I have brought my readers through a waste literary country to-day; but we cannot reach the oases of bloom without going across the desert spaces. In looking back upon this moil and turmoil—this fret and wear and barrenness of the fifteenth century, in which we have welcomed talk about Caxton’s sorry translations, and the wheezing of his press; and have given an ear to the hunting discourse of Dame Juliana, for want of better things; and have dwelt with a certain gleesomeness on the homely Paston Letters, let us not forget that there has been all the while, and running through all the years of stagnation, a bright thread of balladry, with glitter and with gayety of color. This ballad music—whose first burst we can no more pin to a date than we can the first singing of the birds—had lightened, in that early century, the walk of the wayfarer on all the paths of England; it had spun its tales by bivouac fires in France; it had caught—as in silken meshes—all the young foragers on the ways of Romance. To this epoch, of which we have talked, belongs most likely that brave ballad of Chevy Chase, which keeps alive the memory of Otterbourne, and of that woful hunting which
“Once there did, in Chevy Chase befal.
“To drive the deare with hounde and horne
Erle Percy took his way;
The child may rue, that is unborn
The hunting of that day.”
Hereabout, too, belongs in all probability the early English shaping of the jingling history of the brave deeds of Sir Guy of Warwick; and some of the tales of Robin Hood and his “pretty men all,” which had been sung in wild and crude carols for a century or more, now seem to have taken on a more regular ballad garniture, and certainly became fixtures in type. This is specially averred of “Robin Hood and the Monk,” beginning:—
“In summer when the shawes be sheyne
And levès be large and long,
Hit is full merry, in feyre forést,