“Scarborough Fair” is one of the best known English ballads to today’s listeners – up there with “Greensleeves”. Simon and Garfunkel recorded a version in 1966 that would probably be most familiar to listeners today:

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
For once she was a true love of mine”

The speaker requests the love to perform a series of impossible tasks to regain his affection. (e.g. “Tell her to make me a cambric shirt / Without no seams nor needlework”). But what do the herbs have to do with the story? And why specifically “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme”?

Pictured: Fair food?

The refrain, with those specific four herbs, is actually rather new to the ballad. By looking at older versions, we can piece their story together.

The very oldest lyrics that we have for a song related to “Scarborough Fair” are for a Scottish version, called “The Elfin Knight.” Rather than the speaker reaching out to a former lover, instead a woman and the eponymous knight exchange challenges to see if the other is a worthy match (and in the end, the knight isn’t up to snuff).

This version is, as the folklorists say, “bawdy”. The details of the impossible tasks are full of innuendo (the stitch-free shirt suggesting a lover’s body, for example). So while the structure of the verses and some of the impossible tasks are recognizable, the refrain doesn’t seem to match up with our set of herbs at all. Instead, rather appropriately, the refrain to the suggestive Scottish version involves a man’s tartan clothing being blown off.

“The elphin knight sits on yon hill,
Ba, ba, ba, lilli ba
He blaws his horn both lowd and shril.
The wind hath blown my plaid awa”

Some intermediate versions give us more information. As we get closer to the present, we see versions more like the popular one today, though featuring different places in England, Scotland, or even further afield. This one collected in the 1820s is again Scottish:

“DID ye ever travel twixt Berwick and Lyne?
Sober and grave grows merry in time
There ye’ll meet wi a handsome young dame,
Ance she was a true love o mine.”

While an 1891 version with Scarborough Fair (in the North of England) as the location has a slightly different set of four herbs than the modern lyrics:

“O, where are you going? To Scarborough Fair?
Savoury, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to a lass that lives there,
For she was once a true love of mine.”

The refrains in these two versions are close imitations or rhymes of each other, one being a full sentence and the other being a list of herbs. Clearly they’re related somehow.

It seems likely to me that the non-herb sentence inspired the herb list as a humorous echo, but it’s also possible that the sentence was composed by someone trying to “rationalize” the list of herbs as having a deeper textual meaning. Since the first Scottish version uses nonsense lyrics for part of the refrain, it’s not implausible that random herbs could be thrown in to the lyrical recipe. It’s also possible that the herbs derive from some external source, like a magical recipe – or just a culinary one. After all, all of these herbs have a similar flavor profile.

I’ll also leave you with one more version, from Maine ca. 1890, to show how the song made it “across the pond”:

“Say, young man, are you going to the fair?
Fum a lum a lye fum a lye lo lee
And if you see my true love there,
Timmy hiddle-o a diddle-o, fum a dum a diddle-o
Fum a lum a lye fum a lye lo lee.”

Coming Soon: The coal-fired aircraft carriers of Lake Michigan

Selected sources:

https://mainlynorfolk.info/martin.carthy/songs/theelfinknight.html

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_English_and_Scottish_Popular_Ballads/Part_1/Chapter_2

https://jopiepopie.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-elfin-knight-1670-scarborough-fair.html

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/songstorysamplercollection/23/