Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/166

 150 Notes on Ballad Origins.

memory or from fancy, and, if that fancy is not " popular,"

what is popular ?

Mr. Henderson twits me with speaking of " a monotonous

taunting song of the Scottish maidens," as " a rural ballad "

on Bannockburn. It was obviously not a narrative poem :

I accept the correction. But Barbour, in the fourteenth

century, as Scott remarks, "thinks it unnecessary to

rehearse the account of a victory gained in Eskdale over

the English, because

' ' Whasa like, they may her Young women, when thai will play, Syng it amang thaim ilk day."

The Bruce. Book xvi.

This was a narrative ballad, certainly, for it told the story of a Border battle. Who made the ballad ? Ipsi conjingunt, " they compose their ballads themselves," says Lesley, in the sixteenth century : he speaks of no professional com- posers. Hume of Godscroft in the sixteenth century quotes one verse of an "old song" on the slaying (1353J of the Knight of Liddesdale. May I venture to infer that a song on such an event was probably made, originally, when the tragedy was fresh in the popular memory ? But, by Gods- croft's time (and he was an active conspirator in 1584), one verse ran thus :

" The Countess of Douglas out of her bower she came. And loudly there that she did call, That I let all these tears down fall.' "
 * It is for the Lord of Liddesdale

There was, I think, no Earl or Countess of Douglas in 1353) 3-nd the verse is not, perhaps, in the style of the fourteenth century. The " old song," by the time it reached Godscroft, had been altered by oral tradition — the original song, probably by an individual of the fourteenth century, was no longer, I imagine, to be found. What survived was composite and relatively modern.

In 1875, when ProfessorChild'sgreat collection of materials was still unpublished, I wrote that "the birth of the ballad.