Broadside ballad entitled 'The Paisley Officer'

Commentary

This ballad begins: 'In blythe and bonny Scotland, where the blue bells do grow, / There dwelt a pretty fair maid down in a valley low.' The woodcut included above the title shows a wooded valley. At the bottom of the valley a uniformed man is being brutally attacked by both women and men, one of whom is on a horse.

In a relatively short space this song tells a story which mixes class, gender non-conformity, and imperial colonialism with romantic drama. An officer courts a shepherdess, who is described as a stereotypically beautiful woman. When he has to leave for India, she offers to 'go disguised in man's attire' as his servant. The text refers to 'her' and 'Mary' throughout but imagines women looking at a person they see as an attractive but 'gentle, slight' man. The ballad ends with both Mary and Henry killed by Indian fighters. This ballad has been identified as belonging to the genre of 'warrior women'. It also links Paisley, then at the height of its fame as the home of the 'Paisley shawl' which appropriated Kashmiri patterns, with the military actions of the British colonisation of India.        

Broadsides are often crudely illustrated with woodcuts - the earliest form of printed illustration, first used in the mid-fifteenth century. Inclusion of an illustration on a broadside increased its perceived value, especially among the illiterate. To keep costs down, publishers would normally reuse their limited stock of generic woodcuts.

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