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Upon a Summer's Day
Chappell reports that "the song 'Upon a Summer's-day' is in Merry Drollery Complete, 1661, p. 148". He adds that "Its later name, 'The Garland' refers in all probability to a ballad in the roxburgh Collection. but I don't at the moment have access to these sources. The words given here came from Jon Berger who credits it to a group he describes as "the utterly wonderful and incorrigible City Waites". It's on their CD How the World Wags, Helios CDH550013.
Draw near you country girls, and listen unto me
I'll tell you all a new conceit concerning houswifery
Three aunts I had of late, good housewives all were they,
But cruel death hath taken the best of them away.
Chorus (to B music):
O this was one of my aunts,
and the best of all the three
And surely though I say it myself,
A cleanly woman was she.
But when she went to see her cattle in the fields,
When she came home two pounds of dirt hang dragling at her heels.
And there she let it hang from Candlemas to May,
And then she took a hatchet in hand and chopped it clean away.
Another trick she had, as I shall now declare.
She only swept the house out about four times a year.
And when she swept the hall, the parlour or the spence, (spence : a buttery or pantry, OED)
The dust was worth to her at least a shilling or fourteen pence.
The garment she did wear did shine like a brazen crock,
And where she went she bore such a scent
That the flies blew up her frock.
If otherwise she had, but of a dishclout fail,
She'd set them for the dog to lick and wipe them with his tail.
My aunt so curious was, as I to you may tell,
She used to make fat puddings in markets for to sell.
The smallest candle's end my aunt would never lose,
It would help to make her puddings fat with the drippings of her nose
Another source notes provides "a set of words published in 1707 to the tune of Upon a Summer's Day":
Upon a time I chance to walk along a green
Where pretty lasses danced in strife to choose a queen.
Some homely-dressed, some handsome, some pretty and some gay,
but who excelled in dancing must be the queen of May.
Good fellows, great and small, pray let me you advise
To have a care withall; 'tis good to be merry and wise.
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