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,
- It is for the Lord of Liddesdale
That I let all these tears down fall.' "
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In 1875, when ProfessorChild'sgreat collection of materials was still unpublished, I wrote that "the birth of the ballad.
