



Produced by Les Bowler





A BUNDLE OF BALLADS

Edited By Henry Morley




CONTENTS.

     INTRODUCTION
     CHEVY CHASE
     CHEVY CHASE (the later version)
     THE NUT-BROWN MAID
     ADAM BELL, CLYM OF THE CLOUGH, AND WILLIAM OF CLOUDESLIE
     BINNORIE
     KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR MAID
     TAKE THY OLD CLOAK ABOUT THEE
     WILLOW, WILLOW, WILLOW
     THE LITTLE WEE MAN
     THE SPANISH LADY'S LOVE
     EDWARD, EDWARD
     ROBIN HOOD
     KING EDWARD IV. AND THE TANNER OF TAMWORTH
     SIR PATRICK SPENS
     EDOM O' GORDON
     THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD
     THE BEGGAR'S DAUGHTER OF BETHNAL GREEN
     THE BAILIFF'S DAUGHTER OF ISLINGTON
     BARBARA ALLEN'S CRUELTY
     SWEET WILLIAM'S GHOST
     THE BRAES O' YARROW
     KEMP OWYNE
     O'ER THE WATER TO CHARLIE
     ADMIRAL HOSIER'S GHOST
     JEMMY DAWSON
     WILLIAM AND MARGARET
     ELFINLAND WOOD
     CASABIANCA
     AULD ROBIN GRAY
     GLOSSARY




INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR.


Recitation with dramatic energy by men whose business it was to travel
from one great house to another and delight the people by the way,
was usual among us from the first. The scop invented and the glee-man
recited heroic legends and other tales to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers.
These were followed by the minstrels and other tellers of tales written
for the people. They frequented fairs and merrymakings, spreading the
knowledge not only of tales in prose or ballad form, but of appeals also
to public sympathy from social reformers.

As late as the year 1822, Allan Cunningham, in publishing a collection
of "Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry," spoke from
his own recollection of itinerant story-tellers who were welcomed in the
houses of the peasantry and earned a living by their craft.

The earliest story-telling was in recitative. When the old alliteration
passed on into rhyme, and the crowd or rustic fiddle took the place of
the old "gleebeam" for accentuation of the measure and the meaning of
the song, we come to the ballad-singer as Philip Sidney knew him. Sidney
said, in his "Defence of Poesy," that he never heard the old song of
Percy and Douglas, that he found not his heart moved more than with a
trumpet; and yet, he said, "it is sung but by some blind crowder, with
no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the
dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work trimmed in the
gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?" Many an old ballad, instinct with natural
feeling, has been more or less corrupted, by bad ear or memory, among
the people upon whose lips it has lived. It is to be considered,
however, that the old broader pronunciation of some letters developed
some syllables and the swiftness of speech slurred over others,
which will account for many an apparent halt in the music of what was
actually, on the lips of the ballad-singer, a good metrical line.

"Chevy Chase" is, most likely, a corruption of the French word
chevauchee, which meant a dash over the border for destruction and
plunder within the English pale. Chevauchee was the French equivalent
to the Scottish border raid. Close relations between France and Scotland
arose out of their common interest in checking movements towards their
conquest by the kings of England, and many French words were used with a
homely turn in Scottish common speech. Even that national source of joy,
"great chieftain of the pudding-race," the haggis, has its name from
the French hachis. At the end of the old ballad of "Chevy Chase," which
reads the corrupted word into a new sense, as the Hunting on the Cheviot
Hills, there is an identifying of the Hunting of the Cheviot with the
Battle of Otterburn:--

     "Old men that knowen the ground well enough call it the Battle of
            Otterburn.
      At Otterburn began this spurn upon a Monenday;
      There was the doughty Douglas slain, the Percy never went away."

The Battle of Otterburn was fought on the 19th of August 1388. The
Scots were to muster at Jedburgh for a raid into England. The Earl
of Northumberland and his sons, learning the strength of the Scottish
gathering, resolved not to oppose it, but to make a counter raid into
Scotland. The Scots heard of this and divided their force. The
main body, under Archibald Douglas and others, rode for Carlisle.
A detachment of three or four hundred men-at-arms and two thousand
combatants, partly archers, rode for Newcastle and Durham, with James
Earl of Douglas for one of their leaders. These were already pillaging
and burning in Durham when the Earl of Northumberland first heard
of them, and sent against them his sons Henry and Ralph Percy. In a
hand-to-hand fight between Douglas and Henry Percy, Douglas took Percy's
pennon. At Otterburn the Scots overcame the English but Douglas fell,
struck by three spears at once, and Henry was captured in fight by Lord
Montgomery. There was a Scots ballad on the Battle of Otterburn quoted
in 1549 in a book--"The Complay