The ballads were not made for grand folk.  They were not made to be sung in courts and halls.  They were made for the common people, and sometimes at least they were made by them.  They were meant to be sung, and sung out of doors.  For in those days the houses of all but the great were very comfortless.  They were small and dark and full of smoke.  It was little wonder, then, that people lived out of doors as much as they could, and that all their amusements were out of doors.  And so it comes about that many of the ballads have an out-of-door feeling about them.

A ballad is much shorter than a romance, and therefore much more easily learned and remembered.  So many people learned and repeated the ballads, and for three hundred years they were the chief literature of the people.  In those days men sang far more and read and thought far less than nowadays.  Now, if we read poetry, some of us like to be quietly by ourselves.  Then all poetry was made to be read or sung aloud, and that in company.

I do not mean you to think that we have any ballads remaining to us as old as the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, which was the time in which Havelok was written.  But what I want you to understand is that the ballad-making days went on for hundreds of years.  The people for whom the ballads were made could not read and could not write; so it was of little use to write them down, and for a long time they were not written down.  “They were made for singing, an’ no for reading,” said an old lady to Sir Walter Scott, who in his day made a collection of ballads.  “They were made for singing an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair.”

And so true is this, that ballads which have never been written down, but which are heard only in out-of-the-way places, sung or said by people who have never learned to read, have really more of the old-time feeling about them than many of those which we find in books.

We cannot say who made the ballads.  Nowadays a poet makes a poem, and it is printed with his name upon the title-page.  The poem belongs to him, and is known by his name.  We say, for instance, Gray’s Elegy, or Shakespeare’s Sonnets.  But many people helped to make the ballads.  I do not mean that twenty or thirty people sat down together and said, “Let us make a ballad.”  That would not have been possible.  But, perhaps, one man heard a story and put it into verse.  Another then heard it and added something to it.  Still another and another heard, repeated, added to, or altered it in one way or another.  Sometimes the story was made better by the process, sometimes it was spoiled.  But who those men were who made and altered the ballads, we do not know.  They were simply “the people.”

One whole group of ballads tells of the wonderful deeds of Robin Hood.  Who Robin Hood was we do not certainly know, nor does it matter much.  Legend has made him a man of gentle birth who had lost his lands and money, and who had fled to the woods as an outlaw.  Stories gradually gathered round his name as they had gathered round the name of Arthur, and he came to be looked upon as the champion of the people against the Norman tyrants.