Popular Rhymes of Scotland

Born in 1802, Robert and brother William Chambers moved from Peebles to Edinburgh at the closing end of the Napoleonic wars following their father’s bankruptcy in the cloth trade. From a temporary book stand on Leith Walk the brothers would rise to become prolific publishers.

With the advent of the steam press, through the affordable ‘Chambers Journal’ – an amalgam of literary, historical, political and scientific writings – literature was made available to a broad readership of all social classes. While still in his youth Robert had met up with Walter Scott in Edinburgh where Scott had furthered him in his ambitions as writer and folklorist. Chambers writes in his introduction to Popular Rhymes:

‘Other objects have since occupied me, generally of a graver kind; yet, amidst them all, I have never lost my wish to complete the publication of these relics of the old natural literature of my native country.’

Chambers’ ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland’ can be considered an important document on both the long-established and continuing oral traditions of the Scots language. It cites a number of sources for its folktales including Wedderburn’s 1549 political tract ‘The Complaynt of Scotland’, which itself references traditional Scottish tales such as ‘Tam Lin’ an ‘The Red Etin’. Chambers identifies the lullaby ‘Baw Lula Law’ as being adapted into scriptural verse in ‘Ane collection of godlie and spirituall sangs’, as published bi Andro Hart in 1621.

The trend of showing verbatim folk tales in print can be seen in later 20th century collections by storytellers such as Duncan Williamson, Stanley Robertson and in Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s ‘Till Doomsday in the Afternoon’. The stories ‘Tam Linn’, ‘Rashiecoats’ and ‘Jock an his Mother’ have versions in Duncan Williamson’s ‘Thorn in the King’s foot: Folktales of the Scottish Travelling People’ (1987).

Some of the childrens’ rhymes and songs in ‘Popular Rhymes’ have lived on as recognisable verses in street games at least up till recent times. Those such as ‘Katie Beardie’ and ‘Aiken Drum’ have survived in variant forms, heard in stage and TV shows such as the highly popular ‘The Singing Kettle’. ‘Aiken Drum’ is also the name given to the outlandish creature in Galloway bard William Nicholson’s 1825 poem ‘The Brownie of Blednoch’ and is also given as a song about the Battle of Sherriffmuir in James Hogg’s ‘Jacobite reliques’. A character by the name of Aiken Drum is mentioned in Scott’s Waverley novel ‘The antiquary’.

While ‘Popular Rhymes’ is drawn mainly from oral sources, Chambers makes a connection between the oral tradition and Scottish literature by citing Walter Scott’s ‘Lay of the last minstrel’ (1805) and David Lyndsay’s ‘The Dreme’ (1528). ‘Katie Beardie’ features as a dance in Walter Scott’s novel ‘The fortunes of Nigel’, a tale set in the early 1600s.

In his introduction to ‘The golden city’ (published 1965), James T R Ritchie remarks on having bought an 1841 copy of Chambers’ ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland’ and how it had stirred his interest. Ritchie was a teacher in a school on the boundary between Edinburgh and Leith. With some further research and by writing down the games played by the schoolchildren, he surmised that these contained rhymes and songs that were of long-standing vintage and had variations in places throughout Scotland, England, Wales an Ireland. In 1949 Ritchie produced a radio programme called ‘The Singing Street’ and in 1951 made the film of the same name. ‘The Singing Street’ film is offered as the relatit video for this wee windae.

‘Ram Tam Toosh; An anthology of Scottish verse for children’, edited by Alan MacDonald and Ian Brison, illustrated by John Harrold, cites Chambers’  ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland’ as ain o its sources. First published in 1982, ‘Ram Tam Toosh’ features a number of songs and street games in Scots.

Chambers’ anonymous and sensational book ‘Vestiges of the natural history of creation’, a mix of cosmological theories and evolutionary speculations positing spontaneous origins of life and transmutation of species, caught the attention of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The book was whole-heartedly condemned by many prominent Christians and leading figures of Victorian science. It was Robert Chambers who instigated Huxley to take part in the famous ‘Origin of species’ debate with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860 – in which Huxley provoked Wilberforce when he remarked that he would rather have a monkey for an ancestor than be connected with a man (Wilberforce) who used great gifts to obscure the truth.