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Song

Arthur McBride

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Language
English
Comments
Also known as “Arthur McBride and the Sergeant” and “The Recruiting Sergeant”, this is an Irish folk song, which has also been found in Scotland and in Suffolk and Devon in England with some slight variations. It was collected around 1840 in Limerick by Patrick Weston Joyce and also in Donegal by George Petrie. It is 2355 in the Roud folk music index.
The song tells of the narrator and his cousin, Arthur McBride, being approached by three military recruiters - the recruiting sergeant, a corporal and a young drummer. To ensnare the unwary, recruiting sergeants were reputed to be both silver tongued yet capable of ruthless skulduggery. In this case of attempting to induce the narrator and Arthur McBride into military service, the recruiter extols the virtues of serving the King, having money and wearing nice clothes. Not taken in, Arthur responds that, though fond of their country, if they joined, the pay would be low, the clothes would merely be loaned to them and they would be made to go to war in France where they would almost certainly be killed. The recruiter, taking offence, becomes angry and threatens to use his sword whereupon Arthur and the narrator attack the recruiters, throw their weapons into the sea and leave.
The roots of the song are uncertain. There is some speculation that it references the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th Century. However, it has also been surmised that the song goes back to the late 17th Century, especially the Williamite War in Ireland, since the reference to being "sent to France" suggests the departure of the disbanded Irish Jacobite army from Ireland to France, as a condition of the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.
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