The Bold soldier, together with Sweet pig of Richmond Hill:

Variants of “The Bold Soldier” have since been collected in England and the United States from many informants. Norman Cazden points out that this text is a revision of an older, more tragic lyric dating from about 1679 (the “Yarrow ballads”) and reflects a shift in social expectations (Roxburghe Collection 6:229-33; Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Folk Songs 182-83; Laws M27; Roud; Readex, Archive of Americana: “American Broadsides,” 1:4173). Here the success of the soldier and his love against her father is no longer controlled by the rigidities of a society ruled by lineage and status. In the early song, the hero fights seven brothers for the feudal integrity of the clan that chooses who shall marry their daughters and sisters. He is killed and she commits suicide. In the early nineteenth-century version, they work together: he fights for his love and her dowry and wins both: “and the lady held the horse, while the soldier fought the battle” (verse 5). It is interesting that the text appears in only one songster, The Echo; or, Columbian Songster (150-52; R. Keller).

Like the parody of The Legacy, “Sweet Pig of Richmond Hill” is a collegiate-style comic parody, this time on the popular bucolic song, “The Lass of Richmond Hill.” It may be a satire on a specific person. Edmund Burke’s 1791 comment that “learning will be cast into the mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude” set off a storm of responses using pigs and hogs as images (3:335). A song entitled “The Swinish Multitude,” set to “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” appeared in Paddy’s Resource, a songster published in Philadelphia in 1796; another song in this collection is “The Placemen and Pensioners’ Address to the Swinish Multitude,” set to the tune of “Derry Down” (25-25, 43-44). Coverly’s song, “Sweet Pig of Richmond Hill,” had appeared earlier in Thomas Fleet’s Neptune (18).