Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 23 December 1904
‘Maria Marten’, Mr Booker, Kingsfold, Surrey
The singer, William Corder, tells how he killed Maria Marten after luring her to the Red Barn with a promise of marriage. Maria’s mother is haunted by dreams of her missing daughter lying dead in the Barn: the murdered woman’s body is subsequently found there. Corder is put to trial and found guilty. He warns other young men to think of the consequences of his crime as he prepares to be ‘hanged upon a tree’.
On this third day in a row of collecting, Vaughan Williams met Mr Booker at The Wheatsheaf pub (now The Owl) in Kingsfold, a hamlet in Warnham parish, about six miles south of Leith Hill Place. There were a few Booker households in the area, including those of John, a stockman, and of William, an agricultural labourer, both in their late 60s. John seems to have lived close to the pub, so he may have been the singer that Vaughan Williams met, along with W and J Chennell (I think these are William, in his early 50s, and James, his lodger, presumably related, both agricultural workers); Ted Gill (unidentified); and Mr Knight (several possibles included on the 1901 census), who were all in the pub having a ‘sing-song’. There were a couple of Garman households in the village, too, [25 December 1903 & 25 May 1904] which might explain how the composer knew about this singing party. He recorded ten songs including old favourites such as ‘Salisbury Plain’ and ‘Golden Glove’.
This ballad tells the story of the real murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn, Polstead, Essex in 1827, for which Corder was hanged in the following year. The circumstances of the crime, including ghostly visitations in the evidence of Marten’s step-mother, created huge interest. Several ballads and a play kept the story in the public eye for many years, and the barn and Maria’s grave became tourist attractions.
The tune Booker sang is another variant of ‘Lazarus’ [1 September 1904]. In the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (7, 1905) Vaughan Williams published four variants of this tune associated with ‘Maria Marten’, which he collected during 1904 and early 1905 [see also 8 October 1904]. Broadwood traces the melody back to the ballad ‘Gilderoy’, published in 1719 and she lists numerous examples of other songs set to variants of the melody. The writer of ‘Maria Marten’ purposely framed the words to fit this popular tune as a way of making it easy to learn and sing.
In December 1904 Vaughan Williams was already working on the commission to edit a new English Hymnal [see also 25 December 1903; 23 July 1904; 10 August 1904;] and was looking for melodies to fit the words of religious texts. He matched ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’ by Horatius Bonar to this tune which he renamed ‘Kingsfold’, after the village. Despite this title, the melody is not an exact replica of Booker’s variant. Instead, it is the one published by Broadwood in 1893 as ‘Dives and Lazarus’. Recalling the first moment he saw that melody in her book, Vaughan Williams wrote ‘this was what we had all been waiting for – something which we knew already – something which had always been with us if we had only known it’.
Broadwood and Vaughan Williams both noted that the melody was commonly associated with the words of a carol, ‘Come all you faithful Christians’ and he later published that song in The Oxford Book of Carols (1928) as ‘Come, all you worthy Christian men’, this time renaming the tune ‘Job’. The melody remained an inspiration to the composer throughout his life, and features as a theme in Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes (1930); Festival Te Deum (1938); and in the film score for The Dim Little Island (1949) as well as Five Variants of Dives & Lazarus (1939) [see also 1 September 1904].
Vaughan Williams didn’t supply the words for any of the songs he recorded at the Wheatsheaf sing-song, so I’ve sourced the lyrics from a commonly found 19th century broadsheet, which is also transcribed in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (7, 1905).
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/3/31
Roud No.215
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