Annotation:Pencarrow
PENCARROW (Deer's Head or Camp's end). AKA - "Pencarrow Hunt." AKA and see "Delight of the Men of Dovey (The)," "Difyrrwch Gwyr Dufi." English, Air (3/4 time). England, Cornwall. D Dorian. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. The air “Pencarrow” was published by Baring Gould in Songs and Ballads of the West (1891). It was collected from John Bennet of Menheniot, Cornwall (west of Plymouth), and was the vehicle for a song called “Pencarrow Hunt” or “Lord Arscott of Tetcott,” although there are other melodies associated with the song elsewhere. The narrative focuses on Pencarrow House, near Bodmin, and a bucolic fox hunt across the moors with Lord John Arscott whose family owned much of the land between here and Tetcott just over the border.
Baring Gould noted that the same tune can be found in Wales sung to the words “Difyrrwch Gwyr Dufi/Dyfl” (in Edward Jones’ Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, 1794, p. 129). A portion of the tune also appears with the words “Dear Catholic Brother” in Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy, vol. VI (1720, p. 277), and subsequently in Musical Miscellany, vol. VI (1731, p. 171) with the words “Come, take up your Burden, ye Dogs, and away.” Baring Gould notes that D’Urfey came from Devonshire and suggests that he learned the tune in his youth, later employing “as much of it as he wanted to set his song.” He concludes that the melody predates D’Urfey’s era in tradition, and “probably belongs to an early stock common to the Celts of Wales and Cornwall.”
