Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

When that I was and a little tiny boy

With a heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy

And the rain it raineth every day.

The narrative ballad was most in favour where people were fondest of dancing. The love-song or the nonsense verses could not be kept up so long; something more was wanted, and this was given by the story; also as the story was always dramatic, more or less, with different people speaking, the entertainment was all the better. If this is not the whole explanation, it still accounts for something in the history, and it is certainly true of some places where the ballad has flourished longest. The carole has lasted to the present day in the Faroe Islands, together with some very ancient types of tune; and there the ballads are much longer than in other countries, because the dancers are unwearied and wish to keep it up as long as may be. So the ballads are spun out, enormously.

The history of ballad poetry in Western Europe, if one dates it from the beginning of the French carole fashion—about 1100—is parallel to the history of pure lyric, and to the history of romance. It is distinct from both, and related to both. There are many mysterious things in it. The strangest thing of all is that it often seems to repeat in comparatively modern times—in the second half of the Middle Ages—what has been generally held to be the process by which epic poetry begins. There is reason for thinking that epic poetry began in concerted lyric, something like the ballad chorus. The oldest Anglo-Saxon heroic poem, Widsith, is near to lyric; Deor’s Lament is lyric, with a refrain. The old Teutonic narrative poetry (as in Beowulf) may have grown out of a very old sort of ballad custom, where the narrative elements increased and gradually killed the lyric, so that recitation of a story by the minstrel took the place of the dancing chorus. However that may be, it is certain that the ballads of Christendom in the Middle Ages are related in a strange way to the older epic poetry, not by derivation, but by sympathy. The ballad poets think in the same manner as the epic poets and choose by preference the same kind of plot. The plots of epics are generally the plots of tragedies. This is one of the great differences between the Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the later romances. It is a difference also between the romances and the ballads. Few of the romances are tragical. The story of Tristram and the story of King Arthur are tragical; but the romantic poets are beaten by the story of Tristram, and they generally keep away from the tragedy of Arthur. The ballads often have happy endings, but not nearly so often as the romances; in the best of the ballads there is a sorrowful ending; in many there is a tragical mistake; in many (and in how few of the romances!) there is a repetition of the old heroic scene, the last resistance against the enemy as in Roncevaux or in the Nibelunge Nôt. Chevy Chase is the ballad counterpart of Maldon; Parcy Reed or Johnny of Braidislee answers in the ballad form to the fight at Finnesburgh, a story of a treacherous onset and a good defence. Parcy Reed, beset and betrayed, is more like a northern hero than a knight of romance.

The mystery is that the same kind of choice should be found in all the countries where ballads were sung. The English and Scottish ballads, like the English romances, are related to similar things in other lands. To understand the history of the ballads it is necessary, as with the romances, to compare different versions of the same matter—French or German, Italian, Danish.

Many curious things have been brought out by study of this sort—resemblances of ballad plots all over Christendom. But there is a sort of resemblance which no amount of ‘analogues’ in different languages can explain, and that is the likeness in temper among the ballad poets of different languages, which not only makes them take up the same stories, but makes them deal with fresh realities in the same way. How is it that an English ballad poet sees the death of Parcy Reed in a certain manner, while a Danish poet far off will see the same poetical meaning in a Danish adventure, and will turn it into the common ballad form? In both cases it is the death of a hero that the poet renders in verse; deaths of heroes are a subject for poetry, it may be said, all over the world. But how is it that this particular form should be used in different countries for the same kind of subject, not conventionally, but with imaginative life, each poet independently seizing this as the proper subject and treating it with all the force of his mind?

The medieval ballad is a form used by poets with their eyes open upon life, and with a form of thought in their minds by which they comprehend a tragic situation. The medieval romance is a form used originally by poets with a certain vein of sentiment who found that narrative plots helped them to develop their emotional rhetoric; then it passed through various stages in different countries, sinking into chapbooks or rising to the Orlando or the Faerie Queene—but never coming back to the old tragic form of imagination, out of which the older epics had been derived, and which is constantly found in the ballads.

Probably the old ballad chorus in its proper dancing form was going out of use in England about 1400. Barbour, a contemporary of Chaucer, speaks of girls singing ballads ‘at their play’; Thomas Deloney in the time of Elizabeth describes the singing of a ballad refrain; and the game lives happily still, in songs of London Bridge and others. But it became more and more common for ballads to be sung or recited to an audience sitting still; ballads were given out by minstrels, like the minstrel of Chevy Chase. Sometimes ballads are found swelling into something like a narrative poem; such is the famous ballad of Adam Bell, Clim o’ the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee, which has a plot of the right sort, the defence of a house against enemies. The Little Geste of Robin Hood seems to be an attempt to make an epic poem by joining together a number of ballads. The ballad of Robin Hood’s Death is worth reading as a contrast to this rather mechanical work. Robin Hood’s Death is a ballad tragedy; again, the death of a hero beset by traitors. Red Roger stabbed Robin with a grounden glave (‘grounden’ comes from the oldest poetic vocabulary). Robin made ‘a wound full wide’ between Roger’s head and his shoulders. Then he asks Little John for the sacrament, the housel of earth (he calls it ‘moud’, i.e. ‘mould’) which could be given and taken by any Christian man, in extremity, without a priest—