ballads retain a trace or two of the Becket form, but they are not
derived from the Becket form. The fancy of the folk first evolved
the situations in the story, then lent them to written literature
(Becket's legend, 1300), and thirdly, received the story back from
written legend with a slight, comparatively modern colouring.

In the dispute as to the origin of our ballads one school, as Mr. T.
F. Henderson and Professor Courthope, regard them as debris of old
literary romances, ill-remembered work of professional minstrels.*
That there are ballads of this kind in England, such as the
Arthurian ballads, I do not deny. But in my opinion many ballads
and popular tales are in origin older than the mediaeval romances,
as a rule. As a rule the romances are based on earlier popular
data, just as the 'Odyssey' is an artistic whole made up out of
popular tales. The folk may receive back a literary form of its own
ballad or story, but more frequently the popular ballad comes down
in oral tradition side by side with its educated child, the literary
romance on the same theme.

Cf. The Queen's Marie.

Mr. Henderson has answered that the people is unpoetical. The
degraded populace of the slums may be unpoetical, like the minstrel
named 'Tripe Skewer,' and may deprave the ballads of its undegraded
ancestry into such modern English forms as 'Lord Bateman.' But I
think of the people which, in Barbour's day, had its choirs of
peasant girls chanting rural snatches on Bruce's victories, or, in
still earlier France, of Roland's overthrow. If THEIR songs are
attributed to professional minstrels, I turn to the Greece of 1830,
to the Finland of to-day, to the outermost Hebrides of to-day, to