Chumbawamba - The Bad Squire lyrics

The merry brown hares came a-leaping Over the crest of the hill Where the clover and corn lay a-sleeping Under the moonlight so still Leaping so late and so early ‘Till under their bite and their tread The swedes and the wheat and the barley Lay cankered and trampled and dead A poacher's poor widow sat sighing On the side of the moss-patterned bank Where under the gloom of the fir-woods One acre of ground laying rank She watched over barely grown clover Where rabbit or hare never ran For the ground that it all covered over Hid the blood of a good murdered man She thought of the shaded plantation And the hares and her husband's own blood And the voice of her own indignation Rose up to the throne of her God There's blood on your new foreign shrubs, Squire There's blood on your pointer's cold feet There's blood on the game that you sell Squire And there's blood on the game that you eat You have sold out the labouring man, Squire Both body and soul for to shame To pay for your seat in the House, Squire And to pay for the feed of your game You made him a poacher yourself, Squire When you'd give not the work nor the meat And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden At our starving poor little one's feet When packed into one tiny chamber Man, mother and little ones lay While the rain pattered in on our bride bed And the walls barely held out the day When we lay in the heat of the fever On the mud and the clay of the floor ‘Till you parted us all for three months, Squire And we knocked at the working house door So to kennels and liveried varlets Where you starved your own daughter of bread And worn out with liquor and harlots See your heirs at your feet lying dead When you follow them into your heaven And your soul rots asleep in the grave Then Squire, you will not be forgiven By the free men you took as your slaves