Month: July 2023

I learned this from Ewan MacColl’s album ‘The Manchester Angel’, though, hearing that version again recently, I see I’ve changed the words slightly. I think he collected it from the Dorset singer Caroline Hughes in the 60s, but Hammond also collected two very similar versions, also in Dorset, in the first decade of the 20th century. I noticed around then that the tune is clearly related to one associated with the rather more spiritual The Carnal and the Crane and The Holy Well, though Martin Carthy also used it for a version of the less-than-spiritual ballad of adultery and murder Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard.

When I sang The Sheepstealer in the 70s, I always sang it unaccompanied, as did MacColl.

Much more recently, though, I started to play The Holy Well as an intro to my own Song of Chivalry (though not for the song itself, which uses a more-or-less original tune). Even more recently, when the Dorset song came up in conversation in a Facebook group frequented by Cornish songwriters, it occurred to me that a somewhat similar guitar part would work quite well with it. And I think it does: your mileage may vary, of course!

Same version, but tidied and remastered.

[backup]

If you’re familiar with my album So Sound You Sleep, you may notice that I used the same tune for my lyric about Twm Siôn Cati. (Which I also sang unaccompanied.) Fortunately, I also recorded a version using The Limerick Rake as an alternative tune: having rediscovered The Sheepstealer, I think I prefer to sing it as I learned it and use the Irish tune for the Welsh outlaw story.

You can find words to The Sheepstealer here on Mainly Norfolk.

Backup:

The Inclosure Acts enabled the passing into private hands land that had previously been designated as either ‘common’ or ‘waste’. This process preceded by several centuries the formal Inclosure Acts (which began with an Act of 1604) and continued into the 20th century, resulting in the enclosure of nearly seven million acres. While enclosure facilitated more efficient agricultural methods, that increased efficiency and loss of communal land was a factor in the enforced move of so many agricultural labourers into towns. There are a number of variations of this poem, which is usually assumed to date from the 1750s or ’60s, when enclosure legislation started to accelerate dramatically. The tune here is mine: the repeat of the last line is not in the original text, but I thought some chorus harmonies might be nice. 🙂

There are a number of variations of the text, and often just the first two verses are quoted. There’s an alternative four-verse text from ‘Tickler’ magazine dated 1821, but I like this text better.

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common’
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

[Tune (c) David Harley)