> Folk Music > Songs > The Owslebury Lads

The Owslebury Lads

[ Roud 17212 ; Ballad Index ReCi103 ; VWML GG/1/4/204 ; Mudcat 86542 ; trad.]

Nick Dow: Southern Songster Roy Palmer: The Painful Plough James Reeves: The Everlasting Circle

Roy Palmer sang The Owslebury Lads on the 1972 Topic/Impact album The Painful Plough that accompanied his book of the same name, The Painful Plough.

Dave Williams sang The Owslebury Lads in 1974 on the Forest Tracks album Folk Songs From Hampshire of songs collected in 1905-09 by Dr. George B. Gardiner. This track was also included in 2003 on his posthumous Forest Tracks anthology You’re On Nipper!. John Edgar Mann noted:

A splendid broadside of great interest to local historians. James Reeves wrote of it in The Everlasting Circle: “No better text has come to light of this ballad of the last labourers’ revolts of 1830” (not 1813, as the song states). Threshing and other farm machinery was broken and severe sentences passed. Of 245 prisoners, some were fined, some transported and two were hanged. Among those transported was James Boyes, a small farmer, and there is still a Boyes Farm at Owslebury. Collected from James Stagg at Winchester in 1906 [VWML GG/1/4/204] .

Corinne Male sang The Owslebury Lads on her 2015 album To Tell the Story Truly. She noted:

I found this in Folk Songs of Old Hampshire (John Paddy Browne). There are machine wrecking songs from the industrial midlands, but this is the only agricultural wrecking song I’ve come across. The machines targeted were mostly threshing machines which could do in a day the work which would have kept labourers employed, in barns and so out of the weather, for much of the winter.

Lyrics

Dave Williams sings The Owslebury Lads

The thirteenth of November, last eighteen and thirteen,
The Owslebury lads they did prepare all for the machinery,
And when they did get there, my eye! how they let fly,
The machinery flew to pieces in the twinkling of an eye.

Chorus (after each verse):
O the mob, such a mob, you have never seen before,
And if you live for a hundred years you never will no more.

To Winchester then we were sent, our trial for to take,
And if we do have nothing said, our counsel we shall keep;
But when the judges did begin, I’m sorry for to say
So many was transported for life and some was cast to die.

Some times our parents they comes in for to see us all,
Some times they bring some baccy or a loaf that is so small;
Then we goes into the kitchen and sits all round about,
There is so many of us that we are very soon all smoked out.

At six o’clock in the morning our turnkey he comes in
With a bunch of keys all in his hand tied all in a ring,
And we can’t get any further than back and forth the yard,
A pound and a half of bread a day, and don’t you think it hard?

At six o’clock in the evening the turnkey he comes round,
The locks and bolts they rattle like the sounding of a drum,
And we are all locked up all in our cells so high,
And there we stay till morning, whether we live or die.

It’s now to conclude and finish my new song,
I hope you gentlemen round me will not think it wrong
For all the poor in Hampshire the rising of their wages
I hope that none of our enemies will ever want for places.