> Folk Music > Songs > The Hornet and the Beetle
The Hornet and the Beetle
[ Roud 12624 ; VWML RVW1/1/1 ; Wiltshire 1035 ; trad.]
The Hornet and the Beetle is a poem in Charles Gardiner's article The Old Cotswold Dialect: Birds, Beasts and Flowers, published on 12 February 1960 in the Evesham Journal, and later included in the book The Old Cotswold Dialect: Selected Article by Charles Gardiner (Evesham: Vale of Evesham Historical Society, 2008, p.18). Gardiner noted that these are “verses written eighty years ago in the local dialect”, i.e. around 1880.
Fay Hield learned The Hornet and the Beetle from a version collected from the singing of W.H. Daws by Ralph Vaughan Williams. She sang it on her 2016 album Old Adam and commented in her sleeve notes:
The Hornet and the Beetle shows us the folly of our justice system, though who'd have thought we'd need a woodpecker to do it?
Lyrics
Charles Gardiner's The Hornet and the Beetle | Fay Hield sings The Hornet and the Beetle |
---|---|
The Hornet set in an 'oller tree, |
A hornet sat in an old elm tree, |
A Beetle up thick tree did climb, |
A beetle up that tree did climb, |
The Hornet's conscience felt a twinge, |
The hornet's conscience feeled a smart, |
Just the a Yoffle passing by |
Just then a woodpecker passing by |
All you as be to law inclined, |
So you that be to law inclined, |