Matty Groves (Child 81, Roud 52) was first documented in 1658, though it may be older, and has many variations in the names of those involved and even the melody used, but the story is always the same. Some wealthy and powerful man is out of town and his wife picks up a young man to sleep with while he's away. The hot-tempered lord returns home to catch the adulterous lovers together and kills them, sometimes quite gruesomely.
This particular version, tells of Lord Arnold, Lord Arnold's Wife and Little Matty Groves, but there are Lord Ronalds, Lord Arlens and Lord Donalds, as well as Matty being spelled Mattie or being called Little Musgrave like the Christy Moore version of the song. The traditional melody of Matty Groves resurfaced in the United States in the 1800s in the much, MUCH more cheerful Shady Grove, which is the story of a young man courting.
But this project isn't about cheerful love songs, now is it? Let's talk about the bloody drama and gleefully sordid details of Matty Groves instead.
First off, this story starts off in church, where the titular Matty Groves catches the eye of Lord Arnold's wife. We don't get too much background on any of these folks, but it's interesting to note that the unfortunate Matty is the only one with a given name. The Lord and Lady in the story are only referred to by title, and in the lady's case, she's not even called "Lady Arnold" in this version, but simply "Lord Arnold's Wife" as if to stress the fact that she's married to a fairly important man, and by the way, she's married and yeah, this is going to end badly.
Matty, who clues in the song suggest is of a lower social station, is initially reluctant to give in to the lady's advances, but she persuades him that her husband is away and he's not going to get into trouble for having a little fun (foreshadowing), and it's possible the story could have ended there but for a loyal servant who, overhearing the seduction goes to fetch his boss.
The song skips over the salacious details of the tryst, and the next thing we know, Matty wakes up in bed to find a justifiably irate Lord Arnold looking down at him and the lady. Jealousy may have turned Lord Arnold into a violent rage monster, but he's an honorable violent rage monster, and he challenges Matty to a duel. When Matty objects, that as a poor man he has no sword to fight with, Lord Arnold offers to loan him the better of his own weapons, and furthermore to give Matty the first blow.
As an aside, this may seem excessively generous of Lord Arnold, but it's worth bearing in mind that fighting with a sword is a learned skill, and while a highly motivated amateur can be extremely dangerous with a sharp weapon, it's very unlikely that they could hold their own against an experienced swordsman. We also hear Matty referred to throughout as "Little" Matty Groves, underscoring the fact that he's probably not as physically powerful as the lord.
What follows is as beautifully concise and brutal a description of a fight as I've ever come across:
"Matty struck the very first blow, and hurt Lord Arnold sore, Lord Arnold struck the very next blow and Matty struck no more."
"Little" Matty Groves becomes "Dead" Matty Groves pretty quickly and Lord Arnold sits his wife on his lap (mind you, she's probably still in some state of undress from her affair with Matty, and he's wounded and bloody, this is a gruesome parody of a sweet domestic scene), and cheerfully asks her who she likes better, him or a fresh corpse. The lady says she'd rather kiss the dead guy than "you in your finery," which Lord Arnold doesn't take well. Specifically he kills her. More specifically, the ballad tells us, "he struck his wife right through the heart and pinned her up to the wall."
Lord Arnold leaves his wife pinned to a wall by his sword (!!!) and calls for his servants to dig a hole and throw the two of them into a single grave, but to pile the lady on top because she came from a noble family. Presumably he then lights a cigar and walks away from an explosion like some cinematic antihero.
So... there's really no good guy in this story, though you can argue that cheating on a husband you didn't care for is probably less severe than murder. Or that sleeping with somebody else's wife is less severe than killing an unprepared peasant in a one-sided duel. It's worth noting that in a lot of times and places, the execution of an unfaithful wife would be looked on as a fair punishment, but the ballad doesn't really seem all that sympathetic to Lord Arnold. It's really just a sordid and bloody story about people doing bad things to each other, which makes it, of course, extremely entertaining and a classic of the genre.
It's interesting to see how many Dead Lover ballads seem to feature a wealthy young woman forced into an unhappy marriage. In fact, the unhappy marriage seems to be a common theme in a lot of these traditional songs, and it's almost always involving well-off people with lands and titles. It may be that for many centuries women were treated as bargaining chips to be used by their families to trade money and prestige, but based on the sheer number of times this comes up in song over the past four hundred years, it's also pretty apparent that at least part of society was really aware of this and didn't consider it a good thing.
It's also interesting to note that some of the exact language and situations come up in other songs, although with different outcomes. For example, in the slighly younger ballad "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy" and its variants (Roud 1, Child 200) a young lady runs off from her privileged position to follow a handsome vagabond, and while "Matty Groves" has the line "I'd rather one kiss from dead Matty's lips than you in your finery" the "Raggle Taggle Gypsy" has the line "I'd rather one kiss from the yellow Gypsy's lips than you in your finery." Mild racism aside, the later ballad has a bit happier outcome than "Matty Groves" in that the young lady runs off to be poor and happy rather than rich and miserable.
To be fair, though, Lord Arnold's Wife does end up reunited with her lover as well. They're together forever as Dead Lovers.
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