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On the Dating of the English and Scottish Ballads

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Louise Pound
Louise Pound*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska
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Extract

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.” 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.” 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.” 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 1932 , pp. 10 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932

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References

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.

6 Lieder, Lovett, and Root, British Poetry and Prose, 1928.

7 Snyder and Martin, A Book of English Literature, 1916. “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. Cross and C. T. Goode, Readings in the Literature of England, 1927.

9 H. S. Pancoast, English Verse and Prose, 1915. “Middle English Writers” is the heading under which ballads are grouped in The Modern Student's Book of English Literature, by H. M. Ayres, W. D. Howe, and F. M. Padelford, 1924. G. H. Gerould in his Old English and Medieval Literature (1929) devotes more than a hundred pages to illustrations of fifteenth-century literature. All 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.

10 South Carolina Ballads. 1928.

11 Anglia, xxi, Neue Folge, ix, 312–358.

12 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.

13 A History of British Balladry, 1913, page 192.

14 “The Texts of ‘Edward’ in Percy's ‘Reliques’ and Motherwell's ‘Minstrelsy‘.” MLN, April, 1930.

15 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 Lammie,” 236, “The Laird o Drum,” 287, “Captain Ward and the Rainbow.”