Haunting Songs of the Condemned: Singing The News of Executions with Una McIlvenna

Song: It all you that come to see my fatal end. Unto my dying words I pray attend. Let my misfortunes now a warning be to everyone of high and low degree. Had I been kind and loving to my wife, I might have lived a long and happy life. But having run a loose lascivious race, my days will end in shame and sad disgrace. My duty towards God I did neglect. Therefore, what mercy can I now expect when I, before the mighty judge appear to answer for my sins committed here in wicked pleasures? I my days have spent and never had the power to repent till now. At last my dismal do my sea the just reward of cruel villainy.

Michelle: Hi everyone and welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles. First of all, thank you for taking a listen to this episode. Before we begin, I just want to throw out a few ways you can get involved and help support the show. We have a patreon page as well as an Amazon link, so hopefully if you're interested in supporting you can find a way that best suits you.  All of the links for those can either be found in the show notes or over on the website. Of course, just continuing to help spread the word of the show on social media, leaving reviews and sharing with friends and family is also a huge help. So thank you for all that you do. And now let's get started by introducing today's podcast, August. Within its folds a tapestry woven with tales of triumph, tragedy and the human condition. And what better way to explore these narratives than through the haunting melodies of execution ballads? Today we embark on a journey across time from the 16th century to the early 20th century to uncover the remarkable phenomena of execution ballads. These ballads served as the newspapers of their time, bringing news of criminals deeds and their ultimate fate to the masses through compelling songs. Imagine bustling streets, lively marketplaces and bridges where street singers transform these stories into musical narratives, inviting listeners to engage with tales both chilling and compassionate. Sold by street singers, itinerant souls who brought these ballads to life. Through their heartful renditions, these street singers often lived hand to mouth, driven by a genuine desire to share stories, entertain and perhaps make a living. Along the way, execution ballads, sold on cheap single sheet broadsides and pamphlets, came alive through the power of music. These ballads, set to familiar tunes, held the ability to captivate anyone who heard them, turning listeners into participants in the storytelling. The melodies not only entertained, but also educated, spreading awareness of crime, punishment and the human experiences behind them. Sometimes graphically violent, often compassionate and occasionally satirical, these ballads were a reflection of society's complex emotions, reminding us of our shared humanity. Joining us today is a distinguished guest who has immersed herself in the world of execution ballads. Un MacIlvenna, an honorary senior lecturer in English at the Australian National University, is a literary and cultural historian with a passion for the early modern and 19th century Pan-European tradition of singing the news. Her expertise shines through her extensive research into execution ballads, exploring the depths of this unique art form. Una's monograph, Singing the News of Death Execution Ballads in Europe 1500 to 1900, published by Oxford University Press in 2022, unravels the intricate threads of execution ballads and their impact on societies across Europe. In addition to her research, she has launched Executionballads.com, a website that preserves the echoes of the past by featuring recorded renditions of these ballads. This website serves as a portal to step back in time and listen to the same songs that once echoed through marketplaces and streets. Una's work has been acknowledged in academic journals and publications, including past and Present, Renaissance Studies, Media History and Huntingdon Library Quarterly. She is also a co founder of the International Song Studies Network, fostering a community of scholars dedicated to exploring the diverse facets of song traditions. Through una's insights, we're transported to an era where the boundaries between news, music and emotion blurred, creating a rich tapestry of history that reverberates through time. Join us as we journey into the past, guided by the melodies of execution ballads, and unlock the stories of those whose lives were forever etched into the annals of history. Be prepared to be captivated, moved and enlightened as we venture into the world of execution ballads with our guest Una. Let the melodies of the past carry us through a remarkable exploration of human experience and the power of song. Without further ado, let's embark on this enchanting journey and delve deep into the forgotten corners of history to uncover stories that resonate with us even today.

Song: Forbear your vile plotting, all you that design to escape God's vengeance repent you in time. Remember that prince is his vice,  enrolled in heaven, the chief of his care. No whispers in secret but what are revealed from God. There is nothing that can be concealed. In vain are your plots when his mercy says nay, tis yourselves, you ensnare. You yourselves are the prey tis of Colbin I sing, who once was of fame and good reputation, but now to his shame thou treason has solid his nobler parts and brought him to ruin though his just deserts twas Popish infection to ruin the state that wrought his confusion and hastened his fate. Such desperate malice is price to betray, but in vain are men's plottings if heaven gain.

Michell: Hi Una. Thank you so much for joining me this evening.

Una McIlvenna: Thanks for having me.

Speaker C: Do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about your background?

Una McIlvenna: Sure.

Una McIlvenna: I came to academia late as a mature student, and I did a PhD in something and a very different kind of topic.

Una McIlvenna: It was about the court of Catherine Demetici in France in the 16th century. But what I was looking at were satirical attacks on the court. And at the very end of the PhD, just before I had to kind of finalize it, I realized there were songs everywhere and that I hadn't really talked about them enough. So when I was looking for my first job, there was one going that wanted someone to look at public execution. And I said, I'll do that, and I'll look at songs about public executions. And I had seen a handful of them, literally, like about five.

Una McIlvenna: Some in English and one or two in French.

Una McIlvenna: And I thought, maybe there's a whole bunch.

Una McIlvenna: And I'll write about that and I'll do several languages to try and make this a comparative study and I got the job but I didn't know if maybe the five ballots that I'd seen were all that there were. And of course what I discovered is that there are thousands all over Europe. This is an enormous enduring phenomenon that goes on from the start of the printing press right into the 20th century. And there are execution ballads in every language that all look very similar in fact.

Michelle: So for anybody that is not aware of what an execution ballad is, do you want to just explain precisely what it is?

Una McIlvenna: Sure. So they are songs that tell the news of crimes that have happened and of their very public and usually quite graphic executions. They were one of the genres of, or I should say, the categories of news that was delivered in song form. So it's really important to understand that in early modern Europe most people can't read. And so telling the news via song is a really effective way of allowing people to understand what's happening. So there are news songs about every topic you can imagine politics, military conflicts, natural disasters, anything you can imagine. And so crime and punishment, just like today, is one of the main categories of news. So execution ballads are this huge subgenre of news singing. They look really similar even in all of these languages that I looked at. They are cheaply, printed on very cheap paper.

Una McIlvenna: They're printed, I mean, in their hundreds. If not their thousands or even in some case by the time you get to the 19th century they're printing literally millions of sheets of songs on a single song. And they have text in most languages. There are some exceptions. In most languages they're set to a familiar tune, so you already know that tune. So as soon as you've got the words, you can sing along, which of course helps with memorization and therefore you're more likely to kind of repeat the message in that song. And that's important because these songs are almost always, well, for a start, the guilty party, the condemned criminal is always guilty, no question. They are entirely repentant, they are full of remorse. In fact, a lot of the songs are in the first person voice of the condemned criminal who sings to the sort of imagined spectators from the scaffold in the last moments of their life. And they sing the tale of their descent into sin and crime and they relate the crime usually if it's like a murder, it's usually a very graphically described murder. And then they say, learn from my mistakes, don't do what I did. You don't want to end up like me. And the very last verse, or a couple of verses, they turn to God and they say, please God, Jesus, please save my soul. So it's this cry for mercy at the end. So that format you find all over Europe, sometimes it's in the third person, but still that kind of format, really, there's a lot of continuity in this genre. And the idea is that they exist to teach a lesson to you and to me, to ordinary people, about how to avoid sin and crime and why it's so important. Because the condemned criminal is often presented as a very kind of ordinary person who has just fallen into a life of sin. And that can happen to any of us because we're all sinners. Right? So the songs are very didactic. They're very much about learn Your lesson and they're very conservative in their approach. And so the bad guy is getting his just desserts in the end and I think that's why they're appealing.

Michelle: And I suppose, I mean, you referenced that the medium of song was something that went to everybody, whether they could read or whether they couldn't. So it kind of crosses that barrier of difficulty that might come from poor literacy skills, particularly at that time when obviously not everyone had access to education, but they're also catchy. So you've got something here that is easily picked up, that can be heard, sung, passed on, something that is sung in the homes on the street by any age, by any person, any kind of part of the class system. It kind of transcends all of those.Different things, doesn't it?

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, absolutely. And for a lot of these songs, we still have those melodies. And for the really popular ones, you get people of every social class singing them. So these aren't songs that are just for the working class. And the elite composers are setting courtly arrangements of these songs as well, these melodies. So the melodies are very promiscuous, they move around, they go from court to street, from church to secular. They are absolutely kind of universal, the really popular ones are. And so it means that that message yes, is available to everyone because anyone who can hear can hear a ballad. So it's a really, really effective way of spreading a message. It doesn't matter your gender, your education, your social class, your age, everyone can hear the message of a ballad, even if they can't see it. And so that's also really important that these are printed songs, but they can travel a journey much wider and longer than the physical object, but the physical object even. There's lots of evidence that people were pasting ballads up on the walls and chimney breasts of their houses and their belongings. So they look at them, they see them. So it's important to understand as well that depending on where you are, this varies geographically. But if you're in Britain, for example, Britain or Ireland, your ballads come on a broad side. So on a single sheet, one side of a single sheet and they usually have images, wood cuts that look fairly basic so they're understandable to anyone. And so people put those up as a sort of a decoration and you'll see them now in old paintings, you'll see things pasted up on the walls and that's how people learn sometimes. A lot of the songs actually are literacy lessons, the ABC of a good Christian. So people are singing them and learning their ABCs as they go.

Michelle: So this then was quite big business, wasn't it? You've got this production line of generating these and producing them and then selling them. Do you want to just explain that process of what was involved from kind of beginning to end before it got on to the street and to the people consuming it?

Una McIlvenna: Yes. So the people really making the money out of ballads are not the composers, not the authors or the performers or sellers, they are the printers and printer and bookseller is often the same business. So one of the reasons I think that the ballads end up the way they are, they use a lot of very sensationalist language, they're very black and white, they're very much like tabloid journalism. The kinds of features that we would recognise from tabloid journalism. So really dramatic, very easy to understand.Justice is black and white, there's no gray area that sells that's appealed to the widest possible market. And so we also get songs that are probably misrepresentative of the actual crimes and the crime rates that are going on. For example, murders by women are far more popular in ballads than murders by men. Right? So they print off, they'll do a print run of these ballads which are very cheap to make. So printers are also printing all kinds of other books and things. But ballads are quick and easy and so they can be really very topical. They can be produced very quickly upon an event happening. Then you get the sellers of them are street singers and what are known as chap men who are buying sort of cheap print and then traveling around the countryside selling this cheap print along with a lot of other things. They'll buy the ballads wholesale and then that's a bit of a gamble financially for them. These are usually not well off people. They buy the ballads wholesale and then have to sell them to make their money back. The street singer is someone you find on every street corner in early modern Europe and even I've got photographs of street singers in 19th and early 20th century Europe still. They are one of the many ambulant vendors that roam the marketplaces and busy streets, bridges, places like that to try and draw a crowd to them, to listen, to say, Come and buy my thing. So there's lots of people selling all kinds of vegetables and homeware products but ballad sellers are in there among them always. That's why most of these ballads will open with a line that draws the crowd in come All Ye Maidens Fair that kind of drawing in groups of girls, young Christian men, all good hard workers, that sort of thing. They always open with what's known as a Come All Ye opening linw and so that draws the crowd in and so if you know folk songs, a lot of folk songs will open with a line like that. And it comes from that tradition of selling in the streets. So they draw a crowd around them and then sell it. People will listen. They will buy the song sheet or pamphlet that the song comes in and then take it home. We don't know as much about who exactly is buying them. That's the hardest kind of thing to find out. But when we have pictorial depictions of street singers, they do have a crowd around them. Usually not terribly well dressed. We're not rich people usually, but you get a crowd always in the street. And people are very, very used to. Hearing things being sung in the street. And they'll often be. We have accounts of people kind of trying to decide which singer to listen to because there are so many around.

Michelle: I think for most people, they can't kind of understand why there might be this interest and this intrigue in this area. But we have to remember that at the time when public execution was something that took place, it would draw huge crowds. There would be people coming to watch to see this event, and it was seen as an event. And so that scene that you just painted of people around the singer is something that I can imagine and I can really picture. And the fact that they might have their favorite makes sense because it's kind of the equivalent of us today, isn't it? We have our favorite newspapers that we might consume or our favorite magazines or our favorite journalist or writer or author singer. It's exactly the same thing. You go to the person for whom you enjoy listening to. You enjoy this story that they're sharing. And if their whole purpose is to draw you in and to tell this tale, to sing this tale, this account, you're going to want to consume that information from the person that captures your attention, that manages to draw you in in that fashion.

Una McIlvenna: Absolutely.

Una McIlvenna: And you do get a lot of elite commentators in the early modern period who are scathing of street singers. They say, oh, these terrible singers, screeching, caterwalling in the street, et cetera. But actually we have to look beyond that sort of snobbery. They still know all the tunes and actually some of the singers are very talented. So you do get some what you might call like celebrity singers in the 18th and 19th century that people are they know what to expect, they know where they are, they're always in the same place. Street singers also will rely very often on some kind of disability to they'll be blind or they'll be a cripple and that's one way of kind of garnering sympathy from your audience. But yet the idea of stopping to watch a spectacle is of course as well something from the early modern period because, of course, we have no recording and playback devices until the 20th century. So if you want to experience music of any kind, you need to either physically do it yourself or be in the physical presence of someone else doing it. There's no radio, there's no record player, anything like that. So the idea that everything in the early modern period is very much conducted in public for the community and people are constantly congregating in open places to.

Una McIlvenna: Listen, watch, observe, be part of something.

Una McIlvenna: And executions, of course, are absolutely a really extreme example of that.

Una McIlvenna: And by the time you get to the 19th century you're talking about literally tens of thousands of people gathering in London, for example, to the point where there are regularly people getting trampled, crowds getting crushed it becomes a kind of a dangerous thing. There are so many people going we in fact have evidence, a coroner's report from one execution in 19th century London where I think 30 or 40 people died. And so the coroner's report goes through in detail each person and why they were there and who they were. And what you find out is a lot of apprentices, a lot of young men are going out of curiosity and they all ask their masters and mistresses if they're allowed to go. And every single time the master and mistress says, no, you can't because it's too dangerous. So they don't say to them, you can't go because you shouldn't be watching people being executed. That's not a problem. They say, no, it's dangerous because of the crowds. So, yeah, being a part of a communal event is something that's very, very central to early modern. And still in 19th century Europe, even in fact, when literacy rates really go up in the 19th century, you still get people singing songs even though they can read newspapers, they can get the news from other places, but they still want to sing and to listen to people sing about important news events.

Michelle: And obviously we have records of these ballads that have survived. What was that process of saving them, of keeping them? Because obviously we have a record of some of them, however many of them we will never know. But what was that process of saving them and keeping them in terms of preserving them?

Una McIlvenna: Well, we get lucky. I think certain guys recognize the value of these things historically because they are ephemeral. Like I said, they're printed on cheap paper and people are just throwing them away, the way we do with junk mail that we get in our post box. They're throwing them away or they're literally using them as toilet paper. So the ones that survive, it's just a piece of luck, really. We get certain collectors that we know. So Samuel Peeps, the guy that wrote the diary for The Great Fire of London, he luckily is one of those collectors. But we have a few of them in various countries who kind of just saved them. Nowadays they tend to be in big collections, in big libraries. And luckily, various digitization projects have happened in the last 20 years or so. The first one was the Bodleyan Library started digitizing their collection, which are mostly of Pete's own collection. And those same sorts of digitization projects have happened for various languages. So we're now able to see these things in high resolution. Some projects have transcriptions of the song, so really they're available even to someone like me, who's in Melbourne that I can get on my computer and see. And luckily, the various projects in different languages, I can compare what we find and the differences and the similarities that we find from one language to another.

Michelle: Again, I suppose it makes sense- that need to keep them almost as a record when we consider just how newsworthy some of these events were, the individuals, the fact that this was something that was used for all kinds of news, if there was something very political, very kind of celebratory or something very ominous, something that was really drawing everybody in. People would want to keep that to preserve that, to have that memory of it in the same way that we keep memories like photographs. Here you've got something that preserved that moment of time and that feeling. And I think that's something that is very evident with this singing and with execution ballads in particular, is this kind of relationship with feeling, with emotion, how it makes you feel. And I suppose that's very much intentional given the structure of the ballad itself, which is to make you reflect on you yourself and how to be a good Christian so that you yourself don't end up where this person is in this position. So the whole point is to make you feel emotion listening to the song, so that you conduct a better life. So again, it kind of makes sense that people would want to have these memories kept, possibly for that reason, to reflect, to remember that particular moment and that person or that event that it's tied to.

Una McIlvenna: Yes, I mean, there are events like the French Revolution or in England, you have the popush plot in the 17th century where a whole bunch of people are executed. And those are extremely high profile news events. And so it makes sense that people are gathering up ballads around that event. But for us, what's even kind of more valuable in a way is that sometimes for lesser known things, the ballad can be the only record we have of, say, a murder in the 16th Century for which there is no crime report, there's no archival document, that if we didn't have the ballad, we wouldn't know about it. And so for me, they're valuable in that way, as well as the sole record of maybe less high profile events with the more high profile ones, something like the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. You have a lot of ballads, obviously, and the way they can be compared is really interesting, the way mean, I've written about the way that the differences between the ballads about Louis and the ones about Marie Antoinette, they're much more sympathetic to him, whereas they absolutely eviscerate her. She could call her every name in the book. So they're a fascinating source to compare against pros accounts of those kind of high profile events. But we get them across all kinds of things, even ones that maybe no one else remembers.

Michelle: Well, I think you've got something here that truly does reflect every corner of society and religion, gender, I mean, it literally covers everything. And so I think it enables you to really evaluate those differences, those subtle differences that might be there, all the very obvious differences, and to again, see how it very much reflects all of society. And I was going to ask if you have any examples of ranges that kind of show that difference, to show how it was something that might be used to discuss, to share something from someone, maybe in the upper classes all the way down through to an event, a murder, from someone who is just the common person in the working classes.

Una McIlvenna: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, the nobility, when they are executed, have a very, very different treatment to ordinary kind of criminals.

Una McIlvenna: It's important to understand, of course, when we talk about representation and reception and things like that, that we don't generally know who has composed these ballads. The most common author of them is good old Anonymous. When we do know the authorship, it's an incredibly broad range of professions that these people also have. They are pub owners, they are shoemakers, they are sometimes clergy. And I think the fact that the ballads are conservative in nature doesn't necessarily reflect that the crown is putting these out or that the clergy are responsible. I think the conservative viewpoint in them is because that's the best selling kind of thing, that's what people want to see. But in terms of different presentations of victims, or I shouldn't say victims, condemned criminals, let's say a noble person is most likely being executed for treason. So you've got someone? We've got ones like Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Essex. These are people being executed in Tudor times, elizabethan and Jacobean times, Tudor and Stuart. It's very hard when you execute a military hero like Raleigh and Essex, you have to not call into question royal justice. You can't question the monarch's decision to execute this guy, but everybody loves him, so how do you do that? And they walk a very fine, delicate line between, this guy is the greatest hero that ever lived, but he deserved to die. So they really do a very interesting kind of tightrope walk. Those songs, on the other hand, you get the other kind of traitors in that period who are religious people who are heretics.

Una McIlvenna: So under Elizabeth, you get people executed. Under Mary, they would have been executed for heresy. But Elizabeth is a bit savy and she executes them for says, oh, well, you know, these bad Catholics, it's nothing to do with them being Catholic. The idea is that what they wanted to do was assassinate the queen or overthrow the monarchy, and so they're executed like traitors. But the ballads about them are vitriolic polemic in their hatred of know polluters of the body politic, is really how they're treated. So there's a couple of priests, for example, who are executed under Elizabeth, Catholic priests, so they get dragged to the execution. The drawing is a very important part of the entire ritual and that it's been taken from the prison to the execution site. So they're drawn to the execution site on a hurdle, which is this sort of thinly woven mat, and they're dragged behind, like on the ground behind horses, who are defecating on them as they walk. And then they get to the execution site, they are hanged until they're nearly dead and then they're taken down, beheaded, eviscerated, and their body cut into four parts. So it's a particularly gruesome end. Now, that doesn't happen to Raleigh and Essex. They just get beheaded with a sword. No, sorry, not they get beheaded with an axe. In Britain, on the continent, they would get a sword. So it's a much nicer way to go, a much more honourable way to go. And so the ballads reflect those two differences. The ones about Raleigh and Essex and guys like that talk a lot about honor and the shame of this execution. But the other kinds of traitors, the rebels, the heretics, no one is going to miss them. And we're thrilled, really, that they're dead. So a very, very different kind of treatment depending on who they are the identity of the condemned, I suppose.

Michelle: It reflects public perception. You don't want to put something out there to those that are consuming it that they're going to be angered by. So if these are their heroes, in some ways they're the likable figures, the likable characters. It is that dance, isn't it, about what you say not. Saying too much to anger those listening consuming because you want them to buy this, you want them to take this in.

Una McIlvenna: I mean, it's very interesting because it's one of the exceptions to the standard model of execution. Ballad are martyr ballads that are written by supporters of the condemned and these are usually Protestants being executed in Catholic countries and vice versa. You get some for Catholics in England but these are ones that they don't question the justice, say oh, you know, yes, he definitely was preaching this new faith. They fully admit to it because they're proud of it. But they support the condemned and they present the condemned as a model of courage on the scaffold, at the gallows. That's a huge risk to take because just composing a song like that in the 16th and 17th century could be a death sentence. And in fact, you have the anabaptists in Europe, a lot of them in the Dutch speaking and German speaking regions. It's a huge movement within the Protestant movement. They are persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike and they build almost an entire song culture based on songs about their brethren being executed in horrific ways. And in fact, the ones that survive tend to flee to America and are the forerunners of the Amish today in places like Pennsylvania who still sing those songs, those exact execution ballads about those early their ancestors and they have a whole kind of culture around it. That's their heritage. But just to be caught with one of those songs was enough for somebody back in the sort of late 16th and early 17th century to be executed. You just had to be convicted of singing the song or knowing of the song because that identified you as the heretic. So it was a very dangerous kind of territory. Singing could be really controversial.

Michelle: Oh my gosh, you can't, can you? But you can. It's not something that you imagine would happen, but it did. And it's just like you said. It's that kind of danger, that kind of hidden element to it. That kind of sense of you're walking that line, aren't you, in terms of.

Una McIlvenna: And songs we find songs in the criminal archives and in the Inquisition archives and those kinds of things because songs were so and even melodies. Someone would say you were humming that melody and you know that that's a melody of the wrong kind. And so just the melody alone, you can be humming. There's a famous line from a play where someone says he was whistling treason and the guy says, what do you mean whistling treason? He said, well, we know that that melody belongs to the wrong group of people. So there's so much meaning simply in the tunes and then the lyrics go with it. So people are being arrested and persecuted constantly simply for the songs themselves.

Michelle: And I know that your website does kind of very much collect and collate these different ballads. As you mentioned at the very beginning, this was widespread in terms of geography. This is something that you see across Europe and I suppose in cataloging some of that, we've just been talking about how this very much plays into religion and politics and so on. Do you see commonalities, do you see differences across geography and continent play out in these ballads?

Una McIlvenna: Yeah.

Una McIlvenna: Oh, absolutely.

Una McIlvenna: As I said, contrafactum that is that setting of new words to familiar tunes is standard practice all over Europe from Ireland up to Scandinavia and down to France where we don't find contrafactum being used for execution ballads. Although it is a practice that goes on in other songs is in Italian and in Spanish language ballads. But what I worked out, because I looked at the Italian ballads very closely and what I noticed after a while, because they don't have any tune indication. So when you buy a ballad in Britain, for example, it will say at the top to the tune of and then they give you the name of the tune that you know in Italian, they don't have that. So I spent years going what does it sound like? How do people sing them? And then I discovered that I worked out that when I looked more closely that there was a specific meter for the different songs. So some were in Ottawarima, which is a specific rhyme scheme, a specific metrical form which was used at the time for singing epic tales of chivalry which were very, very popular at the time. So Orlando Furioso was sung in Ottawa and these sort know chronological telling of a very long tale. And some other execution ballads were set in Terza Rematch which is the metrical form used by Dante and know Dante's Inferno is about set in Terza. It is a rhyme scheme and a metrical form used for the nobility. So in every single case of a Terza Rema song, the condemned was a noble man or woman who was presented completely differently than the condemned. People in other songs in Ottawa there they are very sympathetic, they admit to the crime, but it's only very sort of very obliquely, very vaguely referenced and really they're just so sad and so remorseful and you really have so much compassion for them. Very, very different to the songs in Ottawa.

Una McIlvenna: So what seems to be although there aren't the melodies for those particular metrical forms apparently depend on where you come from, where you grow up, your region. We sing Ottawa with these melodies but if you live come from another region of Italy, you sing it in a different way. So the metrical form carries meaning with.

Una McIlvenna: It in the same way that melodies carry meaning in other countries. So for example, if we're talking about contrafactum, I've got a song about an 18th century convicted murderer in Paris and everybody hates him and he's horrifically executed. The ballad about him is set to the tune of what had been an earlier kind of folk hymn about St. Genevieve, so a very sweet, nice song about this lovely saint. And then I tried to find the tune for that, and then I found out that it actually come from a ballet opera that was composed for Louis XIV. So a whole century earlier than the execution ballad, and for a very, very different kind of performance. And so it has three different associations at each point. And you can never say exactly what understanding, what associations people bring into each performance of a melody, but they definitely carry meaning with them. So when I say something like whistling Treason, the idea that the melody carries as much meaning as the lyrics do, and we really have to study that. And that's something that I find could vary depending on where you were. But contrafactum is very, very common, Oliver. We find it even in Central Europe. There's a big project on Czech ballads. They use contrafactum there up in Scandinavia, Britain, France, German, Dutch, all using that form.

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Song: Assist me some mournful muse while I a sad story relate let all that these lines peruse lament a poor maid's heart fate, who guiltless and innocent fell by the hands of a barbarous dame as fierce as a fury of hell her sex is eternal shame. Her husband to Bristol went his trade to advance at the fair whilst she was on mischief bent. Such mischief she can't repair for suspicion or clouding her mind bred a tempest within her breast her soul, like a sea with rough wind, was ruffled and robbed of rest. All jealous she taxed her maid, and falsely did her Ah accuse with theft she did her a hup braid, and shamefully did ah abuse while the maid in her own defense, undaunted and boldly he stood, which made the fierce dame commence a tragedy full of blood.

Michelle: And you just mentioned something there, which kind of I think, again, is something we've touched upon this idea that these songs, these ballads, these melodies, they bring something to them. And I think one of them is this connection with emotion, with this interplay with feeling, and what it's trying to make you feel as you're listening and how it's connecting you to the person convicted and about to be sentenced to death. Do you want to just explain that in a bit more detail? Because I think it's really important because it's then something that changes, doesn't it, depending on who's the narrator, which voice, which narrative it is that you are being expected to listen to, to be drawn into. So that kind of sense of emotion, that feeling that's being created becomes something a bit more specific then to the event, to that person, to the style of the narrator and what they're trying to get across.

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, for sure.

Una McIlvenna: We can never know what someone listening to a song or even singing it themselves actually thought at the time. Right. But we can be very clear about what people were encouraged to think, how they were encouraged to respond. And so some of them it's very obvious. I think the big difference, of course, is the difference between the first person voice and the third person with the first person voice. If you're singing that song, you for a moment become the condemned criminal who's standing on the scaffold looking at the noose or the axe or the flames. And in your final moments you're singing to people about the terrible things you've done and how scared you are and all those emotions that we can only imagine would be racing through someone in the moments, in their final moments of life. Right? And I think that must be an incredible kind of emotion to experience. And I think today the only equivalent is going on like a roller coaster where you think for a moment, oh my God, I'm going to die. That really heightened emotion is something that we have to actively search out. But I think going to an execution and knowing that the person that's standing in front of you is going to die in a moment and that also I mean, I think that what we really, really have to remember is that that also means that they'll either if they are very repentant on the scaffold and they make a good performance of remorse, well, then God will save them and so they will be with Jesus today. It's like what Jesus says to the robbers, either side of him when he's being crucified and one of them is very good and he know, you will be with me on my right hand side today in heaven and the other one is going to hell. That's what you're watching when you watch an execution.If the person looks like they are hanging on to trying to hang on to life and trying to claim that they didn't do it, they'll go to their death with sin on their soul. You have to be repentant. And so people are watching for this performance and what you want to see is total remorse because otherwise they're going to hell today. So that plays out in execution ballads. That's why they are this immaculate performance of utter repentance. If you sing that. I mean, these songs are quite long and you can really start to build the emotion and the fear builds and the sort of rising panic towards the end of them. And those final verses where you cry out to God saying, please, Lord, have mercy on my soul. You can get really caught up in them. So they become a real performance of the final moments on the scaffold. The contrast, of course, is the third person voice where you don't necessarily get anything like that. They can be a lot less compassionate for the condemned and much more, you know, reserved, you know, standing back and sort of just relaying events. So I think that that is quite important. That first person voice is so important in terms of emotion. And what's interesting is that I discovered that German language ballads are very, very rarely in the first person voice. So you get a very different kind of depiction of the criminal in those songs because of that refusal to use what in other languages is a very common device.

SMichelleC: Is there any difference between types of victims in the kind of the motion that's drawn in to the song, to the ballad?

Una McIlvenna: I divided my book into sort of kinds of crimes, so I started in a roughly chronological order. So I started with the very earliest ones which are about religion heresy, people being executed for heresy and for witchcraft and sorcery and I think those things are related. Yeah, they're connected. The fact that the Reformation is followed very quickly with enormous witch panics that go on all across know Europe is absolutely thrown into turmoil and someone is looking for scapegoats and so they start to blame, they start to point the finger at other people. In the German lands, that leads to witch panics in which men, women and children are rounded up and denounced in their hundreds. We have executions of hundreds of people over the space of a few days. It's really terrifying. So they're very different. The songs like that are just accounts of scores of people and they only have time to point out a few of them and what they did. Oh, here's this terrible they poisoned the crops and this one murdered babies and this one did this. So you don't really identify with those except that the songs encourage you to. Mothers and fathers, hold your children close and make sure you raise them as good Christians is the only kind of message you can take away from it. Whereas then a bit later we start to get murder ballads which are but homicide, they turn up. I was kind of surprised at how late in the day we start to see songs about people being executed for murder. What's different is you get wife versus husband murderers and they're very different when wives murder.

Una McIlvenna: In fact, in Britain you get a kind of a kind of a fad for wife murderers in the early 17th century. You get this sort of rush of ballads about this and they are seen as they're very often when we have the historical evidence for them, these wives are often the victims of domestic abuse and they kill their husbands in self defense. But the ballots never, ever tell you that the women are always guilty, they're scold, They're not tolerant and they need to be quiet. And so those ballads become a message about wifely submission. Whereas the husbands who murder there tends to be a sort of a matrix of alcohol, a violent life. Already there's a few songs about butchers who then murder their wives. So these are men who are already vulnerable to bad things and then the devil walks in and kind of takes advantage of that vulnerability and so they go to their deaths. I mean, what's interesting is that men who murder other men are usually get off on manslaughter charges but men who murder their wives don't they get executed.

Michelle: It's an interesting thing to kind of look at and to see the differences between how they were used and you were mentioning things like the persecution of witchcraft and this epidemic that swept everywhere, really across Europe. And you can see how songs, just like other things that they were doing at the time almost become propaganda. It's a way of telling this story and it continuing it and it being spread very, very quickly like wildfire everywhere. You don't necessarily have to have a person attached to it. It is just something that becomes known that is told that everybody should be scared of, that everybody should be aware of, that you should be looking out for. And this is the power of song, the spoken word, the way that it does have that ability to cover huge distances of geography. And again, people cover huge varieties of different people to get across this message that people are wanting to push out there to bring to the fore and to bring to people's attention.

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, I mean, another really interesting crime that is again, very tied to a chronological moment is outlaw balladry. We get a whole genre in the sort of late 17th and 18th century of outlaw and bandits and they become these romantic heroes. You think about Dick Turpin or in France it's Cartouche and Mondra and these are guys that become robin Hood is the subject of some of the oldest ballads we have in the English language. People love a story of a guy who robs from the rich and gives to the poor. None of these outlaws did that. But when they're executed I find two models of ballads one of which I call the realistic ballad and one which is the Nostalgic model. The nostalgic one is the one those are the songs we're still singing today about those guys where they're kind of fun and they're kind of swashbucklers and they rob from the rich and they give to the poor. And the execution is not really talked about very much. On the other hand, you have realistic ballads which are written I can trace them to be produced on the moment of the execution, like really shortly after. They use melodies that are used for other execution ballads. So they're very much in that vein. And they are excoriating about these terrible men who persecuted the whole countryside, these gangsters that everyone is thrilled to see the end of. And it's really interesting that they are. And in those realistic ones, the execution is described in great detail. They haven't lasted in popular consciousness the way the nostalgic ones have. And I think that's really fascinating that we want to have this kind of romantic idea of what these guys did, even if it doesn't really match up with the reality. And those are the ones that still today in every language, if you start to sing one, the people who speak that language will be able to sing along because very often they've become like children's nursery rhymes. And I think that's fascinating. They've entered into a sort of oral historical kind of nostalgic tradition. And again, I think it's because it reflects that what the popular masses want, isn't it?

Michelle: Like you said, they want that nostalgic element. And so it becomes something that, like. You said, almost creeps into the everyday experience even today. It's something that lasts, it endures.

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, it's a version of history that's not necessarily accurate.

Michelle: No.

Michelle: So you kind of mentioned this sense that you almost get these themes, these messages that come through and I wonder if, during your research you've kind of ever explored and noticed ballads that reflect people's interest in the supernatural, because obviously this was something that very much was part of everybody's everyday experience. Their belief in the supernatural, the unexplained, that element of, you know, they had so many things didn't you know, you have to wonder if it creeps into even this aspect of life. The execution ballad.

Una McIlvenna: Well, of course, what's important to remember is that all of Europe is deeply religious, right? And religion is a belief in the supernatural. If you're Christian, you believe that there are invisible deities who control what we do. So if you understand your universe in that vein, the supernatural elements of ballads that we today might think that makes it sound a bit dubious. So, for example, the existence of witches, or indeed werewolves, or for example, a very common kind of trope is that you find when someone murders someone else, the spots of blood will not wash out of their skin. A bit like Lady Macbeth for us, when we look at those ballads, we think, oh, well, that's not obviously that bit was made up, or that's not true.

Una McIlvenna: But for early modern people, those were all signs that God was making his will manifest in our day to day lives. God was constantly sending us signs and signals that we need to repent, that the end is nigh, that bad things happen because God is angry with us. So floods, crimes, murders, witches, werewolves, all that kind of stuff, that is God telling us that we are sinners and we need to repent. Whereas good things, a victory in a war, things happening in the sky, there's a lot of things like comets and things that they don't really understand. Well, that's obviously God giving us a very obvious signal that he's either mad with us or he's happy that we are being good Christians. So what's really important for us to do when we look at these ballads? As someone like me who does not believe in anything supernatural, I believe that nature is very much explainable. Even if we don't know yet the answers. I have to not look at these ballads and think, well, that obviously makes it untrue for a lot of their audience in the early modern period. It's those elements that make it true that's the proof that, you know, it happened. And what's interesting is that a lot of the songs, I mean, most of the songs, the title of them is a new and true report on the shocking and unheard of incidents of whatever murders or whatever and the justice that was served on the body of the, of the criminal. And so even the they're, they're clearly aware that some of this stuff sounds a bit too much to be true. Werewolves, for example. So people know at this point you still have wolves in the forests in Europe, so wolves are still a big deal. So the idea that people could turn into wolves was not as far fetched as it might seem to us today.

Una McIlvenna: Plus, people are still being convicted of being werewolves, people are being executed for being werewolves. So that doesn't make the song untrue because they are songs about things that genuinely happened. Now, whether that person transformed into a werewolf is for us, probably very obviously not true, but for its audience it was and that was God telling us this is a punishment for doing something bad as a society.

Michelle: Ballads like this we use to validate experiences, accounts. If there was a particular example of a werewolf trial happening in a particular location, the song of that traveling was evidence of this was something that does happen and therefore be aware again. It becomes propaganda, it spreads.

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, and I mean, when I've tried to triangulate my sources to find historical evidence for the songs, very often the songs are accurate, they're telling the truth as it was reported in the period. They're not changing facts or adding things. They're just as reliable as any prose account of the news events. So we shouldn't assume that because it's a song, it somehow plays fast and loose with the truth in order to kind of be entertaining or whatever they really are. Just as reliable as pros a kind.

Michelle: Oh, I completely agree. And I think in some ways, again, it reflects that local level history. You get the geography, you get something very much relevant to a particular region time frame. It very much reflects the attitudes of the day, the interests of the day.

Una McIlvenna: I have a colleague in who works on Breton ballads, ballads in Brittany, and she was able to find loads and loads, like scores of variants of one song about a serving girl being murdered and her body being found on the street. And the songs only varied in terms of those specific location details, tiny details about the name of the town or whatever. The further away you got from the thing is that she was able to find the 17th century record of that event, of that murder from I think it was 1673, 400 years later, people in 20th century Britain, France, are still singing the exact facts of that song, of that event, the way it happened. And it's only the further away you got from this little village in which it actually happened, then the names of the village and the names of the people involved change a little. But what was extraordinary is that the song has kept the information, the key details of that story absolutely accurate for centuries. So that's when singing and that ability to listen and repeat means that it's actually a more efficient way of telling the news than simply printing it out on a sheet of paper and we mentioned how it does reflect societal opinion. And what's fascinating is it doesn't always reflect the societal opinion that you think it's going to. For example, you look at the treatment of ballads with regards to infanticide and you would think that that would be something that would be considered completely heinous and horrendous, but yet there is empathy, there's sympathy that seems to be reflected in the lack of songs with regards to them, isn't there?

Una McIlvenna: So in what we call the oral tradition, so these are songs that are not being printed. You do get in certain countries, France and Scotland, for example, lots and lots of songs about infanticide that are very clearly not referencing specific historical events. They're just a general song about a poor girl and oh, wasn't it terrible?But when you realize that from the 16th century onwards, right up to the late 18th century, that the infanticide legislation became ever more draconian all across Europe. So young women were being executed on flimsier and flimsier reasons.

Una McIlvenna: And you would expect, because we love songs about women murdering and women murdering babies, well, that's horrific. So therefore, you'd expect a concurrent, simultaneous rise in the number of ballads along with that rise in numbers of executions. But you don't you don't get songs about locatable, recognizable, identifiable girls being executed. There's so few. I couldn't believe it when I was doing this research, I thought, where are they? Why haven't I got more? And what we're finding in the most recent research that's being done across multiple different regions of Europe is that communities worked extremely hard to mitigate the consequences of unplanned pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies. They worked with the young couple, they did all kinds of things to try and make it better. Sometimes that involved infanticide, sometimes not right, but they were actually really sympathetic because they understood that young women, especially young, poor women, were the most vulnerable to sexual assaults, sexual violence, there's no birth control, there's no other way of controlling this. And so they understood that and were really sympathetic. And so I don't think people wanted to sing about girls that had actually been executed they had a lot of sympathy for them. And we've got accounts of actual executions of these girls in which the crowd it's a really difficult one to pull off for the executioner because the crowd is not on his side the way they normally are. And so if he doesn't do it very smoothly and very quickly and carefully the crowd will revolt and hurl things at him and try and save her. So, yeah, it's a really interesting way in which the ballads are not created because they just won't sell, because people just don't want to sing them.

Michelle: It is a really interesting topic, though. I mean, just where I live in my kind of local area, I'm not too far away from Oxfordshire, and there is a really well known case of precisely this, where a very young servant girl who had been taken advantage of by the master of the house, became pregnant and she lost that pregnancy midway through. And by reports of the account, it was a stillbirth and the master of the house basically took her to court for murder. And you had midwives, you had other women coming forward testifying to this was a young girl who'd been experiencing abdominal pain, that something was clearly wrong, that she didn't seem to have any awareness of what was happening to her, that she was pregnant, and there were pamphlets being produced. There was huge support for this very young girl because she was young, who seemed to be totally unaware of her condition, who had gone through this experience not knowing what was happening to her. So there was a real sense of public support, obviously, with someone very wealthy who was her master, with privilege position tied to the court. I'm sure you can imagine what the outcome was. Sadly, she was found guilty and she was executed. In her case, though, the execution was botched, so she revived and so therefore having been executed, they couldn't execute her a second time. So she managed to kind of evade that part of it by it going wrong. But I think it reflects very much precisely what we were just talking about, this sense that sometimes public opinion was very much in support of these young. Girls who could find themselves in these positions. And I think society, the working class society very much reflected that maybe these were girls being taken advantage of. Maybe it was a case of something had gone wrong. It wasn't always murder, it wasn't always the kind of the punishment that was being rendered on them by upon high. It could be something different to that. And so I think support was there for them.

Una McIlvenna: The scientific knowledge around gestation and childbirth was pretty primitive compared to what we have today. And so you didn't even know if you were pregnant until the quickening, which is when the baby actually you can feel the baby kicking, which doesn't happen till about four months.

Una McIlvenna: But what's important there about that specific story is any botched execution or anyone who revives that was also interpreted in popular culture as a sign that God was trying to tell you this is an innocent person. And so God was stepping in at that point. And so that was if you were innocent, you could go to your execution confident in the knowledge that God would save you. But in fact, there's an even a very, very old song tradition around that in which very similar story a serving girl who it's the daughter of the rich family who actually ends up pregnant, gives birth, murders the baby and blames it on her serving girl. The serving girl goes to who's innocent, goes to her death. But depending on where you hear this story, Mary the Virgin Mother or St. James or some other kind of supernatural figure holds her up from the noose so that she doesn't strangle. So she survives and stays there for like three days but doesn't die. And that is proof that it was actually the daughter of the she points the finger at the right person in the end. So that's actually a very, very old story. It actually comes from the lives of the saints, the golden legend, which is like twelfth century or something very, very old. And it's told again and again in stories and songs. So people this is an ancient belief that these girls are probably innocent. And we don't know. The stillbirths are an enormous issue in this period. There's huge infant mortality. And so that's why the legislation around this is really outrageous that just says if there's a dead baby, you must have killed it. So it's a really fascinating incident of why a kind of a crime that doesn't really end up in execution ballots. The other, even more obvious one are the crimes committed, the most common crimes committed which are committed by young men between the ages of 16 and 45. They are crimes against property for which those men are hanged. But because they are so common, they're so ordinary, nobody writes a song about them. But in fact, if you look at the stats, doesn't matter where you are or when, those are the people who are going to be executed by far more than any other any other group. But we don't have silence about them, unfortunately not usually.

Michelle: No, they're not quite as interesting, are they? A bit more mundane.

Una McIlvenna: And then when, you know, you get to the 19th century, the only crime that is really features in execution ballads, because it's the only crime, or almost the only crime that gets the death sentence is murder. And you start to see when I looked at the sort of statistics, I looked at the numbers, it's really men murdering women, usually their wives or girlfriends, and they absolutely dominate.

Una McIlvenna: And the most fascinating thing I discovered when I kind of looked and crunched the numbers was that what stops execution ballots as a trend, as a kind of genre, is the end of public executions. So in each country in Europe, that or most countries in Europe that happened around 1860, 1870, give or take, and then they move inside the prison walls and only a limited group of people get invited to come and watch. And everywhere that that happened, immediately there's a drop off in the number of execution ballots. They just almost disappear overnight. The only ones that still get created are about really horrific crimes. So the man doesn't just murder his wife, he cuts her up and puts her pieces of her body in a suitcase or he rapes and murders a child or something really, really heinous. And those are the only ones left in all the other places it just stops. The exception, of course, is France, because France is still guillotining people in public until 1939 and it's in fact so late. So we're right in the Second World War, they are still rolling out a guillotine in public that anyone can go and watch. But what happens in 1939? That Eugene Weidman is a murderer who's getting executed and someone manages to get video footage of it, very grainy footage, and that goes public. And a week later, public execution cease in France and exactly the same thing happens. The execution ballads stop. So I've got five ballads about Eugene Weidman, and then I have no more. That's the last one.

Michelle: Doesn't that just show exactly what we've been saying though, that this is very much tied up with public know, eliminate the public, eliminate their ability to see this because it's no longer a public spectacle and you don't need the song anymore. You don't need the song to draw people in. There isn't that connection because this execution is being done behind closed doors.

Una McIlvenna: It's a really interesting sort of connection that it seems to be that there has to be some sort of public event for interest around it to happen.

Una McIlvenna: And so it achieves the aim that.

Una McIlvenna: Those who wanted to move private executions indoors had, which was removing it from the sight of the mob who no longer understand the religious and spiritual significance of this event. They're too low class to understand. There's again such snobbery around this that people like Charles Dickens, he's one of he guys arguing that this is a mob of low class criminals themselves and they don't understand what they're here to see. So we need to remove it from public view and the songs just cease at the same time.

Michelle: And you only have the records then of those that are kind of being talked about in the public arena. So those crimes like you mentioned that seem to be gossiped about because they are so heinous so extreme, an extreme example of murder because of these extra details. So these are the things that are still being sung about because of that. The rest kind of gone under the radar.

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, fascinating.

Michelle: Gosh, we could talk about this all day and all night, I think. I think anybody that though, is interested should really take a look at the examples that you've got on your website because it is an incredible array of different examples of this from different countries that very much highlight all the things that we've been discussing and is a record of history. And it tells us so much it tells us so much about what was being talked about, what was happening politically, what was happening in religion, things at local level people. It speaks so much about the day to day lives, I think, of the common person all the way through to the person in court and we don't have very many records that do that so completely. But I think this is one example where song is powerful in being able to convey that to us even today.

Una McIlvenna: Yeah, so the website has ballads in English, French, German, Dutch and Italian and across four centuries and we have some recordings at the moment, only one's in English. If you want the other languages, they are coming, but hopefully you can get on there and listen to some performances and enjoy it and learn a little bit about how we thought about crime and punishment.

Michell: So what are you up to next? What are your next steps in terms of research writing? Where are you going next with this?

Una McIlvenna: So, as I said, there are songs about every topic under the sun and so I'm actually hoping to do that project looking at ballads about other news categories. So politics and satire, military battles and sieges, songs for soldiers as well, and.

Una McIlvenna: Then natural disasters and wonders. So things like comets but also conjoined twins. I mean, these were seen as monsters in the early modern period. People didn't understand why you'd have conjoined twins, for example. And so hopefully taking the same approach that I've taken to execution ballads, but really broadening it out to all kinds of news topics.

Michelle: Oh, that's fascinating. I can see this could be something as a project that you really could keep running with.

Una McIlvenna: Oh yeah, it'll be on my deathbed and I'll still be doing research on ballads.

Una McIlvenna: And as I say to my students whatever topic you're researching in history, I guarantee you there's a ballad about it somewhere.

Michelle: But I suppose doesn't it just reflect today, though, with different types of songs and genres and the millions of songs across the world that we have that literally touch upon every facet of life? It's the same thing, isn't it? It's just people singing about their day to day lives. The news of the day.

Una McIlvenna: Although I don't think that we use song to tell us the news in the same way the songs that are about news topics are often commentary on them. We already know what has happened, whereas I would argue in certain cases, for an early modern audience, the song could be the first thing they've heard about this event. And so, in that sense, I think we have changed our approach, at least in the Western world, to song. It remains much more of an art form than it was then. Whereas in the early modern period, we're looking at something that's news, entertainment and more or less and all wrapped up in one package.

Michelle: It's just fascinating. And like I said, I think you've got plenty of material to keep going and going and going with it. And for anybody that's been interested following on from this, I'll make sure that all of your details are on the website, links to your books, links to your website, social media, so that people can find you. Be signposted to you to hear these, read more. Dive into this topic because it is so fascinating in a bit more detail. And yeah, thank you so much for coming along to talk about it today because it is so intriguing. It's been fascinating to chat with you.

Una McIlvenna: Thank you so much, Michelle. It's been a pleasure.

Michelle: And I will say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye, everybody.

Song: Great God that sees all things that hear are done keeping thy court with thy celestial son hear her complain that hath so sore offended forgive my fact before my life is ended army the shame unto a womankind to harbor such a thought within my mind that now hath made me to the world of scorn and makes me curse the time that I was born I were to guard my mother's hapless womb before my birth had been my happy tomb. Oh, would to God, when first I did take breath that I had suffered any painful death. If ever died a true repentance soul, then I am she whose deeds are black and foe. Then take heed, wise be to your husband's kind and bear this lesson truly in your mind. Let not your tongues or sways true reasons bounds, which in your rage your utmost rancor sounds. A woman that is wise should seldom speak unless discreetly she her words repeat. O, would that I had thought of this before, which now to think on makes my heart fall sore. Then should I not have done this deed, so foul the witch have stained my immortal soul tears not to die, that thus dos cause me grief. I am more willing for to die than live. But tis for blood which mounteth to the skies and to the Lord revenge. Revenge it cries. My dearest husband did I wound to death, and was the cause he lost his sweetest breath. But yet I trust in soul is heaven doth dwell, and mine without God's mercy sings to hell in London near to smithfield did I dwell, and amongst my neighbours was beloved well, till that the devil wrought me this same spide, that all their loves are turned to hatred quite. John Wallen was my loving husband's name, which long hath lived in London in good fame. His trader Turner, as was known for well my name and Wallen doleful tale to tell. My husband, having being bout the town and coming home, he on his bed lay down to rest himself, which when I did aspy I fell to railing most outrageously I called him rogue and slave, and all to naught, repeating the worst language might be thought. Thou drunken nave, I said an Aaron sought. Thy mind is set on nothing but the pot, sweetheart, he said. I pray thee, hold thy tongue and if thou DOST not, I shall do thee wrong. At which straightway I grew in worse a rage that he by no means could my tongue assuage. He then arose and stroke me on the ear. I did at him begin to curse and swear. Then presently one of his tools I got and on his body gave a wicked stroke. Amongst his entrails I this chiseled through, whereas his call came out, for which I rue. What hast thou done? I pray thee, look woof he. Thou hast I wish for thou hast killed me. When this was done, the neighbors they ran in, and to his bed they straight conveyed him where he was dressed and lived till more next day. Yet he forgave me, and for me did pray. No sooner was his breath from body fled, but unto new gate. Straightway then he led, where I did lie until the sizes came, which was before I there three days was lame. Mother in law, forgive me. I you pray for I have made your only child away. Even all you had my self made husband less my life and all cause I do so transgress. He never did wrong to any in his life, but he too much was wronged by his wife. Then wise be warned example take by me heavens grant no more, that such a 1 may be my judgment. Then it was pronounced plain because my dearest husband I had slain in burning flames of fire I should fry receive my soul. Sweet Jesus, now I die.