Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: throughout the political culture of england in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries runs an oscillating but continuous thread of anti-Scots prejudice.The turbulent and often violent encounters that characterized relations between the kingdoms of Britain in this period did much to fan the flames of English hostility.Three principal charges were leveled against the Scots in various combinations at various times.In the first place, they were poverty-stricken beggars who swarmed south seeking to profit from the honors, lands, and titles that flowed from the honeypots of royal patronage and political power.In the second place, they were dissenters from the true Church, traitors to the Crown, and ultimately rebels against the State whose resistance frequently turned to armed insurrection as successively Presbyterians, Covenanters, and then Jacobites.Finally, they were crude barbarians whose strange speech, Jockey and Jenny: English Broadside Ballads and the Invention of Scottishness Adam Fox abstract This essay examines the images of Scots portrayed in English broadside ballads of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.On the one hand, ballads on political themes most often portrayed the "blue caps" of Scotland as traitors and rebels.On the other hand, the wooing ballads of the period promoted an idealized "north country" as backdrop to the amorous adventures of "Jockey" and "Jenny." Adam Fox argues that the "Scotch" tunes composed for songbooks, plays, and broadsides in London during the late seventeenth century came to be adopted by the popular press in Scotland as it developed over the following generations.As a result, melodies of English provenance were naturalized north of the border and entered the repertoire of "Caledonian airs" that were to become such a defining feature of Scottish culture in the Georgian age.eywords: late seventeenthcentury popular music; Scottish stereotypes; Thomas D'Urfey; Martin Parker; cultural influence of ballads 1640, a number of them deriding the "blue caps." In particular, Martin Parker was the author of, as one hostile newsbook put it, "many base ballads against the Scots." 5 Among them, "A True Subjects Wish" deplored how "Jocky with his bonnet blew, / both Crown and Scepter would subdue."6 His "Britaines Honour.In the two Valiant Welchmen, who fought against fifteene thousand Scots" was published in early September 1640, immediately after the humiliation of the English army at Newburn and the loss of Newcastle.A copy was produced by one of the company who were playing cards at the widow Black's in St. Martin's Lane the following month, who said it was a "ballad lately printed" that he had "sent into Scotland with other letters where it would make very good sport." 7 Other sideswipes in song were made at the rebellious blue caps during the 1640s and 1650s, including "The Turne of Time, " of about 1648, and "Jockies Lamentation, " licensed to Francis Grove in 1657, and still being printed for Wright, Clarke, Thackeray, and Passinger in the early 1680s.The Scots' crowning of Charles II at Scone in January 1651, in return for his agreement to their terms, aroused particular ire south of the border.The broadside ballad "Articles of Agreement betwixt Prince Charles and the Parliament of Scotland" was one response.Another was the satirical print Old Sayings and Predictions Verified and Fulfilled, which depicts a Scots Presbyterian minister holding Charles's nose to a grindstone while one of his countrymen turns the handle.Above the image a verse begins: "I Jockey turne the stone of all your plots, / For none turnes faster then the turne-coat Scots."Traces of the contemporary hand coloring on the British Museum copy still reveal the blue hue in which Jockey's cap was rendered.8 Another flurry of anti-Scottish balladry was prompted by the murder of James Sharp, archbishop of St. Andrews, in May 1679 at the hands of radical Presbyterians.Soon afterward, some eight thousand covenanters in the southwest of Scotland rose up against the regime of Charles II. 9 The English army, led by the Duke of Monmouth, joined by local forces under Sir John Graham of Claverhouse, defeated the rebels at the battle of Bothwell Bridge in June. 10 It would be more than a year, however, before the ballads and the invention of scottishness 203
Source: Huntington Library Quarterly
Author: Adam Fox
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2460233813