On the Dating of the English and Scottish Ballads
by Louise Pound
PMLA, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1932), pp. 10-16
II. ON THE DATING OF THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH BALLADS
THE practice has established itself among literary historians and anthologists of associating the English and Scottish ballads primarily with the fifteenth century, sometimes with the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. One of the best and most popular of the histories of English
literature now used in schools and colleges states in its revised editions:
"These ballads appear to have flourished luxuriantly among the folk in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after which their composition
ceased. Over three hundred of them, in 1,300 versions, have survived,
and have been collected and printed."[1] The now widely used History of
English Literature by M. Emile Legouis, the most ambitious among recent
histories of our literature, remarks of the ballads: "They cannot all
be claimed for the fifteenth century, for poems of this sort must have had
an earlier beginning and certainly were produced until a later time, but
the impulse to make them seems to have been particularly active in this
century, to which, moreover, the oldest extant specimens belong."[2] A
recent excellent poetical anthology has: "Ballad is the name applied to a
simple form of narrative poetry which in England and Scotland flourished
between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries."[3] Statements like
these leave with readers the definite impression that the fifteenth century
was the heyday of ballad production, and that the bulk of the three hundred
ballads in Professor Child's collection emerged from this century,
or from an even earlier period.
An examination of the standard historical anthologies used in schools
and colleges leaves the same impression with readers. In one of the most
recent,4 the exhibit of English ballads-including "Edward" and "Sir
Patrick Spens"-comes directly after Chaucer. The display precedes, not
follows, lyrics like the well-known "Cuckoo Song" of the thirteenth century,
"Springtime," "Alysoun," "A Plea for Pity," "Blow, Northern
Wind," and even the Quem Quaeritis trope. Another,5 under the heading
"Chaucer to the Renaissance," enters "Captain Car," or "Edom O'Gordon,"
"Lord Randal," "The Wife of Usher's Well," and "Bonny Barbara
1 Moody and Lovett, History of English Literature, 1902, 1918, etc., page 67.
2 A History of English Literature: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Translated by
H. D Irvine. 1926.
3 Jacob Zeitlin and Clarissa Rinaker. Types of Poetry, 1926.
4 James Dow McCallum, The Beginnings to 1500, 1929. Scribner's English Literature
series.
5 J. W. Cunliffe, J. F. A. Pyre, Karl Young, Century Readings in English Literature, 1929.
10
Louise Pound
Allan." Another6 has "Edward," "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Wife of
Usher's Well," "The Two Corbies," and "Mary Hamilton," under
"The Later Middle Ages." Another7 has, under "The End of the Middle
Ages," "Edward," "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Wife of Usher's Well,"
"Bonnie George Campbell." Another,8 one of the most recent, enters
under the heading "The Age of Chaucer," "Edward," "Sir Patrick
Spens," "The Wife of Usher's Well," "Bonny Barbara Allan," and
"Johnny Armstrong." These precede, as in the anthology first cited, the
thirteenth-century "Cuckoo Song," and the early lyrics, "Springtime,"
"Alysoun," "A Plea for Pity," and "Blow, Northern Wind." Another,9
which has on the whole careful chronological arrangement, supplies the
heading "Ballads of Uncertain Date," but enters among them "The
Nut-Brown Maid," and "Helen of Kirconnell," the first of which is, as
pointed out long ago, a verse debate, a bit of special pleading, while the
second is a pure lyric. Both were once accounted ballads but both were
excluded from his collection by Professor Child. Professor Reed Smith,
in a recent anthology of South Carolina ballads'? writes of "Five Hundred
Years of 'The Maid Freed from the Gallows'," remarking that it
was "composed before Chaucer's pilgrimage," although our earliest text
of it comes from the Percy Papers of the eighteenth century and we are
ignorant of its antecedent history. There is not a scrap of evidence to
connect it with the days before Chaucer's pilgrimage.
Accounts of ballads or displays of ballad texts are often accompanied
by statements such as "ballads have no dates," "it is impossible to assign
dates to ballads," or "the dates of ballads are unknown"; and this
explains, no doubt, the far from careful way in which the texts are placed
chronologically. The effect, however, on the users of anthologies is to
lead them to believe that the body of the Child ballads, or at least, the
illustrative texts entered for the student to read, date from before the
Renaissance.
6 Lieder, Lovett, and Root, British Poetry and Prose, 1928.
7 Snyder and Martin, A Book of English Literature1, 916. "The End of the Middle
Ages" is also the heading under which ballads are placed in J. M. Manly's English Poetry
1170-1892, 1907.
8 T. P. Crossa nd C. T. Goode,R eadingsin theL iteraturoe f England,1 927.
9 H. S. Pancoast, English Verse and Prose, 1915. "Middle English Writers" is the heading
underw hich balladsa re groupedi n The ModernS tudent'sB ooko f EnglishL iterature,
by H. M. Ayres, W. D. Howe, and F. M. Padelford, 1924. G. H. Gerould in his Old English
and MedievalL iterature(1 929) devotes more than a hundredp ages to illustrationso f fifteenth-
centuryli terature.A ll but about twenty of these pages are given over to a miscellany
of Child ballads, among them "Mary Hamilton," Percy's literary text of "Edward,"
etc.
10S outhC arolinaB allads. 1928.
11
Dating of the English and Scottish Ballads
Professor Ewald Fluegel, in an article in Anglia as far back as 1899,11
made a valuable survey of the dating of the ballad texts. He found that
one of the Child texts comes from the thirteenth century, none from the
fourteenth, very few from the fifteenth (only a few clerical and greenwood
pieces antedate 1500), and ten or fewer may come from the sixteenth.
Thus not more than fifteen or twenty, at the most liberal estimate,
of the texts coming down to us antedate 1600. The number usually
given is eleven.'2 The rest of the hundreds of the Child texts come from
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The date of the
recovery of ballad texts is not the same thing, of course, as establishing
the dates of their origin. A ballad may have been composed much earlier
than the earliest text of it that happened to be preserved. Naturally, too,
most texts would reach us from later centuries, since conscious efforts to
find and to preserve ballads came late. But, at least, Professor Fluegel's
survey affords no evidence for the pre-Renaissance period as that of their
greatest popularity and production. It does not justify sentences like
"After the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their composition ceased."
Other lyric matter, both popular and secular, has come down to us in
abundance from before the Renaissance, but, curiously enough, not ballads.
Professor Frank Bryant in his Harvard dissertation on the history of
ballads,'3 reached the conclusion: "If the Child type was at all common
[in the reign of Elizabeth] the almost universal silence about it is as
strange as it was undeserved.... My own conclusion," he adds, "-oft
arrived at-is, therefore, that the Child ballad was not much current in
Southern England." Professor Bryant reached this opinion after a careful
survey of the history of English and Scottish ballad material, and I
have always felt inclined to agree with him.
Is it not time that we stopped repeating so mechanically and unqualifiedly
that "ballads have no dates"? Though we may not be able to date
accurately a large number of them, yet each had its date if we could find
it. Occasionally the general period from which a ballad emerged can be
determined by the nature or content-the subject-matter or story-of
the oldest text; or by the slant of the composer in handling his narrative;
or by the ballad style in which he composed. To illustrate, among the
Robin Hood ballads, those in which England is reflected as yet Catholic
must have come from the period before the Protestantizing of England.
Those in which Robin Hood is burlesqued or disparaged must have been
11 Anglia, xxi, Neue Folge, ix, 312-358.
2 Cf., for instance: "Only some eleven of the ballads are preserved in documents older
than the seventeenth century." Century Readings in English Literature, page 105.
18 A History of British Balladry, 1913, page 192.
12
Louise Pound
late of composition, when the tradition was in its decay. The ballads of
"The Hunting of the Cheviot" and "The Battle of Otterburne" cannot
have preceded the events with which they profess to deal, although the
composition of them might come from as late as the early sixteenth century,
much as our best-known poem of John Brown comes, not from the
date of his activities but from our own decade. The allegorical "Rose of
England," reflects unmistakably the period of the civil Wars of the
Roses. The terminus a quo, at least, can often be established with no uncertainty
at all. Ballads cannot be earlier than the events they celebrate,
where they are not obviously adaptations, as certain American narratives,
of pieces already in existence.
I wish here to protest, in general, against the customary sweeping references
by literary historians and critics to "the ballads," accompanied
by no effort to place them with whatever chronological exactness may be
possible. There are many layers of the Child ballads. They come from
different periods and different regions, and they are composed in different
styles. When we group them historically we ought to try to do so with
discrimination, selecting as carefully as we can those that may best be
associated with the historical period that we have in mind. The association
may be suggested by the events treated, or the character of the narrative,
or by the style, or by the date of recovery of the text. But certainly
one of these considerations should be taken into account when
texts are presented to illustrate certain periods. The Child ballads include
many classes: sacred legends and classical stories, riddle ballads,
and wit contests, ballads of the greenwood, (these are earlier types),
chronicle ballads, Border ballads, ballads of the dying or dead, nautical
ballads, ballads of domestic tragedy, love stories, romances, ballads of
the supernatural, humorous ballads. They bear plain traces of emerging
from different periods and of conforming to changing tastes. It is as unscientific
to speak sweepingly of "the ballads" as it is to speak of the body
of English sonnets, from four centuries, as "the sonnets," or to speak of
"the odes," "the hymns," or "the elegies," as though they were the homogeneous
products of one or two periods.
Let us return to the matter of the ballad groupings made by literary
anthologists. The events chronicled in "Johnny Armstrong" took place,
according to Professor Child's investigations, in 1530. The ballad might
have been composed some time after that date. It could not have been
composed before it. Why allow it, then, to appear in the Age of Chaucer?
The burning of the house of Towie by Captain Car ("Edom O'Gordon")
occurred in 1571. Why, then, place the ballad telling of this event before
1500, as though antedating the Renaissance? "Mary Hamilton" belongs,
in the events narrated, in the reign of Mary Stuart. Why place it under
13
Dating of the English and Scottish Ballads
"The Later Middle Ages"? We first hear of "Barbara Allan" as the
Scotch song of a London actress, heard by the diarist Samuel Pepys. It
is about what it ought to be for a stage song of the seventeenth century.
A hundred years later Goldsmith heard it sung by a dairymaid, the natural
fate of a London success of the preceding century. Yet this song also
has been placed in the "Age of Chaucer." Sir Walter Scott's striking text
of "The Wife of Usher's Well" is a favorite among ballads placed in early
periods by anthologists. His is a rather suspicious version, probably
touched up by him. The texts of this ballad are yet to be studied; but
those that are not Scott's, (especially the American texts, which often
retain earlier features of the Child ballads than do those from the Old
World) are so different from his as to bring his into question. In any case,
the ballad gives better testimony concerning late eighteenth-century
Scottish folk-song than it does concerning that of Chaucer's time. "The
Two Corbies" is another of Scott's texts, and sounds like it. If this song
is to be placed "Before the Renaissance," it would be wiser to select the
earlier seventeenth-century text of it from Melismata (1611), "The Three
Ravens," than to go to Scott's Minstrelsy of 1802. Much the same protest
may be made against "Edward," placed early by a majority of anthologists,
doubtless because of the formerly-held theory that "situation
songs" represent a very early type. Percy's version of "Edward" is a
quite isolated one, composed in literary Scots of the eighteenth century.
Professor Archer Taylor has pointed outl4 that the many other texts of
this song are not debased versions of Percy's texts. Percy's may be the
manipulated text, while the other versions represent an older form of the
story. "Edward" no more belongs properly in the Age of Chaucer than
does "Lord Randal," for which Sir Walter Scott's is one of the older
English texts. We have our first knowledge of this song as belonging to
the repertory of an Italian professional singer in Verona in the seventeenth
century. That it existed in England at Chaucer's time is extremely
unlikely. Of "Sir Patrick Spens" we know nothing before Percy's
Reliques. "Bonnie George Campbell" is almost a pure lyric, hardly a ballad
at all, and it cannot be traced back of the eighteenth century.
In general, an impressive number of the Child ballads can be dated
by the events they describe. To illustrate, the sea fight narrated in "Sir
Andrew Barton" took place in 1511. The exploit celebrated in "Jock O
the Side" took place about 1550, and that in "Archie O Cawfield" about
1579. That referred to in "Willie Macintosh" came in 1592, and so did
the events in the "Bonnie Earl of Murray" and "The Laird O Logie."
"The Lads O Wamphray" tells of a skirmish that took place in 1593.
14 "The Texts of 'Edward' in Percy's 'Reliques' and Motherwell's 'Minstrelsy'." MLN,
April, 1930.
14
Louise Pound 15
The exploit told in "Kinmont Willie" took place in 1596. The murder in
"The Laird of Wariston" took place in 1600. Lord Maxfield of "Lord
Maxfield's Last Goodnight" was executed in 1613. The pillaging of the
"Bonny House of Airlie" was in 1640. Johnny Faa of "The Gypsy Laddie"
belonged in the first half of the century; he was executed in 1624.
The death of "Bessie Bell and Mary Gray" may be referred to the plague
of 1645, etc.15
It is natural, I think, that the fifteenth century, despite its meagreness
of ballad production, should be given chief emphasis in literary histories
and anthologies. It is more convenient to give them space there than in
the crowded following century, the sixteenth, or to let them follow Percy's
Reliques in the yet more crowded eighteenth century. Another reason
for our favoring the fifteenth century is that we like to think of "the
ballads" vaguely as "old," and the fifteenth century affords a last chance
to enter them as mediaeval. The tradition started of presenting them
here; it has never been given up, nor its validity questioned. Probably it
need not be given up. Ballads may be treated with a degree of appropriateness
in the fifteenth century as a time when the type was definitely
emerging. The century should not have too great emphasis, however
nor should students be led to believe that they flourished luxuriantly
then, and that soon after their composition ceased. Further, the texts
cited in illustration should be confined to those that, with some probability,
may be cited as late mediaeval. The canvassings of Fluegel and
Bryant suggest the throwing forward of the date of production of the
Child ballads, in the mass, until later centuries; and this shift forward is
valid, I think. Their heyday came after, not before, the Renaissance.
The typical ballads that most writers on the subject recall, when admiring
the spirited quality of ballads, their lyrical appeal, and the characteristics
of their style, are those of Scotland, of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the selected texts touched up by Sir Walter Scott,
16 I have made no exhaustive examination of the Child ballads for the dates of the
events they narrate, where these can be determined; but the following are additional examples
of ballads dealing, according to Professor Child, with events that occurred in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries: No. 168, "Flodden Field," 170, "The
Death of Queen Jane," 171, "Thomas Cromwell," 172, "Musselburgh Field," 174, "Earl
Bothwell," 175, "The Rising in the North," 176, "Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas,"
177, "The Earl of Westmoreland," 179, "Rookhope Ryde," 180, "King James and Brown,"
196, "The Fire of Frendraught," 197, "James Grant," 198, "Bonny John Seton," 202,
"The Battle of Philiphaugh," 203, "The Baron of Brackley," 204, "Jamie Douglas," 205,
"Loudon Hill," 206, "Bothwell Bridge," 207, "Lord Delamere," 208, "Lord Derwentwater,"
209, "Geordie," 225, "Rob Roy," 229, "Earl Crawford," 230, "The Slaughter of
the Laird of Mellerstain," 231, "The Earl of Erroll," 232, "Richie Story," 233, "Andrew
T,ammie," 236, "The Laird o Drum," 287, "Captain Ward and the Rainbow."
Dating of the English and Scottish Ballads
or those printed by the great Scottish collectors who specialized in the
best texts that they could find. It is partly, too, because of this specialization
on the part of the nineteenth-century collectors, and because of our
formulation of our ideas of the ballads from the attractive Scotch ballad
style, that we have so exalted an idea of the poetical quality of English
folk-song as a whole. Weak and crude texts existed, of course, alongside
the poetical ones, but no one preserved them. The collectors of the twentieth
century preserve whatever they find, good and bad. The great collectors
of nineteenth-century Scotland preserved the best they could
find, and thought the rest negligible.
The purpose of this brief paper has been to make a plea, first, against
overemphasis on the fifteenth century as the heyday of ballad popularity
and production; second, against too sweeping assertion that "ballads
have no dates"; for it is possible to date, approximately, a surprising
number of them; third, against too sweeping references to "the ballads,"
as though no discriminations need be made concerning them; and, fourth,
against too great carelessness of chronological considerations in the selection
of texts for period-placement in anthologies.
LOUISE POUND
University of Nebraska