This is the first of three posts about songs more or less related to the infamous Red Barn Murder in Polstead, England in 1827. This post introduces the song and the background story. The next post explores the song’s “career.” The third discusses Tom Waits’s “Murder in the Red Barn.”

“Why will not unhappy females bethink themselves before it be too late, that he who is depraved enough to corrupt their innocence, has already made no small advance in that course which ends too often in his exacting from them the only remaining sacrifice?“
    — London Times, August 11, 1828

Come all ye thoughtless young men…

This is an “outside-in” week for me.  By that I mean that “The Murder of Maria Marten” was completely off my radar until we started the blog. I have no long personal history with it. I’m writing in the hope of unlocking something worthwhile and novel relative to our overall discussion. This may prove a small challenge, in that the story sounds all too familiar. A young woman’s lover lures her to a secluded place with the promise of marriage, and she ends up dead at his hands.

I learned of the song from reading an interview with Richard Thompson in which the interviewer asks him to name his favorite murder ballads. Thompson doesn’t exactly answer the question, but mentions “Maria Marten.” More recently, Thompson explained that he “grew up on murder ballads.” With his Scots ancestry and rich knowledge of the tradition, “Maria Marten” is a rather odd one for Thompson to pull out of his beret. This choice made me curious about the song. Thompson hasn’t recorded it solo, to the best of my knowledge, but he did lend his guitar talents to this performance in 1971:

Listen on Spotify.

Lyrics

The Red Barn Murder was one of the more notorious murder cases in late Georgian Era England. The crime inspired many interpretations in music and popular theater, among other media. It wasn’t alone in being a sensationalized murder, and certainly not alone in being a murder story put to song. The story of Maria Marten’s sad end stands out from many others by continuing to be told well through the next two centuries.

For all its endurance, however, it comes up rather lacking in breadth. Its legacy seems primarily English, and not more broadly popular, particularly in the United States, as earlier Scots border ballads have been. In this post and the ones following, I will explore how and why this song took root, and why it appears not to have taken root more widely.  I’ll have the benefit of some thoughts from others, and the usual “asset” of my own (wild) conjectures. I have a theory or two about why it stands out from its peers, but doesn’t stand out too far.

I will return to the quote at the top before we’re done.  It’s from a newspaper account of the execution of William Corder for the murder of Maria Marten in 1827, and just one installment in the long tradition of blaming the victim. First, we need the basic story to understand the song.

The Polstead Murder

William Corder was a farmer’s son, a country squire.  Maria Marten was a mole-catcher’s daughter. (Where is our Suffolk Loretta Lynn now?)  She was slightly older than Corder, and had given birth to two children. Corder’s brother fathered the first child, before Marten’s romantic involvement with William Corder.  Her relationship with William Corder also led to the birth of a second child, who died in infancy.

In 1827, Marten disappeared. Corder explained that Marten had gone to Ipswich. Facing pressure, he eventually left town as well, and continued to send excuses to her family as to why Marten wasn’t communicating.  The next year, Marten’s step-mother, who was about one year her senior, claimed to have dreams about Marten’s fate. She asked for an excavation of the floor of the Red Barn in Polstead, a local landmark.

Local legend speculated that Maria Marten’s ghost haunted her step-mother. Later analysts of the case suspect that the step-mother participated in the early stages of the murder plot. She may have been a competitor for Corder’s affections. The haunting “dream” may have been a means to expose Corder after her own hopes went unrealized.  If she conspired with him, however, we don’t hear Corder confess it. Given earlier and not particularly generous assessments of his character, this measure of loyalty is surprising.

Searchers found Marten’s remains buried in the earth below the Red Barn. They identified her by scraps of clothing and a missing tooth. Authorities tracked Corder down in London, and brought him back to Bury St. Edmund’s in Suffolk for trial. He was convicted and hanged before an enormous crowd of spectators. Authorities dissected his corpse, and rendered parts of it into rather peculiar and macabre artifacts.

Numerous web sites provide the story in detail.  (See here, here, and here.) These two video clips provide a concise account.

If there’s anything creepier than the murder in this story, it is that book binding displayed in the second clip.

The treatment of Corder’s corpse makes clear that spectacles of punishment in 1827 still retained gruesome elements of medieval excess. This is but one aspect about this story and this song that implicates transitions between the pre-modern and the modern.  We’ll take that up with regard to the music in the next post.

All the news that’s fit to print, and then some

Like many crimes of the day, Corder’s killing of Marten became fodder for the broadside printing industry. This becomes the genesis of the music, which is our main concern.

Some are graphic:

You can explore more of the press on this piece at the time here.

Most importantly for our purposes, others give us the “facts” with a song.  The J. Catnatch broadside provides the lyrics for the core of the Shirley Collins/Albion Band version above.

If you look closely at the text, you can see that Corder’s narrative confession differs in some important details from the musical one attributed to him, specifically around the issue of premeditation.  Corder’s narrative confession is his highly doubtful in its own right. He maintains that the killing was not premeditated, and that his effort to hide the body took a long time, requiring several trips back to the barn with large tools. He had nothing to lose at the time he confessed, however, except Marten’s step-mother’s life or freedom if he happened to implicate her in the plot.

The song version, however, sharpens his villainy by describing his advance preparation of not only the tools of Marten’s demise, but of covering it up as well. Whether the musical story is more accurate, I can’t say; but it is a better story, with a hint of the supernatural as well.

At the movies

Next up

We’ll listen to more musical versions of this tale, and explore their courses as folk songs and as popular songs, the difference between them, and the difference it makes.