This text was such a joy to do! When Kolfinna contacted me about this assignment, we both instantly knew we wanted to do this nautical image from a 16th century roll of the English fleet.

The original image (shown below) from the Anthony Roll contained two major text section we wanted to maintain in our version: the prose paragraph at the top of the image, and the lines of text below.

I wanted to use period prose for that first section, and I was inspired to focus on Grace O'Malley (Gráinne Ní Mháille), a woman who dominated the Irish coast during Queen Elizabeth I's reign, because of the recipient's work with the Corsairium, Atlantia's Nautical Guild, and her captaining a ship in our fleet. In doing some research on Gráinne Ní Mháille, I discovered letters both from her and about her with perfect text to adapt to a Court Barony. In July 1593, Gráinne wrote a letter directly to Queen Elizabeth asking the Queen to intercede in arbitration between Gráinne and the governor of Connacht, Sir Richard Bingham, and to give her permission to maintain her fleet for self defense, and in service of the Queen. There isn't currently a digital record of the letter in the UK National Archives database, but an image of the letter can be found on their blog. Anne Chambers, who wrote a biography called Granuaile: Grace O'Malley - Ireland's Pirate Queen deciphered the original handwriting in her research for the book, a full facsimile of which can be found here.

Ultimately, I chose to use the sections reprinted below to adapt into scroll text:

Specific phrases like "maintaine her selfe and her people by Sea and land," and "grant unto your said subject under your most gracious hand of signet" served perfectly the appointment of a Court Barony for someone who, in Atlantia, did maintain herself and her people during the pandemic, and who does serve Atlantia both on sea (on her ship The Siren's Song) and land. In the original, Grainuile is writing about herself in the third person to describe the pains to which she has gone to protect what of her land and wealth she could after her husband died, which suited perfectly for our scroll to describe Captain Redfox's accomplishments in the third person, too!

Below is the full text for the prose portion of the scroll, after removing some portions to better fit the scale of the scroll, and adapting some of my original language to better match the period spelling:

Lady Una Redfox, by grace and by force did maintain her selfe and her people by Sea and Land, the space of many years past. It pleases Us to Grant unto Our said subject Baronage, and under Our most gracious hand of signet the free libertye during her lyfe to invade with sword and fire all Our enemyes whersoever they ar or shalbe without any interruption of any persone or persones whatsoever, and to fly noble Arms, to wit: gyronny argent and gules, a lymphad sable and a bordure Or. Done this 11th Day of December at the Yule Toy Tourney in Our Barony of Nottinghill Coill, in the year 2021, Anno Societatis 56.

The work shanty proved to be an incredible task! I knew I wanted to try and identify period lyrics to adapt for this original piece, but as many bards have already discovered, confirmed records of lyrics or tunes before 1600 can be scarce for secular or orally-transmitted works, and especially so for so-called "shanties" or work songs, which were rarely committed to paper outside of anthropological uses much later on. However, one Robert Wedderburn wrote a piece of anti-English literature in 1549-1550 as tension flared between Scotland and England, which contains a transcription of the working songs Scottish sailors were singing as they hoisted anchor. An added difficulty to this adaptation process was that the entire text is written in Scots, a close neighbor to English, and the book was published using Early Modern spelling, adding to the difficulty of comprehension for a modern English reader. See if you can decipher the portion below:

My other major challenge was metric. Work songs need to have really strong and consistent downbeats, and in this case, I knew I needed it to be call and response, considering the repetition of every phrase in the original text indicated such an organization, and that call-and-response work songs are really common for work requiring simultaneous action, like rowing or hauling on lines.

Some of the lines in the original Scots text had a strong triplet rhythm, like "haul hym up" and "ly a bak", but I knew I needed the final piece to be 4 to fit the most common tunes, so I decided to write each line as "/ u u / / u u". The first benefit of this metric style would be to really emphasize each of the strong beats with two stressed syllables right after one another, to give time for the actual "hauling" to happen. Second, the lines of seven syllables would serve an important purpose for the song: by ommitting the last, expect stressed syllable of the 4:4 line (it should be / u u / / u u / to be perfectly even, right? ) that missing syllable can serve as the beginning of the response portion of the song. In many of the work songs I listened to in preparing this piece, I found that the last beat of the caller would often overlap with the first beat of the response, such that the response always happened directly on the beat given by the caller, rather than waiting a "fuzzy" amount of time between the caller's finished lines and the responders beginning.

So, the first line of the song is written "Oars now unrack, ye gallands -------- "" ", which is meant to be sung as :

CALLER: RESPONSE:

"Oars now unrack, ye gallands!" "Oars now unrack!"

/ u u / / u u / u u /

And so it goes for each line, in which the responders repeat all the portion of the line up until "ye gallands" which is the cue for the responders to begin.

After three lines, all (Caller and Responders) then sing the chorus together:

/ u / u / u / u / u u /

More in mood and more in maucht / and long pull the draucht!" <-- these rhyme in the original Scots, but would most likely be "might" and "draft" to a modern English speaker.

I was quite inspired by the Scots work song's focus on the physical act of pulling, and its lyrical reminders to maintain good form, a positive mindset, and encouraging the men by (potentially lying) that the work was almost done! So I incorporated those elements in my own original lines like "dig not the tips" (referring to pushing the oars too deeply) and "bare thee thy hips" (meaning to use the legs muscles, not just pull with the arms). This song is written for rowing specifically because Una Redfox's ship The Siren's Song is a 12-oar, one-masted birlinn that would use oars extensively in shallower waters and in combat. The full song is reprinted below, and can be sung to the tune of "Pull Down Below":