad is set vaguely ‘in the days of old’ and it includes no names or dates. As far as we can tell, it is a product of Deloney’s imagination, though one chapbook version of the tale identified the prince as ‘Alfred’ (see Related texts).
In particular decades, the song may also have felt unusually topical to publishers and consumers, though this possibility is always difficult to assess. In addition to the clutch of editions in 1700-01, we might also wonder about the publication of the ballad in the 1620s, when Prince Charles was seeking a continental wife (after failing to woo the Spanish Infanta, he married Henrietta Maria of France in 1625). Although there are no surviving copies from the 1620s, the registration of the ballad in 1624 makes it extremely likely that they once existed in large quantities.
More generally, the ballad’s portrayal of a princess who became a forester’s wife and a forester who became an earl may have appealed to people who had to negotiate the tensions between a static model of social hierarchy and a far more turbulent reality, particularly in the period c. 1590-1660. Some of the ballad’s most memorable verses – about the children’s extraordinary rich-poor hybrid clothing, for example – highlighted these tensions. As so often, a successful ballad was one that took common experiences and injected them with intense new colours, encouraging in consumers a combination of empathy and escape.
Christopher Marsh
References
Broadside ballads from the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
T[homas] D[eloney], The garland of good will (registered 1593; edition of 1628), D5v-E1v.
Thomas Deloney, The works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford, 1912).
English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/
English Short Title Catalogue.
Madden Collection, Garlands, vol. 3, no. 613, Cambridge University Library.
Christopher Marsh, ‘Best-selling ballads and the female voices of Thomas Deloney’, Huntington Library Quarterly 82.1 (Spring, 2019), pp. 127-54.
Ambrose Philips, A collection of old ballads (1723), pp. 181-87.
Joseph Ritson, A selection of English songs, 3 vols. (1783), vol. 2, pp. 237-44.
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. 1240 and 2425.
Ralph Wallis, More news from Rome, or, Magna Charta discoursed of between a poor man and his wife (1666), p. 15.
To the tune of ‘Crimson Velvet’ (standard name)
The purpose of this section is to provide brief notes on the melody followed by detailed evidence relating to its career, paying particular attention to the ‘echoes’ (inter-song associations and connections) that may have been set up if it was nominated for the singing of more than one ballad. In the list presented in the ‘Songs and Summaries’ section below, we have endeavoured to include as many of the black-letter ballads that used the tune as possible, under any of its variant names. Titles from our chart of best-sellers are presented in bold type (these are also in colour when there is a link to the relevant ballad page on the website). It should be noted that it is extremely difficult to date many ballads precisely and the chronological order in which the songs are listed is therefore very approximate (we have drawn on previous attempts to date the ballads, making adjustments when additional evidence can be brought into play). In most cases, we list the earliest surviving edition of a ballad, though in many instances there may have been earlier versions, now lost.
Versions and variations
Notation for this long, lilting tune can be found in several sources, printed and manuscript: Matthew Holmes’ lute books (late sixteenth century); the lost Straloch lute manuscript (late 1620s?), transcribed in 1839 by George Farquhar; the Skene manuscript for mandore (mid-seventeenth century); the virginal book of Anne Cromwell (1638); and John Forbes’ Cantus, Songs and Fancies (1662). The tune was also known on the continent, and our recording combines Forbes’ version with one that had earlier appeared in Jan Starter’s Friesche Lusthof (1621).
These renditions are all similar, though there are some interesting variations: the Cromwell, Starter and Forbes versions, for example, all display different melodic patterns at the end of the first line, and the earlier Holmes version is in duple rather than triple time and restricts itself to the first strain.
The melody was also known as ‘In the days of old’ (a title that derives from the opening line of this Excellent Ballad) and ‘Twas a youthful knight, wch loved a gallant lady’. Simpson considered the evident success of the tune ‘remarkable’ in view of its length, rhythmic complexity and ‘monotonous repetitions’. It might be suggested, however, that to early modern ears and brains such repetitions probably enhanced memorability and hence, perhaps, popularity.
Echoes (an overview)
‘Crimson velvet’ was popular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but was not often nominated on new ballads after c. 1630. Its strongest associations were clearly with tales of tortured aristocratic love, and An excellent Ballad of a Prince of England's Courtship to the King of France's Daughter was probably the most successful example (though Constance of Cleueland was also a well-known song). The tune title, ‘Crimson velvet’, is a little mysterious, and our best guess is that it came into existence following the revelation that the French princess in An excellent Ballad dressed in this aristocratic fabric at the conclusion of the song.
It is initially surprising that the melody was also named on a pair of ballads about the fall of two cities – Calais in 1596 and La Rochelle in 1628 – to the Spanish and French monarchs respectively. Closer attention, however, reveals a possible connection: both cities, like the princess in An excellent Ballad, were French and in distress, and Calais was also personified as a suffering maiden. The romantic and political songs therefore carried the potential to remind listeners of other thematic possibilities. The only other ballad listed below, The fearefull Judgement of almighty god, lacked the French connection but shared with the other songs a mood of tragedy and trauma.
Direct textual connections between the songs are not as conspicuous as those found in association with other tunes, but the sensation of familiarity generated by hearing the ballads in sequence is nevertheless strong: An excellent Ballad, for example, rhymes ‘on the rarest beauty found’ with ‘my heart blood lies on the ground’ in lines 17 and 20 of a verse; at the same points in the tune, the song about Calais rhymes the lines ‘doe in everye corner sounde’ and ‘horses tread them on the grounde’. The concluding line of An excellent Ballad - ‘thus was their sorrow put to flight’ – is echoed faintly in the final words of Constance of Cleueland: ‘this did vertue bringe to passe’.
In addition, lines 9/10 and 12/13 fall on a repeated portion of the melody, and the couplets that accompany the musical lines often seem to call one another to mind: ‘Oh what hap had I/ Thus to wail and cry’ (Constance of Cleveland); ‘Lift up thy fair eyes,/ Listen to my cries’ (An excellent Ballad); and ‘Her babs heer murthered lye;/ In vaine her virgins crye’ (Callis, his wofull Lamentation for her haplesse spoyle).
[See 'Postscript', below, for additional notes on the melody].
Songs and Summaries
An excellent Ballad of a Prince of England's Courtship to the King of France's Daughter... To the Tune of, Crimson Velvet, &c. (composed late sixteenth century; Alex. Milbourn, 1695-1708). Roxburghe 1.102-03; EBBA 30068. Gender – courtship, marriage, femininity; Family – children/parents; Crime – murder, robbery; Death – unlawful killing, grief; Emotions – love, sorrow; Morality – familial; Politics – foreign affairs; Royalty – authority, incognito; Violence – iterpersonal. The French king’s daughter runs away to meet her sweetheart but tragedy befalls him and she re-builds her life as the wife of a humble forester.
Callis, his wofull Lamentation for her haplesse spoyle. To Crimson velvet (copied by hand, c. 1600-03). Shirburn Ballads LX. Places – European, nationalities; Politics – foreign affairs, war; Death – warfare; Violence – between states; Emotions – horror, patriotism, sympathy; Family – children/parents; History – recent; Morality – general; England – Catholic/Protestant, Christ/God, prayer; Environment – buildings. This laments the capture of Calais by the Spanish, and it contrasts the horrible cruelties visited upon the town by Philip II’s men with the kindness shown to the residents in the past by the English.
Constance of Cleueland. A very excellent Sonnet of the most faire Lady Constance of Cleveland, and her disloyall Knight. To the tune of Crimson Velvet (J. Wright, 1602-46). Pepys 1.138-39; EBBA 20060. Gender – marriage, adultery; Morality – sexual; Crime – murder; Emotions – love, anger; Death – execution, unlawful killing, result of immorality; Violence – interpersonal. An incredibly loyal and long-suffering wife endures her husband’s affair with a harlot and offers to die in his place when he is convicted of murder.
The fearefull Judgement of almighty god, shewed upon two sonnes who unnaturallye murthered their naturall father... To the tune of The Marchant of Emden or Crimson Velvet (copied by hand, 1603-16). Shirburn Ballads XXXIX. Family – children/parents, siblings, inheritance; Crime – murder, punishment; Violence – interpersonal; Death – execution; Morality – familial; Economy – money, trade; Emotions – greed; Religion – blasphemy, Christ/God, divine intervention, sin/repentance; Employment – professions; Places – European. Two brothers murder and mutilate their father in order to get their greedy hands on his money but God intervenes to ensure that both are punished by death for their crime.
Rochell her yeelding to the obedience of the French King, on the 28. of October 1628, after a long siege... To the tune of In the dayes of old (J. Wright, c.1628). Pepys 1.96-97; EBBA 20282. Places – European; Politics – foreign affairs, war; Death – warfare; Emotion – sorrow; Bodies – clothing; News – political, international. This reports on the surrender of La Rochelle to the French king after a terrible siege and comments with surprise on the kindness he showed to the residents after his victory.
Postscript
The tune was also nominated occasionally for the singing of ballads published in song-books. See, for example: ‘The Lamentable complaint of Queen Mary for the unkind departure of King Philip’ in Richard Johnson, The Crown Garland of Golden Roses (1659); and ‘Of Venus and Adonis’ in Thomas Deloney, Strange Histories (1612). The tragic romance of both songs was clearly in keeping with the thematic freight carried by the melody in the broadsides listed above.
The tune’s solemnity also recommended it to William Slatyer whose metrical version of psalm 43 was set, somewhat controversially, to ‘Crimson velvet’ (Slatyer insisted on his good intentions but was nevertheless rebuked by his ecclesiastical superiors for mixing sacred texts and secular melodies).
Christopher Marsh
References
Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book 1638, ed. Howard Ferguson (Oxford, 1974), no. 10.
Thomas Deloney, Strange Histories (1612), I1r-3v.
John Forbes, Cantus, Songs and Fancies (1662), no. 57.
Mathew Holmes, lute manuscript (c. 1588-95), Cambridge University Library MS Dd.2.11, fo. 51v (transcription in Ward).
Richard Johnson, The Crown Garland of Golden Roses (1659), H4r-6r.
Christopher Marsh, Music and society in early modern England (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 196, 236, 292, 420-21
Claude Simpson, The British broadside ballad and its music (New Brunswick, 1966), pp. 141-42.
Skene manuscript (mid-seventeenth century), National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 5.2.15 (transcription in Simpson).
William Slatyer, Psalmes, or songs of Sion turned into the language, and set to the tunes of a strange land (1631), pp. 12-13 and table at back.
Jan Starter, Friesche Lusthof (1621), p. 40.
Straloch manuscript (1627-29), transcribed by George Farquhar (1839): National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 5.2.18.
John M. Ward, ‘Apropos The British broadside ballad and its music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 20.1 (Spring 1967), pp. 35-36.
Back to contentsStandard woodcut name: Nobleman’s head
The purpose of this section is to provide evidence relating to the career of the image under discussion, paying particular attention to the ‘reflections’ (inter-song associations and connections) that may have been set up if it was chosen to illustrate more than one ballad. The list given below includes all ballads from the Pepys and Roxburghe collections that feature this woodcut or a close variant (these are the two largest collections, including approximately 3300 sheets, in total). References to ballads from other collections occur only when the featured edition of the song under consideration here (or the featured edition of another song from our list) comes from such a source. Ballads from our chart of best-sellers are presented in bold type, and they also appear in colour where there is a link to another song in the database. Please note, however, that the editions of hit songs listed below are not necessarily those for which digital images are presented on this website. Cross-references to other examples of our featured woodcuts are also presented in bold. It is extremely difficult to date many ballads precisely and the chronological order in which the songs are listed is therefore very approximate (we have drawn on previous attempts to date the ballads, making adjustments when additional evidence can be brought into play).
Reflections (an overview)
This woodcut was used only rarely, and seems to have represented a king in both of the cases listed below (one benevolent and one angry). On An excellent ballad, the figure presumably represents the King of France, looking in disapproval towards his daughter and the English prince with whom she is controversially in love. The picture does not seem to have appeared on other editions of the song, though several of these display a similar scheme with different woodcuts.
Songs and summaries:
Unfeigned Friendship, OR, The Loyalists Cordial Advice (J. Wright, J. Clark, W. Thackery, and T Passinger, 1682-84). Pepys 4.348; EBBA 22012. Politics – domestic, Royalist, Tories/Whigs, controversy; Religion – Catholic/Protestant; Emotions – hope. A call for concord, urging all Whigs and dissenters to abandon the political positions they have taken up in order to foster English Protestant unity (picture placement: the picture appears over the opening verses, next to images of a sociable male gathering and an amphitheatre).
An excellent Ballad of a Prince of England's Courtship to the King of France's Daughter (Alex. Milbourn, 1695-1708). Roxburghe 1.102-03; EBBA 30068. Gender – courtship, marriage, femininity; Family – children/parents; Crime – murder, robbery; Death – unlawful killing, grief; Emotions – love, sorrow; Morality – familial; Politics – foreign affairs; Royalty – authority, incognito; Violence – interpersonal. The French king’s daughter runs away to meet her sweetheart but tragedy befalls him and she re-builds her life as the wife of a humble forester (picture placement: he appears beneath the title, to the left of a Country couple with large flower).
Christopher Marsh
Back to contentsAround 1690, two specialist publishers of cheap print, Charles Brown and Thomas Norris, issued a chapbook version of this ballad, under the title, The history of the famous and renowned Prince Alfred of England, and the King of Frances Daughter. The connections to the ballad are abundantly plain, and numerous features and phrases are retained from the original (in both texts, for example, the princess’ big reveal in the closing verses is announced with the declaration, ‘I am that child’). The publishers also included the full text of the song at the end of their prose narrative.
Of course, the additional space that was available enabled the anonymous authors of the prose version to expand upon the ballad at various points. The main parties are, for example, identified as Prince Alfred and Princess Catherina. When Catherina realises that Alfred has been murdered, she is prevented from killing herself only by the intervention of the forester. In the ballad, the princess does not even contemplate suicide, and this addition to the chapbook therefore has the effect of making her dependence on men more explicit. And the forester’s mother is given new prominence, forcefully disapproving of the couple’s marriage on the ironic grounds that the princess-in-disguise is not good enough for her tree-chopping son.
As with other expanded prose versions of successful songs, The history was clearly an attempt to profit from the popularity of the musical narrative by issuing it in a new format and with additional detail.
Christopher Marsh
An excellent Ballad of a Prince of England,s Courtship to the/ King of France’s Daughter, and how the Prince was disasterously slain; and how the afore/[s]aid Princess was afterwards married to a Forrester. To the Tune of, Crimson Velvet, &c.
[Play each verse by clicking anywhere within its text]
when fair France did flourish, Stories plainly told, Lovers it annoy; The King a Daughter had, beauteous, fair, and lovely, Which made her father glad, she was his only Joy: A Prince of England came, Whose Deeds did merit fame, he woo’d her long, and loe at last, And what he did require, She granted his desire, their hearts in one were linked fast. Which when her father proved, Lord how he was moved, and tormented in his mind, He sought for to prevent them, And to discontent them, Fortune crossed Lovers kind.
were thus bar’d of pleasure. Through the Kings Disdain, which their joys withstood, The Lady lockt up close, her jewels and her treasure, Having no remorse of State and Royal blood: In homely poor array, She went from Court away, to meet her love and hearts delight: Who in a Forrest great, Had taken up his seat, to wait her coming in the nig’t: But loe what sudden Danger, To this Princely Stranger chanced as he sat alone; By Out=laws he was robbed, And with Poniard stabbed, uttering many a dying Groan.
and by true Desire, Wandring all that night, without dread at all; Still unknown she past, in her strange attire, Coming at the last, within Eccho’s call, You fair wood, quoth she, Honoured may you be, harbouring my hearts delight, Which doth incompass here, My Joy and only Dear, my trusty friend & comely Knight; Sweet I come unto thee, Sweet I come to woo thee, that thou maist not angry be, For my long delaying, And thy courteous staying, amends for all I’ll make to thee.
through the silent Forrest, Many a grievous groan sounded in her ear, Where she heard a man to lament the sorest Chance that ever came, forc’d by Deadly strife. Farewell (my Dear) quoth he, Whom I shall never see, for why my life is at an end; For thy sweet sake I dye, Thro’ Villians cruelty, to show I am a faithful friend; Here lie [‘I’ appears here in other editions] a bleeding, While my thoughts are feeding on the rarest beauty found: O hard hap that may be, Little knows my Lady my heart blood lies on the [g]round.
that did break asunder, All the tender strings of his gentle heart: She who knew his voice, at his tale did wonder, All her former joys did to grief convert, Straight she ran to see who this Man should be, That so like her love did speak, and found when as she came, Her lovely Lord lay slain, smear’d in blood which life did break Which when that she espyed, Lord how sore she cried, her sorrows could not counted be, Her eyes like fountains running, While she cry’d out, My Darling, would God that I had dy’d for thee.
twenty time she kissed And his face did wash with her brinish tears; Evry bleeding wound her fair face bedewed, Wiping off the blood with her golden hair: Speak my Lord (quoth she) Speak fair Prince to me one sweet word of comfort give; Lift up thy fair eyes, Listen to my cries, think in what great grief I live; All in vain she sued, All in vain she wooed, the Prince’s life was fled & gone: There stood she still mourning, Till the Suns approaching, & bright day was coming on.
quoth this Royal Lady, Who can now express what will become of me? To my Fathers Court never will I wander, But some service seek where I may placed be. Whilst she thus made her moan, Weeping all alone, in this deep & deadly fear, A Forrester all in green, Most comely to be seen, ranging the wood did find her there, Round beset with sorrow, Maid (quoth he) good morrow, what hard hap hath brought ye here Harder hap did never Chance to a Maiden ever, here lies slain my Brother dear.
gentle Forrester tell me;
Where might I procure
a service in my need?
Pains will I not spare,
but would do my duty,
Ease me of my care,
help my extream need.
The Forrester all amazed,
On her beauty gazed,
till his heart was set on fire:
If fair maid (quoth he)
You will go with me,
you shall have your hearts desire.
He brought her to his mother,
And above all other
he set forth this maidens praise;
Long was his heart inflamed,
At length her love he gained,
so fortune did his glory raise.
with the Kings fair Daughter, Children seven he had, e’er she to him was known: But when he understood she was a Royal Princess, By this means at last he shews forth her fame: He cloathed his children then, Not like to other men, in partly colours strange to see, The right side cloth of gold, The left side to behold of woollen cloth still framed he: Men thereat did wonder; Golden Fame did thunder this strange Deed in every place: The King of France came thither, Being pleasant weather in these woods the hart to chase.
as their mother willed Where the Royal King must of force come by. Their mother richly clad in fair Crimson Velvet, Their father all in gray, most comely to the eye, When this famous king, Noting every thing, did ask how he durst be so bold, To let his wife to wear, And deck his Children there, in costly Robes of pearl & gold. The Forrester bold replyed, And the cause Descried: & to the king he thus did say: Well may they by their mother, Wear rich cloaths with other, being by birth a Princess gay.
more heedfully beheld them, Till a crimson blush his conceit did cross: The more I look (quoth he) upon thy wife and children, The more I call to mind my daughter whom I lost. I am that child (quoth she) Falling on her knee, pardon me my soveraign Liege, The king perceiving this, his Daughter dear did kiss, till joyful tears did stop his speech With his train he turned, And with her sojourned, straight he dub’d her husband knight, He made him Earl of Flanders, One of his chief Commanders; thus was their sorrow put to flight.
Licensed and Entered according to Order.
Printed by and for Alex. Milbourn, and sold by the Booksellers of Pye-corner/ and London-Bridge.
This ballad is included according to the criteria for List A (see Methodology). The evidence presented here is accurate, to the best of our knowledge, as of 1st January 2024.
Shirburn ballads: no. XLVI.
Appearances on Ballad Partners' lists: Pavier and partners, 1624 (as 'In the daies of old' from first line); Coles, Vere, Wright and Clarke, 1675 ('A new ballad shewing how the Prince of England loved the kings daughter of France'); and Thackeray, 1689 ('In the days of old').
Other registrations with Stationers' Company: 1594.
No. of known editions c.1560-1711: 16
No. of extant copies: 12
New tune-titles generated: 'In the days of old' (1 ballad).
Specially-commissioned woodcuts: none known.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library databases: 10 references, with no evidence of later collection as a folk-song (Roud no. V8040).
POINTS: 2 + 30 + 5 + 32 + 12 + 2 + 0 + 0 = 83
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