The eighteenth-century obsession with the Middle Ages in a search for a British national character brought with it the first examination of the traditional ballads. These, according to the antiquarians, evinced a primitive chivalry of thought and manners which indicated the essential nobility of the native English soul. Today, we still recognize in medieval balladry the voice and perceptions of the illiterate commoner, but our more demanding critical eye deems them debased forms or imperfect imitations of courtly writings, their literary merit negligible. Unfortunately, this persistent perception results, not from the songs themselves, but from the judgments of the Restoration and eighteenth-century literati, even such champions as Thomas Percy and Joseph Addison. Through their attempts to ennoble the medieval character through literature, the antiquarians in fact assured the scorn and neglect of the ballads—and, by extension, of the people who produced them—shaping our perceptions for some two hundred years.

Let me briefly recapitulate the status of medieval balladry in our studies. Despite their distinction as the primary literature produced by the largest segment of the medieval English population, they hold a peripheral position in medieval courses, usually as part of a sociological basis. The various medieval anthologies now in common use either ignore the ballads completely, or include perhaps half a dozen songs of which one is inevitably “Judas,” not a popular composition at all but a clerical imitation. In research, the same holds true: we concentrate on source and linguistic studies. Of the fewer than thirty articles on ballads published in the last twenty-five years, perhaps one or two concentrate primarily on content or inherent literary qualities. Vastly more common are essays which address new manuscripts, historical sources, analogues, and occasionally some relationship between ballads and other literary forms. Only one monograph on medieval balladry has been written during the same period. Why?

Simply, we continue to insist that balladry represents an imitative impulse in the commoners' attempt to partake of the courtly ideology of their betters.¹ We ignore the ballads' subversive qualities as they satirize, belittle, scorn, and otherwise negate aristocratic chivalric mores, positing instead a world view based on pragmatism and the harsh realities of common life which of necessity rejects romanticism and idealism.² We forget that three of the only four surviving religious ballads were clerical compositions set to popular tunes in an attempt to rehabilitate a folk song tradition that the church found, in the main, offensive. In fact, between M. J. C. Hodgart's 1950 monograph and my own 1993 book, only Arthur Moore (in 1958) attempted any defense of the ballads as literature, and ultimately even he accepted consensus regarding the songs as flawed and imitative, disagreeing only by insisting that they had moments of artistry.³ On the whole, Moore selected from among the usual adjectives applied to medieval balladry for three hundred years: rude, crude, rough, imitative, degenerate, unpolished, flawed, and so forth.

The eighteenth-century interest in Old and Middle English literature—part of a general preoccupation with national heritage—bred the first attempts to construct a literary history of England. A growing patriotism directed such efforts, combined with a “scientific” impulse toward the accumulation of knowledge and the era's obsession with definitions of refinement and propriety. Interestingly, social and political developments leading to a heightened awareness of popular opinion and its expression in popular song demanded that the long disregarded ballad be included as an object of study in all these areas.

Unfortunately, as it came to the antiquarians, the ballad was held in well established contempt, fruit of a long history of the form's appropriation as a vehicle for propaganda. A practice since medieval times, this nonetheless reached its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the resultant songs were often printed and publicly displayed, thereby earning the name of “broadsides” (see Friedman, 44). Obviously, broadsides caused the political elite no end of trouble and came to be viewed as an essential element in controlling public opinion. As early as 1703, Fletcher of Saltoun noted that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he needed not care who should make the laws of the nation” (quoted in Friedman, 71), and shortly afterwards Daniel Defoe asserted that the ballads' primary function was “as a useful incentive to mischief.”⁴ Thus associated with rabble-rousing and civil disturbance, the idea arose that ballads could also be appropriated and used by the other side. Horace Walpole, for example, is known to have suggested the composition of ballads to ridicule the French Revolution and to support his own party. However, he was also aware that the genre was a two-edged sword which by its popular and derisive nature could increase social unrest, as his cautionary response to a colleague's idea of producing ballads to support the “cause of liberty” shows.⁵ This association of balladry with riots continued throughout the century and proved a major problem for those who wished to raise the form to a position of literary importance.

Nonetheless, the literati met the challenge head on. In 1712, Sir Richard Steele observed that Elizabeth's minister of state had been in the habit of reviewing current ballads to determine the tide of public opinion and to manipulate it (Spectator Nos. 135, 502).⁶ Some sixty years later, Thomas Warton noted in his History of English Poetry (1774) that a 1264 ballad against Henry III “proved very fatal to the interest of the king,” and that a “ballad on Richard of Alemaigne probably occasioned a statute against libels in the year 1275.” His conclusion that “political ballads … such as were the vehicles of political satire, prevailed much among our early ancestors” seems to have been shared by most of his contemporaries.⁷ In consequence, in attempting the double task of validating the ballad as literature while establishing the nobility and gentility of early English character, and being elitist themselves, the antiquarians were forced to attempt a distinction between “good” and “bad” ballads. In the twentieth century, Albert B. Friedman, Vivian de Sola Pinto, and others managed to develop this distinction as that between broadsides and traditional ballads, but in the eighteenth century any criteria for defining the ballad as form had yet to be established.⁸ Vaguely conceived as a popular song sung to a popular tune and containing certain standard mechanical devices, “ballad” referred equally well to both types.

It was for these very reasons that Bishop Thomas Percy, in his correspondence with his consultant and editor William Shenstone, expressed a concern that his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) might cause him to be known as “merely a Ballad-monger,” and that his essentially antiquarian work might be misunderstood.⁹ Likewise, Warton lamented the satirical, invective ballads but asserted that there were others which “in a much more ingenious strain … have transmitted to posterity the praises of knightly heroism, the marvels of romantic fiction, and the complaints of love” (59). Joseph Ritson, despite his disagreement with Warton on a number of basic issues, reached the same conclusion regarding the dual nature of ballad content in his Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy (1802).

Yet it was not only the propagandistic function of the broadside which caused problems for those defending the ancient ballads: even nonpropagandistic songs carried the stigma of vulgarity, of being unpolished products of the illiterate class. Both Percy and Ritson felt it necessary to apologize for the ballads included in their collections as important in their antiquity although unpolished and uncouth.¹⁰ Warton too adopted this line in the Preface to his History of English Poetry, as he attempted to trace English literature from its “rude” beginnings to “its perfection in a polished age” (ii). The precedent was Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesy in the previous century (1668), which established the concept that the history of poetry was a linear progress.¹¹ Indeed, an essential part of Dryden's theory was that while plot and characterization may have been “pefected” by the time of Shakespeare, poetics of form, verse, and tasteful representation were the province of post-Restoration authors. Thus, the antiquarians could assert that the ballads were valuable as the first attempts of a primitive society to produce poetry, and consequently the seeds from which the artistic triumphs of the eighteenth-century authors had sprung. This compromise allowed Johnson, who on the whole saw no literary merit in the ballads and scorned the imitations of his contemporaries, at the same time to praise Percy's Reliques for their “attention to poetry” which bestowed “grace and splendor to his studies of antiquity.”¹²

Johnson's comment elucidates another reason for the ballads' importance to the antiquarians: the belief that literature provided an accurate description of the society which produced it. Indeed, Percy justifies his selection of ballads in the Preface to his Reliques thus:

Accordingly, such specimens of ancient poetry have been selected, as either show the gradation of our language, exhibit the progress of popular opinions, display the peculiar manners and customs of former ages, or throw light on our earlier classical poets.

(8)

In 1790, Ritson followed Percy's lead, his “Advertisement” for his Ancient Songs and Ballads offering his collection to the public despite its lack of literary merit because the poems illustrate the “history, the poetry, the language, the manners, or the amusements of [our] ancestors.” Indeed, all eighteenth-century ballad collections following the Reliques provide similar disclaimers, and so the antiquarians justified their examinations. Even Walpole, who dismissed all balladry as essentially broadside in nature, approved the publication of such collections as Percy's.

Despite forerunners such as Addison and Steele, it is indeed Percy who is credited not only with stimulating interest in medieval English literature on a large scale but with establishing the early ballads as legitimate objects of study. His Reliques is the first significant collection of early songs, and in it he established the selection principles and critical slant toward medieval popular song which dominate critical perspectives to the present day. Buying into the contemporary belief that literature had reached formal perfection in his own age, and sharing its concern with taste and decorum, Percy could not resist what Johnson called “enthusiastic improvement” (46) of the texts he found in his source manuscript. Indeed, Percy admitted doing so because “miserable trash or nonsense [was] not infrequently introduced into pieces of considerable merit” (Advertisement to the Fourth Edition, 6). In fact, however, he went far beyond this, succumbing to the temptation to eliminate what he interpreted as imperfect grammar, to exaggerate heroic effects, to emphasize medievalism, and to soften what may have been considered vulgarity by his readers' delicate tastes. A comparison between the version of “Chevy Chase” published in the Reliques and that found in Percy's Folio manuscript serves to illustrate the point.

Reliques
That ere my captaine fought on foote
And I stood looking on

91-2

Our English archers bent their bowes

105

O Christ! it was a griefe to see
And likewise for to heare,
The cries of men lying in their gore
And scattered here and there.

129–32

Who never spake more words than these

157

Did many thousands dye.

262

Folio MS
That ere my captain fought on foote
And I stand looking on

91–2

Our English archers bend their bowes

105

O Christ! it was great greave to see
How eche man chose his spere
And how the blood out of their brests
Did gush like water clere.

129–32

Who never sayd more words than these

157

Did many hundreds dye.

262

The Folio itself contains two versions of this ballad, and Percy clearly used the newer as his source. Many minor alterations, such as those in lines 92 and 105 and indeed frequently elsewhere in the text, simply correct tense shifts, where the narrative moves momentarily from past to present. These are instances, one supposes, of eighteenth-century “polish.” Other alterations, however, are more interesting. Those made in lines 129-132 neither correct grammar or obscurity, nor do they change meter or rhyme. The difference, it seems, is one of taste, for the gory image presented in the manuscript of “how eche man chose his spere / and how the blood out of their brests / did gush like water clere” is much softened. Percy offers instead the delicate “and likewise for to heare / the cries of men lying in their gore / and scattered here and there.” The impulse is the same as that which persuaded Dryden to move gore off the stage and allow for heroes' survival in his rewrites of Shakespeare, and therefore might be considered a concession to the decorum of the age. A third type of change is represented in line 157, where the word “said” is altered to “spake.” One of many such, this is an instance of what Percy apparently thought was artistic “medievalizing” and formalizing of the poem's language. Finally, line 262 contains an example of his attempt to heighten the heroic nature of the event, and thereby of its participants: the “many hundreds” dying in the original version become with a stroke “many thousands” in Percy's emendation.

“Chevy Chase” is by no means the only ballad in the Reliques which underwent significant changes at the hand of the collector. While some alterations were indeed, as Percy noted in his Preface, intended to remove obscurity, most were similar to those just mentioned and apparently the result of deference to the sensibilities of the eighteenth-century reader. More importantly, Percy's changes set a precedent and legitimized a prejudice against medieval balladry regarding its language, imagery, and purpose. Consider Ritson, who disapproved of any alteration of original English “relics” and was noted for detecting ballad revisions and forgeries in published collections. Even he had intended to revise his version of “Chevy Chase” (which by then had become an accepted epitome of medieval heroic song) but died before he had completed the task.¹³ What resulted was a sense that (1) ballads were crude and (2) they were intended to promote the same heroism as courtly literature. Both perceptions are wrong, yet they imbue modern critical consensus.

Depite the antiquarian nature of early interest in the ballads, the revival was not, as Friedman asserts, merely a translation of old songs into museum pieces (9) or an “antiquarian lark” (78). Respected men of letters discovered literary merit in the ballad in the early 1700s, and although the general condemnation of the form as vulgar and debased held ascendency, a heated debate over its literary status raged for almost a hundred years. Dissenters from the received view originally based their arguments on the classical idea of “Nature dressed in Art.” Henry Felton, in his Dissertation on Reading the Classics (1709), observed that while Nature's “Dressers” should not “spoil her native Beauty,” Nature herself was not enough, for “we are untaught by Nature, and the finest qualities will grow wild and degenerate” without proper ordering through wit and style. Moreover, he said, art must be blended with “a competent knowledge of the Nature and Decency of Things; in being acquainted with what … is fit to be spoken” (my emphasis).¹⁴

Despite the general opinions to which Felton gave voice, the veiled impulse toward simplicity contained in them became a primary concern of literary theoreticians of the eighteenth century. The rebellion against the artificiality of Neoclassicism gradually led to the cults of sensibility and found its roots in the concept that simplicity permitted the closest representations of the sublime. Addison's early defenses of the ballads as literature appeal to this. In his noted “Chevy Chase Papers” (Spectator Nos. 70 and 74), he asserts that “the sentiments in that ballad are extremely natural and poetical, and full of the majestic simplicity which we admire in the greatest of ancient poets,” and that its rudeness is no excuse for “prejudice … against the greatness of the thought.” Indeed, says Addison, “if this song had been written in the Gothic manner, which is the delight of all our little wits, whether writers or readers, it would not have hit the taste of so many ages, and have pleased so many readers of all ranks and conditions.” He adds that the ballad also provides in its final stanza an “important precept of morality” which in his era was thought an essential quality of great poetry:

The poet, to deter men from such unnatural contentions, desribes a bloody battle, and a dreadful scene of death. … That he designed this for the instruction of his poem, we may learn from the last four lines …

God save the king, and bless the land
In plenty, joy and peace;
And grant henceforth that foul debate
'Twixt noblemen may cease.(15)

Ironically, Addison's admiration appears directed to a late seventeenth-century addition to the ballad, for while this last stanza forms part of the newer “Chevy Chase” in Percy's manuscript, it is absent from the older.¹⁶

Addison's defense of “Chevy Chase,” for which, according to Johnson, he suffered much abuse from other eminent men of letters, began the long debate over balladry's literary status.¹⁷ In spite of the jeering of such men as Dennis, Wagstaffe, and others, Addison shortly afterward offered an approving analysis of “Two Children in the Wood” (Spectator No. 85) as “a plain and simple copy of nature … able to move the mind of the most polite reader with inward meltings of humanity and compassion” (Works 397) and credited “The Wanton Wife of Bath” (Spectator No. 247) with significant merit. However, these later defenses of Addison's include significant stylistic critiques from which the songs do no emerge unscathed, such as accusations of a “despicable simplicity in the verse” and “mean” language.

Nonetheless, such defenses are rare in the debate. The only equal in praise of balladry is found in the 1715 tract A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy, which asserted that ballad poetics were at times developed and refined as modern poetry (Friedman, 148-49). Much more common were outright condemnations or highly tentative defenses. Consider, for example, that Pope qualified his praise of “A Pastoral Ballad” with his admission that polish of verse and style were missing.¹⁸ The antiquarians of the mid-eighteenth century offer timid praise, like that of Warton in his History, or as is suggested by his inclusion of a number of ballad imitations in his Odes on Various Occasions, which, he insisted in his Advertisement, were “an attempt to bring Poetry back into its right channels” (quoted in Friedman, 84). Percy's position in the debate, however, is more decisive. In his Preface to the Reliques, he strikes what is clearly the common ground between the poles of decorum and sensibility:

In a polished age like the present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet they have, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many other artless graces which … if they do not dazzle the imagination, are frequently found to interest the heart.

(8)

As his editor, Shenstone also expressed a concern for literary merit in the ballads. The ordering and selection of the pieces included was governed by his desire to show a progressive improvement in English poetics over time. He did, moreover, believe that “throwing too many ballads together, that were irregular in point of Metre, or obscure in point of language” would reduce readability. He therefore suggested that it would be “safer to defer the publication of such old Pieces as have rather more merit in the Light of Curiosity than Poetry” (Percy Letters 8:120).

As always, Percy's attempts to elevate balladry's status backfired. Not only did Ritson's exposure (in his Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy) of his modifications and omissions lead to the general opinion that ballads needed to be revised, but Percy's suggestion that ballads provided Shakespeare with plot ideas and dialogue drew from Ritson the response that medieval romances were sources for both the ballads and Shakespeare's dramas—an inaccurate opinion still current. Moreover, says Ritson in his Preface to Ancient Songs and Ballads, “it is remarkable that Shakespeare puts these shreds [of ballads] chiefly into the mouths of his fools and lunatics” and such examples as had any beauty or style were courtly imitations of the seventeenth century (lxxxii). Johnson closed the case against the ballad when he ridiculed the “Chevy Chase Papers” in his Life of Addison (Lives, 198) and defined the term “ballad” in his Dictionary as “applied to nothing but trifling verse.”¹⁹

As unwittingly as Percy, the Romantics—especially Wordsworth and Coleridge with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads—condemned medieval balladry as simplistic and unpolished. In spite of his famous thesis outlined in the Preface to the publication regarding rustic subjects and simple language as the most sublime mode of poetry, Wordsworth too found it necessary to employ highly elevated language and classical imagery in his ballad imitations, and later Thomas Hardy's parodies reduced the form further with their misanthropic tone and occasionally off-color subject matter.

Subsequent theoreticians and critics have not only cited the early enemies of the form in their evaluations, but have noted repeatedly the “necessity” felt by Percy, Ritson, and the antiquarians—and by the Romantics and Victorians who professed to employ the form—to improve upon it. Even the once revered idea of simplicity and naturalism has contributed to the ballad's undoing in the twentieth century, for we continue to think it merely “simple.” In short, we have inherited an ingrained disregard for medieval balladry established in the Restoration and eighteenth century. The ballad remains for the majority of scholars a debased form, not to be taken terribly seriously and certainly of no great import. If nothing else, the sense that the ballad's poor reputation is the result of uninformed prejudice and ill-advised attempts to defend it should encourage its re-examination.

Notes

1. Consider the following: Vivian de Sola Pinto and Allan Edwin Roday, The Common Muse (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); Louise Pound, Poetic Origins of the Ballad (New York: Russell & Russell, 1921); Thomas J. Garbaty, Medieval English Literature (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1984); M. J. C. Hodgart, The Ballads, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1962); Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

2. I have argued this at length in my book Medieval Balladry and the Courtly Tradition: Literature of Revolt and Assimilation (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).

3. See Arthur K. Moore, “The Literary Status of the Popular Ballad,” Comparative Literature 10 (1958): 1-20.

4. Daniel Defoe, “The Ballad Maker's Plea” (1722), in Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, ed. William Lee, 3 vols. (New York: Franklin, 1969), 3:59.

5. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947—), 15:232, 38:187, 15:63.

6. The Spectator, ed. George A. Aitken (New York: Longmans, Green, 1898); all further references are to this edition and indicated by issue numbers.

7. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, ed. René Wellek (1774; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprints, 1968), 43, 46, 57.

8. Today, broadsides are considered ballads only in that they mimic certain ballad meter and rhyme schemes, are popularly sung, and usually include an incremental repetition device; most essential characteristics of the folk ballad are missing. They lack the dramatic nature of “true” ballads, possess few traditional mechanical qualities such as question and answer, show a lack of descriptive detail and the usual tragic nature, and exhibit little artistic use of language or imagery. Broadsides, highly topical in nature, tend to lack the universality of traditional songs, and except for the printing press would unlikely have survived much beyond the circumstances they describe. Conversely, many songs found in the manuscripts of Percy, Ritson, and others have roots in the medieval period, and many (e. g., “Barbara Allen,” “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” and—in the form of “Billie McGee McGaw”—“The Three Ravens”) continue to be sung in areas of Britain and America today.

9. The Percy Letters, ed. Cleanth Brooks and A. F. Falconer, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 7:165.

10. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London: Bickers, 1876), 1-2 (Dedication); Ritson, “Advertisement to the First Edition,” Ancient Songs and Ballads (1790), ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Reeves and Turner, 1877; rpt. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968).

11. John Dryden, “Of Dramatic Poesy” and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1962), 85.

12. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 937.

13. Henry Alfred Burd, Joseph Ritson: A Critical Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1916), 106.

14. Henry Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics (New York: Garland, 1972), vii-viii, 7, 76.

15. The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, ed. Henry Bohn (London: Bohn, 1856), 2:384, 378.

16. Moreover, such explicit moralizing is uncharacteristic of the traditional ballad, though it is true that the more tragic or lyrical specimens may imply moral judgments.

17. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 16 vols. (New York: Pafraets, 1903), 9:199.

18. The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault, 2 vols. (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1936), 1:104-105.

19. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967).

This paper was originally delivered in a session on Makers of the Middle Ages sponsored by Studies in Medievalism at the Thirtieth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 1995.