"The Daemon Lover" (Roud 14, Child 243) – also known as "James Harris", "A Warning for Married Women", "The Distressed Ship Carpenter", "James Herries", "The Carpenter’s Wife", "The Banks of Italy", or "The House-Carpenter" – is a popular ballad dating from the mid-seventeenth century,[1] when the earliest known broadside version of the ballad was entered in the Stationers' Register on 21 February 1657.
[13][14][15] "A Warning for Married Women"[16] tells the story of Jane Reynolds and her lover James Harris, with whom she exchanged a promise of marriage.
He is pressed as a sailor before the wedding takes place and Jane faithfully awaits his return for three years, but when she learns of his death at sea, she agrees to marry a local carpenter.
At first she is reluctant to do so, because of her husband and their children, but ultimately she succumbs to the ghost's pleas, letting herself be persuaded by his tales of rejecting the royal daughter's hand and assurance that he has the means to support her – namely, a fleet of seven ships.
[20][21] "The Distressed Ship Carpenter" ends with the eponymous craftsman lamenting and cursing seamen for ruining his life.
[29][30] "A Warning for Married Women" and "The Distressed Ship Carpenter" seem to have inspired the Scottish and American traditions of the ballad, respectively.
"[50] Barbara Fass Leavy describes Jane Reynolds as a "cautionary example" of what happens "when women abandon their responsibilities in order to pursue their own pleasures.
[55] Leavy also suggests a different reading of the ballad, in which it is her marriage with a carpenter, rather than her decision to flee with the former lover, that can be considered an act of infidelity.
[56] Atkinson describes the original broadside as "the preservation of outmoded ways of thinking within the canon of popular literature.
"[57] In accordance with the ecclesiastical law of early seventeenth-century England, a mutual promise of marriage was enough to make the couple husband and wife and was considered binding in the eyes of God.
"[59] The broadside may be read as encouraging faithfulness to the person with whom the original pre-marriage vows were exchanged and warning against divine punishment for breaking the oath.
[80][81][82][83] Canadian folklorists Edith Fowke, Kenneth Peacock and Helen Creighton each recorded a different "House Carpenter" variant in Canada in the 1950s and 60s.
[84][85][86] The song appears to have been largely forgotten in Britain and Ireland, but a fragmentary version, sung by Andrew Stewart of Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland, and learned from his mother, was recorded by Hamish Henderson in 1955,[87] and can be heard on the Tobar an Dualchais website.
Versions of the song, under its several titles, have been recorded by: Elizabeth Bowen's 1945 short story "The Demon Lover" uses the ballad's central conceit for a narrative of ghostly return in wartime London.