BALLADS: BISHOP PERCY, SIR WALTER SCOTT
Shunned by the court and the universities, vernacular literature returned where it had survived during the suppression of English; in ballads, street cries, street poems, it drifted from centers of influence—London and Oxford—to the Marches, the Borders, into Scotland, where a different king reigned with another court. Indeed James IV or V of Scotland composed “The Gaberlunzie Man.” Three centuries later Bishop Percy puts it this way: “As our southern metropolis must have been ever the scene of novelty and refinement, the northern countries, as being most distant, would preserve their ancient manners longest, and of course the old poetry, in which those manners are so peculiarly described.”
True ballads are nobody’s property. Anon.’s, they exist in various versions, depending on when and by whom they were first written down. The most wonderful of them, “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,” has the name of Sir Patrick substituted in some versions with the name of the famous Scottish admiral Sir Andrew Wood. Where scansion allowed, ballads could be taken off the peg for quite different occasions from those originally celebrated.
Sung in a minor key, usually with “tragic” or savage endings, the ballads’ chief concerns are battle, love and death. If careless singers or printers struggling with unfamiliar dialect claimed the right to exploit and spoil them (some of my predecessors lived off the back of ballads that were hugely popular), who can deny us the right—Robert Graves asks—to guess how the originals went? More than any other form of literature, ballads emancipate scholar and poet: the text is not sacred; creative involvement can take place. In Graves’s case invention goes too far, but as he accounts for his adjustments we learn about his techniques of composition, and about the ballad form itself.
Some English ballads survive by historical chance. Antwerp printers issued work for English readers, filling in gaps left by Caxton. Adraien van Berghen around 1503 printed Richard Arnold’s Chronicle, a miscellany that, between a list of the tolls of Antwerp and the differences between English and Flemish coinage, includes the ballad “The Nut Brown Maid.” Some survived through plays, or were gathered with “real” poems into books. But the ballad, when confined to the page after printing came in, usually traveled as a single or folded sheet and was sold for half a penny. In 1520, a man who bought two halfpenny ballads could have used the same money for two pounds of cheese or a pound of butter; for 2d. he could have bought a hen and for 6d. a pair of shoes. Printed ballads were cheap to produce and popular even before publishers learned the art of titling and packaging. In 1595 title pages gave no author or author’s credentials unless that author was already well known. Early printed ballad titles were unwieldy and unmemorable. “The Norfolk gent his will and testament and howe he commytted the keepinge of his Children to his owne brother whoe delte moste wickedly with them and howe God plagued him for it” came to be known in later times as “The Babes in the Wood.”
Ballads were especially hard for the authorities to control. They sprang up of their own accord and traveled from mouth to mouth without benefit of the censor. When they were printed they might be monitored and controlled. In 1586 the Star Chamber decreed an end to provincial printing or “imprinting of bookes, ballades, chartes, pourtraictures, or any other thing, or things whatsoever, but onelye in the cittie of London”—plus Oxford and Cambridge (one printer each). With the approach of the Civil War vigilance relaxed. Ballads needed to be controlled because they contained news, sometimes in biased or subversive form, and city people were hungry for information. With the ballad journalism is born.
It was 1622 before news report publications, called Corantos, first appeared, relating mainly foreign news and none of it dangerously new. From 1632 to 1638 the Corantos were suspended by the Star Chamber after complaints from the Spanish ambassador. In 1641 home news was permitted in the first of the Diurnalls, followed by Weekly Accounts, Mercuries, Intelligencers and accounts of the progress of the Civil War. The first publication that was recognizably an ancestor of our newspapers was the London Gazette (1665). With censorship, inevitably, news was disseminated in the form of fiction. Ballads outnumbered all other forms of publication, though “prognosticating almanacs” became for their publishers “readier money than ale or cakes,” Thomas Nash recalls. Many high-minded individuals (Puritans especially) were against the “sundrie bookes, pamfletes, Poesies, ditties, songes, and other workes... serving... to let in a mayne Sea of wickednesse... and to no small or sufferable waste of the treasure of this Realme which is thearby consumed and spent in paper, being of it selfe a forreign and chargeable comoditie” (William Lambarde). Already in the seventeenth century killjoys of the press were present, with economic arguments against importation on the grounds that it is unpatriotic, and moral arguments against information on the grounds that it provokes wickedness.
We cannot establish relative prices in the early period: nothing in manuscript is comparable to the halfpenny ballad sheet; there is no direct comparison between manuscripts and printed books. Printed texts were clearly cheaper than scribal texts, and readership developed—for ballads, a broad popular readership. The ballad sheets passed from eager hand to hand. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, book and ballad prices shot up because stocks were destroyed.
It may at first seem ironic that the eighteenth century, with stiff manners, powdered wigs and slavish decorum, was the great age for rediscovering and preserving ballads. Their apparent rusticity and simplicity appealed to poets, scholars and readers so long gagged by proprieties that any coarseness, any deviation from good taste with the sanction of antiquity was tonic. The work of poets like Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and the scholarly transcription and exposition of the Bishop of Dromore, Thomas Percy (1729–1811), mean that we have a substantial morsel of oral literature, especially from the north, and a “literary” ballad tradition that grows directly from “folk” roots.
The Scot James Macpherson’s forgeries of the ancient poems of the Gaelic poet Ossian (1760) and his later fabrications inspired many poets, including Thomas Gray. With its apparent formal freedom (the translations are in highly charged, mannered prose), the “primitive” music boomed across the restraints and politenesses of a caustic Cambridge: for Gray it hinted that poetry might one day breathe fresher air, as it had in earlier centuries. Johnson declared: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.” It was precisely abandon that the poets impressed by Ossian desired, an abandon they found too in the more authoritatively sanctioned verses that Bishop Percy put in the Reliques. Ossian’s “Songs of Selma” conclude:
Such were the words of the bards in the days of song; when the king heard the music of harps, the tales of other times! The chiefs gathered from all their hills, and heard the lovely sound. They praised the voice of Cona! the first among a thousand bards! But age is now on my tongue, my soul has failed!
And so on. It is the Celtic twilight over a century before it officially fell, and the authentic voice of the old poems, which sounds in English in the ballads, is here muffled under a pillow of inhibition. Hazlitt takes the Ossianic poems seriously, as indeed they should be taken, despite Macpherson’s subterfuge, because they touch a chord with his age. He says: “As Homer is the first vigour and lustihead, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry.” From that decay William Blake took some of his zanier bearings.
For Bishop Percy, who, whatever he felt for the old poems, was keen to demonstrate his descent from the noble Percys of Northumberland and to celebrate his family (quite a few of the ballads bring his ancestors’ deeds into focus), Macpherson was a catalyst. He based his forgeries—remotely, perhaps—on the Scots Gaelic oral traditions of his childhood, embroidering and extending them in English. Macpherson was compelled to forge the originals when his deceit was suspected. In 1765 Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, with no hint of scandal and with exhaustive editorial probity, brought a refreshing blast of genuine popular poetry (and some literary imitation) into the neoclassical drawing room. He was not above including work of known authorship—by Skelton, Marlowe, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, Beaumont and Fletcher, Samuel Daniel, James I, Lovelace, Suckling, Jonson and others. His purpose in combining literary and popular was to reveal a coherent strand in poetry, perhaps to show how anonymous ballads could hold their own in more refined company. Some of the anonymous ballads, with their unstable texts, existing as they do in dozens of versions with different endings and emphases, began in literary texts but were taken over by the people and made malleable to their needs, like the Spanish ballads of Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca, which in the 1930s were adopted by the people and sung or recited in taverns in Spain, the authors unacknowledged and unknown.
Yet in the Reliques literary ballads and anonymous popular ballads prove different in kind. Percy’s old friend Doctor Johnson was not impressed. He parodied the meter of “The Hermit of Warkworth: A Northumberland Ballad” in memorable quatrains, including:
I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand;
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.
He found distasteful the way many ballads parceled out prose matter in tidy, risible quatrains—risible, that is, if you stand back from quaintness and archaic language and look meaning in the face. And if you are unable to imagine the music that the poems shed in passing into print.
Sir Walter Scott read the Reliques in 1782 and they determined the course of his literary life. His three-volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is, with F. J. Child’s four-volume The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, the place to look for great ballads. Percy, much earlier and with clouded motive, was a reasonable scholar: he discovered an old folio manuscript from the middle of the previous century that belonged to Humphrey Pitt of Shifnal, in his native Shropshire. It included ancient material and ballads from the seventeenth century. “As most of them are of great simplicity, and seem to have been merely written for the people, he was long in doubt, whether, in the present state of improved literature, they could be deemed worthy the attention of the public.” Encouraged by Joseph Addison, Lord Dorset and others he undertook the project with an unlikely colleague, the poet William Shenstone (1714–63), famous for the artificiality and “prettiness” of his work, and for his “improvements” to his estate near Halesowen. He died before Reliques was complete, but perhaps his influence opened the book out to poems that are ballads only by extreme extension of the term.
Augustan gentlemen reading the Reliques may not always have reflected that popular ballads voice opposition, celebrate resistance, lament defeat. There are poems from the time of Chaucer (who alludes to the old poems and knew them at first hand) to the Civil War, “but not one that alludes to the Restoration.” Either by that time popular and oral traditions no longer functioned as previously, or the men from whom this literature emanated did not identify with the Restoration.
The word “ballad” is from Norman French, spelled “ballet,” a song to which people danced. Dance and song are now as separate as ballet and ballad, but it’s worth recalling that they shared a cradle. Ballads were originally a record and reenactment of deeds; later, by a strange analepsis, the term came to refer to any kind of poem, homespun, old- or ill-fashioned. Early English dance-ballads are now often called folk songs. The “Song of Songs” was known as the “Ballad of Ballads,” suggesting a confluence between the ballad, the vernacular Bible (with the politics that it implied) and the hymn, which often adapts ballad forms. The Puritans, hostile to lascivious balladry, purged and converted many of them into religious songs.
Old ballads are tied in with pre-Christian lore. Robert Graves stresses the pagan witchiness of surviving ballads. He classifies ballads under four heads:
1. Festival songs
2. Songs to lighten repetitive tasks: spinning, weaving, grinding corn, hoeing, etc.; “occupational ballads”
3. Sea shanties
4. Entertainments to pass an evening
Another category of ballads exists to keep in memory historical events, which, with the passing of time, are refined to legend. And there are savage and satirical ballads to avenge an ill or pillory a wrongdoer. Scurrilous poems and satirical ballads may have led to the first statute against libels in 1275, under the title: “Against slanderous reports, or tales to cause discord betwixt king and people.” Later satirists and libelers managed to “publish” their poems to advantage, “although they did not enjoy the many conveniences which modern improvements have afforded for the circulation of public abuse.” One poem, in the time of Henry VI, was stuck on the palace gates while the king and his counselors were sitting in Parliament. A few years earlier, when Henry V returned after Agincourt, ballads celebrating his deeds were pinned to the gates, but he discouraged this cult of personality.
Ballads were originally a minstrel’s job, working to a lord (“minstrel” means “a dependent”). In Piers Plowman one monk knows the ballads and rhymes better than his paternoster. Monasteries for a fee provided minstrels with fresh, or reheated, songs and stories and themselves used them for holy days. Some abbeys and monasteries supported a resident minstrel. Welsh abbeys occasionally sustained a Welsh-language bard and were repositories for the poetry of the Britons. But as time passed minstrels were fired by employers, or grew bored with the court or monastery, or were set loose by military defeat (especially in Scotland and the north), and began to wander like mendicants, but singing rather than preaching or selling indulgences. The invention of printing dealt them a final blow—a printed ballad became common property: “The many good Bookes, and variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt all the old Fables out of doors: and the divine art of Printing and gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellow and the Fayries.” Strolling minstrels disappear in Elizabeth’s reign, arrested as vagabonds or displaced by the circulation of “town literature”: the ballad seller on his rounds. For two centuries after Shakespeare’s death broadsheet ballads kept printers alive. Inn-walls displayed them, they appeared in public places. Not until Dickens’s time did they too begin to fade out. In The Winter’s Tale Clown announces a ballad seller and Mopsa says: “Pray now, buy some! I love a ballad in print o’ life, for then we are sure they are true.”
Their truth is of course not of an historical order. Detecting bits of the old religion is a fascinating activity with ballads; so is filling in the scene, imagining the full plot, when the history is missing. The point at which they are written down may have been a point beyond which their literal sense still resonated for the common ballad hearer. For the first audiences, too, there may have been mysteries (we need not call them obscurities). Graves reminds us that a coven is a group of thirteen. “ ‘Robin’ was a title often given to the male leader of a witch coven, the female leader being called the ‘Maid’—hence ‘Maid Marian.’ ” Pagan and Christian marry, but another element is history, valuable to a poet less as fact than for the types and tales it throws up. Graves demonstrates the historical reality of Robin Hood through his employment (documented) by Edward II to train up good archers in the royal army.
The ballad-minstrel tradition thrived most and survived longest in Scotland and the Borders. Indeed, says Graves, it never quite died in the “chimney corners of English and Scottish farmhouses, as also in the hills of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.” Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” is doing nothing less than warbling a ballad when the poet beholds her single in the field. Because most minstrels and balladeers were from the north of England or Scotland, there is a “prevalence of the northern dialect” in their work. Percy stresses that real minstrels did not write down their poems. By that token, the Reliques is the echo of an echo. Some of the fifteenth century can be heard in it.