ar poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages
lay buried under many superincumbent layers of literary fashion.
Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes,
and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer
himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was
known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular
poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down
chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon
the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original
shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged
to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the
Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish
ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe.
Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable
illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part
to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian
admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north
countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland
Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties,
Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin
Hood's haunts. It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs.
They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were
composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering
minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers
at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the
accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames,
who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In
this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the
present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom
conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary
poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs
and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity.
Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border"
from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick
Forest. Profe