Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties,
Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin
Hood's haunts. It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs.
They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were
composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering
minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers
at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the
accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames,
who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In
this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the
present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom
conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary
poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs
and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity.
Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border"
from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick
Forest. Professor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad
collection--contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript,
some of them obtained in America![2]

Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the
notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so
that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents,
descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the
different ballads. The circumstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar
springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches
occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas
and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight
who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and