They belonged to no particular author, but, like all
folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and
ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or
corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain past,
based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear no
poet's name, but are _ferae naturae_, and have the flavor of wild game.
In the form in which they are preserved, few of them are older than the
17th or the latter part of the 16th century, though many, in their
original shape, are doubtless much older. A very few of the Robin Hood
ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same period is assigned
the charming ballad of the _Nut Brown Maid_ and the famous border ballad
of _Chevy Chase_, which describes a battle between the retainers of the
two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was this song of which Sir
Philip Sidney wrote, "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas
but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet; and yet it is sung but
by some blind crouder,[17] with no rougher voice than rude style." But
the style of the ballads was not always rude. In their compressed energy
of expression, in the impassioned way in which they tell their tale of
grief and horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to
any thing in English poetry between Chaucer and Spenser; superior to any
thing in Chaucer and Spenser themselves, in the quality of intensity.
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