the refrain of a chanson sometimes being taken from popular English verse, as the well-known refrain:

Colle to me the rysshys grene, colle to me1.

The May poems that follow the English tradition all breathe that blithe, out-of-doors spirit, that vernal enthusiasm for the greenwood and the fields, which consistently characterises spring songs from 'Sumer is i-cumen in' and 'Blou northerne wynd' to 'It was a lover and his lass,' and Herrick's sweet summons to Corinna. Every wisp of a spring poem has this odour of green things about it, this contagion of happy abandon. One little song has only this to say,

Trolly, lolly, loly, lo,

Syng troly, lolo, lo.

My loue is to the grene wode gone,
Now [af]ter wyll I go;

Syng trolly, loly, lo, lo, ly, lo,

yet how completely it expresses the mood?!

Of kindred spirit are hunting songs, songs of the 'joly fosters' who love the forest, the bow and the horn and the keenness of the chase. Who would not fain be present, when

Talbot, my hounde, with a mery taste
All about the grene wode he gan cast.
I toke my horne and blew him a blast,
With 'Tro, ro, ro, ro; tro, ro, ro, ro!'
With hey go bet, hey go bet, how!

There he gothe, there he goth! [Hey go howe!]
We shall haue sport and game ynowe3.

It is to be regretted that, for the most part, hunting songs have only survived in the more or less modified forms in which they were adapted to pageants, for they were usually marred in the effort to accommodate them to some allegory, as when the aged foster hangs his bow and arrows upon the 'greenwood bough' and, at the command of Lady Venus, leaves her court in disgrace because his 'hard' beard repels maidens' kisses*.

The best of the songs written by official musicians of the court are those in praise of members of the royal family. One of these is a spirited recital of the prowess shown by Henry VIII in the

1 Royal MS, App. 58, f. 2 a—Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 83.

* Add. MS 31922, f. 43 b. For the licentious love songs of clerks, of. Anglia, XXVI, 273, 278; Warton Club, iv, 35; Herrig's Archiv, ov11, 58 etc.

• Wynkyn de Worde's Christmasse Carolles, Douce Fragment, 94 b—Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 75.

▲ Add. MS 81922, f. 65 b—Anglia, x11, 244. Of. also Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, 1, 718, 4622—Jan. 6, 1514—for the pageant in which the song probably occurred.

tourney1; a second is in praise of Katherine and 'le infant rosary"; a third is an animated trio in which each singer professes to love some flower, the praise of which he sings, the last stanza making the disclosure that all three love the same, the rose which unites both the red and the whites; and a fourth is a prayer with the refrain:

From stormy wyndis & grevous wethir

Good Lord preserve the estryge fethir.

A few songs that do not come under any of the above classes at least deserve to be mentioned. Thus there are a few riddles, which perpetuate a style of poem popular in the Old English period; a poem in light-foot verse descriptive of a market-day or a fair, where there is a bewilderment of goods for sale, a multitude running here and there, a fisticuff, a swaggering drunkard and a noisy auctioneer; a fragment of a spinning or knitting song (?)7; a pedlar's songs; and a swaggering soldier's song9.

Such, in brief outline, are the types of songs that constitute these late Transition collections. These songs are all but unknown to readers of English verse, and they have as yet been all but ignored by scholars; yet they constitute an important chapter in the history of our literature. When they are made more accessible, they can hardly fail of appreciation, for they will be enjoyed for what they are, and the student of literary movements will recognise in them one of the two great streams that unite to form the Elizabethan lyric.

1 Add. MS 31922, f. 54 b—Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 90.

2 Ibid. f. 74 b—Anglia, x, 247.

3 Add. MS 5465, 1. 41 a; Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics, 91.

Ibid. f. 104 b-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 159.

• MS Balliol 854, f. 218 b—Anglia, xxv1, 228; MS Sloane 2593, f. 11a-Warton Club, IV, 33.

• Harleian MS 7578, f. 106 a-Herrig's Archiv, ovII, 59.

" Ibid. 109 b-Herrig's Archiv, OVIL, 61.

* Bodleian MS, Eng. Poet. E. I. f. 26 a—Warton Club, xv, 76.

• Add. MS 5165, f. 101 b-Neuenglisches Lesebuch, 147.

CHAPTER XVII

BALLADS

THE subject of this chapter needs careful definition. Sundry shorter poems, lyrics of whatever purpose, hymns, 'flytings,' political satires, mawkish stories in verse, sensational journalism of Elizabethan days and even the translation of Solomon's Song, have gone by the name of ballad. Ballad societies have published a vast amount of street-songs, broadsides and ditties such as Mme de Sévigné knew in Paris under the name of Pont-neuf; for many readers, unfortunately, there is no difference between these 'ballads' and Chevy Chace or Sir Patrick Spens. The popular ballad, however, now in question, is a narrative poem without any known author or any marks of individual authorship such as sentiment and reflection, meant, in the first instance, for singing, and connected, as its name implies, with the communal dance, but submitted to a process of oral tradition among people free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous. Conditions favourable to the making of such poetry ceased to be general after the fifteenth century; and, while it was both composed and preserved in isolated rural communities long after that date, the instinct which produced it and the habit which handed it down by word of mouth were, alike, a heritage of the past. Seen in critical and historical perspective, balladry takes its distinguishing marks mainly from this process of oral tradition. Owing to this process, the ballad has lost its dramatic or mimetic and choral character and become distinctly epic; it has, in many cases, even forfeited its refrain, once indispensable; but it has kept its impersonal note, lacks, last as first, all trace of deliberate composition and appeals to the modern reader with a charm of simplicity quite its own. Nearly all critics are agreed that no verse of this sort is produced under the conditions of modern life; and the three hundred and five individual ballads, represented by some thirteen hundred versions, printed in the great collection of Child, may be regarded, practically,

as a closed account in English literature. Diligent gleaning of the field in the ten years following the completion of that work has brought little or nothing that is new; and little more can be expected. Here and there a forgotten manuscript may come to light; but, in all probability, it will contain only a version of some ballad already known. The sources of tradition have, apparently, at last run dry. Sir George Douglas notes that the Scottish border shepherds, at their annual dinners, no longer sing their old or their own ballads; what are known as 'songs of the day,' mainly of music-hall origin, now rule without any rivals from the past. Remote and isolated districts in the United States keep a few traditional versions alive; such is The Hangman's Tree, a version of The Maid Freed from the Gallows, still sung, with traces of Yorkshire dialect, after generations of purely oral tradition, as it was brought over to Virginia 'before the revolution.' But these recovered versions have revealed little that is both good and new.

Yet another line of demarcation must be drawn. English and Scottish ballads as a distinct species of poetry, and as a body, can be followed back through the fifteenth century, occur sporadically, or find chance mention, for a century or so before and then altogether cease. Owing to the deplorably loose way in which the word 'ballad' is applied, not only the references of early historians, like William of Malmesbury, to the 'popular songs,' the cantilenae, the carmina vulgaria, from which they draw for occasional narrative, but also the passages of older epic that tell a particular deed or celebrate a popular hero, are, alike, assumed to indicate a body of ballads, similar to those of the collections, extending back to the Norman conquest, back even to the Germanic conquest of Britain, but lost for modern readers by the chances of time and the lack of written record. Such a body of ballads may, indeed, be conjectured; but conjecture should not pass into inference. Not a single specimen is preserved. It is, to be sure, unlikely that the primary instinct of song, the tendency to celebrate heroes and events in immediate verse, and the habit of epic tradition, main constituents of balladry, should cease as we cross the marches of the Transition period and pass from the modern speech and modern metres, in which our ballads are composed, into that more inflected language, that wholly different form of rhythm, which prevailed in Old English and, with some modifications, in all Germanic verse. To claim for this older period, however, ballads of the kind common since

the fifteenth century in England, Scandinavia and Germany, is
an assertion impossible to prove. The Old English folk must
have had popular ballads of some sort; but it cannot be said what
they were. Singing, to be sure, implies a poem in stanzas; and that
is precisely what one cannot find in recorded Old English verse—
the one exception, Deor's song, being very remote from balladry.
It is true that the subject of a popular ballad can often be traced
far back; Scandinavian ballads still sing the epic heroes of
'Old Norse.' Community of theme, however, does not imply a
common poetical form; and it is the structure, the style, the
metrical arrangement, the general spirit of English and Scottish
ballads, which must set them apart in our literature and give them
their title as an independent species. We find a relative plenty
of 'popular' verse in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries-songs by a political minstrel of some sort, which had
their immediate vogue, were recorded here and there, and soon
forgotten-but this sort of thing should not be confused with songs
made among the people, passed down by oral tradition and marked
with those peculiarities of structure and style which are inseparable
from the genuine ballad of the collections. In the absence of
texts, conjecture is useless. The earliest recorded piece of English
verse which agrees with balladry in all these important charac-
teristics is the famous song of Canute, preserved in the chronicles
of Ely'. The king's actual part in the case is doubtful, and
unimportant. Coming by boat, it is said, with his queen and
sundry great nobles to Ely, Canute stood up, bade his men row
slowly, 'called all who were with him in the boats to make a
circle about him... and to join him in song; and composed in
English a ballad (cantilenam) which begins as follows:

Merie sunge the munechës binnen Ely,
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by.

Roweth, cnihtës, noer the land,

And here we these muneches sung....

The verses are familiar; but their significance is not always noted. The chronicler turns them into Latin, and, with clear reference to popular tradition, adds 'and so the rest [of the song] as it is sung in these days by the people in their dances, and handed down as proverbial.... That is, the song was traditional a century and a half after the supposed fact, and it seemed natural to the chronicler that such a cantilena should be

1 Historia Eliensis, 11, 27, in Gale, Hist. Script. 1, 505.