And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age.'
In the long struggle with our 'auld enemies' of England that followed Bannockburn; in the quarrels between nobles and king; in the feuds of noble with noble and of laird with laird that continued for nearly three hundred years, themes and inspirations for the ballad muse came thick and fast. It was not alone, or chiefly, kingly doings and great national events that awakened the minstrel's voice and strings. Harpers and people had their favourite clans and names – a favour won most readily by those who were free both with purse and with sword. The Gordons of the North; and, in the South, Graemes, Scotts, Armstrongs, Douglases, are among the races that figure most prominently in ballad poetry. The great house of Douglas, in particular, is in the eyes and lips of romance and legend more honoured than the Stewarts themselves. The Douglas is the hero of both the Scottish and English versions of Chevy Chase. Hume of Godscroft, in his History of the House of Angus, written in 1644, has saved for us several scraps of traditional song celebrating the wrongs or the exploits of the Douglases, some of which must have originated at least as early as the second half of the fourteenth century, and can be identified in ballads that are extant and sung in the present day. One of them, quoted by Scott in his Minstrelsy, and times out of number since, unmistakably reveals the singer's sympathies. It is the verse that commemorates the treacherous slaughter of William, sixth Earl of Douglas, and his brother in 1440, by that great enemy of his race, James II., after the fatal 'black bull's head' had been set before them at the banquet to which they had been invited by the king:
'Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
God grant thou sink for sinne!
And that even for the black dinoúr
Erl Douglas gat therein.'
Another records with glee the Douglas triumph when, in 1528, 'The Earl of Argyle had bound him to ride' into the Merse by the Pass of Pease, but was met and discomfited at 'Edgebucklin Brae.' In another, and much earlier fragment, recording how William Douglas the 'Knight of Liddesdale,' was met and slain by his kinsman, the Earl of Douglas, at the spot now known as Williamshope in Ettrick Forest, after the Countess had written letters to the doomed man 'to dissuade him from that hunting,' we may perhaps discover a germ of Little Musgrave, or trace situations and phrases that reappear in The Douglas Tragedy, Gil Morice, and their variants.
In Johnie Armstrong o' Gilnockie, The Border Widow, and The Sang of the Outlaw Murray, also – in which we should perhaps see the reflection, in the popular mind of the day, of the efforts of James IV. and James V. to preserve order on the Borders – it is on the side of the freebooter rather than of the king and the law that our sympathies are enlisted. Indeed your balladist, like Allan Breck Stewart, was never a bigoted partisan of the law. There is ample proof in the writings of Sir David Lyndsay and others that in the first half of the sixteenth century a number of the Scottish ballads that have come down to us were already current and in high favour among the people, although they have not reached us in the shape in which they were then sung or recited.
Long before this period, however, and on both sides of the Border, the status of the minstrel or ballad-maker – for in old times the two went together, or rather were blent in one, like the words and music – had suffered sad declension. There was no longer question of royal harpers or troubadours, as Alfred the Great and as Richard the Lion Heart had been in their hour of need; or even of bards and musicians held in high favour and honour by king and court, like Taillefer or Blondel. 'King's Minstrels' there were on both sides of Tweed, as is found from Exchequer and other records. But we suspect that these were players and singers of courtly and artificial lays. True, a poet of such genuine gifts as Dunbar had gone to London as the 'King's singer,' and had recited verses at a Lord Mayor's banquet that had tickled the ears of the worshipful aldermen and livery. But these could hardly have been the natural and spontaneous notes of the Muse of Scottish ballad poetry. The written and printed verse of the period had got overlaid and smothered by the flowers of ornament. As a French student of our literature has said, 'The roses of these poets are splendid, but too full blown; they have expended all their strength, all their beauty, all their fragrance; no store of youth is left in them; they have given it all away.'
As has happened repeatedly in our literary history, simplicity in art, as a source both of strength and of beauty, was almost forgotten; or its tradition was only remembered among the humble and nameless balladists. The only ones, says M. Jusserand, who escape the touch of decadence, are 'those unknown singers, chiefly in the region of the Scottish border, who derive their inspiration directly from the people'; who leave books alone and 'remodel ballads that will be remade after them, and come down to us stirring and touching,' like that ride of the Percy and the Douglas which, spite of his classic tastes, stirred the heart of the author of the Art of Poesy 'like the sound of a trumpet.'
Thus, like Antæus, poetry sprang up again, fresh and strong, at the touch of its native earth; 'although declining in castles, it still thrilled with youth along the hedges and copses, in the woods and on the moors'; banished from court, it found refuge in the wilderness and sang at poor men's hearths and at rural fairs, where the King himself, if we may believe tradition, went out in romantic quest of it and of adventure, clad as a gaberlunzie man. In the Complaynt of Scotland, published in 1549, we have an enticing picture of the extent to which ballad lore and ballad music entered into the lives of the country people on the eve of the Reformation troubles. At the gatherings of the shepherds, old tales would be told, with or without stringed accompaniment – of Gil Quheskher and Sir Walter, the Bauld Leslye, pieces now probably lost to us irrecoverably; of the familiar Tayl of Yong Tamlane; of Robene Hude and Litel Ihone, whose fame, like that of the prophecies of Thomas of Ercildoune, had already been firmly established for a couple of centuries; of the Red Etin, whose place in folklore is well ascertained; and of the Tayl of the Thre Vierd Systirs, in which one can snuff the ingredients of the caldron in Macbeth. There were dances, founded on the same themes —Robin Hood, Thom of Lyn, and Johnie Ermstrang; and between whiles the women sang 'sueit melodious sangis of natural music of the antiquite, such as The Hunting of Cheviot and The Red Harlaw.' But of all this feast which he spreads in our sight, our author only lets us taste a morsel – a couple of lines taken apparently from a lost ballad on the fate of the Chevalier de la Beauté, rubbed down by the rough Scottish tongue to 'Bawty,' at Billie Mire in 1517.
The great religious and social upheaval that had already changed the face of England reached Scotland in a severer form. There was an escape of the odium theologicum which always and everywhere is fatal to the tenderer flowers of poetry and romance. Men's minds were too deeply moved, and their hands too full to look upon ballads otherwise than askance and with disfavour. The Wedderburns and other zealous reformers set themselves to match the traditional and popular airs to 'Gude and Godlie Ballates' of their own invention. The wandering ballad-singer could no longer count on a welcome, either in the castles of the nobles or with the shepherds of the hills. Instead of getting, like Henry the Minstrel, his deserts in 'food and clothing,' these were apt to come to him in the shape of the stocks or the repentance-stool. He had lost caste and character, from causes for which he was not altogether responsible. An ill name had been given to him; and doubtless he often managed to merit it. His type, as it was found on both sides of the Border, is Autolycus, whom Shakespeare must often have met in the flesh about the 'footpath ways,' and at the rustic merrymakings of Warwickshire. Autolycus, too, has known the court, and has found his wares go out of fashion and favour with the great, and has to be content with cozening the ears and pockets of simple country folk. One cannot help liking the rogue, although he is as nimble with his fingers as with his tongue. He has the true balladist's love for freedom and sunshine and the open country. He will not be tied by rule; according to his moral law,
'When we wander here and there
We then do go most right.'
His memory and his mouth, like his wallet, are full of snatches of ballads; and they cover a multitude of sins.
Though no undoubted Scottish specimen was drawn from this pedlar's pack, we know, from