A light pastoral ballad of courtship between a shepherd and a shepherdess, set on a May morning. Corydon presses his suit; Phillida resists with wit and caution; love wins out with kisses and pretty oaths, and Phillida is crowned lady of the May. The whole poem breathes the Elizabethan pastoral mode at its most charming and least complicated.

The ballad is attributed to Nicholas Breton (c. 1545-c. 1626), one of the most prolific Elizabethan poets, whose pastoral verse was widely anthologized in his own lifetime. The names Phillida and Corydon are stock figures of the pastoral tradition, inherited from classical eclogue and naturalized into English song.

The text presented here appears in Hamilton Wright Mabie's A Book of Old English Ballads (1903).

IN the merrie moneth of Maye,

In a morne by break of daye,

With a troope of damselles playing

Forthe 'I yode' forsooth a maying;
When anon by a wood side,

Where that Maye was in his pride,

I espied all alone

Phillida and Corydon.

Much adoe there was, God wot:
He wold love, and she wold not.
She sayde, "Never man was trewe;"
He sayes, "None was false to you."
He sayde, hee had lovde her longe;
She sayes, love should have no wronge.
Corydon wold kisse her then;
She sayes, "Maydes must kisse no men,

"Tyll they doe for good and all."
When she made the shepperde call
All the heavens to wytnes truthe,
Never loved a truer youthe.

Then with manie a prettie othe,
Yea and nay, and faithe and trothe,
Suche as seelie shepperdes use
When they will not love abuse,

Love, that had bene long deluded,
Was with kisses sweete concluded;
And Phillida with garlands gaye
Was made the lady of the Maye.

Colophon

From A Book of Old English Ballads, edited by Hamilton Wright Mabie, with illustrations by George Wharton Edwards (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903).

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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