Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious.  He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character.  His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns’s Jolly Beggars.  His Phyllyp Sparrowe is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus’s elegy on Lesbia’s sparrow.  In Spake, Parrot, and Why Come ye not to Courte? he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529.  Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII.  The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as the “one light and ornament of British letters.”  Caxton asserts that he had read Vergil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, “I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon’s well.”

In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition.  The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza.

  In somer, when the shawes[14] be shene,[15]
    And leves be large and longe,
  Hit is full merry in feyre forest,
    To here the foulys song.

  To se the dere draw to the dale,
    And leve the hilles hee,[16]
  And shadow them in the leves grene,
    Under the grene-wode tree.

[Footnote 14:  Woods.] [Footnote 15:  Bright.] [Footnote 16:  High.]

It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads.  They lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were first composed and sung.  Meanwhile they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of the same story.  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