ABSTRACT
Popular folk songs can serve as codes, carrying freights of cultural significance often lost on later audiences. The early modern Walsingham ballad – one of the more popular tunes of the period – was precisely such a meaning-laden work. Widely attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh although perhaps pre-dating him, it tells a story in 11 stanzas of a male pilgrim who journeys to Walsingham (or, in some versions, returns from the shrine) in order to find a woman who has been unfaithful to him.1 The song is named for Walsingham and prominently features Walsingham, and yet has little to do with Walsingham per se. As such it highlights the historical distance between the medieval piety focused on Our Lady of Walsingham and the more secularized early modern world depicted in the song. Furthermore, as a song about male constancy and female infidelity, it crystallizes in musical form a whole host of assumptions about human nature, assumptions that resonate strongly with the demise of Marian piety in early modern England. Adaptations and reiterations of Ralegh’s ballad appear in a variety of texts, as when Old Merrythought sings the distinctive first stanza in Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle or when Ophelia sings a variation of the second stanza in Hamlet. Helen Hackett argues that these references to Walsingham mainly provide “evidence of how Catholic terminology persisted in currency in popular culture,” but while correct at one level, this view also implies that medieval Catholic forms and Renaissance folk ballads are, respectively, like flies and amber: the former is preserved intact and unchanged in the latter’s translucent medium.2 This is, however, to misrepresent
the vitality and transformative power of the early modern ballad tradition. Indeed, given the contexts in which the Walsingham Ballad appears in the early modern period, it seems that by the end of the sixteenth century, the ballad had become a codeword for the baser sexual impulses of fallen human beings. The issue of sexual misconduct that Ralegh lightly introduces with his wayward female pilgrim becomes more and more central in later versions, so much so that by Francis Quarles’s 1649 play The Virgin Widow, a whistled fragment of the Walsingham ballad sharply intensifies a feud between a husband and wife, one in which each accuses the other of lewd and tawdry behavior.
