The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty

It has not proved particularly easy to trace what is usually thought of as ‘folk song’ in England back into the eighteenth century. It is, however, possible in some instances to identify vernacular songs of the kind that were later recovered by folk song collectors circulating in earlier centuries in printed form, and to find contemporary references to the ways in which they were being used. This article takes this approach to one such ballad, The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty, which was sung in England and was eventually collected in Newfoundland, but which in its earlier history strays well outside what might be thought of as the conventional folk song paradigm

Art · Ballad · Criminology · Cruelty · Folk song · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Sociology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Vernacular · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Philosophy

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