The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31071, 28 May 1966, Page 5

The People's Songbag

Not Just A Weed

{Specially written for “The Broom, which is a noxious weed in New Zealand, could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as a member of the hierarchy of plants here. But in England —as far as folk-lore is concerned—its status is altogether different.

Broom is an important plant. It has magical properties: it has wisdom of the ages: Its bright yellow blossoms are a narcotic: witches ride on it (not on the brooms you sweep the floor with): a spray of broom outside the door repels death. Or so they sav in folk-lore. In the lore of plants broom is the symbol of humility, and when Geoffrey of Anjou, the founder of the Plantagenets, made his pilgrimage to the Holy Land he took it as his emblem. In folk-song it is also the symbol of virility, and there’s many an apparently innocuous ditty about broom-cutters and the broom-fields that can draw a sly chuckle. One is called, appropriately enough. “Green Broom”: it is the story of lazy Jack, whose father, exasperated by his slovenly habits, sends him out of the house to find a living cutting broom. In a nearby town Jack catches the eye of a lady: summoning her servants, she instructs them:

Jo down, she says, and let the lad in, For I fancy both him and his broom, green broom. For I fancy both him and his broom. The result is that Jack marries the woman and lives a

Press’’ by DERRICK ROONEY) rich and fpresumably) idle life thereafter. And all “by the selling of broom, green broom." This is a very old song, first published in Durfey’s “Pills to Purge Melancholy” in 1720. Paradoxically, broom in folk-song is also an antiaphrodisiac. In a West Country song. “The Broomfield Wager” or “The Broomfield Hill,” first published in 1769. a girl has arranged a meeting with a knight but is afraid to keep it for fear of losing her virtue.

But a witch tells her howto keep her lover asleep by using the narcotic perfume of broom flowers: so she visits him in the woods without his knowledge. When the knight discovers he has been tricked he accuses his horse and his falcon of not having told him of the girl’s presence: whereupon the horse says that he stamped his feet and jingled his harness and the falcon that he clapped his wings and jingled his bells but could not awaken the knight. In one version the knight reacts savagely, threatening to kill the girl and cast her body to the carrion birds:

If I’d been awake when my true love was here, 1 know .I’d have had mu will Or else these birds in yon’ green woods This night would have had their fill.

From which the moral would seem to be if you’ve got broom on your land, Mr Farmer, steer clear of it. Or I get rid of it.