Kate and her horns

In this English tale, a Colchester clothier courted a reluctant Kate who finally agreed to marry him. But before the wedding, he was attracted to another girl. Resourceful Kate borrowed a “hairy hide” with three-foot horns from the local tanner and accosted the man in the dark as he returned from a tryst with his new girl. Playing the role of the devil, she frightened him into returning to his original vow but did not tell anyone of her trickery until a year later. In childbirth she tells the tale and he accepts the joke with a laugh. Kate’s confession of her sport at her lying-in may be related to the practice of asking unwed mothers to name the father of the child during delivery, a formality allowing the woman to claim child support. The assumption was that a woman would not lie at the height of her suffering in childbirth (Ulrich 149).

This song appears in Roxburghe Ballads as “Crafty Kate of Colchester” with a text dating to 1689-90 (8:430-31). The amusing song appears in other American broadsides of the early nineteenth century, in the Forget-Me-Not Songster, and in other chapbooks. Oral tradition versions were collected by Sharp and others in the twentieth century (Laws N22; Mackenzie 325; Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Folk Songs 471-74). The song appeared on a broadside advertised by the Gilmores in their Newburyport garland A Pennyworth of Wit (1809), and on another, The Good Child’s Death, published by Henry Trumbull in Providence around 1826.

“The Languishing Lover” is stated as the tune on a version of the song published in Newcastle around 1750 (“Crafty Kate”). While a song entitled “The Languishing Lover” appears in Henry Carey’s Musical Century (2:24), it would be an awkward fit for this text.