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" Sir Hugh", also known as " The Jew's Daughter" or " The Jew's Garden", is a traditional British folk song, Child ballad No. 155, Roud No. 73, a folkloric example of a blood libel. The original texts are not preserved, but the versions written down from the 18th century onwards show a clear relationship with the 1255 accusations of the murder of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln by Jews in Lincoln, making it likely that the known versions derive from compositions made around that time.
The title is a corruption of "Little Saint Hugh".
When the boy fails to come home, his mother concludes that he is skylarking. She sets out to find him, with a rod to beat him. From beyond the grave, the boy asks his mother to prepare a funeral winding sheet, and that he is "asleep". In some versions he asks that if his father calls for him, the father is to be told that he is "dead". In some versions the boy's corpse shines "like gold". In some versions the Jew's daughter catches the blood in a basin and puts a prayer book at his head and a bible at his feet.
The death of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1255) falls into this period. The facts of the original story are obscure. An admission of ritual killing was extracted from a Jew named Copin by John Lexington, a member of the Royal court and the brother of the Bishop of Lincoln. The Bishop stood to gain greatly from the establishment of a cult of martyrdom, as it would attract pilgrims and donations. The King intervened, executed the man who had confessed and ordered the arrest of a further 90 Jews. Eighteen were hanged for refusing to take part in the trial, while the remainder were later pardoned.
Because of the intervention of the King, the story became well known and gained credibility. The contemporaneous chronicler Matthew Paris (d. 1259) mentions the story. The story also appears in Annals of Waverley. The Paris version of events was drawn on by Chaucer. Elements of the Paris and Chaucer versions of the story can be found in some versions of the ballad. It is likely that the earliest versions were composed close to the time of the events. "It is … most likely that the ur-ballad of St. Hugh in English was composed in the late thirteenth century whilst interest in the martyrdom was still high"
There is an Anglo-Norman ballad (medieval French), likely composed while Henry III was still alive and probably with knowledge of the city of Lincoln.; This version may contain the main elements of the original English song, many of which were lost in the later versions, which were written down in the 18th century and later. It is possible to relate elements in the older versions to the medieval stories; attempts to reconstruct the probable content of the original have been made.
Paris has a Latin fragment of the ballad in his Chronicle. Thomas Percy's Reliques (1783) has a version from Scotland. David Herd (1776) had a version, and so did Robert Jameison (1806). McCabe says that the "earliest texts of Sir Hugh are Scottish … and preserve the medieval saint's legend in its most coherent form."
The song may also incorporate elements of other medieval anti-semitic texts, particularly a miracle story also drawn on by Chaucer in the Prioress' Tale that features Jews murdering a child, often a school child, that habitually sings an anthem near where they live, and throw the body into their Outhouse. These elements occur in some of the early versions of Sir Hugh.
The known versions have lost many of the elements of the original story, or have simplified them over time. For instance, the original takes place near a castle, while this becomes a castle belonging to a Jew. The well near a castle becomes a private well set in the castle gardens. The location, "Merry Lincoln" becomes garbled, and dropped. The game becomes a ball game. The element of crucifixion is lost. The timing of the events is sometimes preserved as midsummer, sometimes altered to Easter. The role of the mother in warning against associating with the Jews, and later accusing the Jews, is simplified and dropped. (In some versions she becomes a disciplinarian figure, and eventually, even becomes the murderess.) Miraculous elements such as bells ringing without hands are dropped. The funeral element disappears, and the number of characters reduced.
New elements, such as rain or mist, are added, some including references to Scotland, implying that the ballad may have travelled back into England from Scotland. Stanzas from Robin Hood's Death are incorporated. Some of the later versions, particularly the American texts known as The Jew's Garden, incorporate elements of another song about child murder, Lamkin.
Nevertheless, McCabe concludes that the most persistent element in Sir Hugh is the anti-semitic element: "despite the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 … with its consequence that many ballad singers knew no Jews, reference to a Jewish murderess is almost always preserved."
Roud and Bishop make a similar point:
Karl Heinz Göller gives a different view of the origins and resonances of the ballad. Like McCabe, he traces changes showing that the form of the elements are simplified. For Göller, one side of the ballad is a fairy tale, onto which anti-semitic elements have been added, and at later dates, dropped and forgotten. Thus Sir Hugh is in his opinion a "symbolic story", of temptation and sexual deflowering. He details how the anti-semitic elements are largely dropped in the American versions, and even the violence is removed, as the ballad in some cases becomes a nursery rhyme. He speculates that a version existed prior to its merger with the Hugh of Lincoln story, which "must have been similar to the Frog Prince tale in respect to love and the introduction to its mysteries".
Göller points to James Joyce as a figure who recognised the tension between the symbolic story and the anti-Semitic tale. In Ulysses, Stephen and his host debate an Irish version of the song. Stephen "regards the ballad as a parable of human fate. Hugh challenges his fate once through carelessness, twice through premeditation. Fate appears in the person of the Jewish girl, who, as an incarnation of Hope and Youth, allures him into a secret chamber, and kills him like a sacrificial animal." On the other hand, his host remembers the accusations of ritual murder, "the incitation of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulis".Ulysses, p811, quoted in
Given the tension between the story of Hugh, murdered by Jews, and the symbolic story that Göller describes, he concludes that the "introduction of details from the Hugh of Lincoln story is thus in all probability a secondary phenomenon. It is very difficult to say when the amalgamation took place. Events such as the discovery of the bones of the murdered little boy in Lincoln Minster could have been a catalyst. But it is more likely that the anti-Semitism of a part of the ballads and the localization in Lincoln is a kind of euhemerist contamination similar to the Prioress's Tale, which gave rise to associations with the Hugh of Lincoln story through the similarity of its subject matter. Most of these anti-Semitic details have disappeared in the course of oral tradition, because they were no longer understood."
One of the earliest professional recordings of the song was by A. L. Lloyd on "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol 2" in 1956, produced by Kenneth Goldstein, himself a Jew. Another interpreter of the song, Ewan MacColl, described the ballad as "the barbaric functioning of medieval thinking".
It is still a controversial topic as to whether it is something that should be performed or recorded; and if it is, whether it is reasonable to remove the anti-Semitic elements. The 1975 version recorded by Steeleye Span, for instance, removes these references entirely.
| The earliest known professional recording; re-issued in 1952 on the Anthology of American Folk Music |
| The earliest known field recording |
| Reissue: Rounder CD Classic Ballads Of Britain & Ireland: Folk Songs Of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales Vol. 2 |
| Four variants of the ballad: one English ( Sir Hugh) and three American ( The Fatal Flower Garden, Little Saloo, It Rained a Mist) |
| Cover of the 1930 version by Nelstone's Hawaiians, as re-issued on the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music |
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