The Oxford Book of Ballads

Transcriber's Note:

    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
    possible. Some minor corrections of spelling and puctuation have
    been made.

    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.




The Oxford Book of Ballads




                                  The
                            Oxford Book of
                                Ballads

                          Chosen & Edited by
                         Arthur Quiller-Couch

                                Oxford
                        At the Clarendon Press


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




                                  TO
                           THE ONE SURVIVOR
                             OF THREE MEN
                   TO WHOM ALL LOVERS OF THE BALLAD
                        OWE MOST IN THESE TIMES
                          FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
                       FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL
                                  AND
                           JOHN WESLEY HALES




PREFACE


As in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_ I tried to range over the
whole field of the English Lyric, and to choose the best, so in this
volume I have sought to bring together the best Ballads out of the
whole of our national stock. But the method, order, balance of the
two books are different perforce, as the fates of the Lyric and the
Ballad have been diverse. While the Lyric in general, still making
for variety, is to-day more prolific than ever and (all cant apart)
promises fruit to equal the best, that particular offshoot which we
call the Ballad has been dead, or as good as dead, for two hundred
years. It would seem to have discovered, almost at the start, a very
precise Platonic pattern of what its best should be; and having
exhausted itself in reproducing that, it declined (through a crab-apple
stage of Broadsides) into sterility. Therefore this anthology cannot
be brought down to the present day, and therefore the first half of it
contains far finer poetry than the second.

But it may be objected that among Ballads no such thing as chronological
order is possible; and that, if it were, I have not attempted it. ‘Why
then did I not boldly mix up all my flowers in a heap and afterwards
sit down to re-arrange them, disregarding history, studious only
that one flower should set off another and the whole wreath be a
well-balanced circle?’ I will try to answer this, premising only that
tact is nine-tenths of the anthologist’s business. It is very true that
the Ballads have no chronology: that no one can say when _Hynd Horn_
was composed, or assert with proof that _Clerk Saunders_ is younger
than _Childe Maurice_ or _Tam Lin_ older than _Sir Patrick Spens_,
though that all five are older than _The Children in the Wood_ no one
with an ounce of literary sense would deny. Even of our few certainties
we have to remember that, where almost everything depends on oral
tradition, it may easily happen--in fact happens not seldom--that a
really old ballad ‘of the best period’ has reached us late and in a
corrupted form, its original gold overlaid with silver and bronze. It
is true, moreover, that these pages, declining an impossible order,
decline also the pretence to it. I have arranged the ballads in seven
books: of which the first deals with Magic, the ‘Seely Court’, and the
supernatural; the second (and on the whole the most beautiful) with
stories of absolute romance such as _Childe Waters_, _Lord Ingram_,
_Young Andrew_; the third with romance shading off into real history,
as in _Sir Patrick Spens_, _Hugh of Lincoln_, _The Queen’s Marie_; the
fourth with Early Carols and ballads of Holy Writ. This closes Part
I. The fifth book is all of the Greenwood and Robin Hood; the sixth
follows history down from Chevy Chase and the Homeric deeds of Douglas
and Percy to less renowned if not less spirited Border feuds; while the
seventh and last book presents the Ballad in various aspects of false
beginning and decline--_The Old Cloak_, which deserved a long line of
children but in fact has had few; _Barbara Allen_, late but exquisite;
_Lord Lovel_, which is silly sooth; and _The Suffolk Tragedy_, wherein
a magnificent ballad-theme is ambled to market like so much butter. My
hope is that this arrangement, while it avoids mixing up things that
differ and keeps consorted those (the Robin Hood Ballads for example)
which naturally go together, does ‘in round numbers’ give a view of the
Ballad in its perfection and decline, and that so my book may be useful
to the student as well as to the disinterested lover of poetry for whom
it is chiefly intended.

This brings me to the matter of text. To make a ‘scientific’ anthology
of the Ballads was out of the question. In so far as scientific
treatment could be brought to them the work had been done, for many
generations to come, if not finally, by the late Professor Child[1] in
his monumental edition, to which at every turn I have been indebted for
guidance back to the originals.