'And other Harpers many one,
With the Briton, Glasgerion.'
It is not too much to conjecture that it was remembered also in popular poetry; and these and other classical writers of the Middle Ages, who despised not the common folk and their ways, no doubt drank deeply of knowledge and inspiration from the clear and hidden well of English poetry and romance even then existing in ballad lore. In fact, it seems as probable that the prose and metrical romances of chivalry have been derived from the folk-songs they resemble, as that the ballads have been borrowed from the romances; perhaps both owe their descent to a common and forgotten ancestor.
Is it too much to believe that in our older ballads we hear the echoes of the voices – it may be the very words – of the old bards, the harpers and the minstrels, who sang in the ears of princes and people as far back as history can carry us? We know, by experience of other lands and races, from Samoa to Sicily, that are still in their earlier or later ballad-age, that the making of ballads is almost as old as the making of war or of love – that it long precedes letters, to say nothing of the printed page. It comes as natural for men to sing of the pangs of passion, or of the joys of victory, as to kiss or to fight. For untold generations the harps twanged in the hall, and the song of battle and the song of sorrow found eager listeners. All the while, the same tales, though perhaps in ruder and simpler guise, met with as warm a welcome in road and field and at country merrymaking. Trouvere and wandering minstrel, gleeman and eke gleemaiden, passed from place to place and from land to land repeating, altering, adapting the old stock of heroic or lovelorn ditties, or inventing new ones. They were a law unto themselves in other matters than metres; and had their own guilds, their own courts, and their own kings. The names of all but a few that chance, more than anything else, has preserved, have perished. But time may have been more tender than we know to their thoughts and words, or to their words and music, where these have been fitly wedded together. It may have saved for us some thrilling image as old as the time of the scalds, some scrap of melody which Ossian or Llywarch Hen but improved and handed on. The law of the conservation of force holds good in the world of poetry as well as in the physical world; and all that is dispersed and forgotten in ancient song is not lost. It is fused into the general stock of the nation's ideas and memories; and the richest and purest relics of it are perhaps to be sought in the Scottish ballads.
The chroniclers who set down, often at inordinate and wearisome length, what was said and done in court or council or monastery did not wholly overlook the 'gospel of green fields' sung by the contemporary minstrels. But their notices are provokingly vague and unsatisfactory; no happy thought ever seems to have occurred to any monkish penman that he might earn more gratitude from posterity by collecting ballad verses than by copying the Legends of the Saints – so little can we guess what will be deemed of value by future ages. But in Scotland, as elsewhere, we have reason to believe that every event that deeply moved the popular mind gave rise to its crop of ballads, either freshly invented or worked up out of the old ballad stock. So sharply were incidents connected with the departure of a Scottish Princess, daughter of King Alexander III., to be the bride of Eric of Norway, imprinted on people's minds that, according to Motherwell's calculation, the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens preserves the very days of the week when the expedition set sail and made the land:
'They hoisted their sails on a Mononday morn,
Wi' a' the speed they may,
And they have landed in Norawa'
Upon a Wodensday.'
But this has the fault of proving too much. The last virtue that the ballad can claim is that of accuracy. With every desire to find proof and confirmation in the very calendar of the antiquity of this glorious old rhyme, one is disposed to suspect these dates to be a lucky hit; in fact, no sounder evidence than the correct enumeration of the daughters of George, fourth Earl of Huntly, in the old Aberdeenshire ballad:
'The Lord o' Gordon had three daughters,
Elizabeth, Margaret, and Jean,'
which has led some Northern commentators to assume that its heroine was that Lady Jane Gordon whom Bothwell wronged and divorced, and who afterwards managed to console herself by marrying an Earl of Sutherland and a Lord Ogilvy of Boyne. The tragedy of the death of 'Alexander our King,' and the unnumbered woes that came in its train, was, as we know, celebrated in rhymes of which some scant salvage has come down to us; and the feats of William Wallace and the victories of the Bruce were rewarded by the maidens singing and the harpers harping in their praise. This we learn from a surer source than the ballads of the Wallace and Bruce Cycle that have been preserved, and that are neither the best of their kind nor of unquestioned authenticity. Blind Harry was himself of the ancient guild of the Minstrels, and gathered his materials at a date when the 'gude Sir William Wallace' was nearer his day than Prince Charlie is to our own. His poem is nothing other than floating ballads and traditional tales strung into epic form after the manner in which Pausanias is supposed to have pieced together the Iliad; indeed John Major, who in his childhood was contemporary with the Minstrel, tells us that he wrote down these 'native rhymes' and 'all that passed current among the people in his day,' and afterwards 'used to recite his tales in the households of the nobles, and thereby get the food and clothing that he deserved.'
Then nothing could yield more convincing proof of the prevalence and popularity of the ballad in Scotland in the period of Chaucer – and nothing also could be more tantalising to the ballad-hunter – than Barbour's remark in his Brus, that it is needless for him to rehearse the tale of Sir John Soulis's victory over the English on the shores of Esk:
'For quha sa likis, thai may heir
Yong women, quhen they will play
Sing it emang thame ilka day.'
The 'young women,' and likewise the old – bless them for it! – have always taken a foremost part in the singing and preservation of our old ballads, and even in the composing of them. Bannockburn set their quick brains working and their tongues wagging tunefully, in praise of their own heroes and in scorn of the English 'loons.' Aytoun quotes from the contemporary St. Alban's Chronicle a stanza of a song, which (says the old writer) 'the maydens in that countree made on Kyng Edward; and in this manere they sang:
'"Maydens of Englande, sore may ye morne,
For ye have lost your lemans at Bannocksborne,
With rombelogh."'
Do not these jottings of grave fourteenth century churchmen, bred in the cell but having ears open to the din of the camp and the 'song of the maydens,' recall the exquisite words in Twelfth Night, that sum up the ballad at its best?
'It is old and plain:
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do