Scarborough

The song is older than anyone can trace. It appears in English ballad collections from the seventeenth century, but the melody is older than that, and the words before the words are older still. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme — four herbs that have nothing to do with each other except that they were once believed, separately, to have properties that could bind a person to a promise. The song is not really about a fair. It is about an impossible task given to someone who has already left.

Scarborough itself sits on a headland above the North Sea. The town has two bays divided by a castle promontory — the South Bay for tourists, the North Bay for the people who actually live there. The castle has been a ruin since the Civil War. Before that it was a prison. Before that it was a fortress. The headland has been occupied continuously for three thousand years because it is the kind of place that is very easy to defend and very difficult to leave.

The fair itself — the Scarborough Fair — ran for forty-five days every year from the thirteenth century until 1788, when it was discontinued. It was one of the largest trading fairs in England. Merchants came from across Europe. You could buy anything there: cloth, spices, horses, debt. The four herbs in the song were all available. Whether they could actually bind anyone to anything is a different question.

The song survived the fair by more than two centuries. It is still being sung. The fair is a footnote in local history, mentioned occasionally in tourism brochures. The impossible tasks in the song — the shirt without seams, the acre between the salt water and the sea strand — have never been completed. The person who left has never come back. The song keeps asking anyway.