Ballads of the outlaw, indeed, would be of a popular and traditional
type, as the Robin Hood cycle shows; but political songs, which
also had their vogue, were, doubtless, made by the minstrel,
who, also, retouched and sang again the rude verses which warrior
or outlaw had improvised, taking them out of their choral con-
ditions, smoothing, adding, connecting and making them fit for
chant and recitation de longue haleine, precisely as the jongleurs
of early France, according to Gaston Paris, remade the improvi-
sations of an age that knew no minstrel class at all into the
chansons de geste and into the epic itself.
type, as the Robin Hood cycle shows; but political songs, which
also had their vogue, were, doubtless, made by the minstrel,
who, also, retouched and sang again the rude verses which warrior
or outlaw had improvised, taking them out of their choral con-
ditions, smoothing, adding, connecting and making them fit for
chant and recitation de longue haleine, precisely as the jongleurs
of early France, according to Gaston Paris, remade the improvi-
sations of an age that knew no minstrel class at all into the
chansons de geste and into the epic itself.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v02
Every phase of the conventional love complaint, every
chapter in the cycle of the lover's history, is treated in these
ballades precisely as in the corresponding verse in France? .
Light-foot measures, such as the lai and the descort, exerted
a noteworthy influence upon late Transition lyrics, though English
poets were content merely to adopt the characteristic common
to all the species—the long stanza of very short verses—and
did not observe the metrical peculiarities that differentiate one
species from another. This light-foot verse was cultivated to good
effect, and furnishes some of the best songs. They are rapid,
musical and enthusiastic. Any phase of the lover's experience
may be treated in this verse, but it seems to have been most
employed in those songs which deal with the parting, the absence,
or the reunion of lovers. The following verses, which open one of
these songs, will illustrate their grace and spirit:
Can I chuse
But refuce
All thought of mourning,
Now I see
Thus close by me
My love returning?
If I should not joy
When I behould
Such glory shining,
Sith her tyme of stay
Made me to decay
With sorrow pining,
Silly birds might seem
To laugh at me,
Which, at day peering,
With a merry voyce
Sing 'O doo rejoyce! '
Themselves still cheering.
Absence darke
Thou dost marke,
No cause but fearing,
And like night
Turnst thy sight
All into hearing.
1 MS Balliol 354, f. 156 a—Anglia, XXVI, 169.
* MS Rawlinson, C. 813, contains a large number of the ballades,
3 MS Harleian 367, f. 183–Herrig's Archiv, cvii, 56.
## p. 391 (#409) ############################################
Love Songs
391
6
A French type, which, while having no complete exponent,
has yet influenced several English songs, is the aube, or complaint
of the lover at the envious approach of morn, a motive which
Chaucer used with effect in Troilus and Criseydet, and which
Shakespeare immortalised in Romeo and Juliet. In one of the
songs, the refrain of an aube is put into the mouth of a 'comely
queen' (Elizabeth of York? ) who, in a 'glorious garden,' is
gathering roses
This day dawes,
This gentill day dawes,
And I must home gone.
The aube motive is also used as the introduction to another song,
in which a lover complains of an inconstant mistress:
Mornyng, mornyng,
Thus may I synge,
Adew, my dere, adew;
Be God alone
My love ys gon,
Now may I go seke a new%.
One of the earliest phases of the aube tradition, that the
approach of day is announced by the crowing of the cock, is the
theme of a festive little song, which, in other respects, is not at
all like the conventional type. Indeed, the light-hearted spirit
of this merry song is a direct violation of the aube tradition:
I haue a gentil cook
orowyt me day,
He doth me rysyn erly
my matying for to say.
I hane a gentil cook,
comyn he is of gret,
His comb is of reed corel,
his tayil is of get.
I have a gentyl cook,
comyn he is of kynde,
His comb is of red scorel,
his tayl is of inde;
His legges ben of asoor,
80 geintil & 80 smele,
His spores arn of sylver quyt
in to the wortewale;
His eyuyn arn of cristal,
lokyn al in aunbyr;
& euery nygt he perchit hym
in myn ladyis chaumbyr.
The repetitions in this song show that it is of considerable
antiquity.
1 1466, 1702. 9 Add. MS 5465, f. 108 6-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 159.
8 Ritson, Ancient Songs, III, 4, from Harleian MS 2252.
• MS Sloane 2593, f. 10 –Warton Club, iv, 81.
## p. 392 (#410) ############################################
392 Transition English Song Collections
A more apparent influence is observable in the case of the
chanson à personnages. This type of poem finds its germ in the
spring rites attending the pre-Christian worship of Venus, when
maidens, escaped from the tutelage of their mothers, and young
wives, from the exacting authority of their husbands, rushed
to the meadows, joined hands and danced and sang of their
liberty. In the opinion of Jeanroy, such festivities had become
an almost liturgical convention. By the twelfth century, these
songs had been incorporated into semi-polite poetry, and the
resultant genre enjoyed two centuries of popularity. In the earlier
form of the genre, the poet represents himself as listening to a
young woman who complains of her tyrannical mother or of her
cruel husband, and, sometimes, as even protecting her in an ensuing
quarrel. In the later and more refined form, the mother or
husband is not present, and the poet consoles the young woman,
or even makes love to her, the emphasis thus having shifted from
the narrative and dramatic elements to the lyrical The open-
ing words of the chanson are the conventional L'autre jour or
L'autrier, and the opening verses contain a description of May,
the scene being placed in a bower or a garden.
Though English songs furnish no complete example of the
chanson à personnages as it existed in France, there are a score
of songs in which the poet represents himself as chancing upon a
maiden or a man who is lamenting an unrequited love, or the
treachery of a false lover. As in the chansons, these poems open
a
with the words "This other day' and a description of May-time,
and place the scene in the 'wilderness,' the wild wood supplanting
the French bower, through the influence of the native English
songs of the spring to which reference was made in a previous
chapter of this work? .
Whether this modification of the theme of the chanson began
in France, or whether it was strictly an English development, I
have not been able to determine.
Just as other types of love songs were taken over and employed
in religious lyrics, so this type of song was transferred. In one
song the poet comes upon a maiden deep in the wood, and she is
great with child. This maiden does not lament her condition,
however, but rather sings for joy, since it is given her to bear a
Child in whom verbum caro factum est.
The chansons à personnages shade into the English May poems,
1 See Vol. 1, pp. 360 ff.
Bodleian MS, Engl. Poet. E. I. f. 476. Cf. also Anglia, xn, 236, 254, 263 ;
Herrig's Archiv, ovi, 63, 279, 282, 283; Early Sixteenth Century Poems, 12, 83.
## p. 393 (#411) ############################################
Miscellaneous Songs
393
the refrain of a chanson sometimes being taken from popular
English verse, as the well-known refrain:
Colle to me the rysshys grene, colle to mel.
The May poems that follow the English tradition all breathe
that blithe, out-of-doors spirit, that vernal enthusiasm for the
greenwood and the fields, which consistently characterises spring
songs from 'Sumer is i-cumen in' and 'Blou northerne wynd'
to 'It was a lover and his lass,' and Herrick's sweet summons to
Corinna. Every wisp of a spring poem has this odour of green
things about it, this contagion of happy abandon. One little
song has only this to say,
Trolly, lolly, loly, lo,
Syng troly, lolo, lo.
My love is to the grene wode gone,
Now [af]ter wyll I go;
Syng trolly, loly, lo, lo, ly, lo,
yet how completely it expresses the mood !
Of kindred spirit are hunting songs, songs of the ‘joly
fosters' who love the forest, the bow and the horn and the keen-
ness of the chase. Who would not fain be present, when
Talbot, my hounde, with a mery taste
All about the grene wode he gan cast.
I toke my horne and blew him a blast,
With “Tro, ro, ro, ro; tro, ro, ro, ro! '
With hey go bet, hey go bet, how!
There he gothe, there he goth! (Hey go howe ! )
We shall haue sport and game ynowo3.
It is to be regretted that, for the most part, hunting songs
have only survived in the more or less modified forms in which they
were adapted to pageants, for they were usually marred in the
effort to accommodate them to some allegory, as when the aged
foster hangs his bow and arrows upon the 'greenwood bough'
and, at the command of Lady Venus, leaves her court in disgrace
because his 'hard' beard repels maidens' kisses“.
The best of the songs written by official musicians of the court
are those in praise of members of the royal family. One of these
is a spirited recital of the prowess shown by Henry VIII in the
1 Royal MS, App. 58, f. 24-Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 83.
. Add. MS 31922, f. 43 6. For the licentions love songs of clerks, of. Anglia,
XXVI, 273, 278; Warton Club, rv, 35; Herrig's Archiv, ovII, 58 etc.
• Wynkyn de Worde's Christmasse Carolles, Douce Fragment, 94 6—Early Sixteenth
Century Lyrics, 75.
* Add. MS 31922, f. 65 6-Anglia, XII, 244. Cf. also Letters and Papers of Henry
VIII, 1, 718, 4622—Jan. 6, 1514—for the pageant in which the song probably occurred.
## p. 394 (#412) ############################################
394 Transition English Song Collections
tourney? ; a second is in praise of Katherine and 'le infant
rosary? '; a third is an animated trio in which each singer pro-
fesses to love some flower, the praise of which he sings, the last
stanza making the disclosure that all three love the same, the rose
which unites both the red and the whites; and a fourth is a prayer
with the refrain:
From stormy wyndis & grevous wethir
Good Lord preserve the estryge fethir4.
A few songs that do not come under any of the above classes
at least deserve to be mentioned. Thus there are a few riddles,
which perpetuate a style of poem popular in the Old English
period ; a poem in light-foot verse descriptive of a market-day
or a fair, where there is a bewilderment of goods for sale,
a multitude running here and there, a fisticuff, a swaggering
drunkard and a noisy auctioneer; a fragment of a spinning or
knitting song (? )? ; a pedlar's song8; and a swaggering soldier's
songº.
Such, in brief outline, are the types of songs that constitute
these late Transition collections. These songs are all but un-
known to readers of English verse, and they have as yet been
all but ignored by scholars; yet they constitute an important
chapter in the history of our literature. When they are made
more accessible, they can hardly fail of appreciation, for they will
be enjoyed for what they are, and the student of literary move-
ments will recognise in them one of the two great streams that
unite to form the Elizabethan lyric.
1 Add. MS 31922, f. 54 6—Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 90.
2 Ibid. f. 74 6- Anglia, XII, 247.
3 Add. MS 5465, f. 41 a; Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 91.
• Ibid. f. 104 6-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 159.
* MS Balliol 354, f. 218 b-Anglia, XXVI, 228; MS Sloane 2593, f. 11 a-Warton
Club, rv, 33.
6 Harleian MS 7578, f. 106 a–Herrig's Archiv, cvii, 69.
7 Ibid. 109 6—Herrig's Archiv, OVII, 61.
8 Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 26 a—Warton Club, iv, 76.
• Add. MS 5165, f. 1016-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 147.
## p. 395 (#413) ############################################
CHAPTER XVII
BALLADS
THE subject of this chapter needs careful definition. Sundry
shorter poems, lyrics of whatever purpose, hymns, 'flytings,'
political satires, mawkish stories in verse, sensational journalism
of Elizabethan days and even the translation of Solomon's Song,
have gone by the name of ballad. Ballad societies have published
a vast amount of street-songs, broadsides and ditties such as
Mme de Sévigné knew in Paris under the name of Pont-neuf;
for many readers, unfortunately, there is no difference between
these 'ballads' and Chevy Chace or Sir Patrick Spens. The
popular ballad, however, now in question, is a narrative poem
without any known author or any marks of individual authorship
such as sentiment and reflection, meant, in the first instance, for
singing, and connected, as its name implies, with the communal
dance, but submitted to a process of oral tradition among people
free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous. Conditions
favourable to the making of such poetry ceased to be general after
the fifteenth century; and, while it was both composed and pre-
served in isolated rural communities long after that date, the instinct
which produced it and the habit which handed it down by word
of mouth were, alike, a heritage of the past. Seen in critical
and historical perspective, balladry takes its distinguishing marks
mainly from this process of oral tradition. Owing to this process,
the ballad has lost its dramatic or mimetic and choral character
and become distinctly epic; it has, in many cases, even forfeited its
refrain, once indispensable; but it has kept its impersonal note,
lacks, last as first, all trace of deliberate composition and appeals
to the modern reader with a charm of simplicity quite its own.
Nearly all critics are agreed that no verse of this sort is produced
under the conditions of modern life; and the three hundred and five
individual ballads, represented by some thirteen hundred versions,
printed in the great collection of Child, may be regarded, practically,
## p. 396 (#414) ############################################
396
Ballads
as a closed account in English literature. Diligent gleaning of the
field in the ten years following the completion of that work has
brought little or nothing that is new; and little more can be
expected. Here and there a forgotten manuscript may come
to light; but, in all probability, it will contain only a version
of some ballad already known. The sources of tradition have,
apparently, at last run dry. Sir George Douglas notes that the
Scottish border shepherds, at their annual dinners, no longer sing
their old or their own ballads; what are known as 'songs of the
day,' mainly of music-hall origin, now rule without any rivals
from the past. Remote and isolated districts in the United States
keep a few traditional versions alive; such is The Hangman's
Tree, a version of The Maid Freed from the Gallows, still sung,
with traces of Yorkshire dialect, after generations of purely
oral tradition, as it was brought over to Virginia 'before the
revolution. But these recovered versions have revealed little
that is both good and new.
Yet another line of demarcation must be drawn. English and
Scottish ballads as a distinct species of poetry, and as a body,
can be followed back through the fifteenth century, occur spora-
dically, or find chance mention, for a century or so before
and then altogether cease. Owing to the deplorably loose way in
which the word 'ballad' is applied, not only the references of
early historians, like William of Malmesbury, to the 'popular
songs,' the cantilenae, the carmina vulgaria, from which they
draw for occasional narrative, but also the passages of older epic
that tell a particular deed or celebrate a popular hero, are, alike,
assumed to indicate a body of ballads, similar to those of the
collections, extending back to the Norman conquest, back even
to the Germanic conquest of Britain, but lost for modern readers
by the chances of time and the lack of written record. Such a
body of ballads may, indeed, be conjectured; but conjecture should
not pass into inference. Not a single specimen is preserved. It
is, to be sure, unlikely that the primary instinct of song, the
tendency to celebrate heroes and events in immediate verse, and
the habit of epic tradition, main constituents of balladry, should
cease as we cross the marches of the Transition period and pass
from the modern speech and modern metres, in which our ballads
are composed, into that more inflected language, that wholly
different form of rhythm, which prevailed in Old English and,
with some modifications, in all Germanic verse. To claim for
this older period, however, ballads of the kind common since
## p. 397 (#415) ############################################
The Canute Song
397
the fifteenth century in England, Scandinavia and Germany, is
an assertion impossible to prove. The Old English folk must
have had popular ballads of some sort; but it cannot be said what
they were. Singing, to be sure, implies a poem in stanzas; and that
is precisely what one cannot find in recorded Old English verse
the one exception, Deor's song, being very remote from balladry.
It is true that the subject of a popular ballad can often be traced
far back; Scandinavian ballads still sing the epic heroes of
‘Old Norse. ' Community of theme, however, does not imply a
common poetical form; and it is the structure, the style, the
metrical arrangement, the general spirit of English and Scottish
ballads, which must set them apart in our literature and give them
their title as an independent species. We find a relative plenty
of 'popular' verse in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries—songs by a political minstrel of some sort, which had
their immediate vogue, were recorded here and there, and soon
forgotten—but this sort of thing should not be confused with songs
made among the people, passed down by oral tradition and marked
with those peculiarities of structure and style which are inseparable
from the genuine ballad of the collections. In the absence of
texts, conjecture is useless. The earliest recorded piece of English
verse which agrees with balladry in all these important charac-
teristics is the famous song of Canute, preserved in the chronicles
of Ely'. The king's actual part in the case is doubtful, and
unimportant. Coming by boat, it is said, with his queen and
sundry great nobles to Ely, Canute stood up, bade his men row
slowly, 'called all who were with him in the boats to make a
circle about him . . . and to join him in song; and composed in
English a ballad (cantilenam) which begins as follows:
Merie sunge the munechës binnen Ely,
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.
Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,
And herë we these munechës sung. . . . '
The verses are familiar; but their significance is not always
noted. The chronicler turns them into Latin, and, with clear
reference to popular tradition, adds—and so the rest of the
song] as it is sung in these days by the people in their dances,
and handed down as proverbial. . . . That is, the song was
traditional a century and a half after the supposed fact, and it
seemed natural to the chronicler that such a cantilena should be
1 Historia Eliensis, 11, 27, in Gale, Hist. Script. 1, 505.
## p. 398 (#416) ############################################
398
Ballads
improvised to the singing of a chorus. Perhaps songs of this
kind were in Malmesbury's mind when he apologised for using as
material for his history cantilenae 'worn by the friction of time';
but the political verse of minstrels like the later Laurence Minot is
a more likely assumption; and, whatever the likelihood, the verse
itself has vanished. In Canute's case there is a fragment of actual
song, of the highest value; for it is not only one of the earliest
recorded pieces of English poetry to break away from the uniform
stichic order of Old English metres, but it is in the rhythm
which belongs to the best English and Scandinavian ballads of
tradition. Grundtvig thinks that the quoted lines are the burden
or chorus of the piece, which was doubtless narrative in its further
course, and told, one may conjecture, of Canute's own deeds. This
desire of the warrior to sing the battles he has fought did not
pass away with the lost songs. A passage in bishop Leslie's
History of Scotland, used in part by Andrew Lang for the
solution of the problem of ballad origins, declares that 'our
bordir men,' as Dalrymple translates, delight in their own music
and in the songs that they themselves make about their deeds and
about the deeds of their forbears. The bishop's Latin is un-
.
equivocal: cantiones quas de majorum gestis, aut ingeniosis prae-
dandi precandive stratagematis, ipsi confingunt. Gaston Paris',
on good evidence, has made a similar assertion about the early
Germanic and English warriors, who, before the days when the
minstrel existed in a professional class, sang their own deeds
and furnished the prime material of later epics. Even in Beowulf
a warrior is described improvising a song on the defeat of Grendel
There is, thus, a presumption that border ballads, like Cheviot
and Otterburn, owed their earliest form to the improvisation
of fighting men who could sing their own deeds; and thus, too,
one draws a faint line, mainly touching theme and conditions of
origin, from the 'old song of Percy and the Douglas' back to those
lost lays that inspired the poet of Beowulf.
But this is all. Of the actual structure and form of those old
lays nothing is known; and it must be remembered that even
Cheviot and Otterburn, while of the undoubted general type of
balladry, are not, in more exact analysis, of the typical construc-
tion which one finds in ballads recovered from genuine oral
tradition. All that can be said of material gathered from older
chronicles, or suspected in older poems, is that it lends itself to
1 In Romania, xiII, 618, he explicitly defends the analogy of these border songs
with the old cantilenae of Germanic warriors.
1
## p. 399 (#417) ############################################
Outlaw Ballads and Political Songs 399
conjecture, not to proof. The one exception is this song of
Canute, which may pass as a genuine ballad fragment.
Short work can be made of other assumptions. In the four-
teenth century, ‘rimes of Robin Hood and Randolph, earl of
Chester,' are mentioned in Piers the Plowman as known to the
common men of that day. Robin Hood ballads are preserved;
the Randolph cycle is lost. But the outlaw literature must have
been popular long before that. The story of Fulk Fitz-Warine,
preserved in French prose and paraphrased by Leland in fragments
from 'an old Englisch boke yn ryme,' gives its hero traits and
experiences not unlike those of Robin Hood. The forged chronicle
of Croyland says that 'ballads' about Hereward were still sung, in
the chronicler's day, by the common people and by women at the
dance. The deeds of Waltheof at York, told by Malmesbury, are
plainly taken 'from a ballad'--so Freeman declares; but from
what sort of ballad ? Waltheof, it is true, was sung ‘in the war-
like songs of the tongues of both his parents'; one of these songs,
however, the Danish one, is preserved, and has no trace of balladry
about it, but all the art and artifice of the professional scald.
Ballads of the outlaw, indeed, would be of a popular and traditional
type, as the Robin Hood cycle shows; but political songs, which
also had their vogue, were, doubtless, made by the minstrel,
who, also, retouched and sang again the rude verses which warrior
or outlaw had improvised, taking them out of their choral con-
ditions, smoothing, adding, connecting and making them fit for
chant and recitation de longue haleine, precisely as the jongleurs
of early France, according to Gaston Paris, remade the improvi-
sations of an age that knew no minstrel class at all into the
chansons de geste and into the epic itself. Such remade poems
could again be broken into ballads, popular enough, sung and
transmitted by very humble folk. For a late example, the Scottish
ballad Guide Wallace has its evident source in the Wallace of
Blind Harry; but the portions of Blind Harry's poem,' says
Child, 'out of which these ballads were made, were, perhaps,
themselves composed from older ballads, and the restitution
of the lyrical form may have given us something not altogether
unlike what was sung in the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth century. '
Nevertheless, most of the 'ballads' cited by the chroniclers seem
to have been political songs, more or less popular-not what could
be called, in strict use of the term, a traditional ballad.
In one case, we are on sure negative ground. Henry of
Huntingdon has a fiery piece of description in which he reproduces
a
## p. 400 (#418) ############################################
400
Ballads
the story of a battle; as with similar passages, a 'ballad' is his
source; but here, luckily, that source is known. He is translating
a poem, inserted in the Old English Chronicle, on the battle of
Brunanburh; and whoever will read this poem, whether in the
original or in Tennyson's spirited rendering, can see at how great
a distance it stands from any ballad of the traditional kind.
Minstrels, moreover, as actual authors of the ballads recorded
at a later day, are utterly out of the question. Barring a few
wretched specimens labelled by Child with the minstrel's name,
and inserted in the collection because they still may retain some
traditional note, that ‘rogue by act of parliament' to whom Percy
ascribed the making of practically all English and Scottish
ballads is responsible for none of them. It has been pointed out
by Kittredge as 'capable of practically formal proof that for
the last two or three centuries the English and Scottish ballads
have not, as a general thing, been sung or transmitted by profes-
sional minstrels or their representatives. There is no reason
whatever for believing that the state of things between 1300 and
1600 was different, in this regard, from that between 1600 and
1900. . . . Still stronger proof lies in the fact that we have the
poetry which the minstrels did make; and it is far removed from
balladry. "The two categories are distinct. When, finally, one
studies the structure and the elements of the ballad itself as a
poetic form, a form demonstrably connected with choral dramatic
conditions in its origin but modified by a long epic process in the
course of oral and quite popular tradition, one is compelled to
dismiss absolutely the theory of minstrel authorship, and to regard
ballads as both made and transmitted by the people. This phrase
is often misunderstood and challenged, but in vain. All poetry,
good and bad, is found by the last analysis to be made in the same
way; and there is no romantic mystery or 'miracle' about the
ballad. What differentiates it from other forms of poetry is the
conditions under which it is made and the agency by which it is
handed down. We may reasonably infer for early times such a
making and such a transmission; but the older product is lost, and
we are restricted for our study to the actual and undisputed
material at our command.
All English and Scottish ballads agree in the fact of tradition,
-tradition, in the main, oral and communal ; and there result from
this fact two capital exceptions to the ordinary rules of literary
investigation. It is well nigh useless to hunt for the 'original'
document of a given ballad, or to compare the several varying
a
6
## p. 401 (#419) ############################################
The Ballad Question
401
versions, and so establish, by whatever means, an authentic text.
It is also useless to lean with any confidence upon chronology.
Some of the ballads gathered, within a century or so, from oral
tradition of Scotland, are distinctly older in form than many
of the ballads of the Percy manuscript, written down in the seven-
teenth century, and are closer to the traditional ballad type than
many pieces of even earlier date of record than the famous folio.
This renunciation of authentic original texts, and of chronology
in the ordinary sense, is generally conceded. A few critics,
however, are still of opinion that ballads are, after all, nothing
but anonymous poems, and that to trace a ballad to its author
is not, necessarily, an impossible task.
We touch here the inevitable ‘ballad question,' not to argue
about it, but simply to record the fact that weight of authority,
as well as numbers, inclines to the side of those who refuse to
obliterate the line between popular ballads and lettered verse,
and who are unable to accept writers like Villon in France and
Dunbar in Scotland as responsible for songs which, by this con-
venient hypothesis, have simply come down to us without the
writers' names. Child, cautious as he was in committing himself
to any theory, signed an explicit confession of faith in the ballad
as an independent poetic species.
Tradition is something more than a confusion of texts; a choral
throng, with improvising singers, is not the chance refuge, but,
rather, the certain origin, of the ballad as a poetic form; and, while
1;
one is not to regard the corpus of English and Scottish ballads as
directly due to such singing and improvisation, it is thither that one
turns for origins, and it is to tradition that one turns for the growth
and spread of the versions themselves. Once choral, dramatic, with
insistent refrain and constant improvisation, the ballad came to be
a convenient form for narrative of every sort which drifted into
the ways of tradition. This traditional process has been mainly
epic, although oral tradition alone would not and does not force
the ballad out of its choral structure, its dramatic and lyric
purpose. What slowly reduces the importance and, therefore, the
function of these old elements is the tendency of ballads towards
the chronicle, the story, the romance. Literary influences worked
upon it for these ends.
A close study of the material demands that we distinguish
two general classes. One, demonstrably the older in structure,
.
tends in form to the couplet with alternating refrain or burden,
and in matter to the rendering of a single situation. These
E. L. II.
26
CH. XVII.
## p. 402 (#420) ############################################
402
Ballads
ballads, often closely allied to Scandinavian versions, are printed
by Child in the forepart of his collection as a tribute to their
undoubted age. A dominating feature here, often recorded and
always to be assumed, is repetition; it takes a form peculiar to
balladry, is found in all these old pieces and has even left its
mark on the majority of the other versions in Child's four volumes.
As, however, epic purposes prevailed, this typically oldest ballad
was lengthened in plot, scope, details, and was shorn entirely of
its refrain. Hence a second class, the long ballad, recited or
chanted to a monotonous tune by a singer who now feels it to
be his property, a kind of enclosed common. Instead of the short
singing piece, steeped in repetition, almost borne down by its
refrain, plunging abruptly into a situation, describing no characters
and often not naming them, telling no long story and giving no
details, here is a deliberate narrative, long and easy of pace, free
of repetitions, bare of refrain, abounding in details and covering
considerable stretches of time. By a happy chance, indeed, this
epic process can be followed into its final stage. We have a
number of ballads which tell different adventures in the life of
Robin Hood; and we have an actual epic poem, formed upon
these ballads or their very close counterparts, which embodies the
adventures in a coherent whole. Between the style of the Gest of
Robyn Hode, however, and the style of the best Robin Hood
ballads, there is almost no difference at all; and these, for all their
age of record, may well represent the end of the epic process in
balladry. In metrical form, they hold to the quatrain made up of
alternating verses of four and three measures, which is not very
far from the old couplet with its two alternating verses of the
refrain. The change in structure is mainly concerned with loss of
choral elements, especially of incremental repetition. The well
known opening of Robin Hood and the Monk shows both the
change in form and the new smoothness of narrative •
In somer, when the shawes be sheyne
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song;
To se the dere drawe to the dale,
And leve the hillës hee,
And shadow hem in the levës grene
Under the grenewood tre.
Hit befel on Whitsontide. . .
Then the story begins with a dialogue between Little John and
Robin, passes into the third personal narrative and so tells its tale
## p. 403 (#421) ############################################
Babylon
403
with a good plot, fair coherence of motive, character and event,
exciting incident of fight, imprisonment, disguise, escape and the
proper pious conclusion-
Thus endys the talking of the munke
And Robyn Hode i-wysse;
God, that is ever a crowned king,
Bryng us all to his blisse!
not unlike the prayer that Chaucer puts into the mouth of the
nun's priest when his tale is told. There are ninety stanzas
preserved in this ballad, and it has suffered losses by mutilation
of the fifteenth century manuscript. Old as it is by record, how-
ever, it seems far more finished, familiar, modern, than a ballad
recovered centuries later from oral tradition in Scotland, short,
intense, abrupt, with communal song for every other line of it
from beginning to end, a single dominant situation, a dramatic
and choral setting. Just enough epic detail has been added here
to supply in tradition what was lost by transfer from actual choral
rendering; and, even as it is, the taking by the hand, the turning
round, seem little more than the stage directions of a play.
Babylon, local only by name and place, is familiar in its plot
or situation 'to all branches of the Scandinavian race, and has
long wandered on its path of tradition. The reader should repeat
or sing aloud both the burden and the stanzas throughout:
There were three ladies lived in a bower,
Eh vow bonnie,
And they went out to pull a flower
On the bonnie banks o Fordie.
They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man.
He's taen the first sister by the hand,
And he's turned her round and made her stand.
It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? '
It's I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife. '
He's killed this may), and he's laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.
He's taken the second ane by the hand,
And he's turned her round, and made her stand.
'It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? '
I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife. ?
1 Maid.
26-2
## p. 404 (#422) ############################################
404
Ballads
He's killed this may, and he's laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company,
He's taken the youngest ane by the hand,
And he's turned her round, and made her stand.
Says, 'Will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? '
I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.
For I hae a brother in this wood,
And gin ye kill me, it's he'll kill theel!
"What's thy brother's name? Come tell to me. ' -
‘My brother's name is Baby Lon. '
"O sister, sister, what have I done!
O have I done this ill to thee!
O since I've done this evil deed,
Good sall never be seen oʻ2 me. '
He's taken out his wee pen-knife,
Eh vow bonnie,
And he's twyneds himsel oʻhis ain sweet life
On the bonnie banks o Fordie.
6
It needs no deep critical insight to see how near this little
ballad is to the choral throng. The characters, of course, can
be said' or told instead of being presented and acted, and a
word of information must be given about them; but no attempt
is made, as later epic curiosity would demand, to tell more
particularly who and what they were. The situation is the main
thing, and it is developed by a method which, evidently, depends
upon choral and dramatic conditions. The refrain of the throng
is constant; and the action advances not by continuous narrative
but by a series of repetitions, in sets of three stanzas, each
repetition, however, containing an increment, a new phrase or
word to match the new posture of affairs. This incremental
repetition is the main mark of old ballad structure ; it is woven
into the stuff, retained its importance long after the choral con-
ditions which were responsible for it had been forgotten and
occurs whenever a situation needs to be expressed in an emphatic
form. Only in the long narrative ballads, the chronicles, the
pieces that have been submitted to the most urgent epic demands,
does this incremental repetition fade away. Moreover, it furnishes
the connection with that source of balladry-not of mended
ballads-in improvisation and communal composition, with the
1 The rimes in this and the next two stanzas are, evidently, disordered.
Of=by.
8 Deprived, parted.
3
## p. 405 (#423) ############################################
The Making of Ballads 405
a
singing and dancing throng so often described by medieval writers.
Studies in old Portuguese popular song show a corresponding
growth of interlaced repetitions, in fixed formula, out of choral
iteration in the communal dancel.
A ballad known in English as The Maid Freed from the
Gallows still has an astonishing vogue throughout Europe; in
Finland, alone, there are fifty versions of it. Now and then, a
narrative has been prefixed to explain the situation; but, usually,
the situation stands for itself and is, beyond all doubt, original. The
setting, of course, varies; now the girl is to be drowned, or carried
off by pirates, now, as in the English version, she faces death on the
gallows. Who will save her? She appeals to a series of relations, all
of whom refuse to interfere, until a climax is reached, say with the
true love, who is ready to part with all he has and is, so as to save her
life. For each of the relatives there is the same stanza of request,
the same stanza of refusal, the increments being mere change from
father to mother, to brother, to sister and so on, till, with the true-
love, refusal turns to triumphant consent. The cardinal facts in this
ballad are, first, the ease with which it can be sung to any length,
so long as names of relatives hold out, with no artistic effort of com-
position, after the initial stanzas have once been given, and, second,
and most significant fact, the actual use of it for dance and mimetic
game in one of the English versions, in a Faroe version and in
sundered groups like the Danish and the Magyar. Not only is the
connection of dance and ballad firmly established, but, as Kittredge
points out, the making of ballads in a throng becomes a perfectly
intelligible and even necessary process. Of course, few ballads
can remain in this initial stage. They are submitted to oral
tradition, and are sung as stories rather than presented as action.
More than this, a whole narrative, often a definite occurrence,
historical or legendary, or even, it may be, a late form of some
old classical tale, will find its way into the ballad structure and
so be handed down in the traditional way. The epic process
changes this ballad structure, however, only so far as the narrative
demands; there is a succession, rather than a juxtaposition, of
events, smoother progress, disuse of the refrain, pruning of re-
petition, and, above all, a desire for better aesthetic values.
Otherwise, the narrative complies with the rules of its form.
The ballad remains anonymous, objective, simple. From the
mass of stories drifting along the same traditionary stream, other
1 See H. R. Lang, Old Portuguese Songs,' in Festgabe für Adolfo Mussafia,
Halle, 1905, and his earlier Liederbuch des Königs Denis von Portugal.
## p. 406 (#424) ############################################
406
Ballads
details may join the old situation or the borrowed tale, and make
a narrative out of it which has counterparts in popular ballads
all over the world. 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.
chapter in the cycle of the lover's history, is treated in these
ballades precisely as in the corresponding verse in France? .
Light-foot measures, such as the lai and the descort, exerted
a noteworthy influence upon late Transition lyrics, though English
poets were content merely to adopt the characteristic common
to all the species—the long stanza of very short verses—and
did not observe the metrical peculiarities that differentiate one
species from another. This light-foot verse was cultivated to good
effect, and furnishes some of the best songs. They are rapid,
musical and enthusiastic. Any phase of the lover's experience
may be treated in this verse, but it seems to have been most
employed in those songs which deal with the parting, the absence,
or the reunion of lovers. The following verses, which open one of
these songs, will illustrate their grace and spirit:
Can I chuse
But refuce
All thought of mourning,
Now I see
Thus close by me
My love returning?
If I should not joy
When I behould
Such glory shining,
Sith her tyme of stay
Made me to decay
With sorrow pining,
Silly birds might seem
To laugh at me,
Which, at day peering,
With a merry voyce
Sing 'O doo rejoyce! '
Themselves still cheering.
Absence darke
Thou dost marke,
No cause but fearing,
And like night
Turnst thy sight
All into hearing.
1 MS Balliol 354, f. 156 a—Anglia, XXVI, 169.
* MS Rawlinson, C. 813, contains a large number of the ballades,
3 MS Harleian 367, f. 183–Herrig's Archiv, cvii, 56.
## p. 391 (#409) ############################################
Love Songs
391
6
A French type, which, while having no complete exponent,
has yet influenced several English songs, is the aube, or complaint
of the lover at the envious approach of morn, a motive which
Chaucer used with effect in Troilus and Criseydet, and which
Shakespeare immortalised in Romeo and Juliet. In one of the
songs, the refrain of an aube is put into the mouth of a 'comely
queen' (Elizabeth of York? ) who, in a 'glorious garden,' is
gathering roses
This day dawes,
This gentill day dawes,
And I must home gone.
The aube motive is also used as the introduction to another song,
in which a lover complains of an inconstant mistress:
Mornyng, mornyng,
Thus may I synge,
Adew, my dere, adew;
Be God alone
My love ys gon,
Now may I go seke a new%.
One of the earliest phases of the aube tradition, that the
approach of day is announced by the crowing of the cock, is the
theme of a festive little song, which, in other respects, is not at
all like the conventional type. Indeed, the light-hearted spirit
of this merry song is a direct violation of the aube tradition:
I haue a gentil cook
orowyt me day,
He doth me rysyn erly
my matying for to say.
I hane a gentil cook,
comyn he is of gret,
His comb is of reed corel,
his tayil is of get.
I have a gentyl cook,
comyn he is of kynde,
His comb is of red scorel,
his tayl is of inde;
His legges ben of asoor,
80 geintil & 80 smele,
His spores arn of sylver quyt
in to the wortewale;
His eyuyn arn of cristal,
lokyn al in aunbyr;
& euery nygt he perchit hym
in myn ladyis chaumbyr.
The repetitions in this song show that it is of considerable
antiquity.
1 1466, 1702. 9 Add. MS 5465, f. 108 6-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 159.
8 Ritson, Ancient Songs, III, 4, from Harleian MS 2252.
• MS Sloane 2593, f. 10 –Warton Club, iv, 81.
## p. 392 (#410) ############################################
392 Transition English Song Collections
A more apparent influence is observable in the case of the
chanson à personnages. This type of poem finds its germ in the
spring rites attending the pre-Christian worship of Venus, when
maidens, escaped from the tutelage of their mothers, and young
wives, from the exacting authority of their husbands, rushed
to the meadows, joined hands and danced and sang of their
liberty. In the opinion of Jeanroy, such festivities had become
an almost liturgical convention. By the twelfth century, these
songs had been incorporated into semi-polite poetry, and the
resultant genre enjoyed two centuries of popularity. In the earlier
form of the genre, the poet represents himself as listening to a
young woman who complains of her tyrannical mother or of her
cruel husband, and, sometimes, as even protecting her in an ensuing
quarrel. In the later and more refined form, the mother or
husband is not present, and the poet consoles the young woman,
or even makes love to her, the emphasis thus having shifted from
the narrative and dramatic elements to the lyrical The open-
ing words of the chanson are the conventional L'autre jour or
L'autrier, and the opening verses contain a description of May,
the scene being placed in a bower or a garden.
Though English songs furnish no complete example of the
chanson à personnages as it existed in France, there are a score
of songs in which the poet represents himself as chancing upon a
maiden or a man who is lamenting an unrequited love, or the
treachery of a false lover. As in the chansons, these poems open
a
with the words "This other day' and a description of May-time,
and place the scene in the 'wilderness,' the wild wood supplanting
the French bower, through the influence of the native English
songs of the spring to which reference was made in a previous
chapter of this work? .
Whether this modification of the theme of the chanson began
in France, or whether it was strictly an English development, I
have not been able to determine.
Just as other types of love songs were taken over and employed
in religious lyrics, so this type of song was transferred. In one
song the poet comes upon a maiden deep in the wood, and she is
great with child. This maiden does not lament her condition,
however, but rather sings for joy, since it is given her to bear a
Child in whom verbum caro factum est.
The chansons à personnages shade into the English May poems,
1 See Vol. 1, pp. 360 ff.
Bodleian MS, Engl. Poet. E. I. f. 476. Cf. also Anglia, xn, 236, 254, 263 ;
Herrig's Archiv, ovi, 63, 279, 282, 283; Early Sixteenth Century Poems, 12, 83.
## p. 393 (#411) ############################################
Miscellaneous Songs
393
the refrain of a chanson sometimes being taken from popular
English verse, as the well-known refrain:
Colle to me the rysshys grene, colle to mel.
The May poems that follow the English tradition all breathe
that blithe, out-of-doors spirit, that vernal enthusiasm for the
greenwood and the fields, which consistently characterises spring
songs from 'Sumer is i-cumen in' and 'Blou northerne wynd'
to 'It was a lover and his lass,' and Herrick's sweet summons to
Corinna. Every wisp of a spring poem has this odour of green
things about it, this contagion of happy abandon. One little
song has only this to say,
Trolly, lolly, loly, lo,
Syng troly, lolo, lo.
My love is to the grene wode gone,
Now [af]ter wyll I go;
Syng trolly, loly, lo, lo, ly, lo,
yet how completely it expresses the mood !
Of kindred spirit are hunting songs, songs of the ‘joly
fosters' who love the forest, the bow and the horn and the keen-
ness of the chase. Who would not fain be present, when
Talbot, my hounde, with a mery taste
All about the grene wode he gan cast.
I toke my horne and blew him a blast,
With “Tro, ro, ro, ro; tro, ro, ro, ro! '
With hey go bet, hey go bet, how!
There he gothe, there he goth! (Hey go howe ! )
We shall haue sport and game ynowo3.
It is to be regretted that, for the most part, hunting songs
have only survived in the more or less modified forms in which they
were adapted to pageants, for they were usually marred in the
effort to accommodate them to some allegory, as when the aged
foster hangs his bow and arrows upon the 'greenwood bough'
and, at the command of Lady Venus, leaves her court in disgrace
because his 'hard' beard repels maidens' kisses“.
The best of the songs written by official musicians of the court
are those in praise of members of the royal family. One of these
is a spirited recital of the prowess shown by Henry VIII in the
1 Royal MS, App. 58, f. 24-Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 83.
. Add. MS 31922, f. 43 6. For the licentions love songs of clerks, of. Anglia,
XXVI, 273, 278; Warton Club, rv, 35; Herrig's Archiv, ovII, 58 etc.
• Wynkyn de Worde's Christmasse Carolles, Douce Fragment, 94 6—Early Sixteenth
Century Lyrics, 75.
* Add. MS 31922, f. 65 6-Anglia, XII, 244. Cf. also Letters and Papers of Henry
VIII, 1, 718, 4622—Jan. 6, 1514—for the pageant in which the song probably occurred.
## p. 394 (#412) ############################################
394 Transition English Song Collections
tourney? ; a second is in praise of Katherine and 'le infant
rosary? '; a third is an animated trio in which each singer pro-
fesses to love some flower, the praise of which he sings, the last
stanza making the disclosure that all three love the same, the rose
which unites both the red and the whites; and a fourth is a prayer
with the refrain:
From stormy wyndis & grevous wethir
Good Lord preserve the estryge fethir4.
A few songs that do not come under any of the above classes
at least deserve to be mentioned. Thus there are a few riddles,
which perpetuate a style of poem popular in the Old English
period ; a poem in light-foot verse descriptive of a market-day
or a fair, where there is a bewilderment of goods for sale,
a multitude running here and there, a fisticuff, a swaggering
drunkard and a noisy auctioneer; a fragment of a spinning or
knitting song (? )? ; a pedlar's song8; and a swaggering soldier's
songº.
Such, in brief outline, are the types of songs that constitute
these late Transition collections. These songs are all but un-
known to readers of English verse, and they have as yet been
all but ignored by scholars; yet they constitute an important
chapter in the history of our literature. When they are made
more accessible, they can hardly fail of appreciation, for they will
be enjoyed for what they are, and the student of literary move-
ments will recognise in them one of the two great streams that
unite to form the Elizabethan lyric.
1 Add. MS 31922, f. 54 6—Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 90.
2 Ibid. f. 74 6- Anglia, XII, 247.
3 Add. MS 5465, f. 41 a; Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 91.
• Ibid. f. 104 6-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 159.
* MS Balliol 354, f. 218 b-Anglia, XXVI, 228; MS Sloane 2593, f. 11 a-Warton
Club, rv, 33.
6 Harleian MS 7578, f. 106 a–Herrig's Archiv, cvii, 69.
7 Ibid. 109 6—Herrig's Archiv, OVII, 61.
8 Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 26 a—Warton Club, iv, 76.
• Add. MS 5165, f. 1016-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 147.
## p. 395 (#413) ############################################
CHAPTER XVII
BALLADS
THE subject of this chapter needs careful definition. Sundry
shorter poems, lyrics of whatever purpose, hymns, 'flytings,'
political satires, mawkish stories in verse, sensational journalism
of Elizabethan days and even the translation of Solomon's Song,
have gone by the name of ballad. Ballad societies have published
a vast amount of street-songs, broadsides and ditties such as
Mme de Sévigné knew in Paris under the name of Pont-neuf;
for many readers, unfortunately, there is no difference between
these 'ballads' and Chevy Chace or Sir Patrick Spens. The
popular ballad, however, now in question, is a narrative poem
without any known author or any marks of individual authorship
such as sentiment and reflection, meant, in the first instance, for
singing, and connected, as its name implies, with the communal
dance, but submitted to a process of oral tradition among people
free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous. Conditions
favourable to the making of such poetry ceased to be general after
the fifteenth century; and, while it was both composed and pre-
served in isolated rural communities long after that date, the instinct
which produced it and the habit which handed it down by word
of mouth were, alike, a heritage of the past. Seen in critical
and historical perspective, balladry takes its distinguishing marks
mainly from this process of oral tradition. Owing to this process,
the ballad has lost its dramatic or mimetic and choral character
and become distinctly epic; it has, in many cases, even forfeited its
refrain, once indispensable; but it has kept its impersonal note,
lacks, last as first, all trace of deliberate composition and appeals
to the modern reader with a charm of simplicity quite its own.
Nearly all critics are agreed that no verse of this sort is produced
under the conditions of modern life; and the three hundred and five
individual ballads, represented by some thirteen hundred versions,
printed in the great collection of Child, may be regarded, practically,
## p. 396 (#414) ############################################
396
Ballads
as a closed account in English literature. Diligent gleaning of the
field in the ten years following the completion of that work has
brought little or nothing that is new; and little more can be
expected. Here and there a forgotten manuscript may come
to light; but, in all probability, it will contain only a version
of some ballad already known. The sources of tradition have,
apparently, at last run dry. Sir George Douglas notes that the
Scottish border shepherds, at their annual dinners, no longer sing
their old or their own ballads; what are known as 'songs of the
day,' mainly of music-hall origin, now rule without any rivals
from the past. Remote and isolated districts in the United States
keep a few traditional versions alive; such is The Hangman's
Tree, a version of The Maid Freed from the Gallows, still sung,
with traces of Yorkshire dialect, after generations of purely
oral tradition, as it was brought over to Virginia 'before the
revolution. But these recovered versions have revealed little
that is both good and new.
Yet another line of demarcation must be drawn. English and
Scottish ballads as a distinct species of poetry, and as a body,
can be followed back through the fifteenth century, occur spora-
dically, or find chance mention, for a century or so before
and then altogether cease. Owing to the deplorably loose way in
which the word 'ballad' is applied, not only the references of
early historians, like William of Malmesbury, to the 'popular
songs,' the cantilenae, the carmina vulgaria, from which they
draw for occasional narrative, but also the passages of older epic
that tell a particular deed or celebrate a popular hero, are, alike,
assumed to indicate a body of ballads, similar to those of the
collections, extending back to the Norman conquest, back even
to the Germanic conquest of Britain, but lost for modern readers
by the chances of time and the lack of written record. Such a
body of ballads may, indeed, be conjectured; but conjecture should
not pass into inference. Not a single specimen is preserved. It
is, to be sure, unlikely that the primary instinct of song, the
tendency to celebrate heroes and events in immediate verse, and
the habit of epic tradition, main constituents of balladry, should
cease as we cross the marches of the Transition period and pass
from the modern speech and modern metres, in which our ballads
are composed, into that more inflected language, that wholly
different form of rhythm, which prevailed in Old English and,
with some modifications, in all Germanic verse. To claim for
this older period, however, ballads of the kind common since
## p. 397 (#415) ############################################
The Canute Song
397
the fifteenth century in England, Scandinavia and Germany, is
an assertion impossible to prove. The Old English folk must
have had popular ballads of some sort; but it cannot be said what
they were. Singing, to be sure, implies a poem in stanzas; and that
is precisely what one cannot find in recorded Old English verse
the one exception, Deor's song, being very remote from balladry.
It is true that the subject of a popular ballad can often be traced
far back; Scandinavian ballads still sing the epic heroes of
‘Old Norse. ' Community of theme, however, does not imply a
common poetical form; and it is the structure, the style, the
metrical arrangement, the general spirit of English and Scottish
ballads, which must set them apart in our literature and give them
their title as an independent species. We find a relative plenty
of 'popular' verse in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries—songs by a political minstrel of some sort, which had
their immediate vogue, were recorded here and there, and soon
forgotten—but this sort of thing should not be confused with songs
made among the people, passed down by oral tradition and marked
with those peculiarities of structure and style which are inseparable
from the genuine ballad of the collections. In the absence of
texts, conjecture is useless. The earliest recorded piece of English
verse which agrees with balladry in all these important charac-
teristics is the famous song of Canute, preserved in the chronicles
of Ely'. The king's actual part in the case is doubtful, and
unimportant. Coming by boat, it is said, with his queen and
sundry great nobles to Ely, Canute stood up, bade his men row
slowly, 'called all who were with him in the boats to make a
circle about him . . . and to join him in song; and composed in
English a ballad (cantilenam) which begins as follows:
Merie sunge the munechës binnen Ely,
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.
Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,
And herë we these munechës sung. . . . '
The verses are familiar; but their significance is not always
noted. The chronicler turns them into Latin, and, with clear
reference to popular tradition, adds—and so the rest of the
song] as it is sung in these days by the people in their dances,
and handed down as proverbial. . . . That is, the song was
traditional a century and a half after the supposed fact, and it
seemed natural to the chronicler that such a cantilena should be
1 Historia Eliensis, 11, 27, in Gale, Hist. Script. 1, 505.
## p. 398 (#416) ############################################
398
Ballads
improvised to the singing of a chorus. Perhaps songs of this
kind were in Malmesbury's mind when he apologised for using as
material for his history cantilenae 'worn by the friction of time';
but the political verse of minstrels like the later Laurence Minot is
a more likely assumption; and, whatever the likelihood, the verse
itself has vanished. In Canute's case there is a fragment of actual
song, of the highest value; for it is not only one of the earliest
recorded pieces of English poetry to break away from the uniform
stichic order of Old English metres, but it is in the rhythm
which belongs to the best English and Scandinavian ballads of
tradition. Grundtvig thinks that the quoted lines are the burden
or chorus of the piece, which was doubtless narrative in its further
course, and told, one may conjecture, of Canute's own deeds. This
desire of the warrior to sing the battles he has fought did not
pass away with the lost songs. A passage in bishop Leslie's
History of Scotland, used in part by Andrew Lang for the
solution of the problem of ballad origins, declares that 'our
bordir men,' as Dalrymple translates, delight in their own music
and in the songs that they themselves make about their deeds and
about the deeds of their forbears. The bishop's Latin is un-
.
equivocal: cantiones quas de majorum gestis, aut ingeniosis prae-
dandi precandive stratagematis, ipsi confingunt. Gaston Paris',
on good evidence, has made a similar assertion about the early
Germanic and English warriors, who, before the days when the
minstrel existed in a professional class, sang their own deeds
and furnished the prime material of later epics. Even in Beowulf
a warrior is described improvising a song on the defeat of Grendel
There is, thus, a presumption that border ballads, like Cheviot
and Otterburn, owed their earliest form to the improvisation
of fighting men who could sing their own deeds; and thus, too,
one draws a faint line, mainly touching theme and conditions of
origin, from the 'old song of Percy and the Douglas' back to those
lost lays that inspired the poet of Beowulf.
But this is all. Of the actual structure and form of those old
lays nothing is known; and it must be remembered that even
Cheviot and Otterburn, while of the undoubted general type of
balladry, are not, in more exact analysis, of the typical construc-
tion which one finds in ballads recovered from genuine oral
tradition. All that can be said of material gathered from older
chronicles, or suspected in older poems, is that it lends itself to
1 In Romania, xiII, 618, he explicitly defends the analogy of these border songs
with the old cantilenae of Germanic warriors.
1
## p. 399 (#417) ############################################
Outlaw Ballads and Political Songs 399
conjecture, not to proof. The one exception is this song of
Canute, which may pass as a genuine ballad fragment.
Short work can be made of other assumptions. In the four-
teenth century, ‘rimes of Robin Hood and Randolph, earl of
Chester,' are mentioned in Piers the Plowman as known to the
common men of that day. Robin Hood ballads are preserved;
the Randolph cycle is lost. But the outlaw literature must have
been popular long before that. The story of Fulk Fitz-Warine,
preserved in French prose and paraphrased by Leland in fragments
from 'an old Englisch boke yn ryme,' gives its hero traits and
experiences not unlike those of Robin Hood. The forged chronicle
of Croyland says that 'ballads' about Hereward were still sung, in
the chronicler's day, by the common people and by women at the
dance. The deeds of Waltheof at York, told by Malmesbury, are
plainly taken 'from a ballad'--so Freeman declares; but from
what sort of ballad ? Waltheof, it is true, was sung ‘in the war-
like songs of the tongues of both his parents'; one of these songs,
however, the Danish one, is preserved, and has no trace of balladry
about it, but all the art and artifice of the professional scald.
Ballads of the outlaw, indeed, would be of a popular and traditional
type, as the Robin Hood cycle shows; but political songs, which
also had their vogue, were, doubtless, made by the minstrel,
who, also, retouched and sang again the rude verses which warrior
or outlaw had improvised, taking them out of their choral con-
ditions, smoothing, adding, connecting and making them fit for
chant and recitation de longue haleine, precisely as the jongleurs
of early France, according to Gaston Paris, remade the improvi-
sations of an age that knew no minstrel class at all into the
chansons de geste and into the epic itself. Such remade poems
could again be broken into ballads, popular enough, sung and
transmitted by very humble folk. For a late example, the Scottish
ballad Guide Wallace has its evident source in the Wallace of
Blind Harry; but the portions of Blind Harry's poem,' says
Child, 'out of which these ballads were made, were, perhaps,
themselves composed from older ballads, and the restitution
of the lyrical form may have given us something not altogether
unlike what was sung in the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth century. '
Nevertheless, most of the 'ballads' cited by the chroniclers seem
to have been political songs, more or less popular-not what could
be called, in strict use of the term, a traditional ballad.
In one case, we are on sure negative ground. Henry of
Huntingdon has a fiery piece of description in which he reproduces
a
## p. 400 (#418) ############################################
400
Ballads
the story of a battle; as with similar passages, a 'ballad' is his
source; but here, luckily, that source is known. He is translating
a poem, inserted in the Old English Chronicle, on the battle of
Brunanburh; and whoever will read this poem, whether in the
original or in Tennyson's spirited rendering, can see at how great
a distance it stands from any ballad of the traditional kind.
Minstrels, moreover, as actual authors of the ballads recorded
at a later day, are utterly out of the question. Barring a few
wretched specimens labelled by Child with the minstrel's name,
and inserted in the collection because they still may retain some
traditional note, that ‘rogue by act of parliament' to whom Percy
ascribed the making of practically all English and Scottish
ballads is responsible for none of them. It has been pointed out
by Kittredge as 'capable of practically formal proof that for
the last two or three centuries the English and Scottish ballads
have not, as a general thing, been sung or transmitted by profes-
sional minstrels or their representatives. There is no reason
whatever for believing that the state of things between 1300 and
1600 was different, in this regard, from that between 1600 and
1900. . . . Still stronger proof lies in the fact that we have the
poetry which the minstrels did make; and it is far removed from
balladry. "The two categories are distinct. When, finally, one
studies the structure and the elements of the ballad itself as a
poetic form, a form demonstrably connected with choral dramatic
conditions in its origin but modified by a long epic process in the
course of oral and quite popular tradition, one is compelled to
dismiss absolutely the theory of minstrel authorship, and to regard
ballads as both made and transmitted by the people. This phrase
is often misunderstood and challenged, but in vain. All poetry,
good and bad, is found by the last analysis to be made in the same
way; and there is no romantic mystery or 'miracle' about the
ballad. What differentiates it from other forms of poetry is the
conditions under which it is made and the agency by which it is
handed down. We may reasonably infer for early times such a
making and such a transmission; but the older product is lost, and
we are restricted for our study to the actual and undisputed
material at our command.
All English and Scottish ballads agree in the fact of tradition,
-tradition, in the main, oral and communal ; and there result from
this fact two capital exceptions to the ordinary rules of literary
investigation. It is well nigh useless to hunt for the 'original'
document of a given ballad, or to compare the several varying
a
6
## p. 401 (#419) ############################################
The Ballad Question
401
versions, and so establish, by whatever means, an authentic text.
It is also useless to lean with any confidence upon chronology.
Some of the ballads gathered, within a century or so, from oral
tradition of Scotland, are distinctly older in form than many
of the ballads of the Percy manuscript, written down in the seven-
teenth century, and are closer to the traditional ballad type than
many pieces of even earlier date of record than the famous folio.
This renunciation of authentic original texts, and of chronology
in the ordinary sense, is generally conceded. A few critics,
however, are still of opinion that ballads are, after all, nothing
but anonymous poems, and that to trace a ballad to its author
is not, necessarily, an impossible task.
We touch here the inevitable ‘ballad question,' not to argue
about it, but simply to record the fact that weight of authority,
as well as numbers, inclines to the side of those who refuse to
obliterate the line between popular ballads and lettered verse,
and who are unable to accept writers like Villon in France and
Dunbar in Scotland as responsible for songs which, by this con-
venient hypothesis, have simply come down to us without the
writers' names. Child, cautious as he was in committing himself
to any theory, signed an explicit confession of faith in the ballad
as an independent poetic species.
Tradition is something more than a confusion of texts; a choral
throng, with improvising singers, is not the chance refuge, but,
rather, the certain origin, of the ballad as a poetic form; and, while
1;
one is not to regard the corpus of English and Scottish ballads as
directly due to such singing and improvisation, it is thither that one
turns for origins, and it is to tradition that one turns for the growth
and spread of the versions themselves. Once choral, dramatic, with
insistent refrain and constant improvisation, the ballad came to be
a convenient form for narrative of every sort which drifted into
the ways of tradition. This traditional process has been mainly
epic, although oral tradition alone would not and does not force
the ballad out of its choral structure, its dramatic and lyric
purpose. What slowly reduces the importance and, therefore, the
function of these old elements is the tendency of ballads towards
the chronicle, the story, the romance. Literary influences worked
upon it for these ends.
A close study of the material demands that we distinguish
two general classes. One, demonstrably the older in structure,
.
tends in form to the couplet with alternating refrain or burden,
and in matter to the rendering of a single situation. These
E. L. II.
26
CH. XVII.
## p. 402 (#420) ############################################
402
Ballads
ballads, often closely allied to Scandinavian versions, are printed
by Child in the forepart of his collection as a tribute to their
undoubted age. A dominating feature here, often recorded and
always to be assumed, is repetition; it takes a form peculiar to
balladry, is found in all these old pieces and has even left its
mark on the majority of the other versions in Child's four volumes.
As, however, epic purposes prevailed, this typically oldest ballad
was lengthened in plot, scope, details, and was shorn entirely of
its refrain. Hence a second class, the long ballad, recited or
chanted to a monotonous tune by a singer who now feels it to
be his property, a kind of enclosed common. Instead of the short
singing piece, steeped in repetition, almost borne down by its
refrain, plunging abruptly into a situation, describing no characters
and often not naming them, telling no long story and giving no
details, here is a deliberate narrative, long and easy of pace, free
of repetitions, bare of refrain, abounding in details and covering
considerable stretches of time. By a happy chance, indeed, this
epic process can be followed into its final stage. We have a
number of ballads which tell different adventures in the life of
Robin Hood; and we have an actual epic poem, formed upon
these ballads or their very close counterparts, which embodies the
adventures in a coherent whole. Between the style of the Gest of
Robyn Hode, however, and the style of the best Robin Hood
ballads, there is almost no difference at all; and these, for all their
age of record, may well represent the end of the epic process in
balladry. In metrical form, they hold to the quatrain made up of
alternating verses of four and three measures, which is not very
far from the old couplet with its two alternating verses of the
refrain. The change in structure is mainly concerned with loss of
choral elements, especially of incremental repetition. The well
known opening of Robin Hood and the Monk shows both the
change in form and the new smoothness of narrative •
In somer, when the shawes be sheyne
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song;
To se the dere drawe to the dale,
And leve the hillës hee,
And shadow hem in the levës grene
Under the grenewood tre.
Hit befel on Whitsontide. . .
Then the story begins with a dialogue between Little John and
Robin, passes into the third personal narrative and so tells its tale
## p. 403 (#421) ############################################
Babylon
403
with a good plot, fair coherence of motive, character and event,
exciting incident of fight, imprisonment, disguise, escape and the
proper pious conclusion-
Thus endys the talking of the munke
And Robyn Hode i-wysse;
God, that is ever a crowned king,
Bryng us all to his blisse!
not unlike the prayer that Chaucer puts into the mouth of the
nun's priest when his tale is told. There are ninety stanzas
preserved in this ballad, and it has suffered losses by mutilation
of the fifteenth century manuscript. Old as it is by record, how-
ever, it seems far more finished, familiar, modern, than a ballad
recovered centuries later from oral tradition in Scotland, short,
intense, abrupt, with communal song for every other line of it
from beginning to end, a single dominant situation, a dramatic
and choral setting. Just enough epic detail has been added here
to supply in tradition what was lost by transfer from actual choral
rendering; and, even as it is, the taking by the hand, the turning
round, seem little more than the stage directions of a play.
Babylon, local only by name and place, is familiar in its plot
or situation 'to all branches of the Scandinavian race, and has
long wandered on its path of tradition. The reader should repeat
or sing aloud both the burden and the stanzas throughout:
There were three ladies lived in a bower,
Eh vow bonnie,
And they went out to pull a flower
On the bonnie banks o Fordie.
They hadna pu’ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man.
He's taen the first sister by the hand,
And he's turned her round and made her stand.
It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? '
It's I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife. '
He's killed this may), and he's laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.
He's taken the second ane by the hand,
And he's turned her round, and made her stand.
'It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? '
I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I'll rather die by your wee pen-knife. ?
1 Maid.
26-2
## p. 404 (#422) ############################################
404
Ballads
He's killed this may, and he's laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company,
He's taken the youngest ane by the hand,
And he's turned her round, and made her stand.
Says, 'Will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? '
I'll not be a rank robber's wife,
Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.
For I hae a brother in this wood,
And gin ye kill me, it's he'll kill theel!
"What's thy brother's name? Come tell to me. ' -
‘My brother's name is Baby Lon. '
"O sister, sister, what have I done!
O have I done this ill to thee!
O since I've done this evil deed,
Good sall never be seen oʻ2 me. '
He's taken out his wee pen-knife,
Eh vow bonnie,
And he's twyneds himsel oʻhis ain sweet life
On the bonnie banks o Fordie.
6
It needs no deep critical insight to see how near this little
ballad is to the choral throng. The characters, of course, can
be said' or told instead of being presented and acted, and a
word of information must be given about them; but no attempt
is made, as later epic curiosity would demand, to tell more
particularly who and what they were. The situation is the main
thing, and it is developed by a method which, evidently, depends
upon choral and dramatic conditions. The refrain of the throng
is constant; and the action advances not by continuous narrative
but by a series of repetitions, in sets of three stanzas, each
repetition, however, containing an increment, a new phrase or
word to match the new posture of affairs. This incremental
repetition is the main mark of old ballad structure ; it is woven
into the stuff, retained its importance long after the choral con-
ditions which were responsible for it had been forgotten and
occurs whenever a situation needs to be expressed in an emphatic
form. Only in the long narrative ballads, the chronicles, the
pieces that have been submitted to the most urgent epic demands,
does this incremental repetition fade away. Moreover, it furnishes
the connection with that source of balladry-not of mended
ballads-in improvisation and communal composition, with the
1 The rimes in this and the next two stanzas are, evidently, disordered.
Of=by.
8 Deprived, parted.
3
## p. 405 (#423) ############################################
The Making of Ballads 405
a
singing and dancing throng so often described by medieval writers.
Studies in old Portuguese popular song show a corresponding
growth of interlaced repetitions, in fixed formula, out of choral
iteration in the communal dancel.
A ballad known in English as The Maid Freed from the
Gallows still has an astonishing vogue throughout Europe; in
Finland, alone, there are fifty versions of it. Now and then, a
narrative has been prefixed to explain the situation; but, usually,
the situation stands for itself and is, beyond all doubt, original. The
setting, of course, varies; now the girl is to be drowned, or carried
off by pirates, now, as in the English version, she faces death on the
gallows. Who will save her? She appeals to a series of relations, all
of whom refuse to interfere, until a climax is reached, say with the
true love, who is ready to part with all he has and is, so as to save her
life. For each of the relatives there is the same stanza of request,
the same stanza of refusal, the increments being mere change from
father to mother, to brother, to sister and so on, till, with the true-
love, refusal turns to triumphant consent. The cardinal facts in this
ballad are, first, the ease with which it can be sung to any length,
so long as names of relatives hold out, with no artistic effort of com-
position, after the initial stanzas have once been given, and, second,
and most significant fact, the actual use of it for dance and mimetic
game in one of the English versions, in a Faroe version and in
sundered groups like the Danish and the Magyar. Not only is the
connection of dance and ballad firmly established, but, as Kittredge
points out, the making of ballads in a throng becomes a perfectly
intelligible and even necessary process. Of course, few ballads
can remain in this initial stage. They are submitted to oral
tradition, and are sung as stories rather than presented as action.
More than this, a whole narrative, often a definite occurrence,
historical or legendary, or even, it may be, a late form of some
old classical tale, will find its way into the ballad structure and
so be handed down in the traditional way. The epic process
changes this ballad structure, however, only so far as the narrative
demands; there is a succession, rather than a juxtaposition, of
events, smoother progress, disuse of the refrain, pruning of re-
petition, and, above all, a desire for better aesthetic values.
Otherwise, the narrative complies with the rules of its form.
The ballad remains anonymous, objective, simple. From the
mass of stories drifting along the same traditionary stream, other
1 See H. R. Lang, Old Portuguese Songs,' in Festgabe für Adolfo Mussafia,
Halle, 1905, and his earlier Liederbuch des Königs Denis von Portugal.
## p. 406 (#424) ############################################
406
Ballads
details may join the old situation or the borrowed tale, and make
a narrative out of it which has counterparts in popular ballads
all over the world. 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.
