Ross, writing in 1578, "take much pleasure in their old music and
chanted songs, which they themselves compose, whether about the deeds
of their ancestors, or about ingenious raiding tricks and
stratagems." {2a}

The historical ballads about the deeds of their ancestors would be
far more romantic than scientifically accurate. The verses, as they
passed from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, would
be in a constant state of flux and change. When a man forgot a
verse, he would make something to take its place. A more or less
appropriate stanza from another ballad would slip in; or the reciter
would tell in prose the matter of which he forgot the versified form.

Again, in the towns, street ballads on remarkable events, as early at
least as the age of Henry VIII., were written or printed. Knox
speaks of ballads on Queen Mary's four Maries. Of these ballads only
one is left, and it is a libel. The hanging of a French apothecary
of the Queen, and a French waiting-maid, for child murder, has been
transferred to one of the Maries, or rather to an apocryphal Mary
Hamilton, with Darnley for her lover. Of this ballad twenty-eight
variants--and extremely various they are--were collected by Professor
Child in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ten parts, 1882-
1898). In one mangled form or another such ballads would drift at
last even to Ettrick Forest.

A ballad may be found in a form which the first author could scarcely
recognise, dozens of hands, in various generations, having been at
work on it. At any period, especially in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the cheap press might print a sheet of the
ballads, edited and interpolated by the very lowest of printer's