Take again the ballad of “The Elfin Knight” or “The Wind hath blown my Plaid away.” This is found in Scotland, but also as a broadside in the Pepysian collection; it was the subject within the memory of man of a sort of play in farmhouses in Cornwall; it is found in a more or less fragmentary condition all over England. The same ballad is found in German, in Danish, in Wend—and the story in Tyrol, in Siberia, and Thibet.
Buchan, in his “Ballads of the North of Scotland,” gives the ballad of “King Malcolm and Sir Colvin,” but it is based on a story told by Gervase of Tilbury, in his Otia Imperialia, and the scene is laid by him on the Gogmagog Hills in Cambridgeshire. He wrote in the 12th century, and his story is clearly taken from a ballad. So also Buchan’s “Leesome Brand” is found in Danish and Swedish. And “The Cruel Sister” is discovered in Sweden and the Faroe Isles. At an early period there was a common body of ballad, where originated no one can say; the same themes were sung all over the North of Europe, and the same words, varied slightly, were sung from the Tweed to the Tamar, in the marches of Wales and in Ireland.
The greatest possible debt of gratitude is due to the Scots for having preserved these ballads when displaced and forgotten elsewhere, and it speaks volumes for the purity of Scottish taste that it appreciated what was good and beautiful, when English taste was vitiated and followed the fashion to prefer the artificial and ornate to the simple and natural expression of poetic fancy.
It has been said that about the period of James I., the fashion set in for re-writing the old ballads in the style then affected.
There is a curious illustration of this accessible.
A ballad still sung by the English peasants, and found in an imperfect condition in Catnach’s broadsides, is “Henry Martyn.” It is couched in true ballad metre, and runs thus—
“In merry Scotland, in merry Scotland
There lived brothers three,
They all did cast lots which of them should go
A robbing upon the salt sea.