The mystery is that the same kind of choice should be found in all the countries where ballads were sung. The English and Scottish ballads, like the English romances, are related to similar things in other lands. To understand the history of the ballads it is necessary, as with the romances, to compare different versions of the same matter—French or German, Italian, Danish.
Many curious things have been brought out by study of this sort—resemblances of ballad plots all over Christendom. But there is a sort of resemblance which no amount of ‘analogues’ in different languages can explain, and that is the likeness in temper among the ballad poets of different languages, which not only makes them take up the same stories, but makes them deal with fresh realities in the same way. How is it that an English ballad poet sees the death of Parcy Reed in a certain manner, while a Danish poet far off will see the same poetical meaning in a Danish adventure, and will turn it into the common ballad form? In both cases it is the death of a hero that the poet renders in verse; deaths of heroes are a subject for poetry, it may be said, all over the world. But how is it that this particular form should be used in different countries for the same kind of subject, not conventionally, but with imaginative life, each poet independently seizing this as the proper subject and treating it with all the force of his mind?
The medieval ballad is a form used by poets with their eyes open upon life, and with a form of thought in their minds by which they comprehend a tragic situation. The medieval romance is a form used originally by poets with a certain vein of sentiment who found that narrative plots helped them to develop their emotional rhetoric; then it passed through various stages in different countries, sinking into chapbooks or rising to the _Orlando_ or the _Faerie Queene_—but never coming back to the old tragic form of imagination, out of which the older epics had been derived, and which is constantly found in the ballads.
Probably the old ballad chorus in its proper dancing form was going out of use in England about 1400. Barbour, a contemporary of Chaucer, speaks of girls singing ballads ‘at their play’; Thomas Deloney in the time of Elizabeth describes the singing of a ballad refrain; and the game lives happily still, in songs of _London Bridge_ and others. But it became more and more common for ballads to be sung or recited to an audience sitting still; ballads were given out by minstrels, like the minstrel of _Chevy Chase_. Sometimes ballads are found swelling into something like a narrative poem; such is the famous ballad of _Adam Bell, Clim o’ the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee_, which has a plot of the right sort, the defence of a house against enemies. _The Little Geste of Robin Hood_ seems to be an attempt to make an epic poem by joining together a number of ballads. The ballad of _Robin Hood’s Death_ is worth reading as a contrast to this rather mechanical work. _Robin Hood’s Death_ is a ballad tragedy; again, the death of a hero beset by traitors. Red Roger stabbed Robin with a grounden glave (‘grounden’ comes from the oldest poetic vocabulary). Robin made ‘a wound full wide’ between Roger’s head and his shoulders. Then he asks Little John for the sacrament, the housel of earth (he calls it ‘moud’, i.e. ‘mould’) which could be given and taken by any Christian man, in extremity, without a priest—
