retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words
like contrié, barón, dinére, felàwe, abbày, rivére, monéy, and its
assumption by words which never properly had it, such as ladý, harpér,
weddíng, watér, etc.[7] Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his
introduction, there were "many phrases and idioms which the minstrels
seem to have appropriated to themselves, . . . a cast of style and
measure very different from that of contemporary poets of a higher class."

Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the class of poetry
that we are here considering. In its looser employment the word has
signified almost any kind of song: "a woeful ballad made to his mistress'
eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat
intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently
reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose, and others, along
with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. There is also a numerous class
of popular ballads--in the sense of something made _for_ the people,
though not _by_ the people--are without relation to our subject. These
are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by
ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are
satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture
or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history
of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all
sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell
and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads
like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands
of such are included in manuscript collections like the "Pepysian," or
printed in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the Ballad Society.
But whether entirely modern, or extant in black-letter broadsides, they
are nothing to our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, the
_traditional_ ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was