Raven King (ballad)

The Raven King is a ballad so well-known to us all that it would be supererogatory to quote it. The text of its most popular version may be found in Miss Clarke's history, as a footnote to the first page of the chapter entitled 'The Stones of York'[3].

The ballad tells the familiar tale of an abduction into Faerie. Although the precise details are lacking - the date, the place, the names (or even the sex) of the partiy involved - it is quite clear that the guilty abductor of the unnamed protagonist is the Raven King himself. It is also clear that his motive is the beauty of the stolen person; that none of those claiming to love the victim is able to summon up resistance sufficient to prevent the theft; that the church makes no genuine protest at these scandalous proceedings; and that the person's eventual fate is to become part of the king's retinue, the 'King's wild company', forever.

This latter notion, of Christian souls being carried off to become part of some ghostly meiny, is a very old one. It takes many forms and has been given many names, but is perhaps best known as the Wild Hunt.

According to tradition the sound of a bell was often heard just before such an abduction. John Hyde hears such a bell when he sees the waff of Arabella Strange on the Dyke prior to her abduction by the gentleman with thistle-down hair. The labourers who witness the abduction itself also hear a bell - a distant, melancholy bell.