Brevity is a characteristic of the true ballad, and it may be, in this respect, profitably contrasted with Buchan’s versions. Version C of Brown Adam (98) “has the usual marks of Buchan’s copies, great length, vulgarity, and such extravagance and absurdity as are found in stanzas 23, 26, 29.”[291] “Buchan, who may generally be relied upon to produce a longer ballad than anybody else, has ‘Young Waters’ in thirty-nine stanzas, ‘the only complete version which he had ever met.’”[292] His version of The Gay Goshawk (96, G) is “vilely dilated and debased,”[293] and that of Jellon Grame (90, C) “has nearly the same incidents as B, diluted and vulgarized in almost twice as many verses.”[294]

The action is seldom carefully localized: the compiler of A Gest of Robyn Hode was careless of geography.[295] The New England copy of Archie o Cawfield (188, F) “naturally enough, names no places.” “The route in C is not described[2] there is no reason, if they start from Cafield (see 23), why they should cross the Annan, the town being on the eastern side. All difficulties are escaped in D by giving no names.”[296] The attention given to the setting in some of the Robin Hood ballads is, then, exceptional. Of Robin Hood and the Monk (119), “the landscape background of the first two stanzas has often been praised, and its beauty will never pall. It may be called landscape or prelude, for both eyes and ears are addressed, and several others of these woodland ballads have a like symphony or setting: Adam Bell, Robin Hood and the Potter, Guy of Gisborne, even the much later ballad of The Noble Fisherman. It is to be observed that the story of the outlaw Fulk Fitz Warine, which has other traits in common with Robin Hood ballads, begins somewhat after the same fashion.”[297]

In dealing with the supernatural the way of the true ballad is to omit description or explanation. In James Harris (243), “to explain the eery personality and proceedings of the ship-master, E-G, with a sort of vulgar rationalism, turn him into the devil.... D (probably by the fortunate accident of being a fragment) leaves us to put our own construction upon the weird seaman; and, though it retains the homely ship-carpenter, is on the whole the most satisfactory of all the versions.”[298] In Johnie Scot (99) “the champion is described in A 31 as a gurious (grugous, gruous?) ghost; in H 27 as a greecy (frightful) ghost; in L 18 he is a fearsome sight, with three women’s spans between his brows and three yards between his shoulders; in the Abbotsford copy of A, 29, 30, a grisly sight, with a span between his eyes, between his shoulders three and three, and Johnie scarcely reaching his knee. These points are probably taken from another and later ballad, which is perhaps an imitation, and might almost be called a parody, of Johnie Soot.”[299] Ghosts, though not thought sufficiently strange to demand special treatment, should, nevertheless, “have a fair reason for walking.... In popular fictions, the motive for their leaving the grave is to ask back plighted troth, to be relieved from the inconveniences caused by the excessive grief of the living, to put a stop to the abuse of children by stepmothers, to repair an injustice done in the flesh, to fulfil a promise; at the least, to announce the visitant’s death.”[300]

Turning now from technique,—from treatment of plot, of setting, of the supernatural,—to style in the narrower sense, we find that the comments are again largely in the way of pointing out flaws, or traits which are not characteristic of the true ballad, and which are due to the peculiar conditions of ballad transmission. From such negative comments may be inferred, again, the stylistic marks of the true ballad. Thus, in the first place, ballad style is artless and homely. In Andrew Lammie (233):

Her bloom was like the springing flower

That hails the rosy morning,

With innocence and graceful mein

Her beauteous form adorning.

and

‘No kind of vice eer staind my life,