The late Canon Atkinson has made this
land familiar to us by his fascinating Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,
and, to the lover of traditional dialect songs, an even greater service
has been rendered by a later gleaner in this harvest-field, Mr. Richard
Blakeborough of Norton-on-Tees, whose T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg has already
been considered. In his supplement to the little volume which contains
that poem, and again in his highly instructive and entertaining Wit,
Character, Folklore, and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire, Mr.
Blakeborough has brought together a number of traditional songs and
proverbial rhymes of great interest, and, to some extent at least, of
high antiquity. Many of these have been collected by him among the
peasantry, others are taken from a manuscript collection of notes on
North Riding folklore made by a certain George Calvert early in the
nineteenth century, and now in Mr. Blakeborough's possession.
Of the first importance in this anthology of traditional song are the
"Cleveland Lyke-wake Dirge" and "A Dree Neet." The former has been well
known to lovers of poetry since Sir Walter Scott included it in his
Border Minstrelsy; the latter, I believe, was never published until the
appearance of T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg in 1896.
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