Britain; it survived, naturally, wherever
it could be preserved by a living popular tradition. And so it found a
congenial refuge, though in greatly reduced circumstances, in the
rough outlying regions where personal strength and daring were still
vitally necessary--in the borderland between England and Scotland. An
epic poem gave heroic poetry on a grand scale, it told the incidents
of a great war: the ballad tells of a single skirmish or foray. Yet
the difference is but one of degree, for both epic and ballad were
composed for men and by men, who were in the right atmosphere; and so
we have here very different work from that of the fanciful romancer.
There are not many good examples; yet the antique tone rings out now
and then, as in the ballad of Chevy Chase, which commemorates a fierce
Northumbrian fight at Otterburne that must have stirred the hearts of
the whole countryside. Here you have no knightly tournament, or duel
for rescue of dames, but the sharp clash of bloody conflict between
English and Scots borderers, the best fighting men of our island. Of
course the genuine account, given in Froissart, is very different; but
the ballad-singer knows his art; and whereas from history we only
learn that a Scottish knight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, was slain in the
medley, in the ballad an English archer draws his bow

'An arrow of a cloth yard long
To the hard head hayled he.'

And then

'Against Sir Hugh Montgomery
So right his shaft he set,
The swan's feather that his arrow bare
In his heart's blood was wet.'

In the compressed energy of these four lines, without an epithet or a
superfluous word, we have a picture, drawn by a sure hand, of a man
drawing his long bow, and driving it from steel to feathers through a
knight in armour.

Well, the border fighting disappeared with the union of the two
kingdoms, and as Great Britain became civilised and began to transfer
her wars oversea, the heroic verse decayed under the influence of the
higher culture. For a civilised and literary society to have preserved
its ancient lays and ballads is the rarest of lucky chances; the
enthusiastic collector, like Percy or Walter Scott, is generally born
too late, for indeed all antiquarianism is a very modern task. And
poetry of this sort must decay under what Shakespeare calls 'the
cankers of a calm world': while it also tends to disappear with the
introduction of professional soldiers and great armie