Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

Tonight it is the New Year’s night, tomorrow is the day,
And we are come for our right and for our ray,
As we used to do in old King Henry’s day:
Sing, fellows, sing, hag-man, ha!

If you go to the bacon-flick cut me a good bit;
Cut, cut, and low, beware of your maw.
Cut, cut, and round, beware of your thumb,
That me and my merry men may have some:
Sing, fellows, sing, hag-man, ha!

If you go to the black ark, bring me ten marks;
Ten marks ten pound, throw it down upon the ground,
That me and my merry men may have some;
Sing, fellows, sing, hag-man, ha!

Comment

Comment

The year assigned is that preceding publication, but I suspect the song to be much older. The pinder (someone in charge of impounding stray animals) is added by Robert Bell several years later (Bell 1857). Hogmanay is of course first recorded in a Latin entry in 1443 in the West Riding as hagnonayse (OED contributors 2021). “Rey” < rea, a low-denomination Portuguese coin cognate with the Spanish real.

Take the warning in verse 2 seriously: a good guitarist I know in Barcelona started slicing ham while drunk, and took off his left thumb. On the same hand, the damage Django Reinhardt suffered to the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand was caused by a caravan fire, not a love of pork.

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Original

To-night it is the New Year’s night, to-morrow is the day,
And we are come for our right and for our ray,
As we used to do in old King Henry’s day:
Sing, fellows, sing, hag-man, ha!

If you go to the bacon-flick cut me a good bit;
Cut, cut, and low, beware of your maw.
Cut, cut, and round, beware of your thumb,
That me and my merry men may have some:
Sing, fellows, sing, hag-man, ha!

If you go to the black ark, bring me ten marks;
Ten marks ten pound, throw it down upon the ground,
That me and my merry men may have some;
Sing, fellows, sing, hag-man, ha!

131 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Animal pound (3) ·
• Ballad (18) ·
• Henry VIII (1491-1547) (16), ruled 1509 until his death, initiator of the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority and introducing the theory of the divine right of kings, dissolved convents and monasteries, invested heavily in the navy ·
• Hogmanay (1) ·
• North Riding of Yorkshire (51) ·
• Poetry (70) ·
• Richmond, North Yorkshire (3) ·
• Richmond (2) ·
• Song (20) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 20 June 1881: John Tutin of Hull visits Hart-leap Well, the subject of Wordsworth’s anti-hunting poem
• 14 May 1673: Long after the longbow’s demobilization, the Scorton Archers agree to shoot annually for a silver arrow
• 29 September 1684: It being Michaelmas, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield (in song) deserts his beasts and pound and joins Robin Hood in the greenwood
• 19 February 1557: At a tithe hearing, Ralph Dicconson (60) of Malton recalls his visits 40 years ago as a pedlar to Kirkham Priory before its dissolution in 1539
• 18 April 1812: Dressed as a country lass, George Butler recites the West Riding dialect tragicomedy of Richard and Betty at the Theatre Royal, Ripon
• 29 January 1785: The beginning of a fox-hunting song by W.S. Kenrick and J. Burtell about the odyssey of the Cleveland hounds on this day
• 1 December 1851: John (65) and Betty (73) of Wibsey are at long last united in a “funny wedding” at Bradford
• 24 August 1870: Fakesong by an army captain about the sights of the St. Bartholomew’s Fair today at Reeth, Swaledale
• 15 March 1715: Frustrated lovers Martha Railton and Roger Wrightson of Bowes (NR) are buried together
• 29 September 1513: Black humour in a report to Venice regarding the arrival at York of the body of James IV of Scotland after Flodden