in the houses of the peasantry and earned a living by their craft.

The earliest story-telling was in recitative. When the old
alliteration passed on into rhyme, and the crowd or rustic fiddle took
the place of the old "gleebeam" for accentuation of the measure and
the meaning of the song, we come to the ballad-singer as Philip Sidney
knew him. Sidney said, in his "Defence of Poesy," that he never heard
the old song of Percy and Douglas, that he found not his heart moved
more than with a trumpet; and yet, he said, "it is sung but by some
blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so
evil apparelled in the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would
it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?" Many an old
ballad, instinct with natural feeling, has been more or less
corrupted, by bad ear or memory, among the people upon whose lips it
has lived. It is to be considered, however, that the old broader
pronunciation of some letters developed some syllables and the
swiftness of speech slurred over others, which will account for many
an apparent halt in the music of what was actually, on the lips of the
ballad-singer, a good metrical line.

"Chevy Chase" is, most likely, a corruption of the French word
chevauchee, which meant a dash over the border for destruction and
plunder within the English pale. Chevauchee was the French equivalent
to the Scottish border raid. Close relations between France and
Scotland arose out of their common interest in checking movements
towards their conquest by the kings of England, and many French words
were used with a homely turn in Scottish common speech. Even that
national source of joy, "great chieftain of the pudding-race," the
haggis, has its name from the French hachis. At the end of the old
ballad of "Chevy Chase," which reads the corrupted word into a new