Na Píobairí Uilleann

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An Píobaire

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8 1 20 20120206 A date before 1742 for the song is implied by the reference in the last verse to Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), prime minister of Great Britain, 1721–42, and André-Hercule de Fleury (1653–1742), prime minister France, 1726–42. A possible objection to that date is the ‘Forgotten Famine’ of 1740–1 caused by 21 months of bizarre weather. It began with the Great Frost of January 1740 and ended with floods of biblical proportions in September 1741. Such a disaster, though, need not have curbed the pursuits of country gentry. 14 In the introduction, ‘Namur’ was William III’s re- capture from the French of this fortress-city on the Franco-Belgian border in 1695 – his ‘one great victory in sixteen campaigns’; 15 ‘Blenheim’ was the famous battle of 1704 , and ‘Ypres’ the siege of 1710 during the War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–14. ‘Addison’ was the English writer and politician, Joseph Addi- son (1672–1719), proprietor of the London journal, The Spectator. ‘Ben Johnson’ was the famous poet, dramatist (and murderer) Ben Jonson (1572–1637), and ‘Chevy Chase’, the song he wished to have written, commemo- rated the battle of Otterburn, fought in the Cheviot Hills on the Scottish Border in 1338. In the song itself, ‘sonnet’ in verse 1 obviously means ‘ballad’ / ‘song’. 16 There may be a fur- ther literary allusion in the lines ‘We fell to with fury, / Like a long-famish’d jury …’ in verse 5, which seem to echo a couplet in The Rape of the Lock (1714) by Alexander Pope: ‘The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, / And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.’ ‘Rippon’ in verse 2 was the town of Ripon in Yorkshire, and ‘Ringwood’ a hound. In verse 3, ‘Dubourg’ (‘De Burgh’ in 1831) 17 was the brilliant English violinist Matthew Dubourg (1703–67), Master of the State Musick in Ire- land, 1728–52. Of the two hills named, ‘knock- ainy’ is Knockainy is in the parish of that name, barony of Smallcounty, but ‘Knockdis- can’ is more difficult to identify. Croker gives ‘Knockaderk’ (parish of Grean, barony of Coonagh), but the ‘correction’ seem too ex- treme. Much closer to ‘Knockdiscan’ is Ralph Ouseley’s ‘Knock-kiston’, 18 and perhaps both are attempts at rendering Knockastanna (parish of Doon, barony of Coonagh). Traditionally the ‘beggar’s benison’ (verse 7) was ‘a guinea al- ways in your purse’; but it had a bawdier form, which explains why a sex club founded in 1707 in Anstruther, in the Scottish county of Fife, was called the Beggar’s Benison. 19 Of the belles toasted in verse 6, Crofton Croker identified ‘Miss Bligh’ as the eldest sister of John Bligh (1683–1728) of Rathmore, co. Wesmeath, 1st earl of Darnley, adding that she married in 1748. (She is ‘Miss Blythe’ in 1831). 20 ‘Miss Prittie’ was Edward Croker’s sister-in-law and married in 1736. ‘Miss Cro- ker’, his second sister, Alice, was subject of the song ‘Ally Croker’ (she married in 1744). W.H. Grattan Flood later identified ‘Cherry Singleton’ as the daughter of the distinguished lawyer and judge, Henry Singleton (1682– 1759), Prime Sergeant (1726), Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1740), and Master of the Rolls in Ireland (1754). 21 Neither Croker nor Flood could identify ‘Sweet Sally Curry’. The problem with these identifications, however, is that Crofton Croker, having pitched on 1735 as the date of the song, would have tailored them to support it. The marriage of ‘Miss Prittie’ in 1736 would point to a date before that for the song; but if it does date from 1741, then the girl toasted could have been either of her younger sisters, one who married 1742 and the other in 1745. Flood’s identification of ‘Cherry Singleton’ as a daughter of Henry Singleton’s was probably just a guess, but as ‘Cherry’ is a pet form of ‘Charity’, she was possibly Sin- gleton’s niece of that name who was already a widow in 1744, when she married William Yorke, justice of the Common Pleas. 22 The un- reliability of the identifications is epitomised by ‘Miss Perrse’ of 1831/39, whom Crofton Croker and Flood assumed to have been a Perrse of Roxboro, co. Galway, incidentally, 20

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2012-02-01T00:00:00

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