The footprints matched the town’s suspicion
Mary Ashford, the poor girl drowned
They locked him up in the local prison
Abraham Thornton must go down
Abraham Thornton must go
Down with the jury who cut him loose
Down ’til his neck’s in the hangman’s noose
Down with the evidence he hid away
For my sister’s life he’ll pay
He threw down the gauntlet
Settle it with a fight
He threw down the gauntlet
Whoever wins is right
But I’m no match for a brute like Thornton
That much I know
So he threw down the gauntlet
And I let him go
In October 2018 Gilmore & Roberts, three times nominees at the Radio 2 Folk Awards, released a new album A Problem of Our Kind. It opens with their single ‘Gauntlet’ which tells the story of the murder of Mary Ashford, which is also the subject of my latest book.
Gilmore & Roberts have had some great reviews for the album, including this from Folk Radio UK :
The album’s opening track, Gauntlet, is a brawny folk-rock masterstroke. Spare but heavy, full of the fiddle screech and forceful drums that characterised the best bits of mid-seventies Steeleye Span, it is nonetheless very much the duo’s own song. Because where Gilmore and Roberts really excel is in their songwriting. They split the job roughly half and half, and Gauntlet is one of Gilmore’s songs. It is an emotional and eloquent account of one of the strangest and most influential court cases in British legal history, the Ashford v Thornton case of 1818. Gilmore writes herself into the mind of William Ashford, brother of Mary, whom he was certain had been murdered by Abraham Thornton. Ashford appealed against the ‘not guilty’ verdict, causing Thornton to invoke the arcane right of trial by battle – the proverbial throwing down of the gauntlet. In a few swift strokes, Gilmore paints a vivid picture of Ashford as a righteous, principled man stymied by physical meekness. Like many true stories, there is no happy ending, and the song raises more questions than it answers. It is a subtle and highly entertaining way of shedding fresh light on a small but important corner of our shared past.
You can order A Problem of Our Kind from Gilmore & Roberts’ website.
