The ballad - Index of

Reliques ;
The Ballad
there were manuscripts of all ages, including
the famous " Folio Manuscript " used
by Percy, the very existence of which had been
challenged, and which was only printed after
Child had undertaken his task ;
and it was patent
that some ballads were still in oral circulation.
All three sources were bound to provide material
of ballads confoundingly intermixed and overlapping.
Ballads might be lurking unsuspected
in books or manuscripts or memories : it has been
since shown that they were, and no doubt still
are, so concealed. A version of a ballad written
down in the eighteenth century might be an
earlier, better, purer version than one printed in
a seventeenth-century broadside ;
and any version
surviving in a person's memory, but otherwise
unrecorded, might well be of greater
scientific value than any others that had achieved
ink. In each class forgeries no doubt existed :
there were the confessed " improvements " of
Percy, there was the dangerous brilliance of
Scott, there was the highly suspicious fertility of
Peter Buchan's beggar-man, whom, he alleged,
he had kept travelling Scotland in the early years
of the nineteenth century to collect ballads from
oral tradition. The investigator had to combine
the sincerest faith in ballads with the utmost
suspicion of every ballad-text to train himself
;
to recognise the genuine, in however unlikely
a
place it might occur, and disentangle
it from the
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