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English and Scottish Ballads of the 15th c.

The popular balladis a narrative poem without any known author or any marks of individual authorship, 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 15thcentury; and, while it was both composed and preserved in isolated rural communities long after that date, the instinct which producted it and the habit which handed it down by word of mouth were, alike, a heritage of the past.

English and Scottish ballads as a distinct species of poetry, and as abody, can be followed back through the fifteenth century, occur sporadically, 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 carminavulgaria, 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.

The most popular ballad cycle of the period wasRobin Hood ballads.

In the 14thcentury, “rimes of Robin Hood and Randolph, earl of Chester,” are mentioned in Piers the Plowman as known to the common men of that day. But the outlaw literature must have been popular long before that. 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 conditions, 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 improvisations of an age that knew no minstrel class at all into the chansons degeste and into the epic itself.

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.



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 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 Maitland is spurious, and he drops it from his list; but Andrew Lang makes a vigorous plea for it. It has the marks of a traditional 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.

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 Brown 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 SuleSkerry, a mournful little ballad from Shetland, tells of him who is “a man upo’s the lan’,” but a seal, “a silkie in the sea.” Other transformation ballads are Kemp Owyne, 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 Cornwall 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’” 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 castle, 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 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 impression 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 ipsiconfingunt—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. Epic, on the other hand, and reminiscent, is Dick o’s 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’s Cawfield, Hobie Noble, Jock o’s 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 Otterburn. 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 Shakespeare into the audience, and of regarding that ancient ballad as contributing to his conception of Hotspur. These are no spinsters’s songs, but rather, in the first instance at least, the making and the tradition of men-at-arms. A curiously interlaced stanza arrangement, 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.

305 the most famous British ballads were collected by F.J. Child during the second half of the 19th century. Apart from the group of Robin Hood ballads, funeral ballads and tragedy ballads, one more remains – Border ballads.

Border ballads, like all traditional ballads, were sung unaccompanied. There may be a repeating motif, but there is no “chorus” as in most popular songs. The supernatural is a common theme in Border ballads, as are recountings of raids and battles. The most famous ballad of the cycle is The Ballad of Chevy Chase(written in 1430s). The ballads tell the story of a large hunting party upon a parcel of hunting land in the Cheviot Hills. The hunt is led by Percy, the English earl of Northumberland. The Scottish earl of Douglas had forbidden this hunt and interpreted it as an invasion of Scotland. In response he attacked, causing a bloody battle after which only 110 people survived. The ballad has historical and political background and was well-known in English literature.

The text of this ballad was either quoted or mentioned in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, etc.


Date: 2015-01-11; view: 2848


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