I am extremely fond of house-spirits, two of which appeared in my first books for children. The three books of my Troll trilogy all feature one of the Scandinavian nisses I first met in Thomas Keightley’s 1828 compendium ‘The Fairy Mythology’. I was charmed by their mischief, vanity, naïvety, essential goodwill and occasional bursts of temper. My Nis has all these characteristics and I love him. The second house spirit arrived in my fourth book ‘Dark Angels’: he’s a hob (a ‘bwbach’ in Welsh) who lives under the hearthstone of a 12th century motte and bailey castle on the Welsh Marches, loves food and does his gruff best to help the young daughter and heiress of Hugo de la Motte Rouge, the lord of the place. (I wrote a short story involving this hob, which you can read here.)
There are hobs or brownies in all parts of the British Isles, but some have names of their own, though these names themselves are often generic: if the English have Puck, the Irish have the pooka or phooka and the Welsh have the pwca... In Scotland though, the brownie is often named the Billy Blin’, with variants such as Billy Blynde or Belly Blin – and he is found in a number of ballads in which he usually takes on an advisory role. I should issue a warning that the ballads 'Gil Brenton' and 'Earl Lithgow', examined in this post, include sexual violence.
But ‘Young Bekie’ (Child Ballad 53c) does not! A Scottish knight named Young Bekie takes service with the King of France. He falls in love with the king’s daughter, Burd Isbel, and is ‘thrown into prison strong’ where the mice and the ‘bold rattons’ gnaw his yellow hair, a scene Arthur Rackham obviously could not resist illustrating. Burd Isbel simply steals the keys and rescues him: this practical young woman then provides a razor for his chin, a comb for his hair, five hundred pounds ‘for his pocket’, a fast horse and (a little oddly) a number of hounds all from one litter, one of which is called Hector. The two young people then part, solemnly promising to marry within three years. Off goes Young Bekie to Scotland and his own lands, but within the year he is ‘forced to marry a duke’s daughter’ or lose all his land. The young man laments his ill fortune, since – he says –
‘I know not what to dee,
For I canno win to Burd Isbel
And she kens nae [doesn’t know] to come to me.’
Enter
the Billy Blin’:
O it fell once upon a day
Burd Isbel
fell asleep
An up it
starts the Belly Blin
An stood at her bed feet.
‘Oh waken,
waken, Burd Isbel,
How can ye
sleep so soun’
When this is
Bekie’s wedding day,
An’ the marriage gaein on?’
The Billy Blin’ tells her what to do. She must take two of the ‘Marys’ (serving women) from her mother’s bower, dress them in green and herself in ‘the red scarlet’, with rich girdles about their waists, and go down to the sea strand where a ‘Hollans boat’ will come rowing in for them. Burd Isbel takes his advice and when the boat arrives, ‘the Belly Blin was the steerer o’t/To row her o’er the sea.’ As Burd Isbel and her maids arrive at the castle gate, she hears music playing for the wedding, and gives the porter ‘guineas three’ to call the bridegroom down to her. When the porter describes the ladies’ rich clothing to the company the bride comments sarcastically that if these ladies are ‘braw without’, she herself is ‘braw within’: but Young Bekie jumps up. ‘I’ll lay my life it’s Burd Isbel/Come o’er the sea to me.’ Running downstairs he takes her in his arms: she reminds him of all she’s done for him, the wedding is cancelled and the other bride sent home: ‘For I maun marry my Burd Isbel/That’s come o’er the sea to me.’
Isbel is not a bit surprised by the Billy Blin’s warning: he seems a known and respected household inhabitant. I should like to point out that this ballad is another instance of the many ‘fairy’ tales, whether prose or verse, in which the girl does nearly everything: Burd Isbel gets all the action. She rescues Young Bekie in the first place – and with help from the Billy Blin’ she crosses the sea and ejects the bride he doesn’t want.
In ‘Willie’s Lady’ (Child Ballad 6), a wicked mother – ‘a vile rank witch of vilest kind’ – prevents her son’s wife from giving birth, so ‘in her bower she sits wi’ pain/And Willie mourns o’er her in vain.’ Willie tries bribing his mother to undo the spell she has cast on his wife:
He says; ‘My
ladie has a cup
Wi’ gowd and
silver set about.
This goodlie
gift shall be your ain
And let her
be lighter o’ her young bairn.’
His
mother replies:
‘Of her
young bairn she’ll ne’er be lighter
Nor in her
bower to shine the brighter:
But she
shall die and turn to clay
And you shall wed another may.’
While
his wife lies in agony wishing she could die, Willie tries again to bribe his mother,
offering her a horse shod with gold, with golden bells hanging from every lock
of its mane. Again his mother refuses. Trying for the third time, Willie offers
her his wife’s girdle of red gold, ringing with golden bells that hang from a
silver hem, but this too is refused – and in steps the Billy Blin’.
Then out and spake the Billy Blind;
He spake aye
in good time.
‘Ye doe ye
to the market place
And there ye buy a loaf o’ wax.
He tells Willie to mould the wax into the shape of a new-born baby, place two glass eyes in its head, invite his mother to its christening – and listen carefully to her words. And fooled into believing the baby has been born, she exclaims:
‘Oh wha has
loosed the nine witch knots
That was
among that ladie’s locks?
And wha has taen
out the kaims of care
That hangs
among that ladie’s hair?
And wha’s
taen down the bush o’ woodbine
That hangs
atween her bower and mine?
And wha has
killd the master kid
That ran
beneath that ladie’s bed?
And wha has
loosed her left-foot shee
And letten
that ladie lighter be?’
Hearing this, Willie looses the nine witch knots, removes the ‘combs of care’, pulls down the bush of woodbine, kills the ‘master kid’ – it really is a young goat! – and takes off his wife’s left shoe. The lady then promptly gives birth to ‘a bonny young son’. We don’t find out what, if anything, happens to the wicked mother; it’s simply to be hoped she doesn’t try this again – but the Billy Blin’ has clearly saved the day.
In ‘Gil Brenton’ (Child Ballad 5c), the young hero – a title he hardly merits given his behaviour – meets a young woman, the seventh of seven sisters, who comes to the wood to pick lilies and roses for her sisters’ bowers. She tells what happened next:
‘And was I
weel or was I wae
He keepit me
a’ the simmer’s day.
‘And tho I
for my hame-gaun sicht [sighed for my
home]
He keepit me a’ the simmer nicht.’
He gives her tokens – a gold ring, a short knife and ‘three locks of his yellow hair’ – and then departs. The result of course is that she becomes pregnant, and seeks to find him across the sea. Sending her dowry ahead of her, she arrives at his dwelling, only to be warned that ‘Childe Brenton’ has already ‘wedded’ seven king’s daughters, but never bedded them: they have all proved not to be maidens, so he has ‘cut the breasts frae their breast-bane’ and sent them back to to their fathers. Mysteriously she still wants to marry him, and is warned also not to sit in a particular golden chair until she is bidden to do so. But she does. At this point the Billy Blin’ pops up and defends the girl by suggesting that she only sat in the chair because ‘the bonnie may is tired wi’ riding’ – which sounds reasonable in an otherwise unreasonable milieu. Presumably anxious about the chance of having her breasts carved off by an ‘unco’ lord’ (‘unco’ means strange, uncanny, weird, a description we can agree seems apt) she begs her virginal maid to take her place in the bridal bed. For her lady’s sake the girl agrees, and when they are lying down together Gil Brenton asks the Billy Blin’ to tell him ‘if this fair dame be a leal [true] maiden’. The Billy Blin’ replies:
I wat [know] she is as leal a wight
As the moon
shines on in a simmer night.
I wat she is
as leal a may
As the sun
shines on in a simmer day.
But your
bonnie bride is in her bower
Dreeing the
mither’s trying hour.’
[Enduring the birth of her child: becoming a mother]
Leaping out of bed, Gil Brenton runs to his mother’s bower and tells her that ‘the maiden I took to my bride/Has a bairn atween her sides’ and is currently giving birth. You’d assume this might have been noticed before, but this is a ballad: so no. Rushing to the lady’s chamber, his mother flings the door wide, demanding to know who is the father of the child? The lady tells her story, produces the tokens, and the pair are united. This particular version was taken and slightly abridged, from R.H. Cromek’s ‘Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song’ (1810) in which the introduction states it to have been ‘copied from the recital of a peasant-woman of Galloway, upwards of ninety years of age’, which may well put it back at least to the mid-1700s. Cromek gives the title as ‘We Were Sisters, We Were Seven’, and he comments:
The singular character of the Billy Blin’ (the Scotch Brownie, and the lubbar fiend of Milton*) gives the whole an air of the marvellous, independently of the mystic chair, on which the principal catastrophe [denouement, reveal] of the story turns.
Strangely, the ‘Child 5c’ version misses out a long verse passage from Cromek’s. In it, following the rape and ignorant of the victim’s identity, Brenton arrives at the seven sisters’ gate and shouts that he’s a ‘lord o’ lands wide’ and wants one of them to be his bride, preferably the youngest. The youngest, speaking for herself, remarks: ‘Little ken’d he, when aff he rode,/I was his token’d luve in the wood’ – but at least the passage explains how she knows where to find him, and where to send the dowry. Unembarrassed by Brenton’s dubious character, the ballad ends on a tender note as Brenton kneels at his lady’s bedside:
O tauk [take] ye up my son,’ said he,
And mither,
tent [look after] my fair ladie;
O wash him
purely in the milk,
And lay him
saftly in the silk;
An’ ye maun [you must] bed her very soft,
For I maun
kiss her wondrous oft.
It was well
written on his breast bane,
Childe
Branton was the father’s name;
It was well
written on his right hand,
He was the heir o’ his daddie’s land.
Ballads in which the girl ends up married to the man who raped her seem deeply problematic today. Back in those days though, how likely was it that girls in such circumstances got any redress whatever? I think such ballads offer a fantasy ending: the girl gets married to the rich lord and her child becomes legitimate, and heir to a fine estate. The Billy Blin did his best, I suppose.
A ballad with a similar theme is ‘Earl Lithgow’, variant F of Child Ballad 110 generally known as ‘The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter’. The Billy Blin’ once more appears in it; this ballad too begins with a rape; but the young woman gets as good a revenge as she can and is more than a match for Earl Lithgow. He tries to hide his identity, but she knows his real name and races after him when he rides away. When they come to the River Dee his horse swims it, but she swims faster, fast as an otter and reaches the ‘queen’s high court’ well ahead of him, where she gains an audience with the queen. Announcing proudly that she can neither ‘card nor spin’, but knows how to ‘sit in a lady’s bower and lay gold on a seam’, she accuses Lithgow, who is the queen’s brother, of stealing her maidenhead. Brought before her, Lithgow attempts to pay her off with one – two – three purses of gold, but the young woman will have none of it:
‘I’ll hae
nane o’ your purses o’ gold
That ye tell
[count] on your knee:
But I will
hae yoursell,’ said she,
‘The queen has granted it me.’
The furious Earl is forced to marry her, and she taunts him with her supposed low birth (he wasn’t there when she told the queen about being able to sew with gold thread). As the pair pass by a watermill, she tells him how her ‘auld mither, the carlin’ (a carlin is an old woman) would have pricked and stung him like the nettles that grow by the dyke.
‘Sae well’s
she would you pyke,’ she says,
‘She would
you pyke and pou [prick and pull],
And wi’ the dust lies in the mill
Sae would she mingle you.’
If that wasn’t sufficiently crushing, she further informs him that her ‘mither’ would sup till she was full, lay her head on a sod and snore like a sow. This is her heritage: THIS is who he’s married! He can throw his china plates away: she’s happy eating from a ‘humble gockie’ – a wooden dish. She doesn’t want to sleep in ‘holland sheets’, not she: she prefers ‘canvas clouts’. She is wreaking sweet revenge on him by shaming him socially as deeply as he’d shamed her. And it’s working:
He’s drawn
his hat out ower his face,
Muckle shame
thought he;
She’s driven
her cap out ower her locks,
And a light laugh gae she.
I love that! At long last he begins to wonder about her. ‘If ye be a carlin’s get,’ he begins slowly, still unsure – ‘As I trust well ye be/Where got ye all the gay claithing/Ye brought to the greenwood with thee?’ The quick-thinking young woman instantly replies that her mother was an old nurse, whose mistress would sometimes give her cast-off clothes which she kept for her daughter. Then comes the sting in the tail:
And I put them on in
good greenwood,
To beguile fause [false] squires like thee.
At this point the Billy Blin’ decides that enough is probably enough, and intervenes.
It’s out then spake the
billy-blin,
Says, I speak nane out
of time [not before time]
If ye make her lady o’ nine cities,
She’ll make you lord o’
ten.
Out it spake the
billy-blin,
Says, The one may serve
the other;
The king of Gosford’s ae
daughter,
And the queen of Scotland’s brother.
Revealed as a princess, the girl is distinctly displeased and turns on him:
Wae but worth you,
billy-blin.
An ill death may ye die!
My bed-fellow he’d been
for seven years
Or he’d ken’d sae muckle
frae me.
[He’d
have been my bedfellow for seven years
Before
he’d learned so much from me!]
She’s clearly enjoyed humiliating her new husband, who equally clearly deserved it. He now at least tries to make peace, saying:
Fair fa’ ye, ye billy-blin
And well may ye aye be!
In my stable is the
ninth horse I’ve kill’d
Seeking this fair ladie.
Now we’re married and
now we’re bedded
And in each other’s arms shall lie.
Here’s
to the girl who got her own back! More colourful stuff about the
Billy Blin’ in my next post.
* The lubber fiend is described by Milton as a 'drudging goblin' in his 1631 poem L' Allegro. After spending a night threshing a quantity of corn that 'ten day-labourers could not end': "Then lies him down, the lubber fiend/And stretch'd out all the chimney's length/Basks at the fire his hairy strength...' He sounds rather large for a brownie, but who knows?
Picture credits
Brownie sweeping - by Alice B Woodward, wikipedia
Young Bekie in prison - by Arthur Rackham - Some British Ballads, 1919
The Billy Blin' wakes Burd Isbel - by Arthur Rackham - Some British Ballads, 1919
Willie's Lady - by Vernon Hill - Ballads Weird and Wonderful, 1911
The Knight and the Shepherdess - by Byam Shaw - Ballads and Lyrics of Love, 1908
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