This is a well known border ballad, that describes the return of the ghosts of three sons who return to their mother at Martinmas. The feast of St. Martin was held on November the eleventh, one of the Scottish quarter days. It is usually referred to as Martinmas but pronounced Martimas. It was the same day as Hallowe'en in the old calendar.

The author and origin of the ballad are not known, but is commonly dated as being 17th century. It first appears in print in Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802).

(This score available as ABC, SongWright, PostScript, DVI, or a MusicTeX fragment)
Pennywhistle notation and Dulcimer tab for this song is also available

(alternate:)

(This score available as ABC, SongWright, PostScript, DVI, or a MusicTeX fragment)
Pennywhistle notation and Dulcimer tab for this song is also available

There lived a wife at Ushers Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o'er the sea.

They hadna been a week from her,
A week but barely ane,
Whan word came to the carline wife
That her three sons were gane.

They hadna been a week from her,
A week but barely three,
Whan word came to the carlin wife
That her sons she'd never see.

"I wish the wind May never cease,
Nor (fashes) in the flood,
Till my three sons come home to me,
In earthly flesh and blood,"

It fell about the Martinmass,
When nights are lang and mirk,
The carlin wife"s three sons came hame,
And their hats were o' the birk.

It neither grew in syke nor ditch,
Nor yet in ony sheugh;
But at the gates o Paradise,
That birk grew fair enough

"Blow up the fire, my maidens!
Bring water from the well!
For a' my house hall feast this night,
Since my three sons are well."

And she has made to them a bed,
She's made it large and wide
And she's ta'en her mantle her about,
Sat down at the bed-side.

Up then crew the red, red cock,
And up and crew the gray;
The eldest to the youngest said,
"'Tis time we were away."

The cock he hadna craw'd but once,
And clapp'd his wings at a',
When the youngest to the eldest said,
"Brother, we must awa'.

"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
The channerin' worlm doth chide;
Gin we be mist out o' our place,
A sair pain we maun bide.

"Fare ye weel, my mother dear!
Fareweel to barn and byre!
And fare ye weel, the bonny lass
That kindles my mother's fire.

carlin wife = old woman
fashes = troubles
flood = sea
birk = birch
syke = trench
sheugh = furrow
daw = dawn
channerin = grumbling
A sair pain we maun bide: We must expect sore pain
byre: cow shed

Here "The cock doth craw, the day doth daw," having a middle rhyme, can scarcely be of extreme antiquity, probably, in the original poem, the dead return to rebuke the extreme grief of the Mother, but the poem is perhaps really more affecting in the absence of a didactic motive. Scott obtained it from an old woman in West Lothian. Probably the reading "fashes," (troubles), "in the flood" is correct, not "fishes," or "freshes." The mother desires that the sea May never cease to be troubled till her sons return (verse 4, line 2).

Essay

I also found an email thread containing an essay by Brian S. Lee. The essay and the replies are below.

The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" Brian S Lee 10 Oct 94
       RE: The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" Naomi Liebler 10 Oct 94
       RE: The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" James W Earl 10 Oct 94
             RE: The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" John McLaughlin 12 Oct 94
                   RE: The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" Norman Hinton 12 Oct 94
       RE: The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" Grover Furr 11 Oct 94
             RE: The Everyday in "The Wife of Ushers Well" Duane Osheim 12 Oct 94

    It fell about the Martinmas
    When nights are lang and mirk,
    The carline wife's three sons came hame,
    And their hats were o' the birk.

"The Wife of Ushers Well" juxtaposes the everyday with the
nightmarish other so closely that it is hard to tell which is which.
This "other" is presumably the reason for the poem, this "everyday"
the reason for our present interest in it.

Everyday life, like the moor in Browning's poem "Memorabilia", is
that major portion of life which we easily forget. We only bother to
remember what seems rare or significant to us:

    I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
    And a certain use in the world no doubt,
    Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
    'Mid the blank miles round about:

    For there I picked up on the heather
    And there I put inside my breast
    A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!
    Well, I forget the rest.
    (stanzas 3-4)

Human intelligence is designed to lose interest in what has grown
familiar, in order to free attention for what is novel and still-to-
be-learnt. But the mundane makes up most of our lives, which are
rarely exciting enough not to need art to expand their capacity for
experience. If literature exists to atone for the limits of
individual experience, it does so by distilling what May be
significant in other lives, other times, other places, and has
neither room nor time (for neither have we) to multiply examples of
the everyday.

Why then would we want to recover from the Middle Ages what they
themselves did not care to preserve? We do want to, of course: as
historians, and also as students of literature, our interest in the
everyday of those times depends on our recognizing it as different
(or at least as potentially different) from our own everyday. But it
is difficult to assess, for we are trying to look directly at
evidence seen, as it were, out of the corner of the eyes of
contemporaries who recorded it only incidentally, if at all.

    They hadna been a week from her
    A week but barely ane
    When word came to the carline wife
    That her three sons were gane.

"The Wife of Ushers Well" portrays the very unusual (and only
therefore worth portraying) return of three ghosts to the everyday
world. The ordinariness of their former home is emphasized to
heighten the extraordinariness of the presence of the very earthly
and palpable but nevertheless otherworldly ghosts. Since we cannot
take them as seriously as probably the poet and certainly the Wife
did, our interest is likely to be fixed rather on the world they
returned to. Even then what we want is to see how it compares with
our own familiar world.

The Wife appears to be the matriarch of a farm whose men-servants are
either absent or not worth mentioning; her property includes barn and
byre, her wealth deriving, evidently, from corn and cows, and she is
rich enough to send her sons over the sea: for what purpose we can
only guess, but she calls all the shots. It is a world of syke and
sheugh (marsh and ditch, or seed-furrow), and certainly not Paradise,
where the ghosts' birch hats come from. It is a world where people
sleep three to a bed, where time is measured by cocks, not clocks,
where water is fetched by women from a well, not turned on and off at
a pipe, where cooking is done not in a microwave oven but by maidens
blowing up a fire. It is a world of sooty or muddy maidservants
subservient to their mistress, but one where class distinctions do
not prevent the bonny ones attracting her sons.

The fact that much of the poem is taken up with showing that people
ate and slept in those days probably does not much interest us, for
so do we; but we would like to be told what the feast specially
prepared to celebrate the return of the lost sons consisted of, and
what was entailed in making a large wide bed for the three of them.
How high was it, when their mother sat down and later slept beside
it, wrapped in her mantle against the cold of murky November?

But the strangest (and therefore to us most interesting) aspect of
the everyday is surely the folk religion that made so little of the
separation between dead and living which seems so fundamental
nowadays. We know the dead do not come back. The Wife not only
didn't, but somehow had the power to bring them back, if only, and
tragically, for a short time.

    I wish the wind May never cease,
    Nor fashes in the flood,
    Till my three sons come hame to me,
    In earthly flesh and blood!

And about Martinmas they did. Just as well, or the weather would
have remained intolerable. Was her wish a prayer? Was her prayer a
curse? To whom did she offer it: to the spirit of Ushers Well?
Then what idea did the name of the feast of St Martin convey to her?

We May wonder how faithfully the poem represents not only
contemporary social conditions, but also popular belief. It does not
seem unreasonable to infer that everyday, carline (rural) belief in
the supernatural was sub-Christian, related to seasons and weather,
and absurdly inconsistent. If the sons drowned, why do they fear the
channerin' worm? If they have qualified for hats from beside the
gates of Paradise, why would they be punished with a sair pain for
staying out after cockcrow? Nobody seems to recognize them as
ghosts: there is nothing ethereal about such everyday mortals as they
appear to be. Does this mean that everyday religion made little of
the body-soul dichotomy familiar from contemporary preaching and
debates?

Perhaps we prefer our own everyday explanation. We note that the
Wife was no infidel. She believed until she saw, and then refused to
believe that what she saw was not the everyday that she had always
seen before her sons departed. To us this will appear a case of mind
over matter, which we can explain psychologically; denial of reality
to the point of hallucination under the pressure of bereavement.

    Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes
    She'll go mad ere it be day.

Recognition of the new everyday reality would tip her over. But we
conclude that she was mad already, or she could not have seen them.

                                                       ***

(Having written this, I read the account of the poem in Brooks and
Warren's _Understanding Poetry_. Oh dear! Why _did_ they choose
what they could not understand? The same goes for me too, no doubt,
but theoretically at least, one can avoid the a-historicism that
limited the old New Criticism. The present interest in the everyday
is helpful here. New Critics disliked the everyday, exercising much
ingenuity, when they had to confront it, to prove it was actually
extraordinary, for explicating the extraordinary was what interested
them, and what they excelled at. Hence Great Traditions, and Great
Authors courses, and the consignment to oblivion of writers they
considered minor. And hence their interest in demonstrating how a
poem, of any date, _should_ [which was only how it _might_] affect a
_modern_ reader.)


******************
BSLEE@Beattie.uct.ac.za
******************
Brian S. Lee
Department of English
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, 7700
South Africa

Many thanks to Brian Lee for his contribution regarding "The Wife of Ushers
Well." Some of the points he raises, however, raise further
questions/observations that seem to me central to this discussion. First, he
asks, "Why then would we want to recover from the Middle Ages what they
themselves did not care to preserve?" It seems to me that there are two "theys"
to be considered here. The "they" that has charge of preserving texts also has
the power to choose texts for preservation, and those choices would reflect
"their" own interests, values, goals, etc. The tale of a humble "carline"
family would not serve hegemonic interests. The other "they" is the
unenfranchised community whose lives are imagined or represented in such
ballads as this one. "They," too, have a method of preservation, and we find it
in what we now call "folklore." Foucault has a useful term for such material:
in "Two Lectures" (*Power/Knowledge,* ed. Colin Gordon, 1980) he calls them
"subjugated knowledges" (*les savoir des gens*), languages that endure in
precise relation to the energy with which they are suppressed. WE want to
excavate them, or I do, precisely because WE (or I) want to restore whatever
representional balance is possible after so many centuries of class-privileged
selection of "canons," which, I think, is more than what I understand as
"historical" interest (though maybe that's what "historical" interest really
is).

Professor Lee then finds the wife's refusal to accept her sons' deaths "a
carline (rural) belief in the supernatural[that] was sub-Christian, related to
seasons and weather, and absurdly inconsistent." I'm no theologian, but I'm not
sure I see the inconsistency, or the "sub-Christianity," of this
representation. It May be perfectly compatible with a religion that preaches
resurrection and life everlasting. It is certainly compatible with a very
common affect of grief and mourning, an affect as ordinary today as it was some
centuries ago. This is not madness, unless "madness" is the flat refusal to
accept what is socially imposed as practical (i.e., a grieving mother who sits
by her sons' bed is simply not "getting on with" her duties--and surely merits
correction).

The project of recovering matter long relegated to low-status "folklore" is one
of the more interesting and compelling scholarly endeavors around these days.
Could we have more contributions of the sort Professor Lee has made? I don't
intend any of the above as cavilling; I just want to urge a bit of caution lest
we slip into precisely the same kinds of judgments that have kept ballads like
"The Wife of Ushers Well" suppressed and/or patronizingly slipped into
anthologies as evidence of "folksy" stuff for centuries.

Cheers,
Naomi C. Liebler
Department of English
Montclair State University
Upper MOntclair, NJ 07043 (USA)
"Liebler@apollo.montclair.edu"

I much enjoyed Brian Lee's essay on "The Wife of Ushers Well," which
I am scheduled to teach next week. However, I would like to demur on
two points. First, "we know the dead do not come back": as Halloween
approaches, we might meditate on a survey I took last year--and I
recommend all medievalists take the same survey of their students this
year--which showed that a majority of college students seem to believe
in ghosts. No kidding. Consider too that Hollywood has produced a
dozen major ghost movies in the last few years--which will tell future
generations that ours was quite comfortable with this belief. Analyze
this data as you like, but apply it to the case of "The Wife." It's
not at all clear what this song tells us about popular religion of
the past. Second, I challenge those who casually lampoon the New
Critics to find good examples of the a-historicism they are always
supposed to have embodied. Wellek and Warren, at least, will not
serve as whipping-boys in this regard. I realize that's not to the
point of this discussion, so let me revert to my first point: literary
texts, even traditional ballads, offer only the slippriest evidence
for the everyday, and the incidental details are always more revealing
than matter close to the theme of the work, as in this case. Much
of what is most revealing about the everyday in "The Wife" can be
found in more vivid detail in Chaucer's
"Nun's Priest's Tale," in the description of the widow's farm.

Jim Earl

I disagree that the description of the widow's farm at the beginning of the NPT
can be taken as an instance of the description of "everyday life." Several
scholars have in the past suggested that the poverty described there is a
trope, related to the role of the widow as exemplifying the Church. In any
event, Chaucer is unlikely to have been sufficiently familiar with the daily
life of dairy-maids to have simply given a realistic description of it.
Frankly, it isn't clear to me that what is called 'the everyday' isn't
in fact a naive term for the artistic use of verisimilitude, which is not the
same as realism, as understood in the past 100 years (and it's been understood
quite variously, too).
If simple description is what we're after, we're probably far more
likely to find it in court records (as in Paul Strohm's _Hochon's Arrow_) or
historical accounts, and other non-literary records.

Grover C. Furr

English Department
Montclair State University
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043
(201) 655-7305
furr@apollo.montclair.edu

Jim:

Thank you for advancing where angels fear to tread. I follow.

Taking my trusty Child in hand, I have been able to locate no source for
this ballad earlier than "the Kinnock MSS" (18th c?). Sir Walter
Scott and the oral sources cited (all 19th century) could, obviously, have
drawn from lost literary sources, such as broadsides, as easily as from
oral sources. To my eye, the dialect of the texts in Child could as
easily have come from the 18th century as from any earlier period.

So I have a mundane question. In what sense is "The Wife of Ushers Well"
(my non-religious Scots mother's own favorite "party song"), an example of
medieval balladry from which we can draw lessons concerning medieval
daily life?

Better scholars than I will now descend upon my head. Angels preserve me.
(I asked a class how many of them believed in guardian angels. Over half
did. It was a class in technical writing, drawing mostly upon the computer
science department. How quaint).

John McLaughlin
English -
East Stroudsburg University
<johnmc@esu.edu>

I would agree with Grover Fur's observation that literary descriptions
are written for literary purposes and probably do not normally get us
very close to everyday life--at least to the everyday life described
in diaries, court cases (which have their own difficultites as
narratives), wills, leases and the like. As a historian who reads
court cases, leases, wills, inventories and the like, I have found
much of the discussion mysterious.
Duane Osheim
University of Virginia.

I'm glad to see John McLaughlin raise the question about the dates of the
Child Ballads: some years back, I read an article in a folklore journal which
claimed that very few of the ballads could actually be traced back past the
time in which Child collected them, despite the fact that some have various
medieval _analogs_ (not necessarily sources). I think we too readily believe
they are medieval without any proof....
--
Norman Hinton hinton@eagle.sangamon.edu

© Mark Usher 10 Sep 2001

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