It is, indeed,
ridiculous
to call the ballads
27
E.
27
E.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v02
A new event, as in Scottish ballads like
Captain Car, falls easily into the traditional form, and finds half
of its phrases, even some of its stanzas, made to hand. The
versions, again, may vary with place and time, but not in any
premeditated way. The stamp of popular simplicity remains ;
the old formulas, commonplaces, epithets, traditional in balladry,
occur without fear of restraint by the poet or of exchange for
'heightened' speech; the ballad may resemble literary poems in
its matter, but never in its structure and style. Short or long,
old or new, it shuns metaphor and all striving for figurative effect.
It is simple in the sense that there is no play of fancy in epithet,
phrase or word, or in the arrangement of words and phrases. It is
not simple in all senses, because it has its own easily recognised
style—that ballad "slang' oftener mentioned than known. It
adheres, when it can, to dialogue; it is free from sentiment;
and its modifications are due to a tendency working on purely
traditional lines. The change can often be seen in a single ballad,
where the main situation, choral and dramatic, has been furnished
with opening and concluding verses of a purely narrative type.
A possible explanation which reverses this process, which assumes
the detachable epic details to be original and the choral verses to
be an addition, and a redaction to fit the story for dance or game,
is not to be considered for a moment. A mass of evidence, partly
derived from the study of European ballads at large, partly drawn
from the stores of ethnological material, puts such a plea out
of court.
We may thus state with confidence the general outlines of
ballad progress. What gave the ballad its existence as a poetic
species was a choral, dramatic presentation! Refrain of the
throng, and improvisation by various singers, leant heavily, as
all primitive poetry teaches us, on repetition. To advance the
action, this repetition became incremental, a peculiarity of ballads
which is radically different from the repetition by variation in
Old English verse and from the thought-rime,' or parallelismus
membrorum, established by Lowth for Hebrew poetry. The
rhythmic form into which the ballad verse naturally ran is that
four-accent couplet known all over the world and in every age,
* Any study of ultimate origins would have to reckon with old ritaal and the
survival of myth, sources that have been proved of late for the St George plays in
England and for the beginnings of medieval drama throughout Europe.
## p. 407 (#425) ############################################
Outlines of Ballad Progress
407
as Usener has pointed out, in popular song. With the refrain,
this couplet formed a quatrain ; in later and longer ballads, as
also in some of the short 'situation' ballads, the refrain is re-
placed by a second and fourth line, constituents of the regular
stanza, which may be an actual substitution for the refrain, or else
are simply the three-accent portion of the old septenarius, a con-
clusion which merely sets us hunting for the popular sources of the
septenar. However this may be, the question is not vital. Given
the structure, the form, of choral and dramatic balladry, one now
reckons with its predominant epic contents, due to a process
common in the poetry of all races. It is at this point that a
regrettable confusion occurs: the sources of actual, recorded
ballads, their narrative origins, whether historic, legendary,
romantic or mythical, are confounded with the sources of the
ballad itself, of the poetic species as a whole. The narrative
element in our ballads is, of course, the most obvious mark for
grouping them and comparing them with the popular verse of
other lands; but to account for English balladry as a whole,
we have to rely on the foregoing analysis of its constituent
parts. Analysis of theme is misleading for the larger question.
For example, there is nothing in Celtic tradition which exactly
corresponds to the English popular ballad; such cases as the Lord
Randal versions in Irish and Welsh must be due, as E. G. Cox
points out, to importation. But there are hundreds of points in
narrative, situation, motive and what not, where English ballads
may touch Celtic tale or song. How far these points of contact
concern the origin of a given ballad is to be determined in the
individual case. On a different plane entirely stands the ballad
itself as a poetic species-a form of wonderful definiteness and
stability, flourishing at one time with great vigour in the Germanic
and other continental races, and showing such vitality in survival
as to retain its hold upon English and Scottish tradition for at
least five hundred years.
Turning now to the ballads as a body, their sources both
textual and material, and the classification of them, one notes the
difficulty with which collectors have to contend on the frontiers
of their subject. A few manuscripts preserve what may pass
as ballads, because, although sacred legend is the source of them
and a carol is their evident form, they bear the marks of popular
tradition. Whether these inclusions be always necessary or not,
there is no doubt with regard to certain exclusions which still
cause unnecessary comment. The famous Nut Brown Maid, for
## p. 408 (#426) ############################################
408
Ballads
>
example, a spirited and charming dramatic poem long ago laid to
the credit of some woman as her oratio pro domo, her plea for the
constancy of the sex, has not the faintest claim to its position
in many a collection of popular traditional verse. So it is, for
different reasons, with The Children in the Wood; there is no
mark of popular tradition upon it. Still another question rises
over the counterfeit ballad. By Child's reckoning, Auld Mait-
land is spurious, and he drops it from his list; but Andrew
Lang makes a vigorous plea for it. It has the marks of a tra-
ditional ballad; but are they genuine? Some of the poorer
and later pieces in his collection Child admitted only because of
the possibility that they may contain traditional elements more or
less obscured by the chances of the broadside press. In general,
however, his path has been fairly plain. The oldest ballad, by
record, is Judas, from a manuscript of the thirteenth century.
Another legendary piece, St Stephen and Herod, along with a
curious old riddle-ballad, may be dated, in their manuscript record,
about 1450, the time also of Robin Hood and the Monk and
Robyn and Gandeleyn, which are followed, half a century later, by
Robin Hood and the Potter, and by the earliest printed copy of the
Gest of Robyn Hode. From the nature of the case, these ballads,
oldest of record, are all far gone in the epic process, or else, like
the riddle-ballad, are stripped of choral features; it was reserved
mainly for tradition to hold in survival that old ballad structure,
and to give to eighteenth century collectors the stretched metre
of an antique song as unlettered folk still sang it at work and play.
The legendary pieces, however, which have been recovered from
oral tradition are never equal to the old manuscript copies; and
one of the very few 'finds? ' since the close of Child's collection
shows the disorder in the extreme.
In print of the early sixteenth century comes a long outlaw
ballad, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley;
and, slightly later, there follow in manuscript Cheviot and
Otterburn, Captain Car—the latter, also, recovered later from
tradition—and a version of Sir Andrew Barton. Only eleven
ballads, as Kittredge notes, "are extant in manuscripts older
than the seventeenth century. ' But then came the Percy folio,
written about 1650, a strange medley of poems good and bad,
with many of the finest ballads interspersed; it was partially
known through Percy's Reliques, printed first in 1765, but its
actual and precious contents came to light only in recent years
· The Withies, printed by F. Sidgwick in Notes and Queries, Series 10, No. 83.
## p. 409 (#427) ############################################
Riddle Ballads
409
and made possible the publication of Child's collection itself. This
folio is the most important of all the ballad sources. It is supple-
mented by the Percy papers-copies made at sundry places in
England and Scotland, mainly from recitation; by a number of
broadsides and 'garlands, where the task of culling out real
traditional material becomes difficult to a degree; and, finally,
by collectors in Scotland, Herd, Mrs Boun of Falkland, whose
memory saved several sterling ballads, Scott, the 'old lady' whose
manuscript Scott obtained, Sharpe, Motherwell, notorious Peter
Buchan and the rest.
Apart, now, from chronology of the record, this material may be
grouped according to its subjects, its age in tradition and its
foreign or local origins. Oldest in every way, and quite inde-
pendent of place, are the riddle-ballads which open Child's first
volume. They are far simpler than the Old English riddles,
and are closely related to those ballads of question and answer
made in many countries at the communal dance, and used to
determine the choice of a partner or the winning of a garland.
One Scottish ballad frames the contest of youth and maid in
a little story; the chorus of the throng has become a simple
refrain:
There was a knicht riding frae the east,
Sing the Cuther banks, the bonnie brume,
Wha had been wooing at monie a place,
And ye may beguile a young thing sune.
This strange knight puts a girl to the test of riddles. "What
is higher nor the tree? What is deeper nor the sea ? ” he asks,
and ends with a challenge to name something 'worse than a
woman. ' The girl answers all, saying, at the close, that Clootie—the
devil—is worse than woman; and off goes the fiend, named and
baffled, in fire. Close to this sort of riddle-ballad, very old, wide-
spread, still used in many places for the dance, is alternate request
for impossible things. A late form of this ancient sort of ballad or
'flyting' is Captain Wedderburn's Courtship, where the maid is
finally vanquished; "and now she's Mrs Wedderburn,' the ballad
concludes, with a final change in its infectiously vivacious refrain.
Still further from the early type is that 'base-born' but saucy
little ballad, The Twa Magicians, where alternate changes of
form in pursuer and pursued take the place of the 'flyting' by
word and wit.
The epic tendency, always working out of situation into nar-
rative, now takes us to a very large group of ballads, which
## p. 410 (#428) ############################################
410
Ballads
seldom content themselves with the dramatic crisis, but deal in
a more intricate plot, furnish the details and even add a store of
romantic incidents. This ballad of domestic complications, the
tragedy of kin, looms large in all European tradition; borrowing,
however, or a common source, is not always to be assumed even
where the story is the same, since certain primary instincts must
bring about like results wherever men are set in families or
clans and human passions prevail. Still, there is, in many cases,
abundant reason for identification, and, even, for alliance with more
distant branches of balladry and tales. Bride-stealing and its
results, for example, were common experience, and the bare fact
needed no importation; but a plot like that of Fair Annie is
found in the Lai le Freine of Marie de France, and, although it
is no very recondite affair, yet it is stamped by its recognition-
motive at the end. A knight from over sea steals Annie, takes
her home, makes her mother of his seven sons and then bethinks
him to get a lawful bride with shiploads of dower. Annie wel-
comes the new wife; but her moans are overheard, and the two
turn out to be sisters. This, with the ballad of Child Maurice, on
which Home founded his play of Douglas and which greatly moved
the poet Gray, with Babylon-already quoted-with Hind Horn,
certainly related to the gest and the romance on the same theme,
has, in the recognition-plot, a strongly romantic suggestion; but it
is noteworthy that these ballads all tend, either by abundant
repetition, or by structure and refrain, to the oldest type, and can
be connected with that simplest structural form which is preserved
in The Maid Freed from the Gallows. The stealing of a bride, as
a familiar fact, was an obvious subject of a ballad of situation;
and such a ballad lent itself easily to one of two epic processes.
Either it was connected with a local legend-flight, pursuit, fight
and the death of all parties save the bride—and resulted in an
Earl Brand, or, in Scott's version, a Douglas Tragedy'; or else
it drew on international matter, on myth, legend, the 'good
story' of commerce, what not, resulting in a Lady Isabel and
the Elf-Knight, or in a leisurely and elegant bit of romance like
King Estmere? Indeed, these three ballads will serve as types
of the local, the half-localised and the unattached. Tragedy
broods over them all, but is least suited to the third type; king
!
1 Out of the original eleven stanzas of the Child of Ell, in the Folio, a version of
this ballad, Percy made a poem of fifty stanzas for his Reliques.
? An absurd companion piece of this ballad, whether so designed or not, is Will
Stewart and John.
## p. 411 (#429) ############################################
Balladry in Rags
411
verse.
Estmere must overwhelm the soldan; Susy Pye (in Young Beichan)
and Hind Horn must win their loves. These are entertaining
Earl Brand, however, like Babylon, like the Scandi-
navian versions, is tragic in the matter; although a closely related
ballad, Erlinton, killing fifteen of the pursuers, spares the father,
and lets the lovers go off happy to the greenwood. Lady Isabel,
too, escapes by whatever stratagem from her savage wooer; and
here, of course, are borrowed motives, as in the 'three cries' for
help. There is a glimpse, too, of supernatural aid, as, in some
versions, that of the talking birds. In a ballad of similar theme, but
quite prosaic details, The Fair Flower of Northumberland, it is
hard to say whether the supernatural elements have been toned
down or lost, or else were never in the piece at all. Among other
elopement stories of the primitive sort, mainly situation but with
a few romantic details, Gil Brenton, a sterling old ballad, is
worthy of note; the type, however, easily passes into mere sen-
sation, into mawkish and cheap sentiment and into the rout of
tales about runaways fair or foul, mainly localised in Scotland.
There is even sadder stuff than this. Brown Robin, Willie and
Earl Richard's Daughter (purporting to account for the birth of
Robin Hood), Rose the Red and White Lily, The Famous Flower
of Serving Men and Tim Potts, are a descending series with very
low fall. The singing-robes of balladry are here in rags, and tawdry
rags too. There is recovery of old traditions, however, in the
Scottish ballads of bride-stealing or elopement like Katharine
Jaffray_whether Scott's own doing, or compiled from traditional
fragments, in any case the model of his Young Lochinvar-and in
like pieces of varying merit, Bonny Baby Livingston, Eppie
Morrie and The Lady of Arngosk—the last named known in many
of its details, both as an event about 1736 and as a popular song,
but unfortunately recovered only in fragments. Very different,
finally, is the tone of two good ballads, Willie's Lyke-Wake and
The Gay Goshawk, where love finds out the way by stratagem and
inspires robust verse of the old kind.
Complications of kin make up ballads of domestic tragedy,
a most important group; and even the inroads of a doggerel poet
upon the old material, even the cheap 'liturature of the stalls,
cannot hide that ancient dignity. The motive of Bewick and
Graham, outwardly a story of two drunken squires near Carlisle,
their quarrel, and the sacrifice of two fine lads to this quarrel in
the conflict of filial duty with ties of friendship-told, by the way,
in verse that often touches the lowest levels-redeems the ballad
## p. 412 (#430) ############################################
412
Ballads
from its degraded form and gives it the pathos of a Cid. The cry
of the dying victor-
Father, could yo not drunk your wine at home,
And letten me and my brother be?
a
>
is not impressive, perhaps, as a quotation ; but in its context and
climax it stands with the great things of the great poems. Andrew
Lammie, enormously popular in the north of Scotland, represents
another class of homely ballads, more or less vulgarised by their
form, their overdone sentiment and their efforts at literary grace,
but not without appeal and a certain force of tradition. Tradition
at its purest, and an appeal to which few readers fail in respond-
ing, characterise the great ballads of domestic tragedy. Edward,
for example, is so inevitable, so concentrated, that sundry critics,
including the latest editor of Scott's Minstrelsy, would refer it
to art; but tradition can bring about these qualities in its own
way. Lord Randal, with its bewildering number of versions;
Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, a favourite in Shakespeare's
day and often quoted ; Glasgerion (who may be the 'Glascurion
mentioned in Chaucer's House of Fame and may represent the
Welsh Glas Keraint), a simple but profoundly affecting ballad on a
theme which no poet could now handle without either constraint or
offence; Child Maurice; The Cruel Brother; The Twa Brothers
with a particularly effective climax-offer tragedy of the false
mistress, the false wife, the false servant, and tragedy of more
complicated matter. Wives false and wives true are pictured in two
sterling Scottish ballads, The Baron o' Brackley and Captain Car,
both founded on fact. The Braes o' Jarrow knew another faithful
wife. Darker shadows of incest, mainly avoided by modern litera-
ture, fall in possibility on Babylon, quoted above, and in real
horror upon Sheath and Knife and Lizie Wan. The treacherous
nurse, again, with that bloody and revengeful Lamkin-a satiric
name-long frightened Scottish children; and a case of treachery
in higher station, involving trial by combat and giving many hints
of medieval ways, is preserved in the old story of Sir Aldingar,
familiar to William of Malmesbury. Finally, there is the true-
love. The adjective is beautifully justified in The Three Ravens,
unfortunately less known than its cynical counterpart, The Tua
Corbies. True love is false in Young Hunting ; and fickle lovers
come to grief in Lord Lovel, Fair Margaret and Sweet William,
and Lord Thomas and Fair Annet. Fate, not fickleness,
however, brings on the tragedy in Fair Janet, Lady Maisey,
## p. 413 (#431) ############################################
Child Waters
413
Clerk Saunders; while fickleness is condoned and triumphant in
ballads which Child calls 'pernicious': The Broom o Cowden
knowes and The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie. Better is the
suggestion of The Wife of Bath's Tale in the popular Knight
and Shepherds Daughter. Child Waters, which both Child and
Grundtvig praise as the pearl of English ballads, belongs to the
well known group of poems celebrating woman's constancy under
direst provocation; neither Chaucer's Clerk's Tale nor that
dramatic poem of the Nut Brown Maid pleads the cause of
woman with more eloquence. Ellen in the stable, with her new-
born child, appeals to any heart:
Lullabye, my oune deere child !
Lullabye, deere child, deere!
I wold thy father were a king,
Thy mother layd on a beere!
While this ballad has wandered far from the dramatic and choral
type, the survival in its structure is marked enough; and its
incremental repetition, in several sequences, is most effective.
Ballads of the funeral, echoes of the old coronach, vocero,
whatever the form of communal grief, are scantily preserved in
English; Bonnie James Campbell and The Bonny Earl of Murray
may serve as types; but the noblest outcome of popular lament,
however crossed and disguised by elements of other verse it may
seem in its present shape, is Sir Patrick Spens, which should be
read in the shorter version printed by Percy in the Reliques, and
should not be teased into history. The incremental repetition and
climax of its concluding stanzas are beyond praise. Less affecting
is the 'good night'-unless we let Johnny Armstrong, beloved
of Goldsmith, pass as strict representative of this type. Lord
Maxwell's Last Good Night, it is known, suggested to Byron
the phrase and the mood of Childe Harold's song. To be a
ballad, however, these 'good nights' must tell the hero's story,
not simply echo his emotion.
Superstition, the other world, ghost-lore, find limited scope in
English balladry. Two ballads of the sea, Bonnie Annie and
Broun Robyn's Confession, make sailors cast lots to find the 'fey
folk' in the ship, and so to sacrifice the victim. Commerce with
the other world occurs in Thomas Rymer, derived from a romance,
and in Tam Lin, said by Henderson to be largely the work of
Burns. Clerk Colvill suffers from his alliance with a mermaid.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, a mournful little ballad from
Shetland, tells of him who is 'a man upo' the lan',' but a seal,
## p. 414 (#432) ############################################
414
Ballads
'a silkie in the sea. ' Other transformation ballads are Kemp
Owyme, Allison Gross and The Laily Worm. In Sweet William's
Ghost, however, a great favourite of old, and in the best of
all 'supernatural' ballads, The Wife of Usher's Well, dignified,
pathetic, reticent, English balladry competes in kind, though by no
means in amount, with the riches of Scandinavian tradition.
Epic material of every sort was run into the ballad mould.
King Orfeo finds Eurydice in Shetland; the ballad is of very old
structural type. Sacred legends like that of Sir Hugh, and
secular legends such as Hind Horn, occur; while Sir Cawline and
King Estmere are matter of romance. Possibly, the romances of
Europe sprang in their own turn from ballads ; and Sir Lionel, in
the Percy folio, with its ancient type of structure, may even
reproduce the kind of ballads which formed a basis for Sir Cawline
itself. Minstrels, of course, could take a good romance and make
it over into indifferent ballads; three of these are so described by
Child—The Boy and the Mantle, King Arthur and King Corn-
wall and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine. With the cynical Crow
and Pie we reach the verge of indecency, also under minstrel
patronage, though it is redeemed for balladry by a faint waft of
tradition. This piece, along with The Baffled Knight and The
Broomfield Hill, is close to the rout from which Tom D'Urfey
selected his Pills to Purge Melancholy. Thoroughly debased is
The Keach in the Creel; but The Jolly Beggar, especially in the
'old lady's' manuscript, is half-redeemed by the dash and swing
of the lines. Old ladies, as one knows from a famous anecdote
of Scott, formerly liked this sort of thing, without losing caste, and
saw no difference between it and the harmless fun of Get Up and
Bar the Door, or the old story, which Hardy seems to record as
still a favourite in Dorsetshire, of Queen Eleanor's Confession.
With this ballad we come to history, mainly perverted, but
true as tradition. Lord Delamere, debased in broadsides, Hugh
Spencer's Feats in France and the vastly popular John Dory;
naval ballads like the poor Sweet Trinity and the excellent
Sir Andrew Barton; Scottish King James and Brown, and
that sterling ballad Mary Hamilton which Andrew Lang has
successfully called back from Russia to its place at queen Mary's
own court, with twenty-eight versions still extant to attest its
vogue-all these are typical in their kind. But the historical
ballad, recited rather than sung epic in all its purposes and
details, and far removed from the choral ballad of dramatic
situation, is best studied in those pieces which have become
a
## p. 415 (#433) ############################################
The Historical Ballad
415
traditional along the Scottish border. Not all, however, are of
the chronicle type. In 1593, a certain freebooter was hanged, and
his nephew took good vengeance for him, calling out a ballad;
whatever its original shape, one finds it still fresh with the impres-
sion of actual deeds; and, in its nervous couplets, its lack of
narrative breadth, the lilt and swing of it, one is inclined to call
The Lads of Wamphray a case of ipsi confingunt—a phrase of
which Leslie was making use, not far from this date, as to the
Borderers and their songs. The dialogue is immediate, and has
the old incremental repetition :
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me gang,
And I vow I'll ne'er do a Crichton wrang.
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me be,
And a peck o' goud I'll gio to thee.
O Simmy, Simmy, let me gang,
And my wife shall heap it wi' her hand.
This was not made at long range. Epic, on the other hand, and
reminiscent, is Dick o' the Cow-cited by Tom Nashe-a good
story told in high spirits ; long as it is, it has a burden, and was
meant to be sung. Archie o' Cawfield, Hobie Noble, Jock o' the
Side and others of the same sort are narratives in the best
traditional style ; Scott's imitation of these is Kinmont Willie-
at least it is so much his own work as to deserve to bear his name.
Still another class is the short battle-piece, of which Harlaw,
Bothwell Bridge and even Flodden Field, preserved by Delmey,
may serve as examples. Durham Field, in sixty-six stanzas, was
made by a minstrel. Refusing classification, there stand out those
two great ballads, probably on the same fight, Cheviot and Otter-
burn. The version of the former known as Chevy Chace, 'written
over for the broadside press,' as Child remarks, was the object
of Addison’s well known praise ; what Sidney heard as 'trumpet
sound' is not certain, but one would prefer to think it was the
old Cheviot. One would like, too, the liberty of bringing Shake-
speare into the audience, and of regarding that ancient ballad as
contributing to his conception of Hotspur. These are no spinsters'
songs, but rather, in the first instance at least, the making and the
tradition of men-at-arms. A curiously interlaced stanza arrange-
ment, here and there to be noted in both the old Cheviot and
Otterburn, as well as Richard Sheale's signature to the former as
part of his minstrel stock, imply considerable changes in the
structure of the original ballad. Sheale, of course, had simply
copied a favourite song; but the fact is suggestive.
6
## p. 416 (#434) ############################################
416
Ballads
a
Last of all, the greenwood. Johnie Cock, says Child, is
'a precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad. ' A
single situation and event, it contrasts sharply with a long
story like Adam Bell as well as with the various pieces, short
or long, which deal with Robin himself. From Johnie Cock to
the Gest is a process of great interest to the student of traditional
verse. Had the Gest, indeed, been made by its humble rhapsode
in an unlettered age, the epic process would have had even more
scope, and would have drawn upon poetic sources already claimed
for deliberate composition and the literary record. As it is, Robin
may be proud of his place. ‘Absolutely a creation of the ballad
muse,' he is the hero of a sterling little epic, and of thirty-six
extant individual ballads, good and bad ; the good are mainly
of a piece with the old epic material, and the bad are indebted
for their badness to the corruptions of the broadside press, the
editing for garlands and the exhausted vitality of late tradition.
Robin has a definite personality throughout, though the degenerate
ballads, as in the case of late poems about Charlemagne, make
him anybody's victim. Any local hero could be exalted by the
simple process of outwitting and trouncing the old master of that
craft. One of the latest poems, a dreary compilation called the
True Tale of Robin Hood, the only piece in Child's collection
which is not anonymous, is the work of Martin Parker. But
one forgets trash. Robin remains as the best ballads and the
Gest have drawn him-generous, brave, pious, with a touch of
melancholy and a touch of humour unknown to the strictly choral
а
The narrative art of this good verse is very high. No
story is better told anywhere than the story of Robin's loan to
Sir Richard and its payment; humour is held firmly in hand ;
and Chaucer himself could not better the ease and sureness of
the little epic. Nor does the Gest improve in all ways upon its
material. Robin Hood and the Monk is a sterling piece of
narrative. The brief close of the Gest, telling, in five stanzas, how
Robin was “beguiled' and slain, and rather awkwardly quoting
an unconnected bit of dialogue, should be compared with the
ballad of Robin Hood's Death from the Percy folio. Here, in
spite of eighteen missing stanzas, the story is admirably told.
Every incident counts: the testy humour of Robin at the start,
the mysterious old woman banning him as she kneels on the plank
over 'black water, the fatal bleeding, the final struggle, revenge,
pious parting and death-good narrative throughout. It is clear
that a process had taken place in the gradual formation of this
muse.
## p. 417 (#435) ############################################
Ballad Sources
417
cycle which not only brought its several parts into fair coherence,
but, also, exercised a reactionary influence upon tradition itself.
In any case, with these ballads of Robin Hood, balladry itself
crossed the marches of the epic, and found itself far from the
old choral, dramatic improvisations, though still fairly close to
the spirit and motive of traditional verse.
A word remains to be said on the sources and the values
of British ballads as a whole. Common 'Aryan' origin, though
it was still held in a modified form by Gaston Paris, can no longer
be maintained so as to account for the community of theme
in the ballads of Europe. What has been done by scholars like
Child and Grundtvig, by Nigra, Bugge and others, is to have
established certain groups, more or less definite, which, in different
lands and times, tell the same general story or give the same
particular motive or detail. To account for these groups is an-
other task. A pretty little ballad from Shetland narrates in quite
choral, dramatic form the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Bugge
has traced the same story from a Danish ballad far back into
medieval times ; its ultimate source, to be sure, is the classical
account. Another source, we have seen, is legend; still another
is the direct historical event. Evidently, then, the matter of
sources is something to be settled for the narrative part of each
individual ballad; but, however great the interest of this investi-
gation may be, however obvious its claims and satisfactory its
results, it does not affect the specific ballad as a literary form.
The structure of the ballad—what makes it a species, the elements
of it-derives from choral and dramatic conditions ; what gives it
its peculiar art of narrative is the epic process working by oral
tradition, and gradually leading to a new structure with choral
and dramatic elements still surviving, though dwindling, in the
,
guise of refrain and incremental repetition. The metrical form
remains fairly constant throughout. With certain other formal
characteristics, the commonplaces, the conventional phrases and
motives, there is no space to deal here. So, too, with regard to
imitations good and bad, we can only refer to Scott's Kinmont
Willie for one class, and, for the other, to that famous forgery,
the Hardycnute of Lady Wardlaw.
The aesthetic values of the ballad call for no long comment.
They are the values which attach to rough, strong verse intent
upon its object. Scope and figure are out of the question, and all
feats of language as such. No verborum artifex works here. The
appeal is straight.
It is, indeed, ridiculous to call the ballads
27
E. L. II.
CH, XVII.
## p. 418 (#436) ############################################
418
Ballads
'primitive'; not only have they a developed art of their own, but
they are crossed at every turn by literary influences, mainly work-
ing for coherence of narrative, which are indirect, indeed, yet sure.
Nevertheless, the abiding value of the ballads is that they give a
hint of primitive and unspoiled poetic sensation. They speak not
only in the language of tradition, but also with the voice of the
multitude; there is nothing subtle in their working, and they
appeal to things as they are. From one vice of modern literature
they are free: they have no 'thinking about thinking,' no feeling
about feeling. They can tell a good tale. They are fresh with the
open air ; wind and sunshine play through them; and the dis-
tinction, old as criticism itself, which assigns them to nature rather
than to art, though it was overworked by the romantic school and
will be always liable to abuse, is practical and sound.
## p. 419 (#437) ############################################
CHAPTER XVIII
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS VERSE TO THE CLOSE
OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY-FINAL WORDS
In a previous chapter), something was said of the changes in
language and in thought which accompanied the Norman conquest
of England, and it was pointed out how short a time, comparatively
speaking, was needed for the fusion of race with race. The
incorporation of a French vocabulary into the vernacular was,
inevitably, a more prolonged operation; or, to speak more precisely,
it was longer before that fusion became apparent and was reflected
in the literature of the people, the literary or fashionable language
being, for many a long year, the tongue of the conquerors. The
influence of the courtly literature of the ruling caste in more
than one direction has already been pointed out? It is no part
of the scope of this work to encroach upon what more properly
belongs to the earlier literature of a modern language other than
our own, or to tell over again what has already been dealt
with in the pages of Gaston Paris, in the volumes of Petit de
Julleville and elsewhere; but our interest in medieval French
letters must always be more than that of mere neighbours. Thus,
the period now reached in the history of our own literature, when the
death of Gower points, approximately, to the end of French letters
in England, offers an opportunity for mentioning, in the course
of a very brief summary, the work of one or two Anglo-Normans
whose writings either are intimately connected with English
historical events and personages, or have left their impression
on the form and matter of the rapidly growing body of vernacular
literature. To some of these, special reference has already been
made-Philippe de Thaon, whose Bestiarybelongs to a popular
and fascinating type of didactic literature, and helped to furnish
1 Vol. 1, pp. 149 ff.
2 Vol. 1, chapter XII. See also vol. 1, pp. 238, 446, 447, 460, 466 ff.
3 Dedicated to Adela of Louvain, the second wife of Henry I, for whom Benoit
the Anglo-Norman monk versified a St Brendan in 1121.
27-2
## p. 420 (#438) ############################################
420
Political and Religious Verse
material for early English writers on similar themes, and whose
guide to the ecclesiastical calendar, Li Cumpoz, sets forth what
the ignorant clerk ought to know; Geoffrey Gaimar and Wace, who
became the mediums by which earlier English and Latin histories
provided material for the work of Layamon; William of Wadington,
whose Manuel was written, probably, for Normans in Yorkshire,
and another ‘Yorkshire Norman,' Peter of Langtoft, who were the
literary god-fathers of Mannyng of Brunne! .
Gaimar's Estorie des Engles was based, mainly, on the Old
English Chronicle and, apart from his relation to Layamon,
his chief value for us lies in the sections which deal with
contemporary matters, in his contributions to the story of
Havelok and in his descriptions of social manners and customs? .
Of greater worth is the life of William Marshal, first earl of
Pembroke and Striguil, regent of England, a soldier and states-
man who died in 1219, after having served, for nearly half a century,
more than one king of England with rare fidelity, and whose
deeds are worthily enshrined in the poem which bears his name.
L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, which was finished in 1226,
consists of some 19,000 octosyllabic lines, and its discoverer,
Paul Meyer, has claimed for it a place in the front rank of
French medieval historiography, and as having no superiors in its
kind in the writings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries S.
Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence's Vie de St Thomas Becket, a
poem worthy of its subject, and of great historic value; Fantosme's
Chronicle of the Scottish Wars of 1173–4; Ambroise's Histoire
de la Guerre Sainte, with Richard Cour de Lion for its central
figure; Old French psalters and saints' lives ; moral tales, like
those told by the Franciscan Nicole Bozon in the earlier half of
the fourteenth century; immoral fables ; pilgrimages and gospels
for the laity; popular presentations of current science and works
on venery, such as those which probably served the somewhat
mythical Juliana Berners; lais, as those of Marie de France
-all these may be recorded as links in the direct chain which
bound French medieval literature to England. To these may be
added books of counsel and courtesy, which became models for
and directly inspired the popular literature of the native tongue
—“the booke,' for example, 'whiche the knyght of the Toure
i Vol. 1, pp. 104, etc. , 170, etc. , 204, etc. , 226 ff. , 344 ff. , 447, 460, etc. , etc.
2 See, for example, in Wright, T. , A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments
in England during the Middle Ages, pp. 84, etc.
* L'Hist. de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer, t. in, p. cii, Paris, 1901.
## p. 421 (#439) ############################################
The Vows of the Heron
421
made to the enseygnement and techyng of his doughters, translated
oute of Frenssh in to our maternall Englysshe tongue by me,
William Caxton'; dialogues, as those contained in a maniere de
langage que t'enseignera bien a droit parler et escrire doulz
françois', which help to make clearer to us the social relations
of the fourteenth century; and French versions of the old
romances such as Caxton and his followers popularised, to which
reference has already been made, and which will be further
discussed when the prose of the sixteenth century is under
consideration.
Political verse to the end, approximately, of the reign of
Edward II was glanced at in a previous chapter? In addition
to the two poems in the mixed languages therein mentioned, may
be noted a Song against the King's Taxes, written in the reign
of Edward II, in five-line stanzas, the first half of each line, save
the fifth, being in Anglo-Norman and the latter half of each line
and the whole of the fifth being in Latin. Its theme and its
form can best be seen by such a stanza as the following:
Depus que le roy vodera tam multum cepisse,
Entre les riches si purra satis invenisse ;
E plus, à ce que m'est avys, et melius fecisse
Des grantz partie aver pris, et parvis pepercisse.
Qui capit argentum sine causa peccat egentum 3.
From the reign of Edward III onwards, English, as the main
vehicle for political verse, apparently ousts Anglo-Norman. A late
Anglo-Norman poem, written about 1338, Leus veus du hairon,
The Vows of the Heron', has, for its object, the goading of the
young king Edward III to war with France, by comparing him
with what was held to be a cowardly bird. The poem relates
that Robert of Artois, who had his own purposes to serve, caused
a heron to be served at the king's table and called aloud the bird's
virtues and vices as it was carried in :
Et puis que couers est, je dis à mon avis,
C'au plus couart qui soit ne qui oncques fust vis
Donrrai le hairon, ch'est Edouart Loeis,
Deshiretes de Franche, le nobile pais,
Qu'il en estoit drois hoirs ; mès cuers li est falis,
Et por sa lasquethé en morra dessaisis ;
Sen dois bein au hairon voer le sien avis.
This is too much for the king; and he and his courtiers make their
warlike vows on the heron. The war that ensued, together with
1 See P. Meyer, Revue Critique, 1870, p. 871.
• Vol. , p. 370.
8 Wright, T. , Political Songs, 1839, p. 184.
• Political Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, T. , 1859, Rolls Series.
## p. 422 (#440) ############################################
422
Political and Religious Verse
the Scottish war of the earlier years of the boy-king's reign, were
sung by Laurence Minot; and the death of the king, in 1377, called
forth a tribute the overmastering thought in which was the very
old fashioned sentiment
That alle thing weres and wasteth away.
That the evils of the time were not absent from the minds of
thinking men we see by the writings of Gower and by the Plowman
poems. In these last, there is no room for the light hearted gaiety,
the easy-going happiness that causes us to regard Chaucer, though
a contemporary, as almost belonging to another world. To the
writers of the Plowman poems the times were out of joint and
more than jesting was required to set them right; their sharp
solemn rimeless lines ring in the ear like the sound of an alarm
or the first few strokes of the passing bell.
The unquiet reign of Henry IV saw the miserable game of heresy-
hunting at work under the statute De Heretico Comburendo,
and political revolt after revolt in the north. Four years after
the burning of William Sawtrey the Lollard, at Smithfield, a lay
court condemned the saintly archbishop Richard le Scrope of York
to death for high treason and provided that the sentence should
be carried out as ignominiously as might be. The virtues of the
archbishop are celebrated in Latin and in English verses; and the
political and religious crimes' of the Lollards are not forgotten by
other literary clerks.
Both Latin and English poems against the Lollards and songs
against friars, are of common occurrence. One poet sings
Thai dele with purses, pynnes and knyves,
With gyrdles, gloves, for wenches and wyves,
while another, in a fifteenth century MS, combines Latin and
English, beginning
Freeres, freeres, wo 30 be!
ministri malorum,
For many a manes soule bringe 30
ad poenas infernorum 3
and continuing, in violent lines which cannot be quoted, to set forth
current crimes. In the Middle Ages, popular singers, 'westours
and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, who followed their calling
along the king's highway, helped, often enough, to fan the flames
i Political Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, T. , 1859, Rolls Series, vol. I, p. 215.
Ibid. p. 264.
Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Wright, T. and Halliwell, J. O. , 1841–3, vol. 11, p. 247.
See also vol. I, p. 322.
3
## p. 423 (#441) ############################################
The Libel of English Policy 423
>
6
of rebellion, political and religious; it should be remembered to
their credit that, consciously or unconsciously, their work was
not without effect in the emancipation of the people.
Ten years after the 'Glory of York' had been executed, the
victory of Agincourt gave further employment to song writers;
but the specimen of their work preserved in the Pepysian MS
does not bear comparison with later poems on the same theme.
Professional and laudatory verses on deaths and coronations we
can leave aside; but the interest of its satire should preserve
from forgetfulness a poem on the siege of Calais, 1436. "The
duk of Burgayn,' with 'grete prid' set forth 'Calys to wyn,' and
his preparations are told with a rare spirit of raillery. In Calais
itself, even
The women, both yung and old,
Wyth stones stuffed every scaffold,
The spared not to swet ne swynk;
With boylyng cawdrens, both grett and smalle,
Yf they wold assaute the walle,
All hote to gev them drynki.
In 1436–7, was written one of the most important and re-
markable of early English political poems, The Libel [or little
book] of English Policy. The poem begins by 'exhortynge alle
Englande to kepe the see enviroun,' and it is an early example
of the political insight which recognised that the natural source of
the greatness of a small island lay on the sea ; its influence on
later naval developments can scarce be doubted. English com-
mercial relations with foreign nations are discussed by the
anonymous author at considerable length; "the commodytees
of Spayne and of Filaundres,' and of many another community are
reviewed, and oddly enough these things read in rime:
And lycorys, Syvyle oyle, and grayne,
Whyte Castelle sope, and was, is not in vayne;
Iren, wolle, wadmole, gotefel, kydefel also,
Ffor poynt-makers fulle nedefulle be the ij.
The Irish question is well to the fore, and there is a Welsh
question as well:
wyth alle your myghte take hede
To kepe Yrelond, that it be not loste;
Ffor it is a boterasse and a poste
Undre England, and Wales another.
God forbede but eche were othere brothere,
Of one ligeaunce dewe unto the kynge.
And then the author turns to discuss the comodius stokfysshe
of Yselonde' brought by the seamen that go out from Bristow
1 Political Poems, ed. Wright, T. , vol. 11, p. 151.
## p. 424 (#442) ############################################
424 Political and Religious Verse
and from Scarborowgh 'unto the costes cold'; and he harks back
to Calais and urges, in language which sounds strangely modern,
that there be
set a governaunce.
Set many wittes wythoutene variaunce
To one accorde and unanimité,
Put to god wylle for to kepe the see.
The ende of bataile is pease sikerlye,
And power causeth pease finally!
The last political poem to which reference need be made here is
a mocking dirge, called forth by the death of the king's favourite
the duke of Suffolk, on 3 May 1450, 'a dyrge made by the comons
of Kent in the tyme of ther rysynge when Jake Cade was theyr
cappitayn. . . writn owt of david norcyn his booke by John stowe? '
The poem describes how 'bisshopes and lordes, as grete reson is,'
took their several parts in his funeral service, and it deserves
mention by reason of the prosodic art shown in the refrain, ‘in
which the passing-bell slowness of the first half
6
For | Jack | Napes' | soul pla-1
suddenly turns head over heels into a carillon of satiric joy and
triumph with
cebo and I dirilge3! '
A careful examination of fourteenth century religious poems
preserved in the Vernon MS and elsewhere, of the minor verse of
the school of Richard Rolle of Hampole, of passages in the
religious plays such as those which tell the story of Abraham and
Isaac and of the fugitive verse of the fifteenth century should
convince the most sceptical of the wealth of early English anony-
mous poetry, and of its great prosodic interest; it should abolish
the practice of regarding verse associated with the outstanding
names, and the so-called 'court-poetry,' as the only poetry worth
consideration; and it should help us to render tardy justice to
periods sometimes dubbed barren wastes.
The note of simplicity of utterance, often combined with
1 The quotations are from T. Wright's text, in Political Poems and Songs, but see
also the first volume of Hakluys and The Libell of Englishe Policye, 1436, Text und
metrische Übersetzung von W. Hertzberg, Mit einer geschichtlichen Einleitung von R.
Pauli, Leipzig, 1878. Cf. also the poem On England's Commercial Policy, Wright's
Political Poems and Songs, vol. II, p. 282.
2 Political, Religious and Love Poems, Lambeth MS, etc. , ed. Farnivall, F. J. ,
E. E. T. S. 1866, new edition, 1903.
* Saintsbury, G. , A History of English Prosody, vol. I, p. 261.
## p. 425 (#443) ############################################
Lyrics and Carols
425
perfection of form, which is struck in such poems as the
thirteenth or early fourteenth century lyric from the Egerton MS
Somer is comen and winter is gon,
this day beginniz to longe,
And this foules everichon
joye hem wit songe!
So stronge kare me bint,
Al wit joye that is funde
in londe,
Al for a child
That is so milde
of hondel,
is found again in the Sayings of St Bernard in the Vernon MS
Where ben heo that biforen us weren,
That houndes ladden and haukes beeren,
And hedden feld and wode;
This Riche ladys in heore bour,
That wereden gold in heore tressour,
With heore brihte rode 237
It is carried on by Michael of Kildare, in a hymn written at the
beginning of the fourteenth century in which there are move-
ments like this:
This worldis love is gon 8-wai,
So dew on grasse in someris dai,
Few ther beth, weilawai!
that lovith Goddis lore";
it becomes exquisitely melodious in the northern Hampole poems
of, approximately, the middle of the fourteenth century, notably
in the alliterative verses beginning
My trewest tresowre sa trayturly taken,
Sa bytterly bondyn wyth bytand bandes;
How sone of thi servandes was thou forsaken,
And lathly for my lufe hurld with thair handes",
and in Eve's lines in the 'Coventry' play:
Alas! that evyr that speche was spokyn
That the fals aungel seyd onto me.
Alas! oure makers byddyng is brokyn
Ffor I have towchyd his owyn dere tre.
Oure filesely eyn byn al unlokyn,
Nakyd for synne ouresylf we see,
That sory appyl that we han sokyn
To dethe hathe brouth my spouse and mo®.
1 Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 100.
? complexion.
& Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, with poems from Digby MS, vol. 11, p. 521, ed.
Furnivall, F. J. , E. E. T. S. 1901.
* Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 11, p. 190.
5 Horstman's ed. , vol. I, p. 72.
& Ludus Coventriae, ed. Halliwell, J. O. , pp. 27, 28, 1841.
## p. 426 (#444) ############################################
426
Political and Religious Verse
It exerts magical power in the beautiful carol from the early
fifteenth century Sloane MS :
I syng of a mayden that is makeles,
Kyng of alle kynges to here sone che ches.
He cam also stylle ther his moder was,
As dew in Aprylle that fallyt on the gras.
He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the flour.
He cam also stylle ther his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the sprayl;
it shows itself capable of infinite pathos in the appeal of Isaac to
his father in the Chester play:
Alas! father, is that your will,
Your owne childe here for to spill
Upon this hilles brynke?
Yf I have trespassed in any degree,
With a yard you maye beate me;
Put up your sword if your will be,
For I am but a Childe
Abraham
Come hither, my Child, that art so sweete;
Thou must be bounden hand and feetea;
it reveals passion, strong though subdued to that it works in,
in the Quia amore langueo of the Lambeth MS c. 14308; and it
finds an echo in the poem to the Virgin, printed towards the
close of the fifteenth century in Speculum Christiani, beginning
Mary moder, wel thou be!
Mary moder, thenke on me.
There are, of course, duller and more sophisticated utterances
than these. Mysticism often acts as a clog and didactic aim
frequently achieves its usual end and produces boredom. But
that happy sense of familiarity with the company of Heaven,
which is one of the characteristics of an age of profound faith,
finds delightful expression in hymns from Christ to His 'deintiest
damme'' and, above all, in the religious plays. These last,
which were written to be understood by the common folk, are
1 Songs and Carols, ed. Wright, T. , Warton Club, 1861, p. 30.
Captain Car, falls easily into the traditional form, and finds half
of its phrases, even some of its stanzas, made to hand. The
versions, again, may vary with place and time, but not in any
premeditated way. The stamp of popular simplicity remains ;
the old formulas, commonplaces, epithets, traditional in balladry,
occur without fear of restraint by the poet or of exchange for
'heightened' speech; the ballad may resemble literary poems in
its matter, but never in its structure and style. Short or long,
old or new, it shuns metaphor and all striving for figurative effect.
It is simple in the sense that there is no play of fancy in epithet,
phrase or word, or in the arrangement of words and phrases. It is
not simple in all senses, because it has its own easily recognised
style—that ballad "slang' oftener mentioned than known. It
adheres, when it can, to dialogue; it is free from sentiment;
and its modifications are due to a tendency working on purely
traditional lines. The change can often be seen in a single ballad,
where the main situation, choral and dramatic, has been furnished
with opening and concluding verses of a purely narrative type.
A possible explanation which reverses this process, which assumes
the detachable epic details to be original and the choral verses to
be an addition, and a redaction to fit the story for dance or game,
is not to be considered for a moment. A mass of evidence, partly
derived from the study of European ballads at large, partly drawn
from the stores of ethnological material, puts such a plea out
of court.
We may thus state with confidence the general outlines of
ballad progress. What gave the ballad its existence as a poetic
species was a choral, dramatic presentation! Refrain of the
throng, and improvisation by various singers, leant heavily, as
all primitive poetry teaches us, on repetition. To advance the
action, this repetition became incremental, a peculiarity of ballads
which is radically different from the repetition by variation in
Old English verse and from the thought-rime,' or parallelismus
membrorum, established by Lowth for Hebrew poetry. The
rhythmic form into which the ballad verse naturally ran is that
four-accent couplet known all over the world and in every age,
* Any study of ultimate origins would have to reckon with old ritaal and the
survival of myth, sources that have been proved of late for the St George plays in
England and for the beginnings of medieval drama throughout Europe.
## p. 407 (#425) ############################################
Outlines of Ballad Progress
407
as Usener has pointed out, in popular song. With the refrain,
this couplet formed a quatrain ; in later and longer ballads, as
also in some of the short 'situation' ballads, the refrain is re-
placed by a second and fourth line, constituents of the regular
stanza, which may be an actual substitution for the refrain, or else
are simply the three-accent portion of the old septenarius, a con-
clusion which merely sets us hunting for the popular sources of the
septenar. However this may be, the question is not vital. Given
the structure, the form, of choral and dramatic balladry, one now
reckons with its predominant epic contents, due to a process
common in the poetry of all races. It is at this point that a
regrettable confusion occurs: the sources of actual, recorded
ballads, their narrative origins, whether historic, legendary,
romantic or mythical, are confounded with the sources of the
ballad itself, of the poetic species as a whole. The narrative
element in our ballads is, of course, the most obvious mark for
grouping them and comparing them with the popular verse of
other lands; but to account for English balladry as a whole,
we have to rely on the foregoing analysis of its constituent
parts. Analysis of theme is misleading for the larger question.
For example, there is nothing in Celtic tradition which exactly
corresponds to the English popular ballad; such cases as the Lord
Randal versions in Irish and Welsh must be due, as E. G. Cox
points out, to importation. But there are hundreds of points in
narrative, situation, motive and what not, where English ballads
may touch Celtic tale or song. How far these points of contact
concern the origin of a given ballad is to be determined in the
individual case. On a different plane entirely stands the ballad
itself as a poetic species-a form of wonderful definiteness and
stability, flourishing at one time with great vigour in the Germanic
and other continental races, and showing such vitality in survival
as to retain its hold upon English and Scottish tradition for at
least five hundred years.
Turning now to the ballads as a body, their sources both
textual and material, and the classification of them, one notes the
difficulty with which collectors have to contend on the frontiers
of their subject. A few manuscripts preserve what may pass
as ballads, because, although sacred legend is the source of them
and a carol is their evident form, they bear the marks of popular
tradition. Whether these inclusions be always necessary or not,
there is no doubt with regard to certain exclusions which still
cause unnecessary comment. The famous Nut Brown Maid, for
## p. 408 (#426) ############################################
408
Ballads
>
example, a spirited and charming dramatic poem long ago laid to
the credit of some woman as her oratio pro domo, her plea for the
constancy of the sex, has not the faintest claim to its position
in many a collection of popular traditional verse. So it is, for
different reasons, with The Children in the Wood; there is no
mark of popular tradition upon it. Still another question rises
over the counterfeit ballad. By Child's reckoning, Auld Mait-
land is spurious, and he drops it from his list; but Andrew
Lang makes a vigorous plea for it. It has the marks of a tra-
ditional ballad; but are they genuine? Some of the poorer
and later pieces in his collection Child admitted only because of
the possibility that they may contain traditional elements more or
less obscured by the chances of the broadside press. In general,
however, his path has been fairly plain. The oldest ballad, by
record, is Judas, from a manuscript of the thirteenth century.
Another legendary piece, St Stephen and Herod, along with a
curious old riddle-ballad, may be dated, in their manuscript record,
about 1450, the time also of Robin Hood and the Monk and
Robyn and Gandeleyn, which are followed, half a century later, by
Robin Hood and the Potter, and by the earliest printed copy of the
Gest of Robyn Hode. From the nature of the case, these ballads,
oldest of record, are all far gone in the epic process, or else, like
the riddle-ballad, are stripped of choral features; it was reserved
mainly for tradition to hold in survival that old ballad structure,
and to give to eighteenth century collectors the stretched metre
of an antique song as unlettered folk still sang it at work and play.
The legendary pieces, however, which have been recovered from
oral tradition are never equal to the old manuscript copies; and
one of the very few 'finds? ' since the close of Child's collection
shows the disorder in the extreme.
In print of the early sixteenth century comes a long outlaw
ballad, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley;
and, slightly later, there follow in manuscript Cheviot and
Otterburn, Captain Car—the latter, also, recovered later from
tradition—and a version of Sir Andrew Barton. Only eleven
ballads, as Kittredge notes, "are extant in manuscripts older
than the seventeenth century. ' But then came the Percy folio,
written about 1650, a strange medley of poems good and bad,
with many of the finest ballads interspersed; it was partially
known through Percy's Reliques, printed first in 1765, but its
actual and precious contents came to light only in recent years
· The Withies, printed by F. Sidgwick in Notes and Queries, Series 10, No. 83.
## p. 409 (#427) ############################################
Riddle Ballads
409
and made possible the publication of Child's collection itself. This
folio is the most important of all the ballad sources. It is supple-
mented by the Percy papers-copies made at sundry places in
England and Scotland, mainly from recitation; by a number of
broadsides and 'garlands, where the task of culling out real
traditional material becomes difficult to a degree; and, finally,
by collectors in Scotland, Herd, Mrs Boun of Falkland, whose
memory saved several sterling ballads, Scott, the 'old lady' whose
manuscript Scott obtained, Sharpe, Motherwell, notorious Peter
Buchan and the rest.
Apart, now, from chronology of the record, this material may be
grouped according to its subjects, its age in tradition and its
foreign or local origins. Oldest in every way, and quite inde-
pendent of place, are the riddle-ballads which open Child's first
volume. They are far simpler than the Old English riddles,
and are closely related to those ballads of question and answer
made in many countries at the communal dance, and used to
determine the choice of a partner or the winning of a garland.
One Scottish ballad frames the contest of youth and maid in
a little story; the chorus of the throng has become a simple
refrain:
There was a knicht riding frae the east,
Sing the Cuther banks, the bonnie brume,
Wha had been wooing at monie a place,
And ye may beguile a young thing sune.
This strange knight puts a girl to the test of riddles. "What
is higher nor the tree? What is deeper nor the sea ? ” he asks,
and ends with a challenge to name something 'worse than a
woman. ' The girl answers all, saying, at the close, that Clootie—the
devil—is worse than woman; and off goes the fiend, named and
baffled, in fire. Close to this sort of riddle-ballad, very old, wide-
spread, still used in many places for the dance, is alternate request
for impossible things. A late form of this ancient sort of ballad or
'flyting' is Captain Wedderburn's Courtship, where the maid is
finally vanquished; "and now she's Mrs Wedderburn,' the ballad
concludes, with a final change in its infectiously vivacious refrain.
Still further from the early type is that 'base-born' but saucy
little ballad, The Twa Magicians, where alternate changes of
form in pursuer and pursued take the place of the 'flyting' by
word and wit.
The epic tendency, always working out of situation into nar-
rative, now takes us to a very large group of ballads, which
## p. 410 (#428) ############################################
410
Ballads
seldom content themselves with the dramatic crisis, but deal in
a more intricate plot, furnish the details and even add a store of
romantic incidents. This ballad of domestic complications, the
tragedy of kin, looms large in all European tradition; borrowing,
however, or a common source, is not always to be assumed even
where the story is the same, since certain primary instincts must
bring about like results wherever men are set in families or
clans and human passions prevail. Still, there is, in many cases,
abundant reason for identification, and, even, for alliance with more
distant branches of balladry and tales. Bride-stealing and its
results, for example, were common experience, and the bare fact
needed no importation; but a plot like that of Fair Annie is
found in the Lai le Freine of Marie de France, and, although it
is no very recondite affair, yet it is stamped by its recognition-
motive at the end. A knight from over sea steals Annie, takes
her home, makes her mother of his seven sons and then bethinks
him to get a lawful bride with shiploads of dower. Annie wel-
comes the new wife; but her moans are overheard, and the two
turn out to be sisters. This, with the ballad of Child Maurice, on
which Home founded his play of Douglas and which greatly moved
the poet Gray, with Babylon-already quoted-with Hind Horn,
certainly related to the gest and the romance on the same theme,
has, in the recognition-plot, a strongly romantic suggestion; but it
is noteworthy that these ballads all tend, either by abundant
repetition, or by structure and refrain, to the oldest type, and can
be connected with that simplest structural form which is preserved
in The Maid Freed from the Gallows. The stealing of a bride, as
a familiar fact, was an obvious subject of a ballad of situation;
and such a ballad lent itself easily to one of two epic processes.
Either it was connected with a local legend-flight, pursuit, fight
and the death of all parties save the bride—and resulted in an
Earl Brand, or, in Scott's version, a Douglas Tragedy'; or else
it drew on international matter, on myth, legend, the 'good
story' of commerce, what not, resulting in a Lady Isabel and
the Elf-Knight, or in a leisurely and elegant bit of romance like
King Estmere? Indeed, these three ballads will serve as types
of the local, the half-localised and the unattached. Tragedy
broods over them all, but is least suited to the third type; king
!
1 Out of the original eleven stanzas of the Child of Ell, in the Folio, a version of
this ballad, Percy made a poem of fifty stanzas for his Reliques.
? An absurd companion piece of this ballad, whether so designed or not, is Will
Stewart and John.
## p. 411 (#429) ############################################
Balladry in Rags
411
verse.
Estmere must overwhelm the soldan; Susy Pye (in Young Beichan)
and Hind Horn must win their loves. These are entertaining
Earl Brand, however, like Babylon, like the Scandi-
navian versions, is tragic in the matter; although a closely related
ballad, Erlinton, killing fifteen of the pursuers, spares the father,
and lets the lovers go off happy to the greenwood. Lady Isabel,
too, escapes by whatever stratagem from her savage wooer; and
here, of course, are borrowed motives, as in the 'three cries' for
help. There is a glimpse, too, of supernatural aid, as, in some
versions, that of the talking birds. In a ballad of similar theme, but
quite prosaic details, The Fair Flower of Northumberland, it is
hard to say whether the supernatural elements have been toned
down or lost, or else were never in the piece at all. Among other
elopement stories of the primitive sort, mainly situation but with
a few romantic details, Gil Brenton, a sterling old ballad, is
worthy of note; the type, however, easily passes into mere sen-
sation, into mawkish and cheap sentiment and into the rout of
tales about runaways fair or foul, mainly localised in Scotland.
There is even sadder stuff than this. Brown Robin, Willie and
Earl Richard's Daughter (purporting to account for the birth of
Robin Hood), Rose the Red and White Lily, The Famous Flower
of Serving Men and Tim Potts, are a descending series with very
low fall. The singing-robes of balladry are here in rags, and tawdry
rags too. There is recovery of old traditions, however, in the
Scottish ballads of bride-stealing or elopement like Katharine
Jaffray_whether Scott's own doing, or compiled from traditional
fragments, in any case the model of his Young Lochinvar-and in
like pieces of varying merit, Bonny Baby Livingston, Eppie
Morrie and The Lady of Arngosk—the last named known in many
of its details, both as an event about 1736 and as a popular song,
but unfortunately recovered only in fragments. Very different,
finally, is the tone of two good ballads, Willie's Lyke-Wake and
The Gay Goshawk, where love finds out the way by stratagem and
inspires robust verse of the old kind.
Complications of kin make up ballads of domestic tragedy,
a most important group; and even the inroads of a doggerel poet
upon the old material, even the cheap 'liturature of the stalls,
cannot hide that ancient dignity. The motive of Bewick and
Graham, outwardly a story of two drunken squires near Carlisle,
their quarrel, and the sacrifice of two fine lads to this quarrel in
the conflict of filial duty with ties of friendship-told, by the way,
in verse that often touches the lowest levels-redeems the ballad
## p. 412 (#430) ############################################
412
Ballads
from its degraded form and gives it the pathos of a Cid. The cry
of the dying victor-
Father, could yo not drunk your wine at home,
And letten me and my brother be?
a
>
is not impressive, perhaps, as a quotation ; but in its context and
climax it stands with the great things of the great poems. Andrew
Lammie, enormously popular in the north of Scotland, represents
another class of homely ballads, more or less vulgarised by their
form, their overdone sentiment and their efforts at literary grace,
but not without appeal and a certain force of tradition. Tradition
at its purest, and an appeal to which few readers fail in respond-
ing, characterise the great ballads of domestic tragedy. Edward,
for example, is so inevitable, so concentrated, that sundry critics,
including the latest editor of Scott's Minstrelsy, would refer it
to art; but tradition can bring about these qualities in its own
way. Lord Randal, with its bewildering number of versions;
Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, a favourite in Shakespeare's
day and often quoted ; Glasgerion (who may be the 'Glascurion
mentioned in Chaucer's House of Fame and may represent the
Welsh Glas Keraint), a simple but profoundly affecting ballad on a
theme which no poet could now handle without either constraint or
offence; Child Maurice; The Cruel Brother; The Twa Brothers
with a particularly effective climax-offer tragedy of the false
mistress, the false wife, the false servant, and tragedy of more
complicated matter. Wives false and wives true are pictured in two
sterling Scottish ballads, The Baron o' Brackley and Captain Car,
both founded on fact. The Braes o' Jarrow knew another faithful
wife. Darker shadows of incest, mainly avoided by modern litera-
ture, fall in possibility on Babylon, quoted above, and in real
horror upon Sheath and Knife and Lizie Wan. The treacherous
nurse, again, with that bloody and revengeful Lamkin-a satiric
name-long frightened Scottish children; and a case of treachery
in higher station, involving trial by combat and giving many hints
of medieval ways, is preserved in the old story of Sir Aldingar,
familiar to William of Malmesbury. Finally, there is the true-
love. The adjective is beautifully justified in The Three Ravens,
unfortunately less known than its cynical counterpart, The Tua
Corbies. True love is false in Young Hunting ; and fickle lovers
come to grief in Lord Lovel, Fair Margaret and Sweet William,
and Lord Thomas and Fair Annet. Fate, not fickleness,
however, brings on the tragedy in Fair Janet, Lady Maisey,
## p. 413 (#431) ############################################
Child Waters
413
Clerk Saunders; while fickleness is condoned and triumphant in
ballads which Child calls 'pernicious': The Broom o Cowden
knowes and The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie. Better is the
suggestion of The Wife of Bath's Tale in the popular Knight
and Shepherds Daughter. Child Waters, which both Child and
Grundtvig praise as the pearl of English ballads, belongs to the
well known group of poems celebrating woman's constancy under
direst provocation; neither Chaucer's Clerk's Tale nor that
dramatic poem of the Nut Brown Maid pleads the cause of
woman with more eloquence. Ellen in the stable, with her new-
born child, appeals to any heart:
Lullabye, my oune deere child !
Lullabye, deere child, deere!
I wold thy father were a king,
Thy mother layd on a beere!
While this ballad has wandered far from the dramatic and choral
type, the survival in its structure is marked enough; and its
incremental repetition, in several sequences, is most effective.
Ballads of the funeral, echoes of the old coronach, vocero,
whatever the form of communal grief, are scantily preserved in
English; Bonnie James Campbell and The Bonny Earl of Murray
may serve as types; but the noblest outcome of popular lament,
however crossed and disguised by elements of other verse it may
seem in its present shape, is Sir Patrick Spens, which should be
read in the shorter version printed by Percy in the Reliques, and
should not be teased into history. The incremental repetition and
climax of its concluding stanzas are beyond praise. Less affecting
is the 'good night'-unless we let Johnny Armstrong, beloved
of Goldsmith, pass as strict representative of this type. Lord
Maxwell's Last Good Night, it is known, suggested to Byron
the phrase and the mood of Childe Harold's song. To be a
ballad, however, these 'good nights' must tell the hero's story,
not simply echo his emotion.
Superstition, the other world, ghost-lore, find limited scope in
English balladry. Two ballads of the sea, Bonnie Annie and
Broun Robyn's Confession, make sailors cast lots to find the 'fey
folk' in the ship, and so to sacrifice the victim. Commerce with
the other world occurs in Thomas Rymer, derived from a romance,
and in Tam Lin, said by Henderson to be largely the work of
Burns. Clerk Colvill suffers from his alliance with a mermaid.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, a mournful little ballad from
Shetland, tells of him who is 'a man upo' the lan',' but a seal,
## p. 414 (#432) ############################################
414
Ballads
'a silkie in the sea. ' Other transformation ballads are Kemp
Owyme, Allison Gross and The Laily Worm. In Sweet William's
Ghost, however, a great favourite of old, and in the best of
all 'supernatural' ballads, The Wife of Usher's Well, dignified,
pathetic, reticent, English balladry competes in kind, though by no
means in amount, with the riches of Scandinavian tradition.
Epic material of every sort was run into the ballad mould.
King Orfeo finds Eurydice in Shetland; the ballad is of very old
structural type. Sacred legends like that of Sir Hugh, and
secular legends such as Hind Horn, occur; while Sir Cawline and
King Estmere are matter of romance. Possibly, the romances of
Europe sprang in their own turn from ballads ; and Sir Lionel, in
the Percy folio, with its ancient type of structure, may even
reproduce the kind of ballads which formed a basis for Sir Cawline
itself. Minstrels, of course, could take a good romance and make
it over into indifferent ballads; three of these are so described by
Child—The Boy and the Mantle, King Arthur and King Corn-
wall and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine. With the cynical Crow
and Pie we reach the verge of indecency, also under minstrel
patronage, though it is redeemed for balladry by a faint waft of
tradition. This piece, along with The Baffled Knight and The
Broomfield Hill, is close to the rout from which Tom D'Urfey
selected his Pills to Purge Melancholy. Thoroughly debased is
The Keach in the Creel; but The Jolly Beggar, especially in the
'old lady's' manuscript, is half-redeemed by the dash and swing
of the lines. Old ladies, as one knows from a famous anecdote
of Scott, formerly liked this sort of thing, without losing caste, and
saw no difference between it and the harmless fun of Get Up and
Bar the Door, or the old story, which Hardy seems to record as
still a favourite in Dorsetshire, of Queen Eleanor's Confession.
With this ballad we come to history, mainly perverted, but
true as tradition. Lord Delamere, debased in broadsides, Hugh
Spencer's Feats in France and the vastly popular John Dory;
naval ballads like the poor Sweet Trinity and the excellent
Sir Andrew Barton; Scottish King James and Brown, and
that sterling ballad Mary Hamilton which Andrew Lang has
successfully called back from Russia to its place at queen Mary's
own court, with twenty-eight versions still extant to attest its
vogue-all these are typical in their kind. But the historical
ballad, recited rather than sung epic in all its purposes and
details, and far removed from the choral ballad of dramatic
situation, is best studied in those pieces which have become
a
## p. 415 (#433) ############################################
The Historical Ballad
415
traditional along the Scottish border. Not all, however, are of
the chronicle type. In 1593, a certain freebooter was hanged, and
his nephew took good vengeance for him, calling out a ballad;
whatever its original shape, one finds it still fresh with the impres-
sion of actual deeds; and, in its nervous couplets, its lack of
narrative breadth, the lilt and swing of it, one is inclined to call
The Lads of Wamphray a case of ipsi confingunt—a phrase of
which Leslie was making use, not far from this date, as to the
Borderers and their songs. The dialogue is immediate, and has
the old incremental repetition :
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me gang,
And I vow I'll ne'er do a Crichton wrang.
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me be,
And a peck o' goud I'll gio to thee.
O Simmy, Simmy, let me gang,
And my wife shall heap it wi' her hand.
This was not made at long range. Epic, on the other hand, and
reminiscent, is Dick o' the Cow-cited by Tom Nashe-a good
story told in high spirits ; long as it is, it has a burden, and was
meant to be sung. Archie o' Cawfield, Hobie Noble, Jock o' the
Side and others of the same sort are narratives in the best
traditional style ; Scott's imitation of these is Kinmont Willie-
at least it is so much his own work as to deserve to bear his name.
Still another class is the short battle-piece, of which Harlaw,
Bothwell Bridge and even Flodden Field, preserved by Delmey,
may serve as examples. Durham Field, in sixty-six stanzas, was
made by a minstrel. Refusing classification, there stand out those
two great ballads, probably on the same fight, Cheviot and Otter-
burn. The version of the former known as Chevy Chace, 'written
over for the broadside press,' as Child remarks, was the object
of Addison’s well known praise ; what Sidney heard as 'trumpet
sound' is not certain, but one would prefer to think it was the
old Cheviot. One would like, too, the liberty of bringing Shake-
speare into the audience, and of regarding that ancient ballad as
contributing to his conception of Hotspur. These are no spinsters'
songs, but rather, in the first instance at least, the making and the
tradition of men-at-arms. A curiously interlaced stanza arrange-
ment, here and there to be noted in both the old Cheviot and
Otterburn, as well as Richard Sheale's signature to the former as
part of his minstrel stock, imply considerable changes in the
structure of the original ballad. Sheale, of course, had simply
copied a favourite song; but the fact is suggestive.
6
## p. 416 (#434) ############################################
416
Ballads
a
Last of all, the greenwood. Johnie Cock, says Child, is
'a precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad. ' A
single situation and event, it contrasts sharply with a long
story like Adam Bell as well as with the various pieces, short
or long, which deal with Robin himself. From Johnie Cock to
the Gest is a process of great interest to the student of traditional
verse. Had the Gest, indeed, been made by its humble rhapsode
in an unlettered age, the epic process would have had even more
scope, and would have drawn upon poetic sources already claimed
for deliberate composition and the literary record. As it is, Robin
may be proud of his place. ‘Absolutely a creation of the ballad
muse,' he is the hero of a sterling little epic, and of thirty-six
extant individual ballads, good and bad ; the good are mainly
of a piece with the old epic material, and the bad are indebted
for their badness to the corruptions of the broadside press, the
editing for garlands and the exhausted vitality of late tradition.
Robin has a definite personality throughout, though the degenerate
ballads, as in the case of late poems about Charlemagne, make
him anybody's victim. Any local hero could be exalted by the
simple process of outwitting and trouncing the old master of that
craft. One of the latest poems, a dreary compilation called the
True Tale of Robin Hood, the only piece in Child's collection
which is not anonymous, is the work of Martin Parker. But
one forgets trash. Robin remains as the best ballads and the
Gest have drawn him-generous, brave, pious, with a touch of
melancholy and a touch of humour unknown to the strictly choral
а
The narrative art of this good verse is very high. No
story is better told anywhere than the story of Robin's loan to
Sir Richard and its payment; humour is held firmly in hand ;
and Chaucer himself could not better the ease and sureness of
the little epic. Nor does the Gest improve in all ways upon its
material. Robin Hood and the Monk is a sterling piece of
narrative. The brief close of the Gest, telling, in five stanzas, how
Robin was “beguiled' and slain, and rather awkwardly quoting
an unconnected bit of dialogue, should be compared with the
ballad of Robin Hood's Death from the Percy folio. Here, in
spite of eighteen missing stanzas, the story is admirably told.
Every incident counts: the testy humour of Robin at the start,
the mysterious old woman banning him as she kneels on the plank
over 'black water, the fatal bleeding, the final struggle, revenge,
pious parting and death-good narrative throughout. It is clear
that a process had taken place in the gradual formation of this
muse.
## p. 417 (#435) ############################################
Ballad Sources
417
cycle which not only brought its several parts into fair coherence,
but, also, exercised a reactionary influence upon tradition itself.
In any case, with these ballads of Robin Hood, balladry itself
crossed the marches of the epic, and found itself far from the
old choral, dramatic improvisations, though still fairly close to
the spirit and motive of traditional verse.
A word remains to be said on the sources and the values
of British ballads as a whole. Common 'Aryan' origin, though
it was still held in a modified form by Gaston Paris, can no longer
be maintained so as to account for the community of theme
in the ballads of Europe. What has been done by scholars like
Child and Grundtvig, by Nigra, Bugge and others, is to have
established certain groups, more or less definite, which, in different
lands and times, tell the same general story or give the same
particular motive or detail. To account for these groups is an-
other task. A pretty little ballad from Shetland narrates in quite
choral, dramatic form the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Bugge
has traced the same story from a Danish ballad far back into
medieval times ; its ultimate source, to be sure, is the classical
account. Another source, we have seen, is legend; still another
is the direct historical event. Evidently, then, the matter of
sources is something to be settled for the narrative part of each
individual ballad; but, however great the interest of this investi-
gation may be, however obvious its claims and satisfactory its
results, it does not affect the specific ballad as a literary form.
The structure of the ballad—what makes it a species, the elements
of it-derives from choral and dramatic conditions ; what gives it
its peculiar art of narrative is the epic process working by oral
tradition, and gradually leading to a new structure with choral
and dramatic elements still surviving, though dwindling, in the
,
guise of refrain and incremental repetition. The metrical form
remains fairly constant throughout. With certain other formal
characteristics, the commonplaces, the conventional phrases and
motives, there is no space to deal here. So, too, with regard to
imitations good and bad, we can only refer to Scott's Kinmont
Willie for one class, and, for the other, to that famous forgery,
the Hardycnute of Lady Wardlaw.
The aesthetic values of the ballad call for no long comment.
They are the values which attach to rough, strong verse intent
upon its object. Scope and figure are out of the question, and all
feats of language as such. No verborum artifex works here. The
appeal is straight.
It is, indeed, ridiculous to call the ballads
27
E. L. II.
CH, XVII.
## p. 418 (#436) ############################################
418
Ballads
'primitive'; not only have they a developed art of their own, but
they are crossed at every turn by literary influences, mainly work-
ing for coherence of narrative, which are indirect, indeed, yet sure.
Nevertheless, the abiding value of the ballads is that they give a
hint of primitive and unspoiled poetic sensation. They speak not
only in the language of tradition, but also with the voice of the
multitude; there is nothing subtle in their working, and they
appeal to things as they are. From one vice of modern literature
they are free: they have no 'thinking about thinking,' no feeling
about feeling. They can tell a good tale. They are fresh with the
open air ; wind and sunshine play through them; and the dis-
tinction, old as criticism itself, which assigns them to nature rather
than to art, though it was overworked by the romantic school and
will be always liable to abuse, is practical and sound.
## p. 419 (#437) ############################################
CHAPTER XVIII
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS VERSE TO THE CLOSE
OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY-FINAL WORDS
In a previous chapter), something was said of the changes in
language and in thought which accompanied the Norman conquest
of England, and it was pointed out how short a time, comparatively
speaking, was needed for the fusion of race with race. The
incorporation of a French vocabulary into the vernacular was,
inevitably, a more prolonged operation; or, to speak more precisely,
it was longer before that fusion became apparent and was reflected
in the literature of the people, the literary or fashionable language
being, for many a long year, the tongue of the conquerors. The
influence of the courtly literature of the ruling caste in more
than one direction has already been pointed out? It is no part
of the scope of this work to encroach upon what more properly
belongs to the earlier literature of a modern language other than
our own, or to tell over again what has already been dealt
with in the pages of Gaston Paris, in the volumes of Petit de
Julleville and elsewhere; but our interest in medieval French
letters must always be more than that of mere neighbours. Thus,
the period now reached in the history of our own literature, when the
death of Gower points, approximately, to the end of French letters
in England, offers an opportunity for mentioning, in the course
of a very brief summary, the work of one or two Anglo-Normans
whose writings either are intimately connected with English
historical events and personages, or have left their impression
on the form and matter of the rapidly growing body of vernacular
literature. To some of these, special reference has already been
made-Philippe de Thaon, whose Bestiarybelongs to a popular
and fascinating type of didactic literature, and helped to furnish
1 Vol. 1, pp. 149 ff.
2 Vol. 1, chapter XII. See also vol. 1, pp. 238, 446, 447, 460, 466 ff.
3 Dedicated to Adela of Louvain, the second wife of Henry I, for whom Benoit
the Anglo-Norman monk versified a St Brendan in 1121.
27-2
## p. 420 (#438) ############################################
420
Political and Religious Verse
material for early English writers on similar themes, and whose
guide to the ecclesiastical calendar, Li Cumpoz, sets forth what
the ignorant clerk ought to know; Geoffrey Gaimar and Wace, who
became the mediums by which earlier English and Latin histories
provided material for the work of Layamon; William of Wadington,
whose Manuel was written, probably, for Normans in Yorkshire,
and another ‘Yorkshire Norman,' Peter of Langtoft, who were the
literary god-fathers of Mannyng of Brunne! .
Gaimar's Estorie des Engles was based, mainly, on the Old
English Chronicle and, apart from his relation to Layamon,
his chief value for us lies in the sections which deal with
contemporary matters, in his contributions to the story of
Havelok and in his descriptions of social manners and customs? .
Of greater worth is the life of William Marshal, first earl of
Pembroke and Striguil, regent of England, a soldier and states-
man who died in 1219, after having served, for nearly half a century,
more than one king of England with rare fidelity, and whose
deeds are worthily enshrined in the poem which bears his name.
L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, which was finished in 1226,
consists of some 19,000 octosyllabic lines, and its discoverer,
Paul Meyer, has claimed for it a place in the front rank of
French medieval historiography, and as having no superiors in its
kind in the writings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries S.
Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence's Vie de St Thomas Becket, a
poem worthy of its subject, and of great historic value; Fantosme's
Chronicle of the Scottish Wars of 1173–4; Ambroise's Histoire
de la Guerre Sainte, with Richard Cour de Lion for its central
figure; Old French psalters and saints' lives ; moral tales, like
those told by the Franciscan Nicole Bozon in the earlier half of
the fourteenth century; immoral fables ; pilgrimages and gospels
for the laity; popular presentations of current science and works
on venery, such as those which probably served the somewhat
mythical Juliana Berners; lais, as those of Marie de France
-all these may be recorded as links in the direct chain which
bound French medieval literature to England. To these may be
added books of counsel and courtesy, which became models for
and directly inspired the popular literature of the native tongue
—“the booke,' for example, 'whiche the knyght of the Toure
i Vol. 1, pp. 104, etc. , 170, etc. , 204, etc. , 226 ff. , 344 ff. , 447, 460, etc. , etc.
2 See, for example, in Wright, T. , A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments
in England during the Middle Ages, pp. 84, etc.
* L'Hist. de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer, t. in, p. cii, Paris, 1901.
## p. 421 (#439) ############################################
The Vows of the Heron
421
made to the enseygnement and techyng of his doughters, translated
oute of Frenssh in to our maternall Englysshe tongue by me,
William Caxton'; dialogues, as those contained in a maniere de
langage que t'enseignera bien a droit parler et escrire doulz
françois', which help to make clearer to us the social relations
of the fourteenth century; and French versions of the old
romances such as Caxton and his followers popularised, to which
reference has already been made, and which will be further
discussed when the prose of the sixteenth century is under
consideration.
Political verse to the end, approximately, of the reign of
Edward II was glanced at in a previous chapter? In addition
to the two poems in the mixed languages therein mentioned, may
be noted a Song against the King's Taxes, written in the reign
of Edward II, in five-line stanzas, the first half of each line, save
the fifth, being in Anglo-Norman and the latter half of each line
and the whole of the fifth being in Latin. Its theme and its
form can best be seen by such a stanza as the following:
Depus que le roy vodera tam multum cepisse,
Entre les riches si purra satis invenisse ;
E plus, à ce que m'est avys, et melius fecisse
Des grantz partie aver pris, et parvis pepercisse.
Qui capit argentum sine causa peccat egentum 3.
From the reign of Edward III onwards, English, as the main
vehicle for political verse, apparently ousts Anglo-Norman. A late
Anglo-Norman poem, written about 1338, Leus veus du hairon,
The Vows of the Heron', has, for its object, the goading of the
young king Edward III to war with France, by comparing him
with what was held to be a cowardly bird. The poem relates
that Robert of Artois, who had his own purposes to serve, caused
a heron to be served at the king's table and called aloud the bird's
virtues and vices as it was carried in :
Et puis que couers est, je dis à mon avis,
C'au plus couart qui soit ne qui oncques fust vis
Donrrai le hairon, ch'est Edouart Loeis,
Deshiretes de Franche, le nobile pais,
Qu'il en estoit drois hoirs ; mès cuers li est falis,
Et por sa lasquethé en morra dessaisis ;
Sen dois bein au hairon voer le sien avis.
This is too much for the king; and he and his courtiers make their
warlike vows on the heron. The war that ensued, together with
1 See P. Meyer, Revue Critique, 1870, p. 871.
• Vol. , p. 370.
8 Wright, T. , Political Songs, 1839, p. 184.
• Political Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, T. , 1859, Rolls Series.
## p. 422 (#440) ############################################
422
Political and Religious Verse
the Scottish war of the earlier years of the boy-king's reign, were
sung by Laurence Minot; and the death of the king, in 1377, called
forth a tribute the overmastering thought in which was the very
old fashioned sentiment
That alle thing weres and wasteth away.
That the evils of the time were not absent from the minds of
thinking men we see by the writings of Gower and by the Plowman
poems. In these last, there is no room for the light hearted gaiety,
the easy-going happiness that causes us to regard Chaucer, though
a contemporary, as almost belonging to another world. To the
writers of the Plowman poems the times were out of joint and
more than jesting was required to set them right; their sharp
solemn rimeless lines ring in the ear like the sound of an alarm
or the first few strokes of the passing bell.
The unquiet reign of Henry IV saw the miserable game of heresy-
hunting at work under the statute De Heretico Comburendo,
and political revolt after revolt in the north. Four years after
the burning of William Sawtrey the Lollard, at Smithfield, a lay
court condemned the saintly archbishop Richard le Scrope of York
to death for high treason and provided that the sentence should
be carried out as ignominiously as might be. The virtues of the
archbishop are celebrated in Latin and in English verses; and the
political and religious crimes' of the Lollards are not forgotten by
other literary clerks.
Both Latin and English poems against the Lollards and songs
against friars, are of common occurrence. One poet sings
Thai dele with purses, pynnes and knyves,
With gyrdles, gloves, for wenches and wyves,
while another, in a fifteenth century MS, combines Latin and
English, beginning
Freeres, freeres, wo 30 be!
ministri malorum,
For many a manes soule bringe 30
ad poenas infernorum 3
and continuing, in violent lines which cannot be quoted, to set forth
current crimes. In the Middle Ages, popular singers, 'westours
and rimers, minstrels or vagabonds, who followed their calling
along the king's highway, helped, often enough, to fan the flames
i Political Poems and Songs, ed. Wright, T. , 1859, Rolls Series, vol. I, p. 215.
Ibid. p. 264.
Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Wright, T. and Halliwell, J. O. , 1841–3, vol. 11, p. 247.
See also vol. I, p. 322.
3
## p. 423 (#441) ############################################
The Libel of English Policy 423
>
6
of rebellion, political and religious; it should be remembered to
their credit that, consciously or unconsciously, their work was
not without effect in the emancipation of the people.
Ten years after the 'Glory of York' had been executed, the
victory of Agincourt gave further employment to song writers;
but the specimen of their work preserved in the Pepysian MS
does not bear comparison with later poems on the same theme.
Professional and laudatory verses on deaths and coronations we
can leave aside; but the interest of its satire should preserve
from forgetfulness a poem on the siege of Calais, 1436. "The
duk of Burgayn,' with 'grete prid' set forth 'Calys to wyn,' and
his preparations are told with a rare spirit of raillery. In Calais
itself, even
The women, both yung and old,
Wyth stones stuffed every scaffold,
The spared not to swet ne swynk;
With boylyng cawdrens, both grett and smalle,
Yf they wold assaute the walle,
All hote to gev them drynki.
In 1436–7, was written one of the most important and re-
markable of early English political poems, The Libel [or little
book] of English Policy. The poem begins by 'exhortynge alle
Englande to kepe the see enviroun,' and it is an early example
of the political insight which recognised that the natural source of
the greatness of a small island lay on the sea ; its influence on
later naval developments can scarce be doubted. English com-
mercial relations with foreign nations are discussed by the
anonymous author at considerable length; "the commodytees
of Spayne and of Filaundres,' and of many another community are
reviewed, and oddly enough these things read in rime:
And lycorys, Syvyle oyle, and grayne,
Whyte Castelle sope, and was, is not in vayne;
Iren, wolle, wadmole, gotefel, kydefel also,
Ffor poynt-makers fulle nedefulle be the ij.
The Irish question is well to the fore, and there is a Welsh
question as well:
wyth alle your myghte take hede
To kepe Yrelond, that it be not loste;
Ffor it is a boterasse and a poste
Undre England, and Wales another.
God forbede but eche were othere brothere,
Of one ligeaunce dewe unto the kynge.
And then the author turns to discuss the comodius stokfysshe
of Yselonde' brought by the seamen that go out from Bristow
1 Political Poems, ed. Wright, T. , vol. 11, p. 151.
## p. 424 (#442) ############################################
424 Political and Religious Verse
and from Scarborowgh 'unto the costes cold'; and he harks back
to Calais and urges, in language which sounds strangely modern,
that there be
set a governaunce.
Set many wittes wythoutene variaunce
To one accorde and unanimité,
Put to god wylle for to kepe the see.
The ende of bataile is pease sikerlye,
And power causeth pease finally!
The last political poem to which reference need be made here is
a mocking dirge, called forth by the death of the king's favourite
the duke of Suffolk, on 3 May 1450, 'a dyrge made by the comons
of Kent in the tyme of ther rysynge when Jake Cade was theyr
cappitayn. . . writn owt of david norcyn his booke by John stowe? '
The poem describes how 'bisshopes and lordes, as grete reson is,'
took their several parts in his funeral service, and it deserves
mention by reason of the prosodic art shown in the refrain, ‘in
which the passing-bell slowness of the first half
6
For | Jack | Napes' | soul pla-1
suddenly turns head over heels into a carillon of satiric joy and
triumph with
cebo and I dirilge3! '
A careful examination of fourteenth century religious poems
preserved in the Vernon MS and elsewhere, of the minor verse of
the school of Richard Rolle of Hampole, of passages in the
religious plays such as those which tell the story of Abraham and
Isaac and of the fugitive verse of the fifteenth century should
convince the most sceptical of the wealth of early English anony-
mous poetry, and of its great prosodic interest; it should abolish
the practice of regarding verse associated with the outstanding
names, and the so-called 'court-poetry,' as the only poetry worth
consideration; and it should help us to render tardy justice to
periods sometimes dubbed barren wastes.
The note of simplicity of utterance, often combined with
1 The quotations are from T. Wright's text, in Political Poems and Songs, but see
also the first volume of Hakluys and The Libell of Englishe Policye, 1436, Text und
metrische Übersetzung von W. Hertzberg, Mit einer geschichtlichen Einleitung von R.
Pauli, Leipzig, 1878. Cf. also the poem On England's Commercial Policy, Wright's
Political Poems and Songs, vol. II, p. 282.
2 Political, Religious and Love Poems, Lambeth MS, etc. , ed. Farnivall, F. J. ,
E. E. T. S. 1866, new edition, 1903.
* Saintsbury, G. , A History of English Prosody, vol. I, p. 261.
## p. 425 (#443) ############################################
Lyrics and Carols
425
perfection of form, which is struck in such poems as the
thirteenth or early fourteenth century lyric from the Egerton MS
Somer is comen and winter is gon,
this day beginniz to longe,
And this foules everichon
joye hem wit songe!
So stronge kare me bint,
Al wit joye that is funde
in londe,
Al for a child
That is so milde
of hondel,
is found again in the Sayings of St Bernard in the Vernon MS
Where ben heo that biforen us weren,
That houndes ladden and haukes beeren,
And hedden feld and wode;
This Riche ladys in heore bour,
That wereden gold in heore tressour,
With heore brihte rode 237
It is carried on by Michael of Kildare, in a hymn written at the
beginning of the fourteenth century in which there are move-
ments like this:
This worldis love is gon 8-wai,
So dew on grasse in someris dai,
Few ther beth, weilawai!
that lovith Goddis lore";
it becomes exquisitely melodious in the northern Hampole poems
of, approximately, the middle of the fourteenth century, notably
in the alliterative verses beginning
My trewest tresowre sa trayturly taken,
Sa bytterly bondyn wyth bytand bandes;
How sone of thi servandes was thou forsaken,
And lathly for my lufe hurld with thair handes",
and in Eve's lines in the 'Coventry' play:
Alas! that evyr that speche was spokyn
That the fals aungel seyd onto me.
Alas! oure makers byddyng is brokyn
Ffor I have towchyd his owyn dere tre.
Oure filesely eyn byn al unlokyn,
Nakyd for synne ouresylf we see,
That sory appyl that we han sokyn
To dethe hathe brouth my spouse and mo®.
1 Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 1, p. 100.
? complexion.
& Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, with poems from Digby MS, vol. 11, p. 521, ed.
Furnivall, F. J. , E. E. T. S. 1901.
* Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. 11, p. 190.
5 Horstman's ed. , vol. I, p. 72.
& Ludus Coventriae, ed. Halliwell, J. O. , pp. 27, 28, 1841.
## p. 426 (#444) ############################################
426
Political and Religious Verse
It exerts magical power in the beautiful carol from the early
fifteenth century Sloane MS :
I syng of a mayden that is makeles,
Kyng of alle kynges to here sone che ches.
He cam also stylle ther his moder was,
As dew in Aprylle that fallyt on the gras.
He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the flour.
He cam also stylle ther his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille that fallyt on the sprayl;
it shows itself capable of infinite pathos in the appeal of Isaac to
his father in the Chester play:
Alas! father, is that your will,
Your owne childe here for to spill
Upon this hilles brynke?
Yf I have trespassed in any degree,
With a yard you maye beate me;
Put up your sword if your will be,
For I am but a Childe
Abraham
Come hither, my Child, that art so sweete;
Thou must be bounden hand and feetea;
it reveals passion, strong though subdued to that it works in,
in the Quia amore langueo of the Lambeth MS c. 14308; and it
finds an echo in the poem to the Virgin, printed towards the
close of the fifteenth century in Speculum Christiani, beginning
Mary moder, wel thou be!
Mary moder, thenke on me.
There are, of course, duller and more sophisticated utterances
than these. Mysticism often acts as a clog and didactic aim
frequently achieves its usual end and produces boredom. But
that happy sense of familiarity with the company of Heaven,
which is one of the characteristics of an age of profound faith,
finds delightful expression in hymns from Christ to His 'deintiest
damme'' and, above all, in the religious plays. These last,
which were written to be understood by the common folk, are
1 Songs and Carols, ed. Wright, T. , Warton Club, 1861, p. 30.
