[1] See proofs by Mr. George Neilson, in Blind Harry's "Wallace," "Essays and Studies," by Members of the English Association, 1910.
[CHAPTER XV.]
POPULAR POETRY. BALLADS.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and Scotland were rich in popular poetry and in ballads. We must define the meaning of "popular" and "ballad" poetry, as used in this chapter.
Much confusion and much controversy exist regarding this matter of ballads and popular poetry. To understand the subject it is necessary to be acquainted with the results of research in the orally transmitted verse of peoples in every stage of culture; for till elementary instruction in reading and writing become universal, the untaught rural classes retain, in their songs, the literary methods of the quite uncivilized races of Australia, North America, Africa, and so on.
Taking the, peoples lowest in civilization, we find that the Australian blacks and the American Red Indians have several kinds of songs, usually sung in dances, whether festive or religious or magical. They have magic chants, and even hymns, often unintelligible to those who sing them in the dance, either because the language is obsolete, or because the songs have been borrowed from tribes of alien speech. It is clear that in Europe, too, the ballad was originally a dancing song ("ballad" is from ballare, to dance), and where a story was told, that was given in recitative, while the dancers followed each line of narrative with a chorus or refrain, such as
There were three ladies lived in a bower,
Oh wow! bonnie.
And they went out to pu' a flower
On the bonnie banks o' Fordie.
The story told in the recitative, in surviving examples, was probably, at first, composed by one author, versifying a popular tale, of unknown antiquity, or narrating some recent event. Even now in the remoter isles of the Hebrides, various singers, each in turn, improvise and chant verses, and thus a kind of ballad is made collectively. But it is plain that for each of our oldest surviving narrative ballads there must have been one original author, whether his theme was an old story or a recent occurrence,—on the Borders usually a cattle raid, the escape of a prisoner, or a battle. There would be no professional poet, as Queen Mary's ally, Bishop Leslie of Ross tells us, in his "History of Scotland," "the Borderers themselves make their own ballads, about the deeds of their ancestors, or crafty raids or forays". Such unwritten songs would be altered by every singer, as time went by, so that these ballads as they stand are thoroughly popular and "masterless," many hands have combined to bring them into their present state.