Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural Message

Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural MessageAuthor(s): Gerald PorterSource: Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1995), pp. 43-61Published by: English Folk Dance + Song SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4522502 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 23:14

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

English Folk Dance + Song Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to FolkMusic Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.126 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 23:14:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=efdss

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4522502?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural Message* GERALD PORTER

THIS PAPER CONSIDERS the songs of cobblers and shoemakers in England, and songs about them. Most of the examples of cobblers' and shoemakers' own songs-'insider' songs-including many broadsides, come from the established centres of shoemaking, including Northampton, Newcastle and London, but they also featured as the subjects of 'outsider' songs-broadsides and comic songs written and performed by those who saw shoemakers from the customer's viewpoint. Insider songs, usually rooted in a distinctive use of dialect, local setting, and technical processes, express what Ian Watson calls 'shared, class-internal experience',' while in outsider songs the protagonists usually display simple character traits that are assumed to go with their calling. As in all vernacular song, the difference between songs that were by shoemakers, those that werefor them, and those that were about them is highly significant, and this paper examines how representations of the shoemaker and cobbler play on multiple cultural images of this type. In many respects, the songs discussed here have features in common with the songs of other occupations, and I shall open by briefly considering what is meant by the term 'occupational song'.

Although having a job, or being without one, is a constant preoccupation of the makers and consumers of popular culture, it is not consistently represented there. Novels that have industrial or mining settings often coincide with periods of active working-class organization. English novels from the time of the Chartist movement in the 1840s exposed for the first time the lives and social relations of figures like Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe, and Mary Barton, a Manchester weaver (all three from novels by women) only to submerge them again in the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites and the rarefied air of the fin de siecle.2 Popular culture, even at its most reactionary and manipulative, often showed a similar tendency to feature scenes of work. For a short while at the end of the New Deal period in the United States a century later, Walt Disney films almost invariably included episodes of group labour accompanied by songs of the 'i-o, i-o, it's off to work we go' type.3 Today, if such scenes are found at all in Disney, they are marginal and feature isolated individuals. Mass unemployment and the setting in place of a new international order in the 1980s has ensured that references to 'the working classes' elicit a yawn or a sneer.

Only one field of popular culture has consistently foregrounded working practices and relations, and that is vernacular song. About half of the traditional songs collected

* An early version of this article was read to the Cultural Studies section of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) at its conference in Bordeaux, September 1993. June Swann, formerly of Northampton Central Museum, has been a constant help in the preparation of this article and has saved me from many pitfalls. The patience and alertness of the Editor of Folk Music Journal and the comments of the Editorial Board have helped me to a much more 'user-friendly' version of my original text.

Folk MusicJournal, Volume 7, Number 1, 1995 ISSN 0531-9684 Copyright © English Folk Dance and Song Society



44 GERALD PORTER

in England at least mention the occupation of the protagonist, often in a way that is significant for the narrative. However, the role of occupations in song as an aspect of its meaning has not received much attention. Although in every sense traditional and often narrative in form, occupational songs differ strikingly from the long- established type of the folk song, which the work of Dave Harker and others has led us to recognize as a genre constructed to confirm certain national and class stereotypes.4 As is well known, early editors and collectors felt that songs were preferably to be sought from nonliterate informants in remote country districts. Songs were recorded from solitary individuals, usually singing unaccompanied, in domestic settings. It was almost universally believed that 'true' folk song had more or less died out by the early nineteenth century. The main oral tradition lay in tragic narrative. Finally, folk songs basically dealt with love relationships or the exploits of folk heroes.5

Occupational songs, on the other hand, in the broadest sense of songs where the calling of the protagonist, or the performer, contributes significantly to the meaning of the song, often originate in urban or industrial settings, among men and women who are highly articulate and make considerable use of published material from the popular presses. The songs are sung above all as group expression, in pubs, clubs and workplaces, often noisily accompanied. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, far from representing a decline, have been among the most productive, with new songs not only from the great established industries like weaving, farming and coal, but coming for the first time from engineering and transport. While often showing anger or despair, the songs are also provocative, ribald or parodic, sometimes all three at the same time. 'Folk song' as defined by the early editors was therefore a construct which was almost tailor-made to exclude most occupational songs. Since two other common features of occupational songs are a high degree of sexual reference and a characteristic stance of being at loggerheads with the prevailing ideology, they often remained largely outside the early published collections. Only sea shanties were to some extent exempt, and they could not be published without extensive alterations.6

In editing the manuscripts of Baring-Gould, H. E. D. Hammond and Gardiner, for example, James Reeves maintained that 'traditional song as a rule is concerned with a man's or woman's occupation not for itself but in the context of love-making' .7

As a result of the self-imposed constraints on folksong collecting mentioned above, many of the best-known songs support this view. The song 'I'll Have a Collier for my Sweetheart', for example, probably sung more by men than by women, equates work in the mines with sexual desirability, while the broadside entitled 'The Merry Milk-Maid' offered the buyer the certainty of what we now regard as an account of sexual harassment at work.8 However, Reeves's claim has led to the persistent view that occupational songs are by definition amatory, and this marginalizes the majority of occupational songs, as we shall see in the case of the shoemakers. Like any subculture, an occupation is distinguished by dress, territory and speech, all of which are represented in the songs. For the lacemakers singing their 'tells' (counting rhymes), or the shoemakers singing together on carnival days, their occupation was part of their identity and their songs a site of resistance.9 Daily struggles could be shifted to the song, where there was a certainty of winning.

Representations of the cobbler and shoemaker in vernacular song are basically of two kinds, corresponding to the insider/outsider distinction made earlier. Some of the occupational songs are the voice of members of a subculture who cannot accept



Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural Message 45

their subordinate status and use songs to resist that status. Hence these songs represent what Paul Zumthor calls 'a field of experimentation of self, making mastery of the world possible'.10 Other songs, often from the position of the dispossessed, challenge the shoemakers, representing them as an entrenched group with pretensions to elite status. The insider/outsider distinction should not be regarded as a fixed one. It is meaningful within the context of a single performance or an occupation in a particular setting at a certain time, like the work songs of the Portland quarry workers." How- ever, individual songs could change their status according to the performer's distance from the occupation concerned. This was particularly common in a 'porous' trade like that of the cobbler where the tools were comparatively few and cheap, making it easy for outsiders to move in. There were early attempts by shoemakers to distance themselves from the cobblers. From the fifteenth century onwards, the shoemakers' guild laid down that no one who 'meddled with old shoes' should sell new ones, and even four hundred years later the Amalgamated Cordwainers' Association -the elite shoemakers' union-still excluded the 'dishonourable' part of the trade, the

12 I repairers. It is these attempts at setting up a hierarchy within the occupation that were constantly challenged in songs featuring shoemakers.

In the late sixteenth century, shoemaking became one of the dominant trades, with sizeable workshops not only in London, like that of Simon Eyre in Thomas Dekker's play, The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), but in Northampton and elsewhere.13 Eyre, an actual master shoemaker of the time, is represented by Dekker as encouraging singing in his shop because "twill make us work the faster' (ii.3.53).14 This is not the only evidence that there was a tradition of singing in these workshops. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, a play particularly alert to the practice of singing at work, Malvolio complains about Sir Toby Belch picking up these 'coziers' catches'.15 In 'The Honest Age', a broadside from about 1630, the shoemaker 'merrily sings' at his work.16 The broadsides of the following century likewise confirm that songs were an important element of the shoemakers' working lives, at least in London. The London shoemakers bear no similarity to the image of the autonomous singing community, untainted by contact with print or commerce, so eagerly sought by the early collectors. The apprentices in particular were major buyers of the new popular literature of the day, and at times, particularly during the 1630s and 1690s, the broadside makers turned repeatedly to shoemaking for their subject matter. In the Pepys Collection alone, there are thirteen seventeenth-century broadsides featuring shoemakers as protagonists, all but four being of the 'In Praise of the Gentle Craft' type.

In fact, the chapbooks and broadsides had a two-way relationship with their consumers, simultaneously drawing on traditional material and acting as a powerful initiator of new songs.17 As commodities, they made a profit for their printers and continued to do so until the nineteenth century, but their cultural function is not explained by their economic function. They became a site for the construction of new meanings by groups such as the shoemakers who, newly conscious of their common interests as an occupational group, were only too ready to make use of a resource provided by the system that subordinated them. This subordination was resisted by writers for the popular presses, who were both conscious of their new audience and, like Richard Rigby at the end of the century, were sometimes shoemakers themselves.

At least around the beginning of the seventeenth century, this subordination was social rather than material. There is evidence from about 1590 to the Civil War that



46 GERALD PORTER

shoemakers were wealthier and accorded more respect than other trades.18 Certainly, a cult of gentility was constructed in the popular literature of the time. From 1582 onwards, shoemaking was commonly referred to as 'The Gentle Craft' -'gentle' being used in its class-specific sense and in The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker represented the master shoemaker, Simon Eyre, as being able to say of himself, 'Prince am I none yet I am princely born' (v.5.17).19 The setting up of an anrstocracy of the skilled worker in parodic relation to the actual aristocracy of the time can be seen as part of a continuing project of much popular literature, to set up alternative and often mutually competing social hierarchies in the image of the current system, or systems, of power relations. This operated as a kind of empowerment, a carnivalesque inversion of the workers' subordinate status. In Dekker's play, the inversion of the prevailing class hierarchy is further emphasised when the highborn character, Lacy, dresses himself as a shoenmaker for the purposes of pursuing his courtship of Rose (The Shoemaker's Holiday II.3), an act of disguise closely paralleled in the later broadside 'The Blinking One-Eyed Cobbler'. " Thus the tradesman on the rise meets the anstocrat coming down. This, of course, has the effect of legitimizing the status quo rather than challenging it. Dekker makes it clear that the rhetoric of the master shoemaker, Simon Eyre, about his 'gentleman shoemakers' -that 'none but the livery of my company shall in their satin hoods wait upon the trencher of my sovereign' (The Shoemaker's Holiday, v.4.5)-is illusory. The Lord Mayor of London's comment about 'a foul drunker lubber, a swill-belly, I A shoemaker' in the same play (iv.3.55) is a cool reminder of their actual place within that system. Likewise, it is noticeable that even though the King honours the shoemakers' guild at the end of the play, he is careful not to legitimate Simon Eyre's claims to aristocratic status.

The good-humoured camaradenre among shoemakers already seen in Dekker's play was another of the staple attnrbutes of the occupational group in the popular literature of the time and, by the early seventeenth century, such features began to have a political significance. In the 1630s and '40s, shoemakers were represented as the antithesis of the hardworking small tradesmen who were being drawn to Punrtanism. They came to typify the convivial worker. In the broadside ballad, 'Round boyes indeed, or The Shoomakers Holy-day', dating from 1637, they openhandedly invite other workers to join them:

The carpenter we daily see, round boyes round,

The mason and bricklayers be, round boyes indeed,

[The] Costermonger will not shrinke, [He] is nae niggard of his chincke, But with boone blades will fit a drinke

when he of it hath need.2'

In this ballad nearly all the key components of quasi-noble birth ('Shoemakers sonnes were princes borne', line 27), heavy drinking (passim) and lusty singing (lines 125- 27), first set up by chapbook writers such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe in the 1590s, are firmly in place. The balladmaker, Laurence Price, has only added that merriment is to extend well past the weekend, since 'Munday Sundayes fellow be'. Whether the jest was Price's invention or not, this is one of the first known references to 'Saint Monday' and it is a sign of the marginalization of popular literature in




standard reference works that the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1752, over a century later than this example.22

Finally, the high degree of literacy among shoemakers and their acuteness about social issues made them, with the cobblers, ideal vehicles for political speculation in street ballads at a time of revolutionary change like the seventeenth century. One of the woodcuts for the ballad, 'The Coblers New Prophesie: or, New News for England' (c. 1680),23 shows the shoemaker dressed like an astrologer, sitting at a table decorated with mystical symbols (see Figure 1). The reference to the 'Gentle Craft' in the introductory verse makes it clear that a shoemaker is meant rather than a mere repairer. The shoemaker was renowned for his learning and intelligence at least until the nineteenth century: in E. Sloane's Essays, Tales and Sketches (1849), for example, the cobbler is the village politician, while the dark-eyed shoemaker, Croop, in George Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), is a member of the working-men's discussion group, 'The Philosophers'.24

When broadside ballads incorporated the gift of political prophecy into the signi- fiers of an occupation like that of the shoemaker, they were, of course, far from simply reflecting the working conditions of the time. Their writers were in the business of establishing a sequence of attributes, accurate or not, that could be attached to the shoemaker and then activated at will, not by any means always in the interests of those who were being portrayed. For example, in the broadside ballad 'A New Song In Praise of the Gentle-Craft ... To the Tune of, The Shoomakers Travels' (c. 1690), Richard Rigby harnessed the shoemakers' reputation for shrewd social analysis and nonconformism to the cause of militant anti-Catholicism, and others did the same.25 Similarly, 'The Glory of the Gentle-Craft', which dates from the time of King William's campaign to subdue Ireland in 1691, is decorated with a woodcut featuring a shoemaker at work in his workplace or stall, surrounded by his tools, with a singing bird in a cage in the corner (see Figure 2). A bubble coming from his mouth urges the reader:

The Blackbird thus doth sweetly Sing Go fight for William your great King.26

That a songbird should so faithfully articulate the values of the dominant, written culture in this way points to a basic contradiction in the broadsides' relationship with a group like the shoemakers, who made up an important part of their readership. Unlike a traditional song, which is part of a performance that is continuous and totalizing, broadsides were fractured and discontinuous in the sense that they were ultimately commodities targeted at individual consumers. They were addressed in the first instance to a reader rather than an audience. The relationship was one-to-one rather than communal. Of course, the reader might create an audience through performance. It is known that this happened even at the point of sale.27 As a result of this, and the fact that the sheet had to be a saleable commodity, the broadside makers had an ambivalent role towards occupational groups like the shoemakers. Occasionally, they challenged the status quo in the trade, but not head-on. Perhaps with an enlarged readership in mind, they constantly undermined the legally established distinctions between the shoemaker, the cobbler who repaired shoes, and the translator, the unskilled journeyman who assembled new shoes from old, discarded ones and was regarded as the lowest of the low. The same woodcuts were used to represent all three. Even Richard Rigby makes no distinction: his ballad, 'The Cobler's



48 GERALD PORTER

O

H

~i . 9· hIa _

M~&f fiS, "e.

I, - .

U6

^c-S' ,i ̂ ,l . aaiff! 1 5 ' 6

I ;. i t i i tJ·SYE

l^- t 1)4 1

§112. * j Z X

1s"% I

48 GERALD PORTER



Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural Message

lThe Glory of die Gentle-Craft Or; A britf account of the Valiant

SHOOMAKERS Who prefented themrclves to His Majefty Ki ng Wi4m of &Ale, d in order to ferve him

againft his Enemie Tune ib, Toaci oftre mes. /

'The Jlakirdthsdothrtoly; Sing/ GQ fifiht£orVWia y our grca'ting

Figure 2 Woodcut from The Glory of the Gentle-Craft, Or, A brief account of the Valiant Shoomakers,

broadside printed for J. Blare, London, 1691. By kind permission of the Master and Fellows, Magdalene College, Cambridge

Corrant: or, The Old Shooemaker Metamorphos'd Into a Spick and Span new Trans- lator', uses the fiercely contested terms indiscriminately.28 The song record shows how porous the profession could be when times were hard.

While few broadside makers took an antagonistic stance towards the shoemakers, who were, after all, an important part of their audience, they do not show them as

distinguishing themselves in the key field of lovemaking. Although male vanity con- cocted many songs suggesting that the mere fact of being a collier or a fisher lad made a man irresistible to women, none of the nineteen broadsides featuring shoemakers in the Pepys Collection shows them as subjects of sexual preference. Rather, like the tailor, their characteristic role is to get into ladies' bedrooms only to be humiliated. In assessing the performance of men of eight different occupations as lovers, the 'London Lady'-the central figure of the broadside of that name-rates the shoemaker poorly. He is represented as unable to use the characteristic tools of his work:

A young Man of the Gentle Craft, a Journey Man Shoo-maker,

Did gravely kiss her in the dark, and took her for a quaker;

He set her down upon his Last, and there struck up a Bargan [sic],

His Awl was nought, the Lady Laught, you do not earn a Farthing.

Outside the amatory contexts, implements and materials in the ballads are not portrayed as in use but references to them give a general feel of the shoemakers' milieu. Tools are snatched up to hasten the moment of departure for the carnival,

49



50 GERALD PORTER

for example, as in the seventeenth-century broadsheet, 'Round boyes indeed, or The Shoomakers Holy-day':

S. Hughs bones up we take in hast, both pincers, punching alle [awl] and last,

The gentle Craft was never disgrast, they have money to serve their need.

In both of the above examples, the awl (the cobbler's leather-piercing tool) and the last (the foot-shaped moulding block) are mentioned. The awl and last have punningly signified the shoemaker and cobbler for over four hundred years. They are the essential attributes of the cobbler, so featuring in Cockney rhyming slang (as in 'a load of cobblers', that is, cobblers' awls = balls). In children's rhymes the awl is likewise the representative tool:

Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe. Yes, good master, that I'll do; Here's my awl and wax and thread, And now your shoe is quite mended.3'

In the sixty or so songs of the trade that I have studied, the awl is mentioned fifteen times; only the term 'last' (mentioned ten times) comes near it as a signifier. Its homophonic relation to the word 'all' has made it the source of many jokes (as in 'the cobbler gave his all' and the title of this paper) but such punning references are not a common feature of songs before the nineteenth century. I have found no examples in the early broadsides. The earliest appear in two related printed sheets, 'The Coblers End' and 'The Coblers Funeral', probably dating from the late eighteenth century.32 Nevertheless, they are participating in a popular verbal tradition that goes back to at least 1599. In the opening scene of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the Second Commoner describes himself as 'a mender of bad soles.... I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor women's matters; but withal I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes' (I.1.13).3

Here the pun on 'awl' is driven home by a comical association of 'soles' with 'souls', a device still to be found in John Clare's long poem, The Parish (1820), which documents the breakdown of rural society at the time. The drunken cobbler feels himself called to higher things. He

... leaves his wicked life, Hastes to save others and neglects his wife; to mend men's souls he thinks himself designed, And leaves his shoes to the uncalled and blind.-4

Another example can be found in 'The Priest and the Cobbler's Wife', a ballad sheet from the 1840s, perhaps of Irish or North of England origin. A hapless 'High Church Parson' calls on the cobbler's wife in an attempt to persuade her to seek absolution for her sins. The illustration shows her flourishing a boot above his head and answering him with grotesque pun: 'I'll give you ab sole lotion. Take that!' In the song itself, she retorts, 'Confess to you, indeed, you dolt! I I'll give you some "sole and healing" '!3s In both literary and popular texts, therefore, the terminology associated with the cobbler and shoemaker does not function as circumstantial detail of the workplace but as an extension of that workplace from the literal to the metaphorical, from the performative to the mimetic, and from the material to the spiritual.

With puns, one meaning is usually rooted in the everyday milieu of the speaker while the other transgresses into the unexpected or the taboo. To take the example




of The Parish, quoted above, Clare was confined at the time of writing this to the asylum in Northampton, a town dominated by the shoemaking industry. Once more this would have given the pun a matenral context rather than a merely literary one. Puns are forms of metaphor in that they collapse two worlds into one another and almost all representations of work in popular culture operate by means of metaphor. Texts are polysemic, that is, they operate with multiple meanings which are simultaneously present. Where insiders are the makers, such representations are often elaborated with great skill. A case in point is the grave of a shoemaker who died in 1783 in Alston, Cumbria, which bears an extended epitaph comparing his death to the dissolution of his workshop:

My lapstone's broke, my colour's o'er, My gum-glass froze, my paste's nio more; My heel's sewed on, my pegs are driveni, I hope I'm on the road to heaven. 36

It is axiomatic that a technolect -the sum of the technical terms used by a particular group-is not 'popular' in the sense of being equally accessible to all: 'gum-glass', for example, is not included at all in the Oxford Englislh Dictionary. However, it may function, as here, as a system of representation which is accessible at least on some level to the outsider. On the other hand, close descriptions of working practices, often involving terms used only in one particular locality, act in practice as a selective instrument to narrow the target audience, giving a sense of intimacy, inwardness and shared experience. When these terms were used in a song, therefore, they served to give extra delight to the listeners, who were hearing their 'own' language, while effectively excluding uninitiated outsiders. As the nineteenth-century Northampton broadside, 'Honest Crispin', shows, this was also true of printed sheets:

Our job shall not be scamp'd, Norfudge-work cause us shame. Good ends won't fail (by goles,) I'll wager all my riches, You may count round our soles, Four hundred Plumper stitches.37

Often the use of a single expression in a song, such as 'waxie' (referring to the waxed ends used by shoemakers) or 'honest Crispin' (after the patron saint), stands for the whole occupation, serving to mark the protagonist both instrumentally and expressively as an insider. In other cases, the lack of skilled experience and a command of the technical language to express it serve equally to identify an outsider in the narrative. Thus the homilies of the parson in an Oldham weaver's song, 'Jone o'Grinfield', are suspect simply because he has never 'picked o'er' (thrown) the weaver's shuttle:

Our [parish] church parson kept tellin' us long, We should have better times if we'd but hold our tongues ... I know he lives weel by backbitin' the de'il, But he never picked o'er in his life.38

In one of the few books to integrate working songs into the context of literary and social discourse, David Craig has considered the use of the terminology of the workplace in song. He considers that when a term is used it is invariably a simple transcription of working practice, not a metaphor for other experience: 'the worker



52 GERALD PORTER

has to cope with the stubbornness of materials. He [sic] cannot escape into the less solid realm of words, concepts, figures or any of the other renderings of reality.'39

Analysis of occupational songs, however, shows that command of a technical process could provide much of the language in a song demanding social justice or celebrating success in love relationships. Terms are used precisely to give access to the 'less solid realm of words, concepts, figures'. In fact, a majority of the technical terms found in popular culture are used figuratively and often jocularly, as in a poem on the bootmakers' march from Raunds (Northamptonshire) to London in 1905, where the puns fly out of every line:

The men of Raunds they waxed wroth, And thought upon their feat [sic],

For though, said they, we're cobblers all, We can't make both ends meet.

We pull and stitch and stitch and pull, And Army Hoofs we pads;

But bosses think because we sew We find no use for brads."

Since metaphor creation moves from the concrete to the abstract, from the specific to the general principle, jargon words are obvious candidates. Technical terms are for insiders but, when placed in a sequence of operations, their meaning can be fathomed out even by outsiders, particularly in erotic songs such as the eighteenth-century broadside 'The Jolly Trades-Men':

Sometimes I am a Shoe-maker, And work with silly Bones Sir; To make my Leather soft and moist, I use a pair of Stones Sir: My Lasts for [sic] and my lasting Sticks, Are fit for every size Sir; I know the length of Lasses feet, By handling of their Thighs Sir.4'

When used figuratively in this way, and therefore no longer particularized in a work process, even a dense web of terms can be unravelled.

'The Jolly Trades-Men' is an example of a large group of English ballads which describe sexual performance in terms of the physical process of working at one's trade. In these songs, the miller grinds his stones, the milkmaid strokes until the milk comes, the ploughboy eases himself into the furrow, and the blacksmith's hammer rises and falls. The work process itself becomes a sexual metaphor, usually through the agency of the tools of a man's or woman's trade. The cobbler, and less often the shoemaker, features prominently in such songs. Some are purely scurrilous, like the broadside 'The Cobler's Wedding':

There was a brave Cobler he liv'd in the town, He marry'd a wife and he brought her home, He kept a grand wedding, with hot puddings and pies, She kist him all night, but his tool would not rise.

More often, the tool is made specific to the occupation but the circumstantial detail remains within the familiar parameters of male fantasy:

As I was a-walking one moming in May I met a pretty fair maid, her gown it-a was gay I step-ped up to her, and back she did fall She want to be played with the long peggin'awl.43



Frequently, however, the terms maintain their functional place in the process of mending a shoe:

She went up to the bedroom and gave the snob [cobbler] a call: 'I've got a little job for you if you [ha]ve brought your awl; And if you do it workmanlike some money I shall pay.' 'Oh, thank you,' said the cobbler, and he quickly stitched away.44

The association between production and reproduction in this way may be a survival of ritual, as A. L. Lloyd suggests.45 It is also, however, rooted in the actual practice of describing and recording work processes. In about 1820, a Dublin shoemaker sent this bill to a regular customer:46

To clicking and sowling Miss Mary /0 0 2 To strapping and welting Miss Sally 0 1 4 To binding and closing Miss Ellen 0 0 8 To putting a few stitches in Miss Charlotte 0 0 4

It is evident from this that the songs were drawing on ambiguities already richly present in the working language.

The coincidence between working practices and the pleasures of the body is not fortuitous, for it is here that hegemony is at its weakest. These songs are not merely sexual romps. They may also be carnivalesque challenges to institutions of capitalism like the servitude of women and the enforced separation of free time and work (popularly encapsulated in the large corpus of jokes about milkmen).47

Although these songs are known to have been sung for many hundreds of years, they are barely represented at all in printed collections before the middle of this century. Some examples are to be found among the unpublished papers of early collectors, but they have survived largely because they have continued to be sung to the present day and because, like 'The Long Peggin' Awl' quoted earlier, they are strongly represented in the broadsides.

My examination of nearly two thousand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century broadsides in the Pepys Collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge, shows the extent of the metaphorical association between production and reproduction, and how far the sexualization of work processes, or the co-option of work to its sexual contexts, had advanced.48 Many of the detailed descriptions of occupations in seventeenth-century popular literature are in the form of sexual metaphor.49 Such metaphors are almost the rule in ballads where the occupation of the protagonist is described. Sexual encounters are described in terms of more than sixty different trades, with the addition of a few professions associated with the middle classes, like the academic, scrivener and lawyer. The most commonly represented in this way is the sailor, followed by the fiddler, who is unique in that he appears in no other kind of

50 song.

Occupational songs which turn on erotic metaphor continued to grow in popu- larity after the seventeenth century and became, if anything, more complex in their use of technolects. For the shoemakers, the songs containing the greatest number of trade terms are found among the early nineteenth-century comic broadsides. 'Mutton and Leather', for example, is, as the title hints, a conventional sexual romp involving a 'coblerone' and a woman who keeps a butcher's shop:

... he hammered away for his life, With his bristles, and lapstone and leather.5




54 GERALD PORTER

During one of his visits, the shoemaker's wife spies on her husbanid: She watched him, and saw the old widow, The hair on her head hissed and frizzles [sic], With the cobbler's stone in her lap, Along with his awl and his bristles.52

'Miss Patty Puff and her Two Sweethearts' (c. 1830), containing the most technical terms of all the shoemaking broadsides, describes how a 'spruce shoemaker' called Billy Boot flees from a duel with a milliner and gets stuck fast in a hedge-hardly a role model for a trade that was forming itself into an elite union at this time. The terms used are not by any means conventional ones:

With his last and shoe, and lapstone too, his wax-end, grinding strap, and hammer, O he lov'd this pastry cook, too, and told her many a crammer [lie].53

'Grinding-strap', like 'coblerone' in 'Mutton and Leather', is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, suggesting that a trawl through popular prints and ballads would prove a rich source of 'lost' terminology of this kind. 4

In early nineteenth-century songs like 'Miss Patty Puff', the tradition that shoemakers are humiliated in love has been appropriated to a new function, that of voicing growing criticism of those suspected of profiting from the Napoleonic Wars. Wars enrich contractors for the army, and the militarization of England at this time brought temporary prosperity for many bootmakers and a rise in prices for their other custo- mers. It would be a simplification to say that popular songs always side with the dispossessed, but there was a rise at this time in the number of songs attacking shoemakers from the point of view of the landless labourer. Although 'We Poor Labouring Men' was not collected before the early years of this century, it clearly dates from the time of the Napoleonic Wars in its early consciousness that not all working people were suffering alike:

Some says the shoemaker's best, but I shan't say so. What would the shoemakers do if'twem't for we poor labouring men? We wears out all their boots and shoes, and so their trade comes in,

There's not a trade in old E1n,eland like we poor labouring men.

'The Rigs of the Time', which speaks for those forced to pay inflated prices for shoddy articles, almost certainly dates from the period immediately before Waterloo:

Here's next to the tailor who skimps with our clothes And next the shoemaker who pinches our toes We've nought in our bellies, our bodies are bare No wonder we've reason to curse and to swear ... Honesty's all out offashion.56

An even more bitter attack was recorded by John Bell in Northumberland after 1810. Unlike the effect of distance found in the broadsides, with their mannered references to the 'Gentle Craft', 'The Shoemaker' is clearly based on proximity, and in this case the speaker is a woman:

His hands is like the cuddy's houghs His face is like the Highland Leather His ears is like- I don't know what His hair is like a Bush of Heather




Shoemaker- Leather cracker Stinking kit and rotten leather I wish a Thousand deaths Id died E're I had wed a shoemaker.57

By helping with closing the uppers and twisting the thread, women participated in the first division of labour in the industry, yet their domestic oppression is a continuing feature of the shoemakers' songs. The following rhyme was already proverbial in 1546: 'Who is wurs shod than the shoemaker's wyfe I With shops full of newe shepen shoes all hir lyfe?' 58 Abusive songs like 'The Shoemaker' belong to an anti-patriarchal tradition that existed in counterpoint with the bluff sexist stereotypes of the 'Long Pegging Awl' type. Such songs also implicitly resisted popular songs that dealt with violent or humiliating abuse of women in marriage. Examples of the latter include 'John Hobbs', in which a shoemaker tries to sell his wife at Smithfield Market, and the widely collected 'Dick Darby' or 'Fagan the Cobbler', which describes the murder (or attempted murder) by drowning of a stereotypically shrewish wife, and which is sung to the accompaniment of mocking gestures to represent simultaneously the chastisement and the act of a shoe being repaired.59

In order to resist such a widespread traditioin, women had to make meanings that would connect with their very different social experience of marginalization and abuse. While circumstantial accounts of singing by women within the shoemaking industry are lacking, the hidden tradition of women's singing as a group is gradually being mapped out.60 Although these songs appear at first to refer to purely personal disputes, singing is a collaborative activity which negotiates wider support from the audience, and the songs often follow or parody familiar lines. Songs such as 'The Shoemaker' inverted the male construct where to be a shoemaker, sailor or ploughboy was synonymous with sexual desirability. Others rely on trading insults, like the woman in a Birmingham broadside who complains:

You say a good time's coming, It will be when you are dead, You nasty drunken dirty snob, Sit down and eam your bread.6'

This is a kind of discourse also available to the socially empowered: for example, it is close to the Lord Mayor of London's comment about 'a foul drunken lubber, a swill-belly, I A shoemaker', quoted earlier.

Even though few insider songs have survived, the existence of a continuing singing tradition among shoemakers is much better documented from the nineteenth century onwards. In about 1870, an anonymous reviewer in the trade paper, St. Crispin, made the comment:

St. Crispin's craft appears to favour the cultivation of the muses, and we often hear above the workshop's din of toil, manly voices discoursing melody in lyric numbers. Song is a sweet relief from the monotony of work, it raises the soul above, perhaps, an irksome task by imparting a cheerfulness to it.62

The inflated style suggests that the idea was commonplace. The 1831 Census put the number of adult boot- and shoemakers and -menders

in Britain at 133,000, making the clothing and footwear trades the second largest category of skilled workers, and as late as 1851 there were still more shoemakers than coalminers. However, the boom at the beginning of the century had ended with the



56 GERALD PORTER

defeat of Napoleon, and shoemakers in the larger towns like Northampton and Ketter- ing increasingly found themselves working for the ready-made trade organized on a capitalist outwork system.63 Songs were an important instrument of opposition to this new economic order that was being set in place. One cause of conflict was the mechanization and re-tooling of the trade, which represented for most the imposition of a new working environment-the factory-and a further loss of control over working conditions. Widely dispersed domestic industry became a highly concentrated modern industry. American shoemakers were quicker to absorb machinery into the imagery of their popular literature than the English. For example, the first US patent for a pegging machine was granted in 1811 (the first effective machines were only introduced about twenty years later) and the song, 'Peg and Awl', dates from the same period:

They've invented a new machine, Peg and Awl ... Purtiest little thing you ever seen, Throw away my pegs....

Makes one hundred pairs to my one, Pegging shoes, it ain't no fun.<

Another source of conflict was the gulf that opened up between 'work' and 'free time', policed by the timekeeper and the factory bell. It is an antithesis that continues to this day. For the first time, certain activities, such as social, political and cultural obligations as well as eating, sleeping and caring for one's body, were set apart as 'non-work'.65 Singing was one activity that was quickly incorporated into 'leisure'. In the 1890s, the Manufacturers' Association in Northampton, the major shoemaking centre in England for hundreds of years, prohibited singing in any of its factories.66 However, Dorothy A. Grimes has documented singing activity around Northampton and prints many accounts of singing by shoemakers as a group at this time.67 Among the industrialized shoe workers, these activities included Glee Club meetings, which have often been regarded as delivering a death blow to the oral tradition in Northamptonshire because of their tendency to canonize fixed texts.68 Outings provided a transplanted version of the singing environment at work, including one to Northampton Racecourse where the men and women linked arms and adapted a music hall song:

We're on the booze, we can't make shoes, We'll all be 'appy today. I've pawned me ticker for 'alf a nicker At Jones's over the way.69

The appropriation of an item of music-hall repertoire in this way, transforming it from an 'outsider' to an 'insider' song, shows the danger of dismissing the music hail as pure commercial exploitation. The workers who packed the galleries were being treated as mass consumers for the first time, but by their very numbers they dominated the performance and contributed to its dynamic.

The prohibition placed on singing in the factories did not destroy the shoemakers' singing tradition, but it seems to have mediated the choice of song. Exceptionally, the shoemaking industry has produced only a handful of songs about the continuing struggle for better pay and conditions. The shoemaker Thomas Hardy was tried for treason in 1797 as a leader of the London Corresponding Society, but elite practices died hard. George Odger of the Union of Skilled Bootmakers became Secretary of




the London Trades Council in the 1860s and a member of the Junta, an elite group of unions which maintained the exclusivity of skilled labour.70 Furthermore, some members were themselves guilty of exploitation. Henry Mayhew gives the case of a London shoemaker who lodged ten of his workmen in one large room at a rent of 2s. 6d. each.7'

United action was for many centuries stronger on the periphery. Newcastle shoemakers were organized as early as 1719, and boot- and shoemaking was first industrialized fully in Northampton. The march from Raunds to London in 1905 gave use to several songs and poems, and as late as the 1950s, Acker Bilk recorded a song for the National Union of Shoe Operatives to the tune of 'Marching through Georgia'. It hardly has the flowing rhythm of a song that has been tested on site and even gives the wrong year for the foundation of the Union it is celebrating:

Back in 1873 [recte 1874], twenty five young men Organised and organised and organised again; Now we're eighty thousand strong, a power in the land, Marching along with the Union!

CHORUS Hurrah! Hurrah! the Union makes us strong, Hurrah! Hurrah! it helps us get along, For shorter hours and higher pay let's sing our workin' song MARCHING ALONG WITH THE UNION! 72

The retrospective nature of the song is characteristic of the modem labour song. When the Northamptonshire band Ock 'n' Dough recorded songs about the shoemakers in 1989, they drew on a historical episode, adapting the contemporary poem already quoted about the march from Raunds to London to protest against the system of tendering which kept down the shoemakers' wages. Being situated in the distant past, such a song would have a steady and simple resonance in contrast to the ambivalent responses to a struggle of recent memory.73

The makers of hand-sewn shoes continued to be represented by their traditional craft union, the Amalgamated Cordwainers' Association, whose very name, a medieval title meaning 'worker in Cordoba leather', indicates the contrast between a traditional craft guild and a modem industrialized union. Although they were increasingly threat- ened by the mass-produced article as the nineteenth century progressed, they continued to sing at their lasts. As their paper, St. Crispin, proudly claimed, 'Shoemakers are great lovers of songs; we have heard singing from the shoemaker's seat, that would not disgrace the best theatre in Europe', and this is corroborated by circumstantial accounts from Northampton such as the following: 'It was not unusual to hear the tappers singing as they worked. In one shop, two men worked side by side and they'd often sing a duet.'74 To judge from known repertoires, like that of Henry Burstow of Horsham, their songs had diverged considerably from those in the factories. Burstow, the singer with the largest known repertoire in England, was a bootmaker, and he names other shoemakers among the sources of his songs. Although Lucy Broadwood claimed that 'Mr. Burstow learnt very many old songs and ballads off shoemakers who were always singing at their work', hardly any of the 420 songs he lists as making up his repertoire feature shoemakers, and Vic Gammon found no songs about work among the hundred songs of Burstow's that he analysed.75 Never- theless, songs continued to appear on broadsheets that celebrated, or rather invented, an unbroken tradition of craftsmanship and an unclouded future, and the cobblers



58 GERALD PORTER

even went to the extent of reviving the myth of high birth in parodic form: My palace is in - cellar below,

where I whistle and work as I please, I cobble old shoes and my backy I blow,

And sing and beat time on my knees. With my hammer and pinchers, heel ball & wax,

Bristles andflax, lapstone and tacks; I cobble old shoes, and I stop up the cracks,

A jolly old Cobbler am J.76

A song is a process not a product and this paper has related songs to the continuing search for meaning in shoemakers' lives. Despite the existence of specialized songs written and performed with insiders in mind, there is no 'meaning-centre' in the sense of a single, unmediated 'voice of the shoemaker'. Individual songs are not neutral elements in a given structure so much as an arena of struggle and contradiction. A shoemaker's songs, like himself, can be simultaneously admired, copied and ridiculed, and the significations of the occupation can be displaced, challenged or appropriated.

This simultaneity appears as multiple voices, competing discourses which are related to the carnivalesque function of popular literature. It is a way of showing Otherness in what the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, calls 'jolly relativity' to the everyday world.77 It is a way of understanding the way the world works. It makes familiar relations strange and vice versa: the shoemaker, a familiar neighbourhood sight in his 'stall', could be secretly envied as the equal of princes or mocked as a low drunkard. In both cases, the sacred is profaned. Everyday order is challenged and opposites are mingled.

However, the grand narrative of the autonomous male occupation, stretching through working life from early childhood to old age and being passed on to the next generation, could not survive the de-skilling and fracturing that has been characteristic of patterns of employment and unemployment in an economy that is now global. In a society where long-term unemployment has become an instrument of social control, it is meaningless to speak any more of cohesive occupations with a stable workforce passing on traditional skills. Instead, occupational songs are found on what were once the margins. When a pioneering collection was being assembled in the 1980s, it was found that there were 'more good contemporary songs on [the subject of women's work] than on any of the others'.78 The role of the occupational song is increasingly parodic, directed against, not for, the champion worker, against the engineer who refuses to accept women in his profession, and against the petty official who implements a system that discriminates against the dispossessed. While occupational songs like those of the shoemakers began as a ritual or a celebration of craft exclusiveness, work has won a new relevance in what was once regarded as marginal or oppositional.

Notes I Ian Watson, Song and Democratic Culture in Britain: An Approach to Popular Culture in Social Movements

(London: Croom Helm; New York: St Martin's Press, 1983), p. 193. 2 Francis Trollope, Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (London: Henry Colbum,

1840); George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans], Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (London: William Blackwood, 1861) and Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1848).

3 They include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Walt Disney technicolor film, 1937), Fantasia (Walt Disney technicolor film, 1940) and Dumbo (Walt Disney technicolor film, 1941).




4 Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British 'Folksong' 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985); Richard Sykes, 'The Evolution of Englishness in the English Folksong Revival, 1890-1914', Folk MusicJournal, 6.4 (1993), 446-90.

5 Dave Harker, Onefor the Money: Politics and Popular Song (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 147- 48; Gerald Porter, The English Occupational Song (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell for the University of Umea, 1992), p. 41; The Everlasting Circle: English Traditional Verse, ed. by James Reeves (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 29.

6 For example, English Folk-Chanteys, coil. by Cecil J. Sharp (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent; Schott; Taunton: Bamicott & Pearce, 1914). Even as late as 1984, Shantiesfrom the Seven Seas, coll. by Stan Hugill, 2nd (abridged) edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) still included severely 'camouflaged' texts (see p. xiv).

7 Reeves, p. 29. 8 Come All Ye Bold Miners: Ballads and Songs of the Coa!fields, ed. by A. L. Lloyd, rev. edn (London:

Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), p. 107; The Merry Milk-Maid, printed for P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, J. Blare andJ. Back, 1691; reprinted in The Pepys Ballads, ed. by W. G. Day, 5 vols (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), iv, 13.

9 Gerald Porter, "'Work the Old Lady out of the Ditch": Singing at Work by English Lacemakers', Journal of Folklore Research, 31 (1994), 35-55.

10 Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. by Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 129.

" Peter Kennedy, Work Chants & Shantiesfrom the Portland Quarries (Dorset) (Folktracks Video Cassettes V.10 [1975]).

12 Asa Briggs, A Social History of England, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 99; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 277, 285.

13 June Swann, Shoemaking (Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 1986), pp. 7-8. 14 Thomas Dekker, Plays, ed. by E. Rhys (London: Benn, 1949). 15 Twelfth Night, ed. by J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975). A cozier is a

cobbler. The play also includes references to singing by weavers, lacemakers and tinkers. 16 Printed for H. G., London; reprinted in Day, i, 156-57 (p. 156). 17 Porter, The English Occupational Song, pp. 32-39.

June Swann, private communication, 10 December 1993. 19 Historie of the Gentle Craft (London, 1582). 20 Songs from the Manuscript Collection of John Bell, ed. by D. I. Harker, Publications of the Surtees

Society, 196 (Leamington Spa: James Hall for the Surtees Society, 1985), pp. 237-39. Harker notes that Bell's song text is close to that of a broadside, 'The Blink-ey'd Cobler'.

21 Printed at London for I. Wright; reprinted in Day, i, 442-43 (p. 443). The opening words of lines 5 and 6 are transposed in the broadside.

22 The first known reference is in Dekker, iii.1.32-34. 23 Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, J. Clarke, W. Teackeray [sic], and T. Passiner; reprinted

in Day, iv, 230. 24 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1876), Chapter 42. 25 Printed for A. Milboum in the Old Baily [sic], [London]; reprinted in Day, iv, 233. See, for

example, lines 41-77. Another example is 'The Coblers New Prophesie', quoted above. 26 Printed forJ. Blare on London-Bridge; reprinted in Day, iv, 318. Original italics. 27 Porter, English Occupational Song, p. 33. 28 Printed for C. Bates, Pye-comer, London; reprinted in Day, iv, 231. 29 The London Lady or, Wife and Wanton, printed by John Wallis, in White-Fryars, London, 1689;

reprinted in Day, iii, 41, lines 41-48. Original italics. 30 Day, i, 442. The jocularly named 'S. Hughs bones' were used to smooth up the work. 31 Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. by Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1951), p. 125. 32 Both are reprinted in Later English Broadside Ballads, ed. by John Holloway and Joan Black, 2 vols

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975 and 1979), i (1975), 57-60. 33 Ed. by T. S. Dorsch, 6th edn (London: Methuen, 1975). My italics. 34 Ed. by Eric Robinson (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985). Lines 286-89. My italics. 35 7he Priest and the Cobbler's Wife, or, 'There's Nothing Like Leather', no imprint. Copy in Northampton

Central Library, Local Room, 3160/20.



60 GERALD PORTER

36 Transcription from the Registers of St Augustine's Church, Alston, Vol. iII, kindly supplied by Rev. Lionel Atherton, Alston, Cumbnra.

37 Honest Crispin, printed by Cordeux of Northampton, lines 12-17. Original italics. Copy in Northampton Central Library, Local Room, 3165/64. 'Fudge-work' is not simply poor workmanship but refers to the process of wheeling to smarten up the welt stitches. 'Ends' were the waxed threads used by shoemakers. A 'Plumper stitch' was used for welts. Once again I am indebted to June Swann for her help.

38 Jone o'Grinfield, broadside printed c. 1860 by John 0. Bebbington of Manchester, lines 7-8. 11- 12.

39 David Craig, The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). p. 298. Original emphasis.

40 'Lest We Forget: The Bootmakers' March', published in The Watford Critic, June 1905, and later turned into a song; reprinted in J. R. Betts, The Raunds Strike and March to London 1905, 2nd edn (Raunds: Raunds and District History Society, 1991). The puns include 'waxed', 'feat', 'cobblers all' (awl), 'ends' (wax ends), and 'brads', a slang term for money which also refers to the flattish nails used in shoe repairs.

41 'The Jolly Trades-Men', lines 41-48. Reprinted in [T.] D'Urfey, Songs Compleat, Pleasalt anti Divertive, 6 vols (London: Printed by W. Pearson for J. Tonson, 1719-1720); also reprinted in Thie Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry 15th-20th Century, ed. by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Edwin Rodway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 439, For 'bones', see note 30.

42 Copy in Birmingham Reference Library. No indication of date or origin. I am indebted to Roy Palmer for this reference and for supplying the text.

43 'The Long Peggin' Awl', sung by Harry Cox, Catfield, Norfolk, 1953; published in Folk Solgs (of Britain and Ireland, ed. by Peter Kennedy (London: Cassell, 1975), p. 409.

44 'The Cunning Cobbler', sung by Walter Pardon, Knapton, Norfolk, 25 June 1978, collected by Mike Yates; published in Everyman's Book of British Ballads, ed. by Roy Palmer (London: Dent, 1980), pp. 221-22 (p. 221).

45 Folk Song in England (St Albans: Paladin, 1975), p. 196. 46 Quoted in Voices: The Second Book, ed. by Geoffrey Summerfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),

p. 111. 47 For the radical and anti-sexist tradition in erotic song, see Porter, English Occupational Song, pp. 96-

100, 109-13. 48 Porter, English Occupational Song, pp. 91-100. 49 Thus when William Congreve published a street ballad, A Soldier and a Sailor (1695), on the rivalry

between a soldier, sailor, tinker and tailor over 'buxom Joan', he characterized their sexual performance in terms of their callings (Pinto and Rodway, pp. 445-46).

50 All thirteen broadsides and three songs that I have traced which feature fiddlers involve erotic metaphor, as do the titles of many fiddle tunes. After the sailor, the next most common occupations to display such metaphors in the broadsides are (in cherry-stone rhyme fashion) the tinker, tailor and soldier. They are followed by the farm labourer (above all, the ploughboy), the weaver, the shoemaker and the miller.

51 Early nineteenth-century Nottingham broadside. Copy in Nottingham University Library Collec- tion of Original Broadsides, File r/PR 118/B2; reprinted in Pinto and Rodway, pp. 456-58 (lines 7-8).

52 Ibid., lines 33-36. 53 Miss Patty Puff and her Two Sweethearts; or, Thie Duel a-la Mode, printed and sold by Jennings, 13,

Water-lane, Fleet-street, London; reprinted in Holloway and Black, ii, 304-05 (p. 304). ,4 Alarik Rynell found more than a thousand such unrecorded examples in his study of the texts of

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political cartoons; see his Antedatings and Additions for the Oxford English Dictionary: From the Catalogue of Prints of Political and Personal Satire in the British Museum, Stockholm Studies in English, 72 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1987). In this relatively small sample of the songs and poems of a single occupation, six words (coblerone, gum-glass, grinding-strap, rub[b]ing-clout, shop thread, strupper) have been found that are not listed at all in the latest edition of the OED, and perhaps eight more (bristles, in a transferred sense, cutting-board, nippers, pegging awl, size-sticks, snob, stall, tickling stick) can be ascribed to dates significantly earlier than the first use recorded there.

55 The Ploughboy's Glory: A Selection of Hitherto Unpublished Folk Songs Collected by George Butterworth, ed. by Michael Dawney (London: English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1977), p. 47. My italics. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger also suggest the early date; see their Travellers' Songsfrom England and Scotland (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 309.




56 Sung byJ. W. ('Charger') Salmons, Sutton, Norfolk, 1947 and Stalham, Norfolk, 1950; published in Kennedy, p. 523. Original italics. June Swann points out that pointed shoes were in fashion at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (Private communication, 10 December 1993).

57 Harker, Songsfrom the Manuscript Collection ofJohn Bell, p. 327 (diacritics omitted). Harker glosses cuddy's houghs as 'ass's thighs'.

58 Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, ed. by John Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 202.

59 'John Hobbs', text by G. T. Lawley, in South Staffordshire Stories (publication details unknown), The Rigs of the Fair, ed. by Roy Palmer and Jon Raven, Resources of Music Series, 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 25; 'Fagan the Cobbler', sung by Albert Richardson, Blaxhall, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1953; published in Kennedy, pp. 502, 529-30.

60 See, for example, Porter, "'Work the Old Lady out of the Ditch"'. 61 The Drunken Coblers Wife, a nineteenth-century broadside printed by W. Pratt, Birmingham. Copy

in Northampton Central Library, Local Room, 'Shoemaker' File number 7. 62 St. Crispin, c. 1870 (Northampton Central Museum Collection), p. 108. I am grateful to Brian

Hensman of Northampton Central Museum for this reference. 63 Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, ed. by John Burnett

(London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 257. Outwork had been a feature of shoemaking for many centuries. 64 Reprinted in Thle Collected Reprintsfrom Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, ed. by Peter Blood-

Patterson (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corporation, 1990), p. 32. 65 E. P. Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', Past and Present, 38 (1967),

56-97, reprinted in his Ctustonms in Comnnon (London: Merlin Press, 1991), pp. 352-403; Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: T7le Human Seriousness of Play, Performance Studies Series, I (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), p. 36; Porter, English Occupational Song, pp. 130-32.

66 Swann, Shoemaking, p. 22. 67 Like Dew before the Sun: Lfe and Language in Northamptonshire (Northampton: the author, 1991),

pp. 52, 57, 171. 68 See, for example, George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London: Sinclair Browne,

1983), p. 13. 69 Grimes, p. 57. 70 A. L. Morton, A People's History of England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1948; repr. 1974),

p. 349. 7' Burnett, p. 277. 72 Acker Bilk, Marching Union (7-inch single, National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, [n.d.]);

text taken from the transcription on the back cover. I am grateful to Brian Hensman of Northampton Central Museum for this reference.

73 Swann, Shoemaking, pp. 24-25. Ock 'n' Dough, With Noisy Chorus: Songs of East Northants (Cassette, Ock 001, privately released, Raunds, Northamptonshire, 1989).

74 St. Crispin, p. 146; Grimes, p. 54. Once again, I am grateful to Brian Hensman of Northampton Central Museum for the first of these references.

75 Lucy E. Broadwood, 'Introduction', Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 1.4 (1902), 139-41 (p. 139); Vic Gammon, '"Not Appreciated in Worthing?" Class Expression and Popular Song Texts in Mid- Nineteenth Century Britain', Popular Music, 4 (1984), 5-24 (p. 17).

76 Jolly Old Cobbler, nineteenth-century broadside, no imprint (Northampton Central Library). My italics.

77 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 158-62. 78 Kathy Henderson, Frankie Armstrong and Sandra Kerr, My Song is My Own: 100 Women's Songs

(London: Pluto Press, 1979), p. 119.



Documents

Cobblers All: Occupation as Identity and Cultural Message