No More Learning

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.


## p. 411 (#429) ############################################

Balladry in Rags
411
verse.
Estmere must overwhelm the soldan; Susy Pye (in Young Beichan)
and Hind Horn must win their loves. These are entertaining
Earl Brand, however, like Babylon, like the Scandi-
navian versions, is tragic in the matter; although a closely related
ballad, Erlinton, killing fifteen of the pursuers, spares the father,
and lets the lovers go off happy to the greenwood. Lady Isabel,
too, escapes by whatever stratagem from her savage wooer; and
here, of course, are borrowed motives, as in the 'three cries' for
help. There is a glimpse, too, of supernatural aid, as, in some
versions, that of the talking birds. In a ballad of similar theme, but
quite prosaic details, The Fair Flower of Northumberland, it is
hard to say whether the supernatural elements have been toned
down or lost, or else were never in the piece at all. Among other
elopement stories of the primitive sort, mainly situation but with
a few romantic details, Gil Brenton, a sterling old ballad, is
worthy of note; the type, however, easily passes into mere sen-
sation, into mawkish and cheap sentiment and into the rout of
tales about runaways fair or foul, mainly localised in Scotland.
There is even sadder stuff than this. Brown Robin, Willie and
Earl Richard's Daughter (purporting to account for the birth of
Robin Hood), Rose the Red and White Lily, The Famous Flower
of Serving Men and Tim Potts, are a descending series with very
low fall. The singing-robes of balladry are here in rags, and tawdry
rags too. There is recovery of old traditions, however, in the
Scottish ballads of bride-stealing or elopement like Katharine
Jaffray_whether Scott's own doing, or compiled from traditional
fragments, in any case the model of his Young Lochinvar-and in
like pieces of varying merit, Bonny Baby Livingston, Eppie
Morrie and The Lady of Arngosk—the last named known in many
of its details, both as an event about 1736 and as a popular song,
but unfortunately recovered only in fragments. Very different,
finally, is the tone of two good ballads, Willie's Lyke-Wake and
The Gay Goshawk, where love finds out the way by stratagem and
inspires robust verse of the old kind.
Complications of kin make up ballads of domestic tragedy,
a most important group; and even the inroads of a doggerel poet
upon the old material, even the cheap 'liturature of the stalls,
cannot hide that ancient dignity. The motive of Bewick and
Graham, outwardly a story of two drunken squires near Carlisle,
their quarrel, and the sacrifice of two fine lads to this quarrel in
the conflict of filial duty with ties of friendship-told, by the way,
in verse that often touches the lowest levels-redeems the ballad


## p. 412 (#430) ############################################

412
Ballads
from its degraded form and gives it the pathos of a Cid. The cry
of the dying victor-
Father, could yo not drunk your wine at home,
And letten me and my brother be?
a
>
is not impressive, perhaps, as a quotation ; but in its context and
climax it stands with the great things of the great poems. Andrew
Lammie, enormously popular in the north of Scotland, represents
another class of homely ballads, more or less vulgarised by their
form, their overdone sentiment and their efforts at literary grace,
but not without appeal and a certain force of tradition. Tradition
at its purest, and an appeal to which few readers fail in respond-
ing, characterise the great ballads of domestic tragedy. Edward,
for example, is so inevitable, so concentrated, that sundry critics,
including the latest editor of Scott's Minstrelsy, would refer it
to art; but tradition can bring about these qualities in its own
way. Lord Randal, with its bewildering number of versions;
Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, a favourite in Shakespeare's
day and often quoted ; Glasgerion (who may be the 'Glascurion
mentioned in Chaucer's House of Fame and may represent the
Welsh Glas Keraint), a simple but profoundly affecting ballad on a
theme which no poet could now handle without either constraint or
offence; Child Maurice; The Cruel Brother; The Twa Brothers
with a particularly effective climax-offer tragedy of the false
mistress, the false wife, the false servant, and tragedy of more
complicated matter. Wives false and wives true are pictured in two
sterling Scottish ballads, The Baron o' Brackley and Captain Car,
both founded on fact. The Braes o' Jarrow knew another faithful
wife. Darker shadows of incest, mainly avoided by modern litera-
ture, fall in possibility on Babylon, quoted above, and in real
horror upon Sheath and Knife and Lizie Wan. The treacherous
nurse, again, with that bloody and revengeful Lamkin-a satiric
name-long frightened Scottish children; and a case of treachery
in higher station, involving trial by combat and giving many hints
of medieval ways, is preserved in the old story of Sir Aldingar,
familiar to William of Malmesbury. Finally, there is the true-
love. The adjective is beautifully justified in The Three Ravens,
unfortunately less known than its cynical counterpart, The Tua
Corbies. True love is false in Young Hunting ; and fickle lovers
come to grief in Lord Lovel, Fair Margaret and Sweet William,
and Lord Thomas and Fair Annet. Fate, not fickleness,
however, brings on the tragedy in Fair Janet, Lady Maisey,


## p. 413 (#431) ############################################

Child Waters
413
Clerk Saunders; while fickleness is condoned and triumphant in
ballads which Child calls 'pernicious': The Broom o Cowden
knowes and The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie. Better is the
suggestion of The Wife of Bath's Tale in the popular Knight
and Shepherds Daughter. Child Waters, which both Child and
Grundtvig praise as the pearl of English ballads, belongs to the
well known group of poems celebrating woman's constancy under
direst provocation; neither Chaucer's Clerk's Tale nor that
dramatic poem of the Nut Brown Maid pleads the cause of
woman with more eloquence. Ellen in the stable, with her new-
born child, appeals to any heart:
Lullabye, my oune deere child !
Lullabye, deere child, deere!
I wold thy father were a king,
Thy mother layd on a beere!
While this ballad has wandered far from the dramatic and choral
type, the survival in its structure is marked enough; and its
incremental repetition, in several sequences, is most effective.
Ballads of the funeral, echoes of the old coronach, vocero,
whatever the form of communal grief, are scantily preserved in
English; Bonnie James Campbell and The Bonny Earl of Murray
may serve as types; but the noblest outcome of popular lament,
however crossed and disguised by elements of other verse it may
seem in its present shape, is Sir Patrick Spens, which should be
read in the shorter version printed by Percy in the Reliques, and
should not be teased into history. The incremental repetition and
climax of its concluding stanzas are beyond praise. Less affecting
is the 'good night'-unless we let Johnny Armstrong, beloved
of Goldsmith, pass as strict representative of this type. Lord
Maxwell's Last Good Night, it is known, suggested to Byron
the phrase and the mood of Childe Harold's song. To be a
ballad, however, these 'good nights' must tell the hero's story,
not simply echo his emotion.
Superstition, the other world, ghost-lore, find limited scope in
English balladry. Two ballads of the sea, Bonnie Annie and
Broun Robyn's Confession, make sailors cast lots to find the 'fey
folk' in the ship, and so to sacrifice the victim. Commerce with
the other world occurs in Thomas Rymer, derived from a romance,
and in Tam Lin, said by Henderson to be largely the work of
Burns. Clerk Colvill suffers from his alliance with a mermaid.
The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, a mournful little ballad from
Shetland, tells of him who is 'a man upo' the lan',' but a seal,


## p. 414 (#432) ############################################

414
Ballads
'a silkie in the sea. ' Other transformation ballads are Kemp
Owyme, Allison Gross and The Laily Worm. In Sweet William's
Ghost, however, a great favourite of old, and in the best of
all 'supernatural' ballads, The Wife of Usher's Well, dignified,
pathetic, reticent, English balladry competes in kind, though by no
means in amount, with the riches of Scandinavian tradition.
Epic material of every sort was run into the ballad mould.
King Orfeo finds Eurydice in Shetland; the ballad is of very old
structural type. Sacred legends like that of Sir Hugh, and
secular legends such as Hind Horn, occur; while Sir Cawline and
King Estmere are matter of romance. Possibly, the romances of
Europe sprang in their own turn from ballads ; and Sir Lionel, in
the Percy folio, with its ancient type of structure, may even
reproduce the kind of ballads which formed a basis for Sir Cawline
itself. Minstrels, of course, could take a good romance and make
it over into indifferent ballads; three of these are so described by
Child—The Boy and the Mantle, King Arthur and King Corn-
wall and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine. With the cynical Crow
and Pie we reach the verge of indecency, also under minstrel
patronage, though it is redeemed for balladry by a faint waft of
tradition. This piece, along with The Baffled Knight and The
Broomfield Hill, is close to the rout from which Tom D'Urfey
selected his Pills to Purge Melancholy. Thoroughly debased is
The Keach in the Creel; but The Jolly Beggar, especially in the
'old lady's' manuscript, is half-redeemed by the dash and swing
of the lines. Old ladies, as one knows from a famous anecdote
of Scott, formerly liked this sort of thing, without losing caste, and
saw no difference between it and the harmless fun of Get Up and
Bar the Door, or the old story, which Hardy seems to record as
still a favourite in Dorsetshire, of Queen Eleanor's Confession.
With this ballad we come to history, mainly perverted, but
true as tradition. Lord Delamere, debased in broadsides, Hugh
Spencer's Feats in France and the vastly popular John Dory;
naval ballads like the poor Sweet Trinity and the excellent
Sir Andrew Barton; Scottish King James and Brown, and
that sterling ballad Mary Hamilton which Andrew Lang has
successfully called back from Russia to its place at queen Mary's
own court, with twenty-eight versions still extant to attest its
vogue-all these are typical in their kind. But the historical
ballad, recited rather than sung epic in all its purposes and
details, and far removed from the choral ballad of dramatic
situation, is best studied in those pieces which have become
a


## p. 415 (#433) ############################################

The Historical Ballad
415
traditional along the Scottish border. Not all, however, are of
the chronicle type. In 1593, a certain freebooter was hanged, and
his nephew took good vengeance for him, calling out a ballad;
whatever its original shape, one finds it still fresh with the impres-
sion of actual deeds; and, in its nervous couplets, its lack of
narrative breadth, the lilt and swing of it, one is inclined to call
The Lads of Wamphray a case of ipsi confingunt—a phrase of
which Leslie was making use, not far from this date, as to the
Borderers and their songs. The dialogue is immediate, and has
the old incremental repetition :
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me gang,
And I vow I'll ne'er do a Crichton wrang.
O Simmy, Simmy, now let me be,
And a peck o' goud I'll gio to thee.
O Simmy, Simmy, let me gang,
And my wife shall heap it wi' her hand.
This was not made at long range. Epic, on the other hand, and
reminiscent, is Dick o' the Cow-cited by Tom Nashe-a good
story told in high spirits ; long as it is, it has a burden, and was
meant to be sung. Archie o' Cawfield, Hobie Noble, Jock o' the
Side and others of the same sort are narratives in the best
traditional style ; Scott's imitation of these is Kinmont Willie-
at least it is so much his own work as to deserve to bear his name.
Still another class is the short battle-piece, of which Harlaw,
Bothwell Bridge and even Flodden Field, preserved by Delmey,
may serve as examples. Durham Field, in sixty-six stanzas, was
made by a minstrel. Refusing classification, there stand out those
two great ballads, probably on the same fight, Cheviot and Otter-
burn. The version of the former known as Chevy Chace, 'written
over for the broadside press,' as Child remarks, was the object
of Addison’s well known praise ; what Sidney heard as 'trumpet
sound' is not certain, but one would prefer to think it was the
old Cheviot. One would like, too, the liberty of bringing Shake-
speare into the audience, and of regarding that ancient ballad as
contributing to his conception of Hotspur. These are no spinsters'
songs, but rather, in the first instance at least, the making and the
tradition of men-at-arms. A curiously interlaced stanza arrange-
ment, here and there to be noted in both the old Cheviot and
Otterburn, as well as Richard Sheale's signature to the former as
part of his minstrel stock, imply considerable changes in the
structure of the original ballad. Sheale, of course, had simply
copied a favourite song; but the fact is suggestive.
6


## p. 416 (#434) ############################################

416
Ballads
a
Last of all, the greenwood. Johnie Cock, says Child, is
'a precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad. ' A
single situation and event, it contrasts sharply with a long
story like Adam Bell as well as with the various pieces, short
or long, which deal with Robin himself. From Johnie Cock to
the Gest is a process of great interest to the student of traditional
verse. Had the Gest, indeed, been made by its humble rhapsode
in an unlettered age, the epic process would have had even more
scope, and would have drawn upon poetic sources already claimed
for deliberate composition and the literary record. As it is, Robin
may be proud of his place. ‘Absolutely a creation of the ballad
muse,' he is the hero of a sterling little epic, and of thirty-six
extant individual ballads, good and bad ; the good are mainly
of a piece with the old epic material, and the bad are indebted
for their badness to the corruptions of the broadside press, the
editing for garlands and the exhausted vitality of late tradition.
Robin has a definite personality throughout, though the degenerate
ballads, as in the case of late poems about Charlemagne, make
him anybody's victim. Any local hero could be exalted by the
simple process of outwitting and trouncing the old master of that
craft. One of the latest poems, a dreary compilation called the
True Tale of Robin Hood, the only piece in Child's collection
which is not anonymous, is the work of Martin Parker. But
one forgets trash. Robin remains as the best ballads and the
Gest have drawn him-generous, brave, pious, with a touch of
melancholy and a touch of humour unknown to the strictly choral
а
The narrative art of this good verse is very high. No
story is better told anywhere than the story of Robin's loan to
Sir Richard and its payment; humour is held firmly in hand ;
and Chaucer himself could not better the ease and sureness of
the little epic. Nor does the Gest improve in all ways upon its
material. Robin Hood and the Monk is a sterling piece of
narrative. The brief close of the Gest, telling, in five stanzas, how
Robin was “beguiled' and slain, and rather awkwardly quoting
an unconnected bit of dialogue, should be compared with the
ballad of Robin Hood's Death from the Percy folio. Here, in
spite of eighteen missing stanzas, the story is admirably told.
Every incident counts: the testy humour of Robin at the start,
the mysterious old woman banning him as she kneels on the plank
over 'black water, the fatal bleeding, the final struggle, revenge,
pious parting and death-good narrative throughout. It is clear
that a process had taken place in the gradual formation of this
muse.


## p. 417 (#435) ############################################

Ballad Sources
417
cycle which not only brought its several parts into fair coherence,
but, also, exercised a reactionary influence upon tradition itself.
In any case, with these ballads of Robin Hood, balladry itself
crossed the marches of the epic, and found itself far from the
old choral, dramatic improvisations, though still fairly close to
the spirit and motive of traditional verse.
A word remains to be said on the sources and the values
of British ballads as a whole. Common 'Aryan' origin, though
it was still held in a modified form by Gaston Paris, can no longer
be maintained so as to account for the community of theme
in the ballads of Europe. What has been done by scholars like
Child and Grundtvig, by Nigra, Bugge and others, is to have
established certain groups, more or less definite, which, in different
lands and times, tell the same general story or give the same
particular motive or detail. To account for these groups is an-
other task.