John A. Burrison

A Medieval Folktale
in the Georgia Mountains:
A Tale-Hunting Adventure

It is a June weekend in 1967, my first year in Georgia, where I had come, fresh out of graduate school, to teach folklore at Georgia State University.  This is a wet summer in the mountains, but they are majestic in any weather, and the rain tends to keep folks at home where I can find them more readily.

Looking for folklore to collect, I am riding with one of my students, Joe Treadway, just below Blairsville, in Union County, when through the misty downpour I glimpse an elderly gentleman seated on the porch of an abandoned general store by the roadside.  Waving economically to us as we pass, he has the expectant look of one hoping for visitors to stop and chat.  We turn into the next convenient driveway and head back to the store, on the chance that he may have something for us.  We are not disappointed.

After only the barest of preliminaries, James Satterfield, seventy-three, is singing and telling tales.  The songs are fragments, which include the lament “Only a Miner” and a northwoods lumberjack ballad, curiously out of place in the South.  Mr. Satterfield explains that he had worked for many years in the mining and logging camps of north Georgia and North Carolina and that itinerant Yankee lumbermen would bring such lore with them on their southerly migrations.  The stories are personal-experience narratives, in which Mr. Satterfield plays the role of peacemaker in the rough-and-tumble frontier environment of the camps, and a couple of the most interesting bawdy jests I have ever heard.  We do not record the tales, but one of them sticks in my mind long after our return to Atlanta; its repeated formula, “Lay there, you’ve slayed many,” which the hero addresses to his pistol by way of bragging of his accomplishments to his girlfriend, has the ring of antiquity.  This folktale continues to nag at me; I’ve read it somewhere, but can’t find it in the standard reference works.

More than a year later, in October 1968, I’m traveling just south of Blairsville with another student, Ed Prince.  It is raining again (although this time just a drizzle), and as we approach the general store we see that James Satterfield is still sitting on the porch.  We stop, for I am determined to record “Lay There” with my new battery-powered machine.  But it is Sunday, and Mr. Satterfield, feeling religious, is reluctant to tell the tale.  So we strike a deal: he’ll let us record the story if we help him study for his state driver’s examination (it seems that, although Mr. Satterfield has been driving much of his life, he thinks not might be a good time to obtain a license).  After we had quizzed Mr. Satterfield from the Department of Public Safety booklet for an hour, we are invited to set up the recorder, and to the accompaniment of cars passing on the highway we preserve the tale for posterity.  It is exactly as I recall it from the earlier telling.

“Lay There, You’ve Slayed Many”

That ‘as a man that ‘as a-courtin’ a girl.  An’, she played a trick off on him.  He rode an ol’ white-face horse that he called Baldy.  An’ he ca’ied a pistol all time; an’ he’d go in, an’ she’d be dressed settin’ in a parlor at the table, an’ he’d pull that pistol out an’ th’ow it down an’ say, “Lay there, you’ve slayed many.”

An’ she decided she’d see if he was a brave man as he let on like he was.  He had to go away around—an’ it ‘as just a li’l ways, it ‘as ‘bout a quarter across the hill, little ol’ rough trailway—an’ he had to go about a mile aroun’ to git thar.  She dressed in men’s clothes an’ shoes an’ took a gun an’ hit out across thar to waylay her sweetheart, see if he was brave.

An’ he come ridin’ along, y’know, whistlin’; an’ she walked out in the road in front of his horse an’ took hol’ the bridle an’ tol’ him t’ get down offa that horse!  [Chuckles]  He got down.  She said, “Now, you kiss that horse’s ass!”  ‘At’s what his sweetheart told him.  Says, “You kiss that horse’s ass.”

Said he got behind the horse an’ he’d pat the horse on the ass; the horse’d jump up, “Whik!”

He said, “Now, whoa, Baldy.  Whoa, Baldy.  Now, whoa, Baldy.”  She made him kiss t he horse’s ass.  Told her man to git on his horse an’ ride on.  An’ he got on ‘is horse an’ ride on.

An’ she jist lit back out across thar, an’ was dressed an’ a-settin’ in a parlor at the table when he come in.  He rode up t’ the bars an’ hitched his horse up, an’ walked in an’ jerked his pistol out an’ th’owed it down on the table, says, “Lay thar, you’ve slayed many.”

She said, “Now, whoa, Baldy!” [Laughs]

I guess I better not tell the rest of it.

[After some encouragement:] Well, he played a trick off on her.  Give her gran’mother fifty dollars then ta help ‘im get back on ‘er.  She tol’ him she fix for him ta get it for fifty dollars.  “Well,” he says, “I’ll give it,” an’ he just give the old lady fifty dollars.  She told him what time to come back—he didn’t have a date with her [the granddaughter] on that day.  An’ her gran’mother had fixed it on that time for him ta come in an’ go t’ bed with her granddaughter.

So, she told her granddaughter—it ‘as in the night, y’know, after bedtime—‘at she’d have to get up an’ go out.  She made out like she had a peter [dildo] in ‘er, an’ her granddaughter wanted ‘er to try it on her.  An’ she told her she would after she came back, an’ said, “I’ll be right back in.”

Well, she went out, an’ she sent this girl’s sweetheart in an’ he got in the bed with her.  An’ he got ta pourin’ it to her, an’ she’d say, “Stick it in a little deeper, Granny.  Stick it in a li’l deeper, Granny.”  Well, he got all he wanted of it, an’ he went on off.  An’ ‘er gran’mother come back an’ got in the bed with ‘er, an’ she didn’t know what it ‘as her granny doin’ that, y’ know.  ‘At’s the way he got tricked back on it.

Well, the next time ‘at he come in, on the next Sunday night, he hitched his old Baldy horse up, walked in an’ th’owed his gun down, said, “Lay thar, you slay many.”

She says, “Now, whoa, Baldy.”

He says, “Stick it in a li’l deeper, Granny!”

That’s all of it.  That’s the way he got the trick back on her.  I don’t know what happened after that.  [Laughs]

A stimulus to recording this story was the recognition of just how old and rare it is, for after ransacking my folklore library I finally found it, predictably altered in setting and detail, as “Beranger Longbottom,” from a thirteenth-century French manuscript.  It is included in a translated collection of fabliaux, narrative poems recited (and sometimes written down) largely by a class of medieval entertainers called jongleurs.  “Beranger Longbottom” is attributed to Garin, but it exists in another manuscript version and was very likely based on a tale already in oral currency.  It concerns the lazy son of a lower-class moneylender who is given knighthood and the hand of a nobleman’s daughter to pay off a debt.  She, however, scorns the young man’s base origins, and to redeem himself in his bride’s eyes he boasts of valiant deeds, going so far as to fake combat with nonexistent enemies by repeatedly riding off in his shiny new armor and returning with his shield and lance hacked to bits.  The wife becomes suspicious and decides to test her husband’s valor by donning an old suit of armor and overtaking him in the woods, where she finds him attacking his own shield with his sword.  She gives challenge, and the cowardly peasant, taken in by her disguise, immediately consents to do her will, which is to kiss her posterior (this inspires her alias, Beranger Longbottom, when the husband asks the name of the unknown knight).  She then takes a shortcut home, changes into more womanly attire, and invites a lover into her bedroom, where she knows her husband will find them on his return.  The peasant-who-would-be-knight, furious at this brazen act, prepares to punish her, but she retaliates by threatening to call to her rescue the knight who had just humiliated him in the woods, Lord Beranger Longbottom.  He is cowed, and, as in an inverted Taming of the Shrew, she holds this power over him henceforth.

“Beranger Longbottom” is in many respects a typical fabliau of the sort that inspired Chaucer’s Canterbury tales of the Miller and Reeve: bawdy, cynical, hinging on deception and counterdeception.  It has cropped up a couple of times in later French literature but to my knowledge has never before been reported in English.  How, then, can we explain its appearance in twentieth-century Georgia?  My suspicion is that the tale was carried by early French immigrants to Canada, whence it was introduced to the lumber camps of the upper United States, then brought south by the same itinerant loggers who transplanted “The Jam on Gerry’s Rock,” a fragment of which was known by Mr. Satterfield.

Clearly, “Lay There” is more than “Beranger Longbottom” in translation.  Beyond the obvious transformation of European feudal society to a generalized American frontier setting, the class consciousness underlying Garin’s fabliau is absent (as indeed it is in the other known medieval version), and the focus instead becomes one of sexual one-upmanship and ultimate male domination.  This is certainly understandable within the macho context of the lumber camps; not so understandable is the liberated heroine of the medieval fabliau, for those times were hardly less male dominated.  The episode with the grandmother, which provides a conclusion satisfying to the male ego, makes our mountain tale more complex structurally than the fabliau, and it is conceivable that such an ending was original to the French tale and that Garin’s version is eccentric in its omission.

Though “Lay There” is of more ancient pedigree than most southern folk narratives, its background offers insights into a little-known migration pattern and adds to our knowledge of storytelling as a major form of entertainment within the occupational subcultures of the region.  That the tale has managed to survive for at least seven centuries without the support of the mass media and exists in a culture radically different from the one that spawned it is a testament to the durability and adaptability of oral literature.