Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 7 January 1905
The Foxhunt (Bold Reynolds), Stephen Poll, Tilney St Lawrence, Norfolk
A fox, Bold Reynold, hears the hounds coming for him and is chased for four hours. He says if they let him go, he won’t kill any more feathered fowls or lambs, but they do not spare him.
In early January 1905 Vaughan Williams travelled to Tilney All Saints, a remote fen village west of King’s Lynn, Norfolk. The trip seems to have been the result of a letter he sent to the national newspapers in October of the previous year in which he warned that if the tunes of folk songs ‘were not soon noted down and preserved they will be lost forever.’ He invited readers to get in touch with the Folk Song Society if they had information on traditional ballads and offered ‘to come and note down songs from the mouths of the singers’. It’s thought likely that the vicar of Tilney All Saints got in touch.
On this day Vaughan Williams met Mr Whitby, the sexton (the person who looks after the local church and churchyard), from whom he collected three songs before meeting Stephen Poll of Tilney St Lawrence, three miles to the south. The composer described Poll as a ‘Labourer about 80’, although he was actually in his late 60s, a widower, with a teenage son. Vaughan Williams wasn’t always a very good judge of age: most of the singers were agricultural labourers and had led hard physical lives outdoors – they must have looked very weathered and worn to a well-to-do man in his 30s.
Poll was a fiddle player, and Vaughan Williams took down four dances he’d learnt at Lynn Fair: ‘…when a new dance was danced he used to learn it by dancing in it – then later he would ask for the same again and then knew the tune and the dance…’ Fiddle playing provided extra income - when he played for country dances ‘each couple as they got to the top would give him a penny’.
‘Bold Reynolds’ was collected across England in the twentieth century. Vaughan Williams’s version is currently tagged as the earliest recorded, although it clearly has a close relationship with ‘Bold Reynard’, found on early 19th century broadsides, in which the fox narrates its own demise in a similar way. It is certain that the words for Poll’s version did not originate in the flat lands of eastern England with its chase ‘over hills and mountains high and over stony rocks.’
The melody has an unusual mixed time signature of 3/4 and 5/8
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/3/50
Roud No. 190 and 1868
Next post: 8 January