SONGS AND BALLADS
King Canute’s boat-song has some claim to be the earliest English song in
rhyme—
Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely
Tha Knut king rew therby:
Roweth, knihtes, ner the land
And here we thes muneches sang.
If this claim be disallowed, then the first is St. Godric, the hermit of
Finchale in the reign of Henry II—his hymn to Our Lady and the hymn to
St. Nicholas. These are preserved along with the music (like the Cuckoo
song which comes later); the manuscript of the poems of Godric is copied
in the frontispiece to Saintsbury’s _History of English Prosody_; it
proves many interesting things. It is obvious that musical notation is
well established; and it seems to follow that with a good musical
tradition there may be encouragement for lyric poetry apart from any such
‘courtly’ circumstances as have been described in another chapter. There
is no doubt about this. While it is certain on the one hand that the
lyrical art of the Middle Ages was carried furthest in courtly society by
the French, Provençal, German and Italian poets, it is equally certain
that the art of music flourished also in out-of-the-way places. And as in
those days musical and poetical measures, tunes and words, generally went
together, the development of music would mean the development of poetical
forms, of lyric stanzas. Music flourished in England most of all in
Godric’s country, the old Northumbria. Giraldus Cambrensis, who has been
quoted already for his story of the wake and the English love-song, gives
in another place a remarkable description of the part-singing which in
his time was cultivated where it is most in favour at the present day—in
Wales, and in England north of the Humber. Where people met to sing in
parts, where music, therefore, was accurate and well studied, there must
have been careful patterns of stanza. Not much remains from a date so
early as this, nor even for a century after the time of Godric and
Giraldus. But towards the end of the reign of Edward I lyric poems are
found more frequently, often careful in form. And in judging of their art
it is well to remember that it is not necessary to refer them to the
courtly schools for their origin. Country people might be good judges of
lyric; they might be as exacting in their musical and poetical criticisms
as any persons of quality could be. Hence while it is certain that
England before the time of Chaucer was generally rustic and provincial in
its literary taste, it does not follow that the rustic taste was
uninstructed or that the art was poor. The beauty of the English songs
between 1300 and 1500 is not that of the nobler lyric as it was (for
example) practised and described by Dante. But the beauty is undeniable,
and it is the beauty of an art which has laws of its own; it is poetry,
not the primitive elements of poetry. In art, it is not very far from
that of the earlier Provençal poets. For everywhere, it should be
remembered, the noble lyric poetry was ready to draw from the popular
sources, to adapt and imitate the rustic themes; as on the other hand the
common people were often willing to take up the courtly forms.
The earliest rhyming songs are more interesting from their associations
than their own merits; though Canute and St. Godric are certainly able to
put a good deal of meaning into few words. Godric’s address to St.
Nicholas is particularly memorable for its bearing on his own history.
Godric had been a sea captain in his youth (like another famous author of
hymns, the Rev. John Newton) and St. Nicholas is the patron saint of
sailors. Godric, whose operations were in the Levant, had often prayed to
St. Nicholas of Bari, and he brings the name of the saint’s own city into
his hymn, by means of a sacred pun. ‘Saint Nicholas’, he says, ‘build us
a far sheen house—
At thi burch at thi bare
Sainte Nicholaes bring us wel thare.
‘Bare’ here means shrine, literally, but Godric is thinking also of the
name of the ‘burgh’, the city of Bari to which the relics of the saint
had been lately brought.
Religious lyric poetry is not separate from other kinds, and it
frequently imitates the forms and language of worldly songs. The _Luve
Ron_ of the Friar Minor Thomas de Hales is one of the earliest poems of a
type something between the song and the moral poem—a lyric rather far
away from the music of a song, more like the lyrics of modern poets,
meant to be read rather than sung, yet keeping the lyrical stave. One
passage in it is on the favourite theme of the ‘snows of yester year’—
Where is Paris and Heleyne
That were so bright and fair of blee!
This is earlier in date than the famous collection in the Harleian MS.,
which is everything best worth remembering in the old lyrical poetry—
Betwene Mersche and Averil
When spray beginneth to springe.
The lyrical contents of this book (there are other things besides the
songs—a copy of _King Horn_, e.g.)—the songs of this Harleian MS.—are
classified as religious, amatory and satirical; but a better division is
simply into songs of love and songs of scorn. The division is as old and
as constant as anything in the world, and the distinction between
‘courtly’ and ‘popular’ does not affect it. In the older court poetry of
Iceland, as in the later of Provence and Germany, the lyric of scorn and
the lyric of praise were equally recognized. The name ‘Wormtongue’ given
to an Icelandic poet for his attacking poems would do very well for many
of the Provençals—for Sordello, particularly, whose best-known poem is
his lyrical satire on the Kings of Christendom. It depends, of course, on
fashion how the lyrical attack shall be developed. In England it could
not be as subtle as in the countries of Bertran de Born or Walter von der
Vogelweide, where the poet was a friend and enemy of some among the
greatest of the earth. The political songs in the Harleian manuscript are
anonymous, and express the heart of the people. The earliest in date and
the best known is the song of Lewes—a blast of laughter from the
partisans of Simon de Montfort following up the pursuit of their defeated
adversaries—thoroughly happy and contemptuous, and not cruel. It is
addressed to ‘Richard of Almain’, Richard the king’s brother, who was
looked on as the bad counsellor of his nephew Edward—
Sir Simon de Montfort hath swore by his chin,
Hadde he now here the Erl of Warin
Sholde he never more come to his inn
With shelde, ne with spere, ne with other gin
To helpe of Windesore!
_Richard! thah thou be ever trichard,_
_Trichen shalt thou never more!_
This very spirited song is preserved together with some others dealing
with later events in the life of Edward. One of them is a long poem of
exultation over the death of the King’s Scottish rebels, Sir William
Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser; the author takes great pleasure in the
treatment of Wallace by the King and the hangman—
Sir Edward oure King, that full is of pité
The Waleis’ quarters sende to his owne countré
On four half to honge, here mirour to be
Ther upon to thenche, that monie mihten see
And drede:
Why nolden hie be war,
Of the bataile of Donbar
How evele hem con spede?
The same poet gibes at a Scottish rebel who was then still living and
calls him a ‘king of summer’ and ‘King Hob’—
Nou kyng Hobbe in the mures gongeth.
This King Hob of the moors was Robert the Bruce, wandering, as Barbour
describes him, over the land. There is another very vigorous and rather
long piece on a recent defeat of the French by the Flemings at Courtrai—
The Frenshe came to Flaundres so light so the hare
Er hit were midnight, hit fell hem to care
Hie were caught by the net, so bird is in snare
With rouncin and with stede:
The Flemishe hem dabbeth on the hed bare,
Hie nolden take for hem raunsoun ne ware
Hie doddeth off here hevedes, fare so hit fare,
And thare to haveth hie nede.
This style of political journalism in rhyme was carried on later with
much spirit, and one author is well known by name and has had his poems
often edited—Lawrence Minot, a good workman who is sometimes undervalued.
Lawrence Minot has command of various lyrical measures; he has the clear
sharp phrasing which belongs generally to his northern dialect, and he
can put contempt into his voice with no recourse to bad language. After
describing the threats and boasting of the French, when Minot remarks
And yet is England as it was,
the effect is just where it ought to be, between wind and water; the
enemy is done for. It is like Prior’s observation to Boileau, in the
_Ode_ on the taking of Namur, and the surrender of the French garrison—
Each was a Hercules, you tell us,
Yet out they marched like common men.
Besides the songs of attack, there are also comic poems, simply amusing
without malice—such is the excellent Harleian piece on the _Man in the
Moon_, which is the meditation of a solitary reveller, apparently
thinking out the problem of the Man and his thorn-bush and offering
sympathy: ‘Did you cut a bundle of thorns, and did the heyward come and
make you pay? Ask him to drink, and we will get your pledge redeemed’.
If thy wed is y-take, bring home the truss;
Set forth thine other foot, stride over sty!
We shall pray the heyward home to our house,
And maken him at ease, for the maistry!
Drink to him dearly of full good bouse,
And our dame Douce shall sitten him by;
When that he is drunk as a dreynt mouse
Then we shall borrow the wed at the bailie!
A Franciscan brother in Ireland, Friar Michael of Kildare, composed some
good nonsensical poems—one of them a rigmarole in which part of the joke
is the way he pretends to rhyme and then sticks in a word that does not
rhyme, asking all through for admiration of his skill in verse. As a
poetical joke it is curious, and shows that Brother Michael was a critic
and knew the terms of his art. There are many literary games in the
Middle Ages, nonsense rhymes of different sorts; they are connected with
the serious art of poetry which had its own ‘toys and trifles’—such feats
of skill in verse and rhyming as Chaucer shows in his _Complaint of
Anelida_. Tricks of verse were apt to multiply as the poetic imagination
failed—a substitute for poetry; but many of the strongest poets have used
them occasionally. Among all the artistic games one of the most curious
is where a Welsh poet (in Oxford in the fifteenth century) gives a
display of Welsh poetical form with English words—to confute the ignorant
Saxon who had said there was no art of poetry in Wales.
The stanza forms in the Harleian book are various, and interesting to
compare with modern stanzas. There is an example of the verse which has
travelled from William of Poitiers, about the year 1100, to Burns and his
imitators. Modern poetry begins with William of Poitiers using the verse
of Burns in a poem on _Nothing_—
The song I make is of no thing,
Of no one, nor myself, I sing,
Of joyous youth, nor love-longing,
Nor place, nor time;
I rode on horseback, slumbering:
There sprang this rhyme!
Two hundred years after, it is found in England—
Her eye hath wounded me, y-wisse,
Her bende browen that bringeth blisse;
Her comely mouth that mightè kisse
In mirth he were;
I woldè chaungè mine for his
That is her fere!
The romance stanza is used also in its original lyrical way, with a
refrain added—
For her love I cark and care
For her love I droop and dare
For her love my bliss is bare
And all I waxè wan;
For her love in sleep I slake,
For her love all night I wake
For her love mourning I make
More than any man.
_Blow, northern wind!_
_Send thou me my sweeting!_
_Blow, northern wind!_
_Blow! blow! blow!_
Technically, it is to be noted that some of those poems have the
combination of a six-line with a four-line passage which is frequent in
French lyrics of all ages, which is also found in the verse of _The
Cherrie and the Slae_ (another of Burns’s favourite measures), and also
in some of Gray’s simpler odes. It is found in one of the religious
poems, with the six lines first, and the four lines after, as in Burns.
The common French pattern arranges them the other way round, and so does
Gray, but the constituent parts are the same.
Now shrinketh rose and lily flower
That whilom bare that sweete savour,
In summer, that sweete tide;
Ne is no queene so stark ne stour,
Ne no lady so bright in bower
That death ne shall by glide;
Whoso will flesh-lust forgon,
And heaven bliss abide,
On Jesu be his thought anon,
That thirled was his side.
This poem is a good text to prove the long ancestry of modern verse, and
the community of the nations, often very remote from definite intercourse
between them. And there is one phrase in this stanza which goes back to
the older world: ‘bright in bower’ is from the ancient heroic verse; it
may be found in Icelandic, in the Elder Edda.
The fifteenth century, which is so dismal in the works of the more
ambitious poets (Lydgate, and Occleve, e.g.), is rich in popular carols
which by this time have drawn close to the modern meaning of the name.
They are Christmas carols, and the name loses its old general application
to any song that went with dancing in a round. In the carols, the art is
generally much more simple than in the lyrics which have just been
quoted; they belong more truly to the common people, and their authors
are less careful. Yet the difference is one of degree. The only
difference which is really certain is between one poem and another.
Speaking generally about the carols one may say truly they are unlike the
work of the Chaucerian school; the lyrics of the Harleian book in the
reign of Edward I are nearer the Chaucerian manner. It is hardly worth
while to say more, for the present.
And it is not easy to choose among the carols. Some of them are well
known to-day—
When Christ was born of Mary free
In Bethlehem that fair city
Angels sang loud with mirth and glee
_In excelsis gloria_.
Ballads in the ordinary sense of the term—ballads with a story in them,
like _Sir Patrick Spens_ or _The Milldams of Binnorie_—are not found in
any quantity till late in the Middle Ages, and hardly at all before the
fifteenth century. But there are some early things of the kind. A rhyme
of _Judas_ (thirteenth century) is reckoned among the ballads by the
scholar (the late Professor Child) who gave most time to the subject, and
whose great collection of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads has
brought together everything ascertainable about them.
By some the ballads are held to be degenerate romances; and they appear
at a time when the best of romance was over, and when even the worst was
dying out. Also, it is quite certain that some ballads are derived from
romances. There is a ballad of the young _Hynd Horn_ which comes from the
old narrative poem of _King Horn_ or of _Horn Childe_. There is a ballad
version of _Sir Orfeo_, the ‘Breton lay’ which has been described in
another chapter. But there are great difficulties in the way of this
theory. In the first place, there are many ballads which have no romance
extant to correspond to them. That may not prove much, for many old
romances have been lost. But if one is to make allowance for chances of
this sort, then many old ballads may have been lost also, and many extant
ballads may go back to the thirteenth century or even earlier for their
original forms. Again, there are ballads which it is scarcely possible to
think of as existing in the shape of a narrative romance. The form of the
ballad is lyrical; all ballads are lyrical ballads, and some of them at
any rate would lose their meaning utterly if they were paraphrased into a
story. What would the story of _Sir Patrick Spens_ be worth if it were
told in any other way—with a description of the scenery about
Dunfermline, the domestic establishment of the King of Norway, and the
manners at his Court? Further, the theory that the ballads are degenerate
romances is unfair to those ballads which are known to be descended from
romances. The ballad of _Hynd Horn_ may be derived from an older
narrative poem, but it is not a _corruption_ of any old narrative; it is
a different thing, in a lyrical form which has a value of its own.
‘Corruption’, ‘degeneracy’, does not explain the form of the ballads, any
more than the Miracle Plays are explained by calling them corruptions of
the Gospel.
The proper form of the ballads is the same as the _carole_, with
narrative substance added. Anything will do for a ring dance, either at a
wake in a churchyard, or in a garden like that of the _Roman de la Rose_,
or at Christmas games like those described in _Sir Gawayne and the Green
Knight_. At first, a love-song was the favourite sort, with a refrain of
_douce amie_, and so on. But the method was always the same; there was a
leader who sang the successive verses, the fresh lines of the song, while
the other dancers came in with the refrain, most often in two parts, one
after the first verse, the second after the second—
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—
‘Now give me moud,’ Robin said to Little John,
‘Now give me moud with thy hand;
I trust to God in heaven so high
My housel will me bestand.’
And he refuses to let Little John burn the house of the treacherous
Prioress where he had come by his death. This is heroic poetry in its
simplest form, and quite true to its proper nature.
The beauty of the ballads is uncertain and often corrupted by
forgetfulness and the ordinary accidents of popular tradition. It is not
always true that the right subject has the best form. But the grace of
the ballads is unmistakable; it is unlike anything in the contemporary
romances, because it is lyrical poetry. It is often vague and intangible.
It is never the same as narrative romance.
He’s tane three locks o’ her yellow hair,
_Binnorie, O Binnorie!_
And wi’ them strung his harp so fair
_By the bonny mill-dams o’ Binnorie_.
It is the singing voice that makes the difference; and it is a difference
of thought as well as of style.