ballads

ballads. Defining a ballad is difficult, since it is an adaptable and flexible art-form which has changed with the times. Intended for singing, the metre and language is usually simple and direct, the colours bold, the humour broad, with a chorus to encourage the company to join in. The earliest ballads were often heroic narratives—‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘The Battle of Otterburn’, ‘Flodden Field’. They were meant for minstrels to sing in baronial halls. But with the advent of printing, ballads could be sold as broadsheets and could appeal to a wider audience. They soon acquired a satirical and disrespectful tone which made the authorities uneasy. The ballads of Robin Hood were particularly popular, and Bishop Latimer complained that he had once found an empty church because the congregation was off on Robin Hood's Day—‘a traitor and a thief’. The first collection of ballads seems to have been A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1566). Samuel Pepys was a great collector of ballads and left 1,400 to his Cambridge college, Magdalene. The great revival of interest in old ballads came with the publication of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, which helped to kindle the enthusiasm for the medieval past that characterized the Romantic movement. But by this time ballads were of great variety—love-sick swains, horrible murders, betrayals, pirates, and domestic infighting. Charles Burney deplored the vulgarization of ballads when he remarked in 1802 that a ballad was ‘a mean and trifling song such as is generally sung in the streets’. But the ballad had still some way to fall—to Mrs Dyer baby farmer, the dying cowboy, Frankie and Johnnie, and irreverent wartime ditties about the sergeant-major. Their value as a guide to changing taste was put by John Selden in his Table Talk in the 17th cent.: ‘more solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels.’

J. A. Cannon