“I’ve always done various things to it… never stopped doing, as a matter of fact, because the more you go back to songs like that, the more they reveal. I first heard it 30 years ago. I always say this, but it’s true - the first 5 years I sang it all I saw was red, just red. I’d start singing it and this red appeared, I was hallucinating. It wasn’t the insides of my eyelids, it wasn’t drugs and it wasn’t booze. I never knew Brenda Wooton (whom I first heard singing it) until the 70’s, and she said “sing Prince Heathen”. Afterwards she said “That song’s a bit like being in your own bloodstream, isn’t it?” Couple that with me seeing red all the time! It’s a terrifying song and a hugely important one. I think there’s very few songs in the whole canon that are men’s or women’s songs, but that’s a men’s song. I’m not surprised that women do it - but I’m very surprised that more men don’t. It’s a very important song for men - that word ‘No’ is a very important word for them to understand. The song goes to such extraordinary lengths on the way. It’s about firmness in the truth. Mahatma Ghandi got very annoyed when people described what he did as passive resistance. “Nothing passive about it”, he said - it was “firmness in the truth”, and that’s what ‘Prince Heathen’ has got. That and ‘Famous Flower’ must be what you called my ‘pivotal songs’, both important to me.”

Martin Carthy on “Prince Heathen”

St. Margaret was the patron saint of peasants and women in childbirth, the latter not because she had children but because she was swallowed by the devil in the form of a dragon, and her purity and resistance were so great that he had to spew her up again whole and unhurt. Viewed as someone miraculously reborn uninjured, she became a symbol of hope in the life-and-death agony of childbirth. Margaret’s father was a pagan priest, but she was secretly baptised. She tended animals in the fields. The governor, Olybrius, saw her, wanted her, and had her brought to him. She refused him and declared her faith. She was imprisoned, flogged, and terribly tortured. In prison she was swallowed by the dragon; and when she triumphed over the dragon, the devil confronted her again, this time in the form of a sympathetic man who told her that she had suffered too much:

But she seized his hair, hurled him to the ground, and placing her foot on his head, exclaimed:

“Tremble, great enemy. You now lie under the foot of a woman.”

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

The context is a discussion of Joan of Arc, and the meanings attached to her virginity; Saint Margaret was one of Joan’s patrons, one of the saints with whom she conversed (the other, unsurprisingly, was Saint Catherine). One may read the story of Saint Margaret as religious propaganda for feminine sexual “purity”; but it also promotes an image, counter to the anti-feminist tradition that defined women as weak and incorrigibly sensual, of feminine integrity, resistance and steadfastness in the truth. It is not sex itself, especially not her own sexual desires or identity, that Margaret refuses; it is coercion, male power and male right, the complacent barbarism of the droit de seigneur.

The story of Saint Margaret offers a choice between submission to the “heathen” depredations of Olybrius, and the spiritual shield of Christian feminine identity, with its attendant duties of sexual modesty and continence, continual self-surveillance in place of a visible burkha (although Joan of Arc wore men’s attire, and armour, as signs of her unbreachable virginity). The ramifications of this choice are examined at greater length by Dworkin in Right Wing Women, which sees the religious “right” as offering a woman the explicit promise of protection from rape - from men in general, who will use her without respect or accountability - through submission to a single man who is bound to be faithful to her. Vulnerable men in tough prisons are sometimes offered a similar choice.

“Prince Heathen” reworks the story of Saint Margaret (or, possibly, presents a counter-cultural version of the same source material), moving the emphasis away from sexual inviolability (Margaret is raped almost straight away, and bears her rapist’s son) and towards the symbolic refusal to “weep for” her oppressor, an emotional steadfastness in the face of his demand that she acknowledge her helplessness and inferiority, thereby validating his superiority, power and right. He takes what he wants, but she gives him nothing, even when offered comfort and respect as barter. What she refuses, finally, is complicity and retroactive validation of the wrong that has been done to her.