# The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time/Volume 1/Introduction

It is now nearly twenty years since the publication of my collection of National English Airs (the first of the kind), and about fourteen since the edition was exhausted. In the interval, I found such numerous notices of music and ballads in old English books, that nearly every volume supplied some fresh illustration of my subject. If “Sternhold and Hopkins” was at hand—the title-page told that the psalms were penned for the “laying apart of all ungodly songs and ballads,” and the translation furnished a list of musical instruments in use at the time it was made: if Myles Coverdale’s Ghostly Psalms—in the preface he alludes to the ballads of our courtiers, to the whistling of our carters and ploughmen, and recommends young women at the distaff and spinning-wheel to forsake their “hey, nonny, nonny—hey, trolly, lolly, and such like fantasies;” thus shewing what were the usual burdens of their songs. Even in the twelfth century, Abbot Ailred’s, or Ethelred’s, reprehension of the singers gives so lively a picture of their airs and graces, as to resemble an exaggerated description of opera-singing at the present day; and, if still receding in point of date, in the life of St. Aldhelm, or Oldham, we find that, in order to ingratiate himself with the lower orders, and induce them to listen to serious subjects, he adopted the expedient of dressing himself like a minstrel, and first sang to them their popular songs.
If something was to be gleaned from works of this order, how much more from the comedies and other pictures of English life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries! I resolved, therefore, to defer the re-publication for a few years, and then found the increase of materials so great, that it became easier to re-write than to make additions. Hence the change of title to the work.
Since my former publication, also, I have been favoured with access to the ballads collected by Pepys, the well-known diarist; and the nearly equally celebrated “Roxburghe Collection” (formed by Robert, Earl of Oxford, and increased by subsequent possessors) has been added to the library of the British Museum. These and other advantages, such as the permission to examine and make extracts from the registers of the Stationers’ Company (through the liberality of the governing body), have induced me to attempt a chronological arrangement of the airs. Such an arrangement is necessarily imperfect, on account of the impossibility of tracing the exact dates of tunes by unknown authors; but in every case the reader has before him the evidence upon which the classification has been founded.
​It might be supposed that the registers of the Company of Stationers would furnish a complete list of ballads and ballad-printers, but, having seen all the entries from 1577 to 1799, I should say that not more than one out of every hundred ballads was registered. The names of some of the printers are not to be found in the registers.
It appears from an entry referring to the “white book” of the Company (which is not now existing), that seven hundred and ninety-six ballads were left in the council-chamber of the Company at the end of the year 1560, to be handed over to the new Wardens, and at the same time but forty-four books.
Webbe, in a Discourse of English Poetrie, printed in 1586, speaks of “the un-countable rabble of ryming ballet-makers and compylers of senseless sonnets,” and adds, “there is not anie tune or stroke which may be sung or plaide on instruments, which hath not some poetical ditties framed according to the numbers thereof: some to Rogero, some to Trenchmore, to Downright Squire, to galliardes, to pavines, to jygges, to brawles, to all manner of tunes; which every fidler knows better than myself, and therefore I will let them passe.” Here the class of music is named with which old English ditties were usually coupled—dance and ballad tunes. The great musicians of Elizabeth’s reign did not often compose airs of the short and rhythmical character required for ballads. These were chiefly the productions of older musicians, or of those of lower grade, and some of ordinary fiddlers and pipers. The Frog Galliard is the only instance I know of a popular ballad-tune to be traced to a celebrated composer of the latter half of the sixteenth century. The scholastic music then in vogue was of a wholly different character. Point and counterpoint, fugue and the ingenious working of parts, were the great objects of study, and rhythmical melody was but lightly esteemed.
In the reigns of James I. and Charles I., we find a few “new court tunes” employed for ballads, but it was not until Charles II. ascended the throne that composers of high repute commenced, or re-commenced, the writing of simple airs, and then but sparingly. Matthew Locke’s “The delights of the bottle” is perhaps the first song composed for the stage, that supplied a tune to ballads.
My former publication contained two hundred and forty-five airs; the present number exceeds four hundred. Of these, two hundred are contained in the first volume, which extends no further than the reign of Charles I. This portion of the work may be considered as a collection; but the number of airs extant of later date is so much larger than of the earlier period, that the second volume can be viewed only in the light of a selection. To have made it upon the same scale as the first would have occupied at least three volumes instead of one. My endeavour has therefore been, to give as much variety of character as possible, but especially to include those airs which were popular as ballad-tunes. Some of those contained in the old collection have now given place to others of more general interest, but more than two hundred are retained. Every air has been re-harmonized, upon a simple and consistent plan,—the introductions to the various reigns have been added,—and nearly every line in the book has been re-written.
I have been at some trouble to trace to its origin the assertion that the English ​have no national music. It is extraordinary that such a report should have obtained credence, for England may safely challenge any nation not only to produce as much, but also to give the same satisfactory proofs of antiquity. The report seems to have gained ground from the unsatisfactory selection of English airs in Dr. Crotch’s Specimens of various Styles of Music; but the national music in that work was supplied by Malchair, a Spanish violin-player at Oxford, whose authority Crotch therein quotes. It is perhaps not generally known that at the time of the publication Dr. Crotch was but nineteen years of age. No collection of English airs had at that time been made to guide Malchair, and he followed the dictum of Dr. Burney in such passages as the following:—
“It is related by Giovanni Battista Donado that the Turks have a limited number of tunes, to which the poets of their country have continued to write for ages; and the vocal music of our own country seems long to have been equally circumscribed for, till the last century, it seems as if the number of our secular and popular melodies did not greatly exceed that of the Turks.” In a note, he adds, that the tunes of the Turks were in all twenty-four, which were to depict melancholy, joy, or fury,—to be mellifluous or amorous. (History, ii. 553.)
Again, in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Bottom has been. turned into an ass, and says “I have a reasonable good ear in music; let me have tongs and bones,” the stage direction is “Musick tongs, Rural Music.” Burney inverts the stage direction, and adds “Poker and tongs, marrowbones and cleavers, salt-box, hurdy-gurdy, &c., are the old national instruments of our island.” (iii. 335.)
Jean Jacques Rousseau published a letter on French music, which he summed up by telling his countrymen that “their harmony was abominable; their airs were not airs; their recitative was not recitative; that they had no music, and could not have any.” (Rousseau, Ecrits sur la Musique, Paris, edit. 1823, p. 812.) Dr. Burney seems to have improved upon this model, for Rousseau did not resort to misquotation to prove his case, but Dr. Burney’s History is one continuous misrepresentation of English music and musicians, only rendered plausible by misquotation of every kind.
The effect of the misquotation is that he has been believed; and passages as absurd as the following have been copied by writers who have relied upon his authority:—
“The low state of our regal music in the time of Henry VIII., 1530, may be gathered from the accounts given in Hall’s and Hollinshed’s Chronicles, of a masque at Cardinal Wolsey’s palace, Whitehall, where the King was entertained with ‘a concert of drums and fifes.’ But this was soft music compared with that of his heroic daughter Elizabeth, who, according to Hentzner, used to be regaled during dinner with twelve trumpets and two kettle-drums; which, together with fifes, cornets, and side-drums, made the hall ring for half an hour together.” (History, iii. 143.)
There is nothing of the kind in the books Dr. Burney pretends to quote. The account of the chroniclers is of Henry the Eighth’s landing at Wolsey’s palace, ​where, by a preconcerted arrangement, “divers chambers” (short cannon that made a loud report) were let off, and he was conducted into the hall with “such a noise of drums and flutes as seldom had been heard the like,” for the purpose of surprising the Cardinal and the masquers. Not a word of the music of the masque.
As to Queen Elizabeth, Hentzner describes only the military music to give notice in the palace that dinner was being carried in. Music then answered the purpose of the dinner-bell. He says “the queen dines and sups alone.”
Burney carries his depreciation of English authors systematically throughout his work. It might be supposed that he would have allowed an author of so early a date as John Cotton, who flourished soon after Guido, to pass unchallenged, but he first misrepresents, and then contradicts him. Burney tells us that Cotton ascribes the invention of neumæ erroneously to Guido (ii. 144). Now Cotton speaks of various modes of writing music by the musical signs called neumæ, and attributes the last only to Guido. It is certain that Burney read no more of the treatise than the heading of a chapter (Quid utilitatis afferant neuma a Guidone invente), for he proves by a note upon neumæ, that he only half understood what they were. To any reader of Cotton’s treatise, such misapprehension would have been impossible. (See Gerbert’s Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musicâ, ii. 257.)
It is not always easy to prove that a writer reviewed works without reading them, but I doubt if any musician can now be found who believes that Burney had examined “all the works he could find” of Henry Lawes, with the “care and candour” that he professes; while in the case of Morley’s Concert-Lessons, it is certain that he passed his facetious judgment upon them after scoring only a portion of two parts, the work being in six. This is proved by his own manuscript (Addit. MSS. 11,587, Brit. Mus.), and there was no perfect copy of the work extant at the time.
When Burney tells us that the Catch Club sang old compositions “better than the authors intended” (iii. 123),—that “our secular vocal music, during the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, seems to have been much inferior to that of the Church,” and has no better proof of it than a book of songs composed by an amateur musician, “Thomas Wythorne, Gent.,” in 1571 (iii. 119),—when he says that, in the same reign, “the violin was hardly known to the English in shape or in name!” (iii. 143),—and that Playford was the first who published music in the seventeenth century, yet commenced in 1653! (iii. 417 and 418),—he shews not only a desire to underrate, but also a deficiency of knowledge, that must weaken all confidence in him as an historian.
In his review of the music in Elizabeth’s reign, he tells us that “the art of singing, further than was necessary to keep a performer in tune and time, must have been unknown … solo songs, anthems, and cantatas, being productions of later times” (iii. 114). A more strange misconception could scarcely have been penned. No songs to the lute? No ballads? If so, Miles Coverdale might have spared himself the trouble of telling the courtier “not to rejoice in his ballads,” and Chaucer should have represented at least three persons as serenading the ​carpenter’s wife, and not one. As to the art of singing, Dr. Burney has himself quoted the description of John of Salisbury, written four hundred years before Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and that is quite enough to refute the opinion above expressed; but, if more be required, the reader will find it here in the long note at p. 404.
There was a proverb, of French origin, current both in Latin and English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, respecting the manner of singing by different nations. The Latin version was “Galli cantant, Angli jubilant, Hispani plangunt, Germani ulutant, Itali caprizant:’ the English was “The French sing,” or “The French pipe, the English carol [rejoice, or sing merrily], the Spaniards wail, the Germans howl, the Italians caper.” (The allusion to the Italians is rather as to their unsteady holding of notes than to their facility in florid singing; caper signifying “a goat.”) Burney, without any authority, renders it “the English shout” (iii. 182). Now, although we have no modern English verb that is an exact translation of “jubilare,” the Italian “giubilare” has precisely the same signification; and Pasqualigo, the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII., describing the singing of the English choristers in the King’s chapel, says “their voices are really rather divine than human—non cantavano ma jubilavano,” which can be understood only in a highly complimentary sense.
It is sufficient for my present purpose to say that Dr. Burney’s History is written throughout in this strain. What with mistake, and what with misrepresentation, it can but mislead the reader as to English music or musicians; and from the slight search I have made into his early Italian authorities, I doubt whether even that portion is very reliable. The public has now forgotten the contention between the rival histories of music of Hawkins and Burney, and a few words should be placed upon record. Hawkins’s entire work was published in 1776, and Burney’s first volume in the same year, his second in 1782, and his third and fourth in 1789. Burney obtained a great reputation by his first volume, which is upon the music of the ancients. In that he was assisted by the researches of the Rev. Thomas Twining, the translator of Aristotle’s Poetics, who relinquished his own projected, and partly-written history, in Burney’s favour. Hawkins’s work is of great original research, and he is a far more reliable authority for fact than Burney: still the history is by no means so well digested. It is an analysis of book after book and life after life, fitted rather for supplying materials to those who will dig them out, than to be read as a whole. Burney’s is a very agreeably written book, but he made history pleasant by such lively sallies as those I have quoted: he took his authorities at second hand, when the originals were accessible; and copied especially from Hawkins, without acknowledgment, and disguised the plagiarism by altering the language. Many of his appropriations are to be traced by errors which it is impossible that two men reading independently could commit. Burney had but one love,—the Italian school,—and he thought the most minute particulars of the Italian opera of his day worthy of being chronicled. The madrigal with him was a “many-headed monster” (iii. 885): French music was “displeasing to all ears but those of France,” and ​Rousseau’s letter upon it “an excellent piece of musical criticism,” combining “good sense, taste, and reason” (iv. 615): he dismisses Sebastian Bach in half a dozen lines; and, although he devotes much space to Handel’s operas, his oratorios are often dismissed with the barest record of their existence by a line in a note. Israel in Egypt, Acis and Galatea, &c., are unnoticed.
The present collection will sufficiently prove that “the number of our secular and popular melodies” was not quite as “circumscribed” as Dr. Burney has represented; but, indeed, he had a book in his library which alone gave a complete refutation to his limited estimate. I have now before me one of the editions of The Dancing Master, a collection of Country Dances, published by Playford, which was formerly in Burney’s possession. It contains more than two hundred tunes, the names of which must convince an ordinary reader that at least a considerable number among them are song and ballad tunes, while a musician will as readily perceive many others to be of the same class, from the construction of the melody. If a doubt should remain as to the character of the airs in collections of this kind, further evidence is by no means wanting. Sir Thomas Elyot, writing in 1531, and describing many ancient modes of dancing, says (in The Governour), “As for the special names [of the dances], they were taken as they be now, either of the names of the first inventour, or of the measure and number they do conteine, or of the first words of the ditties which the song comprehendeth, whereoff the daunce was made;” and, to approach nearer to the time of the publication in question, Charles Butler, in 1636, speaks of “the infinite multitude of ballads set to sundry pleasant and delightful tunes by cunning and witty composers, with country dances fitted unto them.” See his Principles of Musick.
The eighteen editions of The Dancing Master are of great assistance in the chronological arrangement of our popular tunes from 1650 to 1728; for, although some airs run through every edition, we may tell by the omission of others, when they fell into desuetude, as well as the airs by which their places were supplied.
​Many of our ballad-tunes were not fitted for dancing, and therefore were not included in The Dancing Master; but a considerable number of these is supplied by the ballad-operas which were printed after the extraordinary success of The Beggars’ Opera in 1728.
I might name many other books which have contributed their quota, especially Wit and Mirth, or Pills to purge Melancholy, with its numerous editions from 1699 to 1720,—but all are indicated in the work. I cannot, however, refrain from some notice of the numerous foreign publications in which our national airs are included. Sometimes they are in the form of country dances,—at others, as songs, or as tunes for the lute. I have before me three sets of country dances printed in Paris during the last century, and as one of these is the “5$^{ême}$ Recueil d’Anglaises telle qu’elles se dansent ché la Reine,” there must have been at least four more of that series. Many of my readers may not know that the “Quadrille de Contredanses” in which they join under the name of “a set of Quadrilles,” is but our old “Square Country Dance” come back to us again. The new designation commenced no longer ago than 1815,—just after the war.
Horace Walpole tells us in his letters, that our country dances were all the rage. in Italy at the time he wrote, and, as collections were printed at Manheim, Munich, in various towns of the Netherlands, and even as far North as Denmark, it is clear that they travelled over the greater part of Europe. The Danish collection now before me consists of 296 pages, with a volume of nearly equal thickness to describe the figures.
Some of the works printed in Holland during the seventeenth century, which contain English airs, have materially assisted in the chronological arrangement. Of these, Vallet’s Tablature de Luth, entitulé Le Secret des Muses, was published at Amsterdam in 1615. Bellerophon, of Lust tot Wysheit, in 1620, and other editions at later dates. Valerius’s Nederlandtsche Gedenck-Clanck, at Haerlem, in 1626. Starter’s Friesche Lust-Hof, and his Boertigheden, in 1634, and other editions without dates. Camphuysen’s Stichtelycke Rymen, 1647, 1652, and without date. Pers’s Gesangh der Zeeden, 1662, and without date. Urania, 1648, and without date.
It is only necessary to remark upon the chronological arrangement, that, in order to ascertain what airs or ballads were popular in any particular reign, the reader will have occasion to refer also to those which precede it. Without endless repetition, it could not have been otherwise.
Facsimiles of a few of the manuscripts will be found in the following pages.
I have now the pleasing duty of returning thanks to those who have assisted me in this collection; and first to Edward F. Rimbault, LL.D., and Mr. G. A. Macfarren. Dr. Rimbault has been the largest contributor to my work, and a contributor in every form. To him I am indebted for pointing out many airs which would have escaped me, and for adding largely to my collection of notices of others; for the loan of rare books; and for assisting throughout with his extensive musical and bibliographical knowledge. To Mr. G. A. Macfarren for having volunteered to re-arrange the airs which were to be taken from my former ​collection, as well as to harmonize the new upon a simple and consistent plan throughout. In my former work, some had too much harmony, and others even too little, or such as was not in accordance with the spirit of the words. The musician will best understand the amount of thought required to find characteristic harmonics to melodies of irregular construction, and how much a simple air will sometimes gain by being well fitted.
To the Right Hon. the Earl of Abergavenny I am indebted for the loan of “Lady Nevell’s Virginal Book,” a manuscript collection of music for the virginals, transcribed in 1591. To the late Lord Braybrooke I owe the means of access to Pepys’s collection of ballads, which was indispensable for the due prosecution of the work.
To Mr. J. Payne Collier, F.S.A., I am indebted for the loan of a valuable manuscript of poetry, transcribed in the reign of James I., containing much of still earlier date; and for free access to his collection of ballads and of rare books: to Mr. George Daniel, of Canonbury, for copies of several Elizabethan ballads, which are to be found only in his unique collection; and to Mr. David Laing, F.S.A. Scot., for the loan of several rare books.
To Sir Frederick Madden, K.H., Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, I am indebted for much information about manuscripts, readily given, and with such uniform courtesy, that it becomes an especial pleasure to acknowledge it.
W. C.
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