The bailey beareth the bell away

[wolfinthewood]

This rather beautiful medieval fragment has intrigued and puzzled me for many years. The refrain suggests that it's a carole, a song for dancing to. It has some of the qualities of a dramatic monologue; at any rate, it evokes a voice, a situation and the rudiments of a story. It could be the start of a ballad narrative, I suppose, though it proceeds more indirectly and allusively than most ballads.

This would seem to be the story that it tells, or adumbrates. The girl is from a noble family. She has led a sheltered life in the care of her mother and she has been perfectly happy like this. She is dreamily aware of the 'bailey', the bailiff or estate steward, whose status is undoubtedly much lower than hers, though he is almost certainly a gentleman: probably one with no inheritance, or only a very modest one.

'To bear the bell away' meant to be the winner; the expression was proverbial. It derives from the fact that bells of gold or silver were sometimes given as prizes in races and other sorts of competition. Perhaps there was a real contest which the bailey won; or perhaps the bell is purely figurative.

The maidens came to her mother's bower – why? To make her ready for her wedding would be my guess. And definitely not with the winning bailey, but with some wealthy, well-born man of her parents' choosing. The poem evokes her sense of helplessness in the way that it delicately suggests her dissociation from what is happening, as her thoughts focus on apparently random (but telling) sensual details: the gold and silver (jewellery? wedding presents? vessels at a feast?), the folded robes (that have been lying in a chest waiting for her wedding day?), the sun shining through the glass window.

What is going to happen next?


The maidens came
When I was in my mother's bower;
I had all that I would.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
The silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
And through the glass window shines the sun.
How should I love, and I so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.

Anonymous (fifteenth century)


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