ABSTRACT
In bustling London in 1609 an exclamation of Pardonnez moi, je vous en prie may have sounded a marvellously genteel note in the midst of the noisy chaos of urban life, but when the composer Thomas Ravenscroft used a rough phonetic approximation of this phrase – Pardona moy ie vous an pree – in one of his Freemens songs for three voices he seems to have had something other than courtesy in mind. 1 He put the words in the mouths of three demobilised military men, one treble, one tenor and one bass, and made them declaim: ‘Wee be Souldiers three, / Pardona moy ie vous an pree, / Lately come forth of the low country, / with neuer a penny of mony.’ In this context, the cosmopolitan phrase, so mannered in the abstract, became more menacing. The soldiers’ apparent courtesy cannot hide their assertiveness, their appetite and their poverty. And when they demand that their fellow drinkers toast them – ‘And he that will not pledge me this / Pardona moy ie vous an pree: / Payes for the shot what euer it is, / with neuer a penny of mony’ – it is clear that they are threatening to exact an on-the-spot fine on all who resist their charm. Ravenscroft’s ditty not only summons up a common scenario – the unsettling effect caused by an aggressive group, galvanised by drink and a sense of entitlement – but also gestures to the elusive and imponderable nature of early modern ‘popular culture’.
