A Most excellent ballad of an old man and his wife, vvho in their want and misery sought to their children for succour, by whom they were disdained, and scornfully sent away succourless, and Gods vengeance shewed on them for the same. : Tune of, Priscillca [sic].

A Most excellent ballad of an old man and his wife, vvho in their want and misery sought to their children for succour, by whom they were disdained, and scornfully sent away succourless, and Gods vengeance shewed on them for the same. : Tune of, Priscillca [sic].

Table of contents

A most excellent Ballad of an Old Man and his Wife, VVho in their want and misery sought to their Children for succour, by whom they were disdained, and scornfully sent them away succourless, and Gods vengeance shewed on them for the same. Tune of, Priscillca.

§

[Page]

A most excellent Ballad of an Old Man and his Wife, VVho in their want and misery sought to their Children for succour, by whom they were disdained, and scornfully sent them away succourless, and Gods vengeance shewed on them for the same. Tune of, Priscillca.

[figure]

[figure]

IT was an Old man and his Poor Wife,

in great distrefs did fall,

They were so feeble with age God wot,

they could not work at all:

A Gallant Son they had

which lived wealthily,

To him they went with a full intent,

to ease their misery:

Alack and alas for woe.

A hundred miles when they had gone,

with many a weary step,

At length they saw their Sons fair house,

which made their hearts to leap,

They sat them on the Green

their Hose and Shoos to trim,

They put their bands about their Neeks,

against they should enter in:

Alack, &c.

Vnto the Door with trembling Ioynts

when these Old couple came,

The Woman with a shaking hand,

the Old Man blind and lame:

Full mannerly they knockt,

fearing for to offend,

At last their Son frowningly came,

unto them in the end;

Alack, &c.

Good folks, qd. he, what would you have?

methinks you are too bold,

Why get you not home to your own Country

now you are lame and old?

With that they both reply'd,

with sorrow, care. and grief,

Here are we come to thee our son,

for succour and relief:

Alack and alas for woe.

THis is thy Father gentle Son,

and I thy loving Mother,

That brought thee up so tenderly,

and lov'd thee above all other,

I bore thee in my womb,

these breasts did nourish thee,

And as it chant'd, I often danc'd,

thee on my tender knee;

Alack and alas for woe.

And humbly now we intreat

our dear and loving Son,

That thou wilt do for us in our age,

as we for you have done:

Now nay not so, he said,

your suit is all in vain,

'Tis best for you I tell you true,

to get you home again:

Alack, &c.

The worlds not now as when I was born,

all things are grown more dear,

My charge of children like wife is great,

as plainly doth appear,

The best that I can do,

will hardly them maintain,

Therefore I say, be packing away,

and get you hame again.

Alack, &c.

The old man with his Hat in his Hand,

full many a Leg did make,

The woman wept and wrung her hands,

and pray'd for Christ his sake,

Not so to send them back,

distressed and undone,

But let us lye in some Barn here by,

Quoth the, my loving Son:

By no means he would thereto consent

but sent them soon away,

Quoth he, you know the peril of the Law,

if long time here you stay,

The Stocks and Whiping-poast

shall fall unto your share,

Then take you heed, and with all speed;

to your Country repair.

Alack, &c.

Away then went this [...]

full sad in heart and mind,

With weeping tears his Wife did lament,

their Son was so unkind:

Thou wicked Wretch, quoth they,

for this thy cruel deed,

The Lord send thee as little pitty,

when thou dost stand in need:

Alack, &c.

His Children hearing their Father set

his Parents thus at naught,

In short time after to have his Land,

his death they subtillty wrought:

What cause have we quoth they,

more kindness to express,

Then he unto his Parents did,

in their great wretchedness:

Alack, &c.

They Murdered him in piteous sort,

they weigh'd not his intreats;

The more he pray'd compassionately,

the greater were his threats

Speak not to us quoth they,

for thou the death shalt dye,

And with that word a dagger and sword,

they mangled him monstrously:

Alack, &c.

When they had got his Silver and Gold,

according to their mind,

They buried him in a stinking Ditch

were▪ no man should him find:

But now behold and see

Gods vengeance on them all,

To gain their Gold their Couzin came,

and slew t [...]em great and small,

Alack, &c.

He came among them with a great Club

in dead of time of the night,

Yea two of the Sons he brain'd therewith▪

and taking of his flight

The Murderer taken was,

and suffered for the same,

Deservedly for that cruelty,

Alack and alas therefore, &c.

§

§

Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, I. Wright, J. Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passenger.

Information about this book

Title statement

A Most excellent ballad of an old man and his wife, vvho in their want and misery sought to their children for succour, by whom they were disdained, and scornfully sent away succourless, and Gods vengeance shewed on them for the same. : Tune of, Priscillca [sic].

Edition statement

1678-1680

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A89358

ID [STC]

Wing M2879

ID [STC]

ESTC R214576

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

45097864

ID [OCLC]

ocm 45097864

ID [VID]

171444

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A89358)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 171444)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Early English books, 1641-1700 ; 21231:332-333 or 2574:15)

Source

— A Most excellent ballad of an old man and his wife, vvho in their want and misery sought to their children for succour, by whom they were disdained, and scornfully sent away succourless, and Gods vengeance shewed on them for the same. : Tune of, Priscillca [sic].,

Extent

2 sheets ([2] p.) : ill.

Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, I. Wright, J. Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passenger.,. [London] :: [between 1678-1680]. (Place and date of publication suggested by Wing.) (Without music.) (Contains two woodcut illustrations.) (Imperfect: cropped with some loss of print.) (Reproduction of original in the British Library (reel 2123) and the Bodleian Library (reel 2574).)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.