Write a short note on Old English
Ballads.
In Anglo-Norman period
the literature was a copy of the French and was intended only for the upper
classes. Here and there were singers who made ballad for common people. On the
account of it's obscure origin and it's fransmission, the ballad is always the
most difficult of literary subjects. Ballads were produced continually in
England from Anglo-Saxon times until the seventeenth century. That for
centuries they were the only popular literature that common people could
understand easily. Read, for instance, the ballads of the 'merrie greenwood
men' which gradually collected unto the Geste of Robin Hood. One will
understand better, perhaps, than from reading many histories what the common
people of England felt and thought while their lords and masters were busy with
impossible metrical romances.
These ballads speak the
heart of the English folk. There is lawlessness but this seems justified by the
oppression of the times and by the barbarous severity of the game laws. An
intense hatred of shams and injustice lurks in every song; but the hatred is
saved from bitterness by the humour with which captives, especially rich
churchmen, are solemnly lectured by the bandits, while the squirm at right of
tortures prepared before their eyes in order to make them give up their golden
purses. And the scene generally ends in a bit of wild horse play. All
literature is but a dream expressed, and 'Robin Hood' is the dream of an
ignorant and oppressed but essentially noble people, struggling and determined
to be free.
0 Comments