The People's Songbag Angel In Disguise

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31221, 19 November 1966, Page 12

The People's Songbag Angel In Disguise

(Specially written for "The Press" t»v

DERRICK ROONEY)

f)NE of the oldest —and still most romantic—of the legendary ballads of Britain is the “Blind Beggar’s Daughter of Bethnall Green,” in which the heroine turns out, with happy consequences, to be a poor little rich girl. K was a blind beggar had long lost his sight. He had a fair daughter of beauty most bright. And many a gallant brave suitor had she. For none was as comely as pretty Bessie It is a very old ballad; Bishop Percy, in his “Reliques” (published in the eighteenth century), wrote that it was “writen in the reign of Elizabeth, as appears not only from verse 23, where the arms of England are called the ‘Queene’s armes’; but its tune being quoted in other old pieces written in her time.” The story, briefly (the original, like most ballads of the period, takes something like 80 or 90 stanzas), is that pretty Betty, to find a suitor who will love her for her own sake, goes on the road and ends up at an inn at Rumford. Before long she is being courted by, variously, the innkeeper’s son, a “gentleman of good degree,” a London merchant “whose wealth was not small,” and a gallant young knight As they propose she tells each, in turn, to seek first her father’s permission; and as they find that her father is none other than “the silly blind beggar of

Bethnall Green” each but one hastily takes his leave. Why then, quoth the knight, for better or worse, I weigh not true love by the weight of the purse; And beauty if beauty in every degree. Then welcome unto me, my pretty Bessie. The song ends with the bride receiving an unexpected dowry: confronted with the bridegroom-to-be’s protesting family, the beggar offers to “drop angells” with them for his daughter—an angell being a gold coin of the time equivalent to several £s in modern currency. And so he does, dropping two to their one until their pockets are empty, and adding another £lOO for a wedding dress. In a second fitt of the song, published by Percy, the blind man turns out to be, not a beggar, but a “great lord of England” who was severely wounded and left for dead in a battle and had been hiding himself from his enemies ever since. Whether the story comes solely from the imagination of an early minstrel, or is an enlargement of some real-life incident, is not known. But Samuel Pepys gives soihe credence to it In his entry for June 25, 1663, describing a trip to the home of Sir William Rider, at Bethnall Green, for dinner: “This very house was built by the Blind Beggar of Bednall Green, so much talked of and sang in ballads; but they say it was only some outhouses of it”