Illustrated Victorian handbill poem, a street ballad entitled 'The Golden Glove.'

Printed on one side of a piece of wove paper roughly 280 x 95 mm. Aged, creased and spotted, with chipping to extremities, but with text and illustration clear and entire. Curious small (roughly 40 x 65 mm) crude illustration at head, showing dove with olive branch and acorn. Forty-line poem arranged in five stanzas. Interestingly-garbled nineteenth-century folk song with ancient antecedents. First stanza reads 'There was a young squire in the north country we hear, | Was courting a nobleman's daughter so dear, | Now, for to marry her it was his intent, | All friends and relations did give their consent. | The time was appointed for the wedding-day, | The farmer was sorry to give her away; | Instead of being married she went to her bed, | And the thoughts of the farmer still ran in her head.' The lady puts on 'A coat and blue trousers', and goes 'a-hunting with her dog and her gun'. She converses with the farmer who, unaware of her true identity, declares his love for her. She gives the farmer a glove full of gold, goes home and declares that she has lost her glove and will marry the man who finds it. Last lines: 'I'll be the mistress of the dairy, and milking of the cows | While my jolly young farmer goes whistling at the plough.' Several copies of items with this title on COPAC, but none exactly corresponding to this one, and most with the first line reading 'A wealthy young squire of Tamworth we hear'.