The Famous Flower of Serving-Men

Traditional song
The Famous Flower of Serving Men or The Lady turned Serving Man (Child 106, Roud 199) is a traditional English language folk song and murder ballad. Child considered it as closely related to the ballad "The Lament of the Border Widow" or "The Border Widow's Lament". "Unusually, it is possible to give a precise date and authorship to this ballad. It was written by the prolific balladeer, Laurence Price, and published in July 1656, under the title of The famous Flower of Serving Men. Or, The Lady turn'd Serving Man. It lasted in the mouths of ordinary people for three hundred years: what a tribute to the work of any writer, leave alone the obscure Laurence Price. Oral tradition, however, has made changes. The original has twenty eight verses and a fairy tale ending: “And then for fear of further strife, / he took Sweet William to be his Wife: / The like before was never seen, / A Serving man to be a Queen”. – Roy Palmer, A Book of British Ballads

A woman's husband and child are killed by agents of her mother (or, sometimes, stepmother). The woman buries them, cuts her hair, changes her name from "Fair Elise" or "Fair Elinor" to "Sweet William", and goes to the king's court to become his servant. She serves him well enough to become his chamberlain. The song variants split, sharply, at this point. The common variant has the king going to hunt and being led into the forest by a white hind. The king reaches a clearing and the hind vanishes. A bird, the personification of the woman's dead husband, then appears and laments what has happened to his love. The king asks, and the bird tells the story. The king returns and kisses his chamberlain, still dressed as a man, to the shock of the assembled court. In many versions the woman's mother/stepmother is then executed, possibly by burning, and usually the king marries the woman. In some versions the king goes hunting, and the woman laments her fate, but is overheard; when the king is told it, he marries her. In The Border Widow's Lament, the woman laments, in very similar verses, the murder of her husband by the king; she buries him and declares she will never love another.

Martha Reid, of Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland, was recorded by Maurice Fleming in 1955. Caroline Hughes of Blandford, Dorset sang the song to Peter Kennedy in 1968. Mary Delaney sang a variant entitled My Brother Built for Me a Bancy Bower to Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie in Co. Tipperary somewhere between 1973 and 1985.

Martin Carthy's version is the most notable recording. For his 1972 album Shearwater, he took the fragments and reworked the ballad, drawing on lines from other ballads. He set the piece to a tune used by Hedy West for the "Maid of Colchester." The song was featured twice on the BBC Radio 1 John Peel show – first on 14 August 1973 and again on 28 April 1975. In 2005 Carthy won the award for Best Traditional Track for "Famous Flower of Serving Men" at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

Joseph Haydn arranged a version of the song in the 1790s, entitled "The Border Widow's Lament" (Hob. XXXIa:232). Bob Davenport sang The Border Widow's Lament in 1964 on the album Northumbrian Minstrelsy.