Broadside ballads in early modern England often had specific purposes. Perhaps this was to moralize, make a political point, or satirize a political figure. Some ballads appear to offer little more than some cheap entertainment in the hopes of selling for a decent profit. Other times, ballads that initially appear to be little more than silly stories actually reveal a lot about the culture in which they were constructed.
Sometimes I’ll come across a ballad on EBBA which has an interesting title or woodcut (or both). I’ve come across one titled The POPLAR-Feast: Or, A CAT-PASTY (about pasties made of cats) and another about a greedy German nobleman whose crimes against the poor were avenged by God sending an army of rats which basically devoured his castle. Usually, I just appreciate that the author’s ‘clickbait’ tactics continue to work hundreds of years after their death and move on. Recently, I stumbled upon a late 17th-century ballad entitled The Couragious Cook-maid which apparently relates a very strange story.
The story appears in at least two ballads from this time period and — aside from some small details — the account is the same: A young cook-maid (that’s a female servant who either cooked or assisted a cook) offers to steal back the wages paid to some tailors by her master. She does this by dressing as a man, riding a horse, and (using the darkness of night to her advantage) arming herself with a black pudding. Thinking the sausage to be a pistol, the terrified men each hand over £5. The ‘jest’ is later revealed to the amusement of others and the shock of the male victims.
On the surface, this is just an absurd story. With regards to the (anonymous) author’s motive, this is certainly the case. “Woman uses sausage to rob men at gunpoint” is something which makes even a modern reader if not chuckle then at least appreciate the incongruity at play. But the humour actually reveals quite a lot about gender roles in early modern England, and possibly even today.
A man robbing three others with a black pudding would also be an absurd series of events but the author’s choice of a female protagonist is very deliberate. It’s almost tempting to view the cook-maid as a feminist figure, whose bravery is subversive, and praise the author’s progressiveness. In fact, while the cook-maid’s actions do subvert contemporary gender norms, it is this subversion which makes the ballad one which relies one the acceptance of traditional, misogynistic gender roles to be funny. The men are mocked and their ‘manhood’ is explicitly questioned. As Garthine Walker notes, ‘The cook-maid emasculated her victims because she lacked physical prowess, not because she possessed it.’ The reason the scenario is supposed to be funny is because a contemporary reader would find it humorous to imagine men being overpowered by women. The joke relies on the maid cross-dressing because a contemporary audience would understand that no man would ever allow themselves to be robbed by a woman, not even one they believed to be armed, and so the appearance of the cook-maid is purposefully gendered as masculine.
In fact, the story contains quite a few allusions to gender. Daggers were often considered to have phallic connotations at the time, so the cook-maid’s weapon, a sausage, is a not-so-subtle priapic object. Walker also links the use of a ‘pudding’ to the word’s double-meaning as a slang for testicles.
Unfortunately, sexist humour which relies on the acceptance, and subsequent subversion, of rigid gender roles is still very much alive. Consider jokes about men being raped in prison (‘don’t drop the soap’), for example. Would a joke about a woman being raped by men receive laughs in the same way? Probably not. But, because a man who is raped has been emasculated and adopts a passive sexual role traditionally occupied by women, the situation subverts what a modern audience (who knowingly or unknowingly buys into these traditionally gendered power dynamics) expects and it is this incongruity which is supposed to make us laugh.
Likewise, a story of three women being robbed by a man (or woman) armed with a sausage would have been much less humorous to a contemporary audience because there is no subversion or incongruity there beyond the obvious absurdity of the weapon of choice. With any ‘humorous’ piece of text which relies on subversion (which is the majority), it’s important to work out what exactly is being subverted in the first place. In this instance, a story about a robbery at sausagepoint betrays sexist attitudes towards women in early modern English society — and perhaps even in our own.
