The Fair Merchant’s Heiress: Class Dressing in Warrior Women Ballads
Matthew Jewell
One of the recurring themes throughout the Warrior Women ballads of the Dugaw Catalogue involves rich women who class dress, or don the clothing of a different social stratum, in order to follow their lower-class male lovers to sea or war. This is particularly obvious in the ballads of the “Parental Intervention in a Courtship” classification, where the only daughters of wealthy merchants or of the gentlemen of the gentry class repeatedly fall in love with young men of a so-called “mean degree.” The prevalence of a merchant class in English street literature is no surprise; indeed, as trade markets and systems accelerated in Renaissance-era England, the chances of achieving prosperity for individuals outside of the nobility increased exponentially. Ballads such as “The Loyal Lovers Garland,” “The Isle of Wight,” and “The Bristol Bridegroom” depict the trappings and comforts of such newly established wealth, which we could liken to our modern-day “middle-class.” Yet the Warrior Woman, who is always the sole heiress of her father’s fortune in my selected ballads, has little interest in this wealth or in the gallants who come to court her; instead of knights or squires, she desires to marry and elope with farmers, sailors, carpenters, and servants of the yeoman and laborer classes. The Warrior Woman’s father, an often-belligerent individual clearly enraged by such a violation of the social hierarchy, responds by confining his daughter to her room while threatening, imprisoning, and eventually “pressing” the male lover to war. Distraught and love-sick, the Warrior Women willingly relinquishes her fine clothing and disguises herself as a sailor or soldier, thereby descending several rungs of the social ladder and undermining the sumptuary laws which would have restricted the clothing she could wear. After experiencing several hardships, finding her lover, and then revealing her true identity to him, the Warrior Woman eventually returns to England with her lover alongside. If her father is still alive, the couple confronts him and reassert their desire to marry. The father, overjoyed that his presumedly dead daughter is still alive, repents of his apparent wrongdoings and consents to their courtship, thereby bestowing his property and wealth upon the male lover as well. The class ascendancy of the male lover, achieved through the interests and intervention of a wealthy woman, suggests that social mobility is somehow possible for peasants through an interclass marriage. Indeed, each of my select ballads actually depicts two forms of class dressing: primarily, the Warrior Woman’s donning of a lower-class disguise, but also the male lover’s donning of a middle- or upper-class clothing by the close of each ballad. Though these ballads could be easily critiqued for promoting a fantasy of class mobility (particularly from a male standpoint), they also seem to be exposing the inherent falseness of social hierarchies in a time when the rise of the merchant class substantiates such a premise (at least in part). For the purposes of these select ballads, I will argue that the class dressing of the Warrior Women and her male lover reveals the fabricated nature of social status by actively inverting standard social expectations of class performance.