They took the gallows from the slack,
They set it in the glen,
They hanged the proud sherìff on that,
Released their own three men.
NOTES.
Among the earliest and most popular of English ballads are those relating to Robin Hood. This noted, half-mythical outlaw was the impersonation of popular rights as they were understood by Englishmen of the lower orders in the days of the Plantagenets. Hence the memory of him and his reputed deeds was preserved in the songs of the people. "It is he," says an old historian, "whom the common people love so dearly to celebrate in games and comedies, and whose history, sung by fiddlers, interests them more than any other." Even so late as the reign of Edward VI., "Robyn Hoode's Daye" was very generally observed in the country parishes as a day of feasting and amusement.
The ballads were originally the production of wandering minstrels or gleemen, a class of men very popular in the Middle Ages, who followed the profession of poetry and music. These rude poets were held in the highest esteem and veneration by the people among whom they lived; they were received and welcomed wherever they went, and even kings delighted to honor them. In short, their art was supposed, by the Anglo-Saxons, to be of divine origin, having been invented by Odin, the great All-Father, and perfected by Bragi, the musician of the gods. As, however, civilization advanced and Christianity became established, this admiration for the minstrel and his art became modified in a degree. He was no longer regarded as a poet, but only as a singer, a sweet musician. Poetry was cultivated by men of leisure and refinement; but lyrical ballads remained the peculiar inheritance of the minstrel. For a long time after the Norman conquest, minstrels continued to gain their livelihood by singing in the houses of the great, and at festive occasions, which were never considered complete unless graced by the presence of these honored descendants of Bragi; nor did they cease to compose and sing their inimitable pieces until near the close of Elizabeth's reign. The greater number of the ballads now in existence were probably produced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and the best of them originated in the "North Country," or the border region between England and Scotland. They were not at first reduced to writing, but were handed down from one generation to another merely by oral tradition. As regards their metre and versification, the ballads were commonly composed of iambic hexameters or heptameters rhyming in couplets. These couplets are readily broken into stanzas of four lines, in which form they are usually printed.
The first collection of English ballads ever published was probably that of John Dryden, in 1684. The collection was included in a volume entitled Miscellany Poems. In 1723 a work called A Collection of Old Ballads was published anonymously. In 1724 Allan Ramsay issued The Evergreen, "being a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600." This work included many popular songs and ballads. It was reprinted in 1875.
We owe the preservation of a large number of the most interesting and beautiful ballads to Bishop Percy, who, in 1765, published the first really valuable collection of such works in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Previous to that time most of these songs had existed only in manuscript, or, if printed at all, in the cheapest style of typography, on sheets designed for circulation among the poor. Bishop Percy's work first called the attention of scholars to the value and beauty of these neglected and half-forgotten relics, and did much to bring about that revolution in literature which took place in the latter part of the last century. And it is to these old ballads, thus rescued from oblivion, that we owe very many of the noblest literary productions of the present century. We know that they were the immediate inspiration of Sir Walter Scott, and that they exerted a wonderful influence in modifying and directing the taste and style of many other distinguished writers.
The Fifteenth Century.
"When we pass from Chaucer's age, we have to overleap nearly a hundred and eighty years before we alight upon a period presenting anything like an adequate show of literary continuation. A few smaller names are all that can be cited as poetical representatives of this sterile interval in the literary history of England: whatever of Chaucer's genius still lingered in the island seeming to have travelled northward and taken refuge in a series of Scotch poets, excelling any of their English contemporaries. We are driven to suppose that there was something in the social circumstances of England during the long period in question which prevented such talent as there was from assuming the particular form of literature. Fully to make out what this 'something' was may baffle us; but, when we remember that this was the period of the Civil Wars of the Roses, we have reason to believe that the dearth of pure literature may have been owing, in part, to the engrossing nature of the practical questions which then disturbed English society. . . . Accordingly, though printing was introduced during this period, and thus Englishmen had greater temptations to write, what they did write was almost exclusively plain grave prose, intended for practical or polemical occasions, and making no figure in a historical retrospect."—David Masson.