"Barbara Allen's Cruelty" is one of the most widely known ballads in the English language. A young man lies dying of love for Barbara Allen, who comes to his bedside but refuses to comfort him, reminding him of a slight at a tavern. He dies; she hears the funeral bell tolling and realizes what she has done. She asks her mother to make her bed, for she will die tomorrow of sorrow. The ballad's power lies in its restraint -- everything devastating happens in the space between what is said and what is felt.

The ballad dates from at least the seventeenth century. Samuel Pepys recorded hearing it performed in 1666 and was deeply moved. It spread throughout the British Isles and across the Atlantic, generating hundreds of variants in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Appalachia, making it arguably the most collected ballad in the English-speaking world.

This text appears in Hamilton Wright Mabie's A Book of Old English Ballads (1903), drawn from the Scottish oral tradition.

ALL in the merry month of May,
When green buds they were swelling,
Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay
For love o' Barbara Allen.

He sent his man unto her then,
To the town where she was dwelling:
"O haste and come to my master dear,
If your name be Barbara Allen."

Slowly, slowly rase she up,
And she cam' where he was lying;
And when she drew the curtain by,
Says, "Young man, I think you're dying."

"O it's I am sick, and very, very sick,
And it's a' for Barbara Allen."
"O the better for me ye'se never be,
Tho' your heart's blude were a-spilling!

"O dinna ye min', young man," she says,
"When the red wine ye were filling,
That ye made the healths gae round and round
And ye slighted Barbara Allen?"

He turn'd his face unto the wa',
And death was wi' him dealing:
"Adieu, adieu, my dear friends a';
Be kind to Barbara Allen."

As she was walking o'er the fields,
She heard the dead-bell knelling;
And every jow the dead-bell gave,
It cried, "Woe to Barbara Allen!"

"O mother, mother, mak' my bed,
To lay me down in sorrow.
My love has died for me to-day,
I'll die for him to-morrow."

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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