A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: authenticity and authorship in the afterlife of a British broadside ballad

The scholar in Lloyd subscribed to a view of authenticity common in nineteenth-century ballad studies, when it was standard practice for scholars to accord ballads that originated with broadside printers far less importance than older songs. The most authentic ballads, according to this theory, were anonymous products of the common muse. Francis James Child famously distinguished between true "popular ballads" and their broadside counterparts, making it his life's work to collect the former, and calling most of the latter "thoroughly despicable and worthless" (Child 1900, 466). Nevertheless, in his work, Child showed a more ambivalent attitude towards broadside ballads, considering some to be worthy, especially those "printed from oral tradition" (Child 1860, vol. 1, vii).

It was a similar ideological and aesthetic position that led Lloyd to resurrect "Reynardine" in the first place. Lloyd is generally disparaging toward broadside ballads, calling them, for example, "turgidly literary--if not always very literate" (Lloyd 1967, 28). Yet, as with Child, there were songs among the broadside stock that earned his praise, particularly ones he thought were old. Lloyd includes "Reynardine" in a group of such praiseworthy broadside ballads, characterising them as "songs lying deep in the tradition, the 'classical' pieces of folk song, that were issued by the street-paper press" (Lloyd 1967, 28). In other words, Lloyd felt that these songs were authentic products of the oral tradition rather than the individual work of professional writers. It was, to his mind, an accident of history that our first record of them is on broadsides. [10] From Lloyd the scholar's point of view, then, "Reynardine" was a natural song to revive; it was one of the few authentically folkloric pieces in the broadside repertoire, one that had fallen out of oral circulation in Britain.

The next obvious question is: why did Lloyd not simply sing the ballad as printed on broadsides? It is paradoxical that Lloyd, who mistrusted ballads of professional authorship, should nonetheless engage in the kind of surreptitious writing, editing and reliance on literary authors that produced his "Reynardine." What, then, prompted Lloyd to put together this particular text of "Reynardine"?

The answer to this question, I believe, lies in the other facet of Lloyd's personality--the romantic. Lloyd was a romantic in the sense that he was prone to leaps of the imagination that grossed over the banalities of life. In Lloyd's mind, the lives of folk-song characters, and of the folk community itself, were more emotionally rewarding than the historical record suggested. This came out most strongly in his approach to erotic songs, on which topic he wrote effusively:

   The erotic folklore of the soil ... with its clean joy and
   acceptance of the realities of virginity and desire, passion and
   pregnancy, belongs to a country people living an integrated
   deeply-communal life ... for whom all nature is sexualised and the
   closest relation exists between the fertility of seeds, beasts and
   humans. [...] Nowhere does this intimate consonance of nature show
   clearer than in the erotic folk songs. [...] (Lloyd 1967, 185).