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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

I Will Give my Love an Apple

song

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionNov 28, 2023
Entity authorityQ18350811 ↗
Source-derived summary

"I Will Give my Love an Apple" is a traditional English folk song. It was arranged by Benjamin Britten and by Herbert Howells. The song goes thus:

I will give my love an apple without e'er a core,I will give my love a house without e'er a door.I will give my love a palace, wherein she may beAnd she may unlock it without e'er a key.My head is the apple without e'er a core.My mind is the house without e'er a door.My heart is the palace, wherein she may beAnd she may unlock it without e'er a key.

A version of the song was collected at Sherborne, Dorset, by H. E. D. Hammond in 1906; another version was printed in Journal of the Folk-Song Society, vol. 3, no. 11, 1907, p114.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “I Will Give my Love an Apple” as song. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Will, Give and Love.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1906, 1907—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Will, Give and Love providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “I Will Give my Love an Apple”, the useful work is to connect “song” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 28, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q18350811. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1906 and 1907.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “I Will Give my Love an Apple”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow I Will Give my Love an Apple primary sources, I Will Give my Love an Apple archive and Will research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “I Will Give my Love an Apple”?
  2. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “I Will Give my Love an Apple” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.