BALLAD GROWTH AND BALLAD HISTORY
_Clown_--What hast here? ballads?
_Mopsa_--Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print, a' life;
for then we are sure they are true.--_Winter's Tale._
There is probably not a verse, there is scarcely a line, in the existing
body of Scottish ballad poetry that can be traced with certainty further
back than the sixteenth century. Many of them chronicle events that took
place in the seventeenth century, and there are a few that deal with
even later history. It may seem a bold thing, therefore, to claim for
these traditional tales in verse the much more venerable antiquity
implied in what has been said in the previous chapter. If we were to be
guided by the accessible literary and historical data, or even by the
language of the ballads themselves, we should be disposed to believe
that the productive period of ballad-making was confined within two or
at most three hundred years.
It would be more than rash, however, to imagine that ballads did not
live and grow and spread in the obscure but fertile ground of the
popular fancy and the popular memory, because they did not crop up in
the contemporary printed literature, and were overlooked by the
dry-as-dust chroniclers of the time. Nor is it a paradox to say that a
ballad may be older, by ages, than the hero and the deeds that it seems
to celebrate. Like thistledown it has the property of floating from
place to place, and even from kingdom to kingdom and from epoch to
epoch, changing names and circumstances to suit the locality, and
attaching itself to outstanding figures and fresh events without
changing its essential spirit and character. The more formal Muses
despised these rude and unlettered rhymes--when they noticed them at all
it was in a disdainful or patronising spirit--and this holds true of the
eighteenth century almost as much as of the sixteenth. It is not that
ballad poetry was dumb, but that history was deaf and blind to its
beauties.
Nor is any adverse judgment as to the antiquity of the Scottish ballad
to be drawn from the comparative modernity of the style and language.
The presence of archaisms in a ballad that claims to have been handed
down by oral repetition from a remote period is, on the contrary, a
thing to raise suspicion as to its genuineness. The ballad, as has been
said, is a living and growing organism; or at least it is this until it
has been committed to print. However deep into the mould of the past its
roots run down, its language and idioms should not be much older than
the popular speech of the time when it has been gathered into the
collector's budget. It is like a plant that, while remaining the same
at the heart and root, is constantly casting the old, and putting out
fresh, leaves.
Thus the very words and phrases that were intended to give an antique
air to _Hardyknut_ stamped it as an imitation; these clumsy and
artificial patches were not the true mosses of age. The ballad of true
lineage, partly from its simplicity of thought and structure, partly
from being kept in immediate contact with the lips and the hearts of the
people, is as readily 'understanded of the general' to-day as when it
was first sung.
It has been noted, for instance, that our ballads preserve fewer
reminiscences of the time when alliteration shared importance with rhyme
or took its place in the metrical system. The bulk of them are supposed
to come hither from the early sixteenth century, from the reigns of
James IV. and James V.; and in that period of Scottish literature
alliteration not only blossomed but often overran and smothered the
court poetry of the day. Alliterative lines and verses appear frequently
in the ballads, but always with good taste, often with exquisite effect.
What phrases are more familiar, more infused with the magic of the
ballad-spirit, than the 'wan water,' the 'bent sae brown,' the 'lee
licht o' the mune'? When the knight rides forth to see his true love, he
mounts on his 'berry brown steed,' and 'fares o'er dale and down,' until
he comes to the castle wa', where the lady sits 'sewing her silken
seam.' He kisses her 'cheek and chin,' and she 'kilts her green kirtle,'
and follows him; but not so fast as to outrun fate. In the oldest set
of _The Battle of Otterburn_, alliteration asserts itself:
'The rae full reckless there sche runnes
To make the game and glee.'
It is but seldom that the balladist avails himself so freely of the
'artful aid' of this device as in _Johnie o' Braidislee_, the vigorous
hunting lay that was a favourite with Carlyle's mother:
'Won up, won up, my good grey dogs,
Won up and be unboun';
For we maun awa' to Bride's braid wood,
To ding the dun deer doun, doun,
To ding the dun deer doun.'
The words that have had the best chance of coming down to us intact on
the stream of ballad-verse, or with only such marks of attrition and
wear as might be caused by time and a rough channel, are those to which
the popular mind of a later day has been unable to attach any definite
meaning; for instance, certain names of places and houses, titles and
functions, snatches of refrains, phrases reminiscent of otherwise
forgotten primaeval or mediaeval customs and the like. These remain bedded
like fossils in the more recent deposits, and form a curious study, for
those who have time to enter into it, in the archaeology and palaeontology
of the ballad. _Childe Rowland_, _Hynde Horn_, _Kempion_, furnish us
with words, drawn from the language of Gothic and Norman chivalry, that
must have dropped out of the common speech long before the ballads began
to be regularly collected and printed. They recall the gentleness and
courtesy, as well as the courage, that were supposed to be attributes of
the 'most perfect goodly knight'--attributes in which, sooth to say, the
typical knight of the Scottish ballad is not always a pattern.
_Kempion_--'Kaempe' or Champion Owayne--is supposed to perpetuate the
name of 'Owain-ap-Urien, King of Reged,' celebrated by Taliessin and the
other early Welsh bards. And this is by no means the only instance in
which ballads appear to have distilled the spirit and blended names and
stories out of both Celtic and Teutonic legend. Thus _Glasgerion_, which
in the best-known Scottish version has become _Glenkindie_, has been
translated as _Glas-keraint_--Geraint, the Blue Bard--an Orpheus among
the Brythons, whose chief legendary sites, according to Mr. Skene,
Professor Rhys, and other authorities, are to be sought in Scotland and
its borderlands. The fame of this harper, who, like Glenkindie, could
'wile the fish from the flood,' came down to the times of Chaucer and
Gavin Douglas, and was by them passed on; the former mentions him in his
_House of Fame_ along with Chiron and Orion,
'And other Harpers many one,
With the Briton, Glasgerion.'
It is not too much to conjecture that it was remembered also in popular
poetry; and these and other classical writers of the Middle Ages, who
despised not the common folk and their ways, no doubt drank deeply of
knowledge and inspiration from the clear and hidden well of English
poetry and romance even then existing in ballad lore. In fact, it seems
as probable that the prose and metrical romances of chivalry have been
derived from the folk-songs they resemble, as that the ballads have been
borrowed from the romances; perhaps both owe their descent to a common
and forgotten ancestor.
Is it too much to believe that in our older ballads we hear the echoes
of the voices--it may be the very words--of the old bards, the harpers
and the minstrels, who sang in the ears of princes and people as far
back as history can carry us? We know, by experience of other lands and
races, from Samoa to Sicily, that are still in their earlier or later
ballad-age, that the making of ballads is almost as old as the making of
war or of love--that it long precedes letters, to say nothing of the
printed page. It comes as natural for men to sing of the pangs of
passion, or of the joys of victory, as to kiss or to fight. For untold
generations the harps twanged in the hall, and the song of battle and
the song of sorrow found eager listeners. All the while, the same tales,
though perhaps in ruder and simpler guise, met with as warm a welcome in
road and field and at country merrymaking. Trouvere and wandering
minstrel, gleeman and eke gleemaiden, passed from place to place and
from land to land repeating, altering, adapting the old stock of heroic
or lovelorn ditties, or inventing new ones. They were a law unto
themselves in other matters than metres; and had their own guilds, their
own courts, and their own kings. The names of all but a few that
chance, more than anything else, has preserved, have perished. But time
may have been more tender than we know to their thoughts and words, or
to their words and music, where these have been fitly wedded together.
It may have saved for us some thrilling image as old as the time of the
scalds, some scrap of melody which Ossian or Llywarch Hen but improved
and handed on. The law of the conservation of force holds good in the
world of poetry as well as in the physical world; and all that is
dispersed and forgotten in ancient song is not lost. It is fused into
the general stock of the nation's ideas and memories; and the richest
and purest relics of it are perhaps to be sought in the Scottish
ballads.
The chroniclers who set down, often at inordinate and wearisome length,
what was said and done in court or council or monastery did not wholly
overlook the 'gospel of green fields' sung by the contemporary
minstrels. But their notices are provokingly vague and unsatisfactory;
no happy thought ever seems to have occurred to any monkish penman that
he might earn more gratitude from posterity by collecting ballad verses
than by copying the Legends of the Saints--so little can we guess what
will be deemed of value by future ages. But in Scotland, as elsewhere,
we have reason to believe that every event that deeply moved the popular
mind gave rise to its crop of ballads, either freshly invented or worked
up out of the old ballad stock. So sharply were incidents connected with
the departure of a Scottish Princess, daughter of King Alexander III.,
to be the bride of Eric of Norway, imprinted on people's minds that,
according to Motherwell's calculation, the ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_
preserves the very days of the week when the expedition set sail and
made the land:
'They hoisted their sails on a Mononday morn,
Wi' a' the speed they may,
And they have landed in Norawa'
Upon a Wodensday.'
But this has the fault of proving too much. The last virtue that the
ballad can claim is that of accuracy. With every desire to find proof
and confirmation in the very calendar of the antiquity of this glorious
old rhyme, one is disposed to suspect these dates to be a lucky hit; in
fact, no sounder evidence than the correct enumeration of the daughters
of George, fourth Earl of Huntly, in the old Aberdeenshire ballad:
'The Lord o' Gordon had three daughters,
Elizabeth, Margaret, and Jean,'
which has led some Northern commentators to assume that its heroine was
that Lady Jane Gordon whom Bothwell wronged and divorced, and who
afterwards managed to console herself by marrying an Earl of Sutherland
and a Lord Ogilvy of Boyne. The tragedy of the death of 'Alexander our
King,' and the unnumbered woes that came in its train, was, as we know,
celebrated in rhymes of which some scant salvage has come down to us;
and the feats of William Wallace and the victories of the Bruce were
rewarded by the maidens singing and the harpers harping in their
praise. This we learn from a surer source than the ballads of the
Wallace and Bruce Cycle that have been preserved, and that are neither
the best of their kind nor of unquestioned authenticity. Blind Harry was
himself of the ancient guild of the Minstrels, and gathered his
materials at a date when the 'gude Sir William Wallace' was nearer his
day than Prince Charlie is to our own. His poem is nothing other than
floating ballads and traditional tales strung into epic form after the
manner in which Pausanias is supposed to have pieced together the
_Iliad_; indeed John Major, who in his childhood was contemporary with
the Minstrel, tells us that he wrote down these 'native rhymes' and 'all
that passed current among the people in his day,' and afterwards 'used
to recite his tales in the households of the nobles, and thereby get the
food and clothing that he deserved.'
Then nothing could yield more convincing proof of the prevalence and
popularity of the ballad in Scotland in the period of Chaucer--and
nothing also could be more tantalising to the ballad-hunter--than
Barbour's remark in his _Brus_, that it is needless for him to rehearse
the tale of Sir John Soulis's victory over the English on the shores of
Esk:
'For quha sa likis, thai may heir
Yong women, quhen they will play
Sing it emang thame ilka day.'
The 'young women,' and likewise the old--bless them for it!--have
always taken a foremost part in the singing and preservation of our old
ballads, and even in the composing of them. Bannockburn set their quick
brains working and their tongues wagging tunefully, in praise of their
own heroes and in scorn of the English 'loons.' Aytoun quotes from the
contemporary _St. Alban's Chronicle_ a stanza of a song, which (says the
old writer) 'the maydens in that countree made on Kyng Edward; and in
this manere they sang:
'"Maydens of Englande, sore may ye morne,
For ye have lost your lemans at Bannocksborne,
With rombelogh."'
Do not these jottings of grave fourteenth century churchmen, bred in the
cell but having ears open to the din of the camp and the 'song of the
maydens,' recall the exquisite words in _Twelfth Night_, that sum up the
ballad at its best?
'It is old and plain:
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chaunt it; it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age.'
In the long struggle with our 'auld enemies' of England that followed
Bannockburn; in the quarrels between nobles and king; in the feuds of
noble with noble and of laird with laird that continued for nearly three
hundred years, themes and inspirations for the ballad muse came thick
and fast. It was not alone, or chiefly, kingly doings and great national
events that awakened the minstrel's voice and strings. Harpers and
people had their favourite clans and names--a favour won most readily by
those who were free both with purse and with sword. The Gordons of the
North; and, in the South, Graemes, Scotts, Armstrongs, Douglases, are
among the races that figure most prominently in ballad poetry. The great
house of Douglas, in particular, is in the eyes and lips of romance and
legend more honoured than the Stewarts themselves. The Douglas is the
hero of both the Scottish and English versions of _Chevy Chase_. Hume of
Godscroft, in his _History of the House of Angus_, written in 1644, has
saved for us several scraps of traditional song celebrating the wrongs
or the exploits of the Douglases, some of which must have originated at
least as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, and can be
identified in ballads that are extant and sung in the present day. One
of them, quoted by Scott in his _Minstrelsy_, and times out of number
since, unmistakably reveals the singer's sympathies. It is the verse
that commemorates the treacherous slaughter of William, sixth Earl of
Douglas, and his brother in 1440, by that great enemy of his race, James
II., after the fatal 'black bull's head' had been set before them at the
banquet to which they had been invited by the king:
'Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
God grant thou sink for sinne!
And that even for the black dinour
Erl Douglas gat therein.'
Another records with glee the Douglas triumph when, in 1528, 'The Earl
of Argyle had bound him to ride' into the Merse by the Pass of Pease,
but was met and discomfited at 'Edgebucklin Brae.' In another, and much
earlier fragment, recording how William Douglas the 'Knight of
Liddesdale,' was met and slain by his kinsman, the Earl of Douglas, at
the spot now known as Williamshope in Ettrick Forest, after the Countess
had written letters to the doomed man 'to dissuade him from that
hunting,' we may perhaps discover a germ of _Little Musgrave_, or trace
situations and phrases that reappear in _The Douglas Tragedy_, _Gil
Morice_, and their variants.
In _Johnie Armstrong o' Gilnockie_, _The Border Widow_, and _The Sang of
the Outlaw Murray_, also--in which we should perhaps see the reflection,
in the popular mind of the day, of the efforts of James IV. and James V.
to preserve order on the Borders--it is on the side of the freebooter
rather than of the king and the law that our sympathies are enlisted.
Indeed your balladist, like Allan Breck Stewart, was never a bigoted
partisan of the law. There is ample proof in the writings of Sir David
Lyndsay and others that in the first half of the sixteenth century a
number of the Scottish ballads that have come down to us were already
current and in high favour among the people, although they have not
reached us in the shape in which they were then sung or recited.
Long before this period, however, and on both sides of the Border, the
status of the minstrel or ballad-maker--for in old times the two went
together, or rather were blent in one, like the words and music--had
suffered sad declension. There was no longer question of royal harpers
or troubadours, as Alfred the Great and as Richard the Lion Heart had
been in their hour of need; or even of bards and musicians held in high
favour and honour by king and court, like Taillefer or Blondel. 'King's
Minstrels' there were on both sides of Tweed, as is found from Exchequer
and other records. But we suspect that these were players and singers of
courtly and artificial lays. True, a poet of such genuine gifts as
Dunbar had gone to London as the 'King's singer,' and had recited verses
at a Lord Mayor's banquet that had tickled the ears of the worshipful
aldermen and livery. But these could hardly have been the natural and
spontaneous notes of the Muse of Scottish ballad poetry. The written and
printed verse of the period had got overlaid and smothered by the
flowers of ornament. As a French student of our literature has said,
'The roses of these poets are splendid, but too full blown; they have
expended all their strength, all their beauty, all their fragrance; no
store of youth is left in them; they have given it all away.'
As has happened repeatedly in our literary history, simplicity in art,
as a source both of strength and of beauty, was almost forgotten; or its
tradition was only remembered among the humble and nameless balladists.
The only ones, says M. Jusserand, who escape the touch of decadence,
are 'those unknown singers, chiefly in the region of the Scottish
border, who derive their inspiration directly from the people'; who
leave books alone and 'remodel ballads that will be remade after them,
and come down to us stirring and touching,' like that ride of the Percy
and the Douglas which, spite of his classic tastes, stirred the heart of
the author of the _Art of Poesy_ 'like the sound of a trumpet.'
Thus, like Antaeus, poetry sprang up again, fresh and strong, at the
touch of its native earth; 'although declining in castles, it still
thrilled with youth along the hedges and copses, in the woods and on the
moors'; banished from court, it found refuge in the wilderness and sang
at poor men's hearths and at rural fairs, where the King himself, if we
may believe tradition, went out in romantic quest of it and of
adventure, clad as a _gaberlunzie man_. In the _Complaynt of Scotland_,
published in 1549, we have an enticing picture of the extent to which
ballad lore and ballad music entered into the lives of the country
people on the eve of the Reformation troubles. At the gatherings of the
shepherds, old tales would be told, with or without stringed
accompaniment--of _Gil Quheskher_ and _Sir Walter, the Bauld Leslye_,
pieces now probably lost to us irrecoverably; of the familiar _Tayl of
Yong Tamlane_; of _Robene Hude_ and _Litel Ihone_, whose fame, like that
of the prophecies of Thomas of Ercildoune, had already been firmly
established for a couple of centuries; of the _Red Etin_, whose place
in folklore is well ascertained; and of the _Tayl of the Thre Vierd
Systirs_, in which one can snuff the ingredients of the caldron in
_Macbeth_. There were dances, founded on the same themes--_Robin Hood_,
_Thom of Lyn_, and _Johnie Ermstrang_; and between whiles the women sang
'sueit melodious sangis of natural music of the antiquite, such as _The
Hunting of Cheviot_ and _The Red Harlaw_.' But of all this feast which
he spreads in our sight, our author only lets us taste a morsel--a
couple of lines taken apparently from a lost ballad on the fate of the
Chevalier de la Beaute, rubbed down by the rough Scottish tongue to
'Bawty,' at Billie Mire in 1517.
The great religious and social upheaval that had already changed the
face of England reached Scotland in a severer form. There was an escape
of the _odium theologicum_ which always and everywhere is fatal to the
tenderer flowers of poetry and romance. Men's minds were too deeply
moved, and their hands too full to look upon ballads otherwise than
askance and with disfavour. The Wedderburns and other zealous reformers
set themselves to match the traditional and popular airs to 'Gude and
Godlie Ballates' of their own invention. The wandering ballad-singer
could no longer count on a welcome, either in the castles of the nobles
or with the shepherds of the hills. Instead of getting, like Henry the
Minstrel, his deserts in 'food and clothing,' these were apt to come to
him in the shape of the stocks or the repentance-stool. He had lost
caste and character, from causes for which he was not altogether
responsible. An ill name had been given to him; and doubtless he often
managed to merit it. His type, as it was found on both sides of the
Border, is Autolycus, whom Shakespeare must often have met in the flesh
about the 'footpath ways,' and at the rustic merrymakings of
Warwickshire. Autolycus, too, has known the court, and has found his
wares go out of fashion and favour with the great, and has to be content
with cozening the ears and pockets of simple country folk. One cannot
help liking the rogue, although he is as nimble with his fingers as with
his tongue. He has the true balladist's love for freedom and sunshine
and the open country. He will not be tied by rule; according to his
moral law,
'When we wander here and there
We then do go most right.'
His memory and his mouth, like his wallet, are full of snatches of
ballads; and they cover a multitude of sins.
Though no undoubted Scottish specimen was drawn from this pedlar's pack,
we know, from the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists and other
evidence, that Border minstrelsy had already raised echoes in London
town, before King Jamie went thither with Scotland streaming in his
train. During the last troublous half century of Scotland's history as
an independent kingdom, the raw material of ballads was being
manufactured as actively as at any period of her history, especially on
the Borders and in the North. It may be called, indeed, the
Moss-trooping Age, and the chief members of the Moss-trooping Cycle date
from the latter years of the sixteenth century. _The Raid of the
Reidswire_ happed in 1575; the expedition of _Jamie Telfer of the Fair
Dodhead_ is conjecturally set down for 1582; _The Lads of Wamphray_
commemorates a Dumfriesshire feud of the year 1593; while the more
famous incident sung with immortal fire and vigour in _Kinmont Willie_
took place in 1596. To the same period belong the exploits of _Dick of
the Cow_ (who had made a name for himself in London while Elizabeth was
on the throne), Archie of Ca'field, Hobbie Noble, Dickie of Dryhope, the
Laird's Jock, John o' the Side, and other 'rank reivers,' whose title to
the gallows is summed up in Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington's terse
verse on the Liddesdale thieves; and their match in spulzying and
fighting was to be found on the other side of the Esk and the Cheviot.
With the Union of the Crowns, Sir Walter Scott half sadly reminds us in
_Nigel_, one stream of Scottish romance and song ran dry; the end of the
Kingdom became the middle of it; and as his namesake, Scott of Satchells
puts it, the noble freebooter was degraded to be a common thief. But
even the Reformation and the Union did not wipe out original sin or
alter human nature. The kingdoms might have outwardly composed their
quarrels; but private feuds remained, and even the Martyrs and the
Covenanters had their relapses, and loved and sang and slew under the
impulse of earthly passion. _The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow_--perhaps the
most moving and most famous of the Scottish ballads--is supposed to have
sprung, in its present shape at least, out of a tragic passage that
occurred by that stream of sorrow so late as 1616.
Away in the North, what we may call the ballad-yielding age, if it came
later and had a less brilliant flowering time, endured longer. They had
a fighting 'Border' there that lasted until the '45. The Gordons, of
their own hand, have furnished a ballad literature as rich, if not quite
so choice, as that of the Douglases themselves. _Glenlogie_ and
_Geordie_ were of the 'gay Gordons,' and had the 'sprightly turn' that
is held to be an inheritance of the race. _Edom o' Gordon_--Adam of
Auchindoun--did his ruthless work in 1571. It was in one of their
interminable quarrels, begun on the farther side of Spey, that, in the
year 1592, the _Bonnie Earl o' Moray_ fell so far away as Donibristle,
in Fife. The mystery of the _Burning of Frendraught_ took place in 1630;
the tragedy of _Mill o' Tiftie's Annie_--one of the few dramas in which
the balladist is content to take his characters from humble life--is
dated, from the tombstone in Fyvie churchyard, in the year following,
and is placed in Gordon country, and under the shadow of the Setons that
became Gordons. _The Bonnie House o' Airlie_ treats of one of the
incidents of the Civil War, and, for a wonder, in the true ballad
fashion; and it turns, as the balladists are apt to do, a crooked and
misliking look on the 'gleyed Argyll'; while that fine Deeside ballad,
_The Baron o' Bracklay_, deals with an encounter between Farquharsons
and Gordons in the period of the Restoration.
After this, however, we hardly meet with a ballad having the antique
ring about it, even on the Highland Line. The fine gold had become dim,
or mixed with later clay. The mood and condition of the nation had
changed. The 'end of the auld sang' of the Scottish Parliament was the
end also of the ballad. There was an outburst of national feeling,
expressed in song and music, over the Jacobite risings of last century;
Allan Ramsay rose like a star at its beginning, and Burns shone out
gloriously towards its close. But the expression was lyrical, and not
narrative. The ballad of the old type no longer grew naturally and
freshly by edge of copse and shaw. The collector had his eye upon it,
and was already collecting, comparing, and classifying--and, what was
worse, correcting, restoring, and improving.