Highway robbery and poaching led to execution and transportation, and both these are subjects for the folk-song maker. The execution songs appear, however, generally to be the work of professional ballad makers, and the “last dying speech and confession” of a criminal, with appended verses, was in print long before he had paid the penalty of his crime. The ballad was sung to one or other of those doleful tunes especially appropriated to this kind of song by the ballad chanter, who hawked the broadsides through the towns on the night of the execution. Frequently the tag to such ditties was—
“Young men all now beware How you fall into a snare.”
In a somewhat similar strain are the songs that tell of the miseries of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, for poaching or other offences.
Of soldier songs the folk-singer has comparatively few. One of the prettiest is that indifferently called “The Summer Morning,” or “The White Cockade.” It commences—
“It was one Monday morning, as I came o’er the moss, I had no thought of listing till the soldiers did me cross; They kindly did invite me to a flowing bowl, and down They advancèd me some money, ten guineas and a crown.
’Tis true my love has ’listed; he wears a white cockade; He is a handsome, tall young man, besides a roving blade; He is a handsome young man, and he’s gone to serve the King. Oh! my very heart is breaking all for the love of him!”
Another soldier’s song popular among folk-singers is “Pretty Polly Oliver,” or “Polly Oliver’s Ramble.”
“One night Polly Oliver lay musing in bed; A comical fancy came into her head, Neither father nor mother shall make me false prove, I’ll ’list for a soldier and follow my love.”
Polly dresses herself in male attire, mounts her father’s black gelding, and joins the regiment, with the captain of which she is in love.
“When first I deserted I thought myself free Until my false comrade informed on me.”
Another favourite is “The Gentleman Soldier,” and yet another, “The bonny Scotch lad with his bonnet so blue.” The battle of Waterloo gave rise to several long ballads descriptive of the fight, and these in their full integrity of twenty or thirty verses used, not long ago, to be remembered by old soldiers.