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A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: authenticity and authorship in the afterlife of a British broadside ballad
Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Stephen D. Winick
The list of British and Irish revival singers who have recorded similar versions is impressive, including Shirley Collins, Fairport Convention, Archie Fisher, Anne Briggs, Bert Jansch, June Tabor, Martin Carthy, Isla St Clair, John Roberts and Tony Barrand, and Finbar and Eddie Furey (see Discography, p. 307). Judging from the number of revival recordings, we might be inclined to conclude that "Reynardine" had been common in pre-revival British singing tradition.
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In fact, there is little evidence for this. An examination of Steve Roud's broadside and folksong indexes (Roud 1994a; 1994b) reveals that in Britain and Ireland "Reynardine" was disseminated primarily through print, rather than through oral performance. Approximately twenty broadside printings are listed in the Roud index, and I have seen several not included there. By contrast, according to Roud's Folksong index, "Reynardine" was collected from oral tradition only once in Britain or Ireland before the folk revival versions began to be recorded (Roud 1994b). That two-verse, fragmentary version was taken down by W. Percy Merrick in Sussex in 1889 and published in 1904 (Merrick 1904, 271-2). [1] The tune without words appeared in the Grieg-Duncan collection from Scotland (Shuldham-Shaw and Lyle 1983, 333), while a stray verse appeared here and there in the works of Irish composers and authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the oral tradition in Ireland in the 1940s. [2] The apparent absence of any pre-revival collected text of longer than two verses, suggests, however, that "Reynardine" never featured strongly in the oral tradition in Britain or Ireland.
The presence of "Reynardine" in the repertoires of so many English revivalists appears instead to be the result of the authorial and authoritative influence of A. L. Lloyd, who was both a singer and a folksong scholar. As will be evident in the following discussion, Lloyd, who sang the song and passed it on to many of the younger revivalists in a new form, was apparently the source of all British revival versions. In a pioneering scholarly essay devoted to "Reynardine," Douglas DeNatale--citing Stephen Sedley's The Seeds of Love (1967, 89)--states that Lloyd collected the song during fieldwork from a singer called Tom Cook, of Eastbridge, Suffolk (DeNatale 1980, 43). In fact, it is unlikely that Lloyd had ever heard anyone sing "Reynardine" before he did so himself. A variety of evidence, both contextual and textual, suggests that Lloyd actually constructed his version from fragmentary texts learned from books, filling it out with broadside stanzas. The evidence further suggests that Lloyd considered "Reynardine" a model of authentic folksong, and changed it only to make it better conform to his idea of its authentic essence.
Establishing Lloyd's Authorship of "Reynardine" I: Contextual Evidence
There appears to be no direct evidence, as far as I am aware, to suggest that Lloyd actually collected the song from a Tom Cook of Eastbridge, Suffolk--or from any other individual in any part of Britain--as Sedley said he did, an ascription repeated by DeNatale in his 1980 article. It is not clear how Sedley came by that information and we can only conjecture that he might have got it from Lloyd himself, as Sedley thanks Lloyd for his expert help in the introduction to his songbook. Furthermore, in his own sleeve-notes to the song, Lloyd does not mention that he collected it from a Tom Cook or even that he collected it from oral tradition. It is unlikely, however, that Sedley invented a Suffolk singer of that name; Lloyd had already referred to a Tom Cook as a source of songs in the sleeve notes to his LP English Drinking Songs (Lloyd 1961)--an ascription that, as we shall see, raises queries about the accuracy of Lloyd's source attributions, and is also relevant to the following discussion of the Reynardine ballad.
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