“Matty Groves”, also known as “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” or “Little Musgrave”, is a ballad probably originating in Northern England that describes an adulterous tryst between a young man and a noblewoman that is ended when the woman’s husband discovers and kills them. It is listed as Child ballad number 81 and number 52 in the Roud Folk Song index. This song exists in many textual variants and has several variant names. The song dates to at least 1613, and under the title Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard is one of the Child ballads collected by 19th-century American scholar Francis James Child.
Little Musgrave (or Matty Groves, Little Matthew Grew and other variations) goes to church on a holy day either “the holy word to hear” or “to see fair ladies there”. He sees Lord Barnard’s wife, the fairest lady there, and realises that she is attracted to him. She invites him to spend the night with her, and he agrees when she tells him her husband is away from home. Her page goes to find Lord Barnard (Arnel, Daniel, Arnold, Donald, Darnell, Darlington) and tells him that Musgrave is in bed with his wife. Lord Barnard promises the page a large reward if he is telling the truth and to hang him if he is lying. Lord Barnard and his men ride to his home, where he surprises the lovers in bed. Lord Barnard tells Musgrave to dress because he doesn’t want to be accused of killing a naked man. Musgrave says he dare not because he has no weapon, and Lord Barnard gives him the better of two swords. In the subsequent duel Little Musgrave wounds Lord Barnard, who then kills him. (However, in one version “Magrove” instead runs away, naked but alive.)
Lord Barnard then asks his wife whether she still prefers Little Musgrave to him and when she says she would prefer a kiss from the dead man’s lips to her husband and all his kin, he kills her. He then says he regrets what he has done and orders the lovers to be buried in a single grave, with the lady at the top because “she came of the better kin”. In some versions Barnard is hanged, or kills himself, or finds his own infant son dead in his wife’s body. Many versions omit one or more parts of the story.
It has been speculated that the original names of the characters, Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, come from place names in the north of England (specifically Little Musgrave in Westmorland and Barnard Castle in County Durham). The place name “Bucklesfordbury,” found in both English and American versions of the song, is of uncertain origin. Some versions of the ballad include elements of an alba, a poetic form in which lovers part after spending a night together.
It seems that the ballad had largely died out in the British Isles by the time folklorists began collecting songs. Cecil Sharp collected a version from an Agnes Collins in London in 1908, the only known version to have been collected in England. James Madison Carpenter recorded some Scottish versions, probably in the early 1930’s. The Scottish singer Jeanie Robertson was recorded on separate occasions singing a traditional version of the song entitled “Matty Groves” in the late 1950’s. However, according to the Tobar an Dualchais website, Robertson may have learned her version from Johnny Wells and Sandy Paton, Paton being an American singer and folk song collector.
Dozens of traditional versions of the ballad were recorded in the Appalachian region. Jean Bell Thomas recorded Green Maggard singing “Lord Daniel” in Ashland, Kentucky in 1934, which was released on the anthology ‘Kentucky Mountain Music’ Yazoo YA 2200. Bascom Lamar Lunsford was recorded singing a version called “Lord Daniel’s Wife” in 1935. The influential Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie had her family version of the ballad, called “Little Musgrave”, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1949, who made a reel-to-reel recording of it in his apartment in Greenwich Vilage; she later released a version on her album Ballads from her Appalachian Family Tradition (1961).
The folklorist Helen Hartness Flanders recorded many versions in New England in the 1930s and 40s, all of which can be heard online in the Flanders Ballad Collection. Canadian folklorists such as Helen Creighton recorded about a dozen versions in Canada, mostly in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A number of songs and tales collected in the Caribbean are based on, or refer to, the ballad.
