But at *c.*1250 (Matthew Paris), or before *c.*1150 (William of Malmesbury), it is very much less probable that the ballad 'Sir Aldingar' *could* have been in existence, and even something recognizable as the basic story is much more likely to have been recorded, in verse, in the language and metres of Latin or Anglo-Norman French.

Superficially, the argument from proper names (summarized above) gains some additional support from the much later version in Walter Scott's *Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border*, in which the queen's accuser is named *Rodingham* and her champion *Sir Hugh le Blond*. Scott gave his source as (indirectly) 'the recitation of an old woman, long in the service of the Arbuthnot family' and claimed the ballad as the original of 'Sir Aldingar'. This was not, however, taken seriously by Child. 69 T. F. Henderson, editor of the *Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border*, adds: 'It may even be nothing more than a mere vamp of that ballad ["Sir Aldingar"] after its publication in the *Reliques*.'70 The truth of the matter is for Scott specialists to determine; but if oral tradition is one scenario that the parity of ignorance principle keeps open, then the deliberate reinvention of ballads must, as Chambers suspected, be another.71

An example of ballad rewriting that has been generally accepted is the recasting of *The Berkshire Tragedy; or, The Wittam Miller* ('Young men and maidens all give ear') as *The Cruel Miller* ('My parents educated me'), probably around the beginning of the nineteenth century (both ballads listed as Roud 263). In twenty-two eight-line stanzas, *The Berkshire Tragedy* tells the story of a miller who kills a young woman he has made pregnant and throws her body into the river, but he falls under suspicion nonetheless, and when the corpse is found he is apprehended and brought to trial, the ballad ending with his plea for God's mercy. *The Berkshire Tragedy* has a good record in chapbook and broadside print from 1744 up until around the second decade of the nineteenth century. Then, at much the same time in the early nineteenth century, there appeared the ballad variously titled *The Cruel Miller*, *Bloody Miller*, or *False Hearted Miller*, which tells the same story in nine stanzas of four long lines, ending more or less with the discovery

Internationality of Ballads', in *Gender and Print Culture: New Perspectives on International Ballad Studies*, ed. Maria Herrera-Sobek ([n.p.]: Kommission für Volksdichtung, 1991), pp. 99–104.

69 *ESPB*, ii, 34.

70 Sir Walter Scott, *Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border*, ed. T. F. Henderson, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1902), iii, 66.

71 Chambers, *English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages*, p. 180.

of the body, the trial verdict and sentence being merely summarized in the last two lines. *The Cruel Miller* is well represented in broadside print from before 1820 until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

'Murdered-sweetheart' ballads represent a common and frequently highly formulaic sub-genre of balladry,72 but in view of a great deal of agreement in narrative detail, as well as numerous very close verbal parallels, there has been a general consensus that *The Cruel Miller* is directly based upon *The Berkshire Tragedy*. 73 It is difficult to convey the parallels without giving the two texts side by side in their entirety, but a few examples will have to suffice (Table 2.1).74 The setting for *The Cruel Miller* is often named on broadsides as Wexford, although the copy cited in Table 2.1, which is probably one of the earliest, leaves a blank. In *The Berkshire Tragedy* the action takes place in the vicinity of Oxford. Of course, if we do accept the textual evidence that the ballad was recast, it is still not possible to identify precisely when that would have been done, or by whom, or how (whether this was simply an act of rewriting, or whether oral reception and memory played a part), or why. These are all legitimate matters for scholarly debate, drawing largely on textual and print trade evidence, since the ballad does not seem to have been collected much before the early twentieth century and there is no pertinent melodic evidence.

72 See Thomas Pettitt, 'Journalism vs. Tradition in the English Ballads of the Murdered Sweetheart', in *Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800*, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 75–89.

73 See G. Malcolm Laws, Jr., *American Balladry from British Broadsides: A Guide for Students and Collectors of Traditional Song* (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1957), pp. 104– 22 (where American variants are also considered). Laws observed that the rewriting of ballads, which he attributes primarily to the broadside trade (pp. 121–22), had received little attention from scholars (p. 104) – and the situation has not changed much over the intervening years.

74 Cited from *The Berkshire Tragedy; or, The Wittam Miller* (London: Sympson's Printing Office, [1765?]) [ESTC T21545; Roxburghe Ballads 3.802–803]; *The Cruel Miller; or, Love and Murder* ([London]: J. Catnach, [1813–38]) [London, British Library, L.R.271.a.2., vol. 4, no. 384].

#### Table 2.1 Parallels in *The Berkshire Tragedy* and *The Cruel Miller*

To give just one example of the direction that research might take, it is sometimes said that the appearance after the beginning of the nineteenth century of ballads that are shorter, less prolix, and less explicitly moralistic (but does the textual evidence actually bear out this last point, or is the difference rather just one of language?) is evidence of a change in popular taste and sensibility. However, these later ballads are also smaller in format (frequently so-called 'slip songs', printed on a narrow piece of paper and often formed by cutting a larger broadside into two or more strips), and the explanation may lie instead in aspects of the print trade that have yet to be fully researched – in particular, improvements in paper and printing that James Catnach is said to have introduced after he moved to London in 1813/14, which were subsequently also adopted by John Pitts. 75 Pitts printed both *The Berkshire Tragedy* (in more than one issue) and *The Cruel Miller*. 76 It does appear that the ballad genre was changing around the early

75 Charles Hindley, *The Life and Times of James Catnach, (Late of Seven Dials), Ballad Monger* (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878), p. 44; Leslie Shepard, *John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials, London, 1765–1844* (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969), p. 58; W. Weir, 'St. Giles's, Past and Present', in *London*, ed. Charles Knight, 6 vols (London: Charles Knight, 1841–44), iii, 257–72 (p. 264).

76 *The Berkshire Tragedy; or, The Wittam Miller* ([London]: J. Pitts, [1802–19]) [Oxford, Bodleian Library, Harding B 6(101)]; *The Berkshire Tragedy; or, The Wittam Miller* ([London]: Pitts, [1819–44]) [Oxford, Bodleian Library, Harding B 6(102)]; *The Cruel Miller* ([London]: Pitts, [1819–44]) [Oxford, Bodleian Library, Harding B 11(755)].

decades of the nineteenth century, even while it would be difficult to argue that *The Berkshire Tragedy* and *The Cruel Miller* are not still the 'same' thing.

At least it ought in principle to be possible to assign to ballad accounts of murder cases a *terminus post quem*. 77 The earliest known text of *The Berkshire Tragedy* is in a chapbook of 1744, where it is followed by (in prose) 'The last dying Words and Confession of John Mauge, a Miller; who was Executed at Reading in Berkshire, on Saturday the 20th of last Month, for the barbarous Murder of Anne Knite, his Sweet-heart'.78 Although the information given here is not comprehensive, the printing of the confession along with the ballad does seem to imply that publication was more or less contemporaneous with the crime and execution, and the proper names and date (1744) certainly look as if they relate to an actual event. Yet no one (to the best of my knowledge) has been able to identify the crime in question.79 And there is something odd about the chapbook itself – which actually exists in two editions, printed, according to the title page, for the same bookseller, John Keed, at Edinburgh and at York, both dated 1744. The two editions are different settings of type, with some textual variants and different title-page woodcuts. No other trace has been found of a bookseller named John Keed; 80 and why would an account of what was presumably a topical event in the Reading area have been printed at either Edinburgh or York (rather than, say, London)?

Among the elements of the ballad story that lend an appearance of historicity is the perpetrator's claim that he posted a notice in a newspaper offering a reward for information about his victim's whereabouts. The Edinburgh chapbook names the publication as the *Post Boy*, which was published 1695–1728 (or perhaps the *Daily Post Boy*, 1728–36?) – which

77 See, for example, Tom Pettitt, 'Mediating Maria Marten: Comparative and Contextual Studies of the Red Barn Ballads', in *Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions*, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), forthcoming.

78 *The Berkshire Tragedy; or, The Whittam Miller* (Edinburgh: John Keed, 1744) [ESTC T60621]; *The Berkshire Tragedy; or, The Whittham* [*sic*] *Miller* (York: John Keed, 1744) [ESTC N49176] (quotation from the Edinburgh printing).

79 There is, for example, no trace in reports of either Berkshire or Oxford assizes in the *Daily Post*, 10 March 1743, 21 July 1743, 8 March 1744, 12 July 1744, 14 March 1745, 1 August 1745. My thanks to Richard Clark of the http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org website who confirms that he has likewise found no trace of this case, its victim, or perpetrator (personal communication, 15 June 2013), and to Tom Pettitt for sharing his own notes on the historicity (or not) of the ballad.

80 No other entries in ESTC and no relevant listings in either the British Book Trade Index, currently available at http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk or the Scottish Book Trade Index, available at http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/scottish-book-trade-index.

immediately poses a problem of dating vis-à-vis the chapbook, compounded by the fact that nothing relevant has been identified in the newspaper itself. The title, moreover, is the site of a textual variant, with the York chapbook naming it as the *Gazett*[*e*], which is harder to pin down and is perhaps just a generic title, although the variously titled *Reading Mercury*/*Oxford Gazette and Reading Mercury*/*Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette*, which began in 1723, might fit. It is true that fictitious or misleading imprints are not altogether unknown; and likewise that the *raison d'être* for early modern murder ballads was less reportage of real events than revelation of the working out of divine providence.81 Yet the deception, if that is really what it is (and, of course, something might turn up in a newspaper or other source), seems exceptionally elaborate for a fairly run-of-the-mill murdered-sweetheart ballad.

*The Berkshire Tragedy*/*The Cruel Miller* provides evidence of ballad rewriting, apparently for the purpose of print and, even more importantly, of ballad rewriting as a factor in continuity and variation – in relation not just to the particular ballad text (and perhaps tune) but to the genre as a whole. How that might then interact with oral transmission is a question that largely remains still to be researched.82 Ballad research has frequently resorted to filling in the gaps around extant items and points of historical reference (actual or supposed) – but while parity of ignorance demands that absence of evidence is not taken as evidence of absence, neither is it an open invitation to invoke a favoured mechanism to fill in the gaps. Rather, an informed scepticism is more likely to allow the ballad genre to unfold at its own pace.

81 Pettitt, 'Journalism vs. Tradition', esp. pp. 76–77; Malcolm Gaskill, 'Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England', *Social History*, 23 (1998), 1–30. The latter is also in Malcolm Gaskill, *Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 203–41. In the nineteenth century, a species of street literature known as 'cocks' related sensational but fictitious narratives of murders and the like. See Hindley, *Life and Times of James Catnach*, pp. 355–56. While 'news' is a useful generic description for broadside ballads from different periods, it should not be assumed that this amounts to factual reportage.

82 See David Atkinson and Steve Roud, eds, *Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions* (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).

# 3. Textual Authority and the Sources of Variance

The previous chapter touched on the iconic status accorded to oral tradition in ballad studies, the corollary of which is the denigration of print. Philip Bohlman writes: 'So strong is the correlation of oral tradition with folk music that most definitions treat oral tradition as fundamental to folk music, if not its most salient feature.'1 Loosely applied, 'oral tradition' might indicate nothing more precise than that ballads in general are amenable to singing or recitation, and/or that a particular item was collected from a singer who had memorized it. However, the implication of non-literacy is frequently there in the qualifier 'oral', and that of transmission from person to person over time and/or place in the substantive 'tradition'. Accordingly – seductively – oral tradition comes to be equated with the very engine of ballad variation, that complex of processes involving remembering and forgetting, addition, subtraction, and rearrangement, substitution, borrowing, and consolidation (to name just a few) that scholars have codified to account for textual and melodic stability and change.2 After all, the argument implicitly runs, it is much harder to reproduce a text learned by word of mouth than one learned from a printed source. Tunes are even more prone to variation than words.3 It is generally understood that the

1 Philip V. Bohlman, *The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World* (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 14.

2 Bohlman, *Study of Folk Music*, pp. 17–24. See also Roger D. Abrahams and George Foss, *Anglo-American Folklsong Style* (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 12–36; Tom Burns, 'A Model for Textual Variation in Folksong', *Folklore Forum*, 3 (1970), 49–56; Eleanor R. Long, 'Ballad Singers, Ballad Makers, and Ballad Etiology', *Western Folklore*, 32 (1973), 225–36.

3 Ian Russell, 'Stability and Change in a Sheffield Singing Tradition', *Folk Music Journal*, 5.3 (1987), 317–58.

melodies have nearly always been learned by ear; although musical literacy was not that rare in the past, ballad tunes were not so frequently printed and, given their relatively simple, strophic nature, seem unlikely to have required recourse to notation.

The oral argument finds its apotheosis, in the wake of the publication of Albert Lord's *The Singer of Tales* in 1960,4 in the attempt to apply the theory of oral-formulaic improvisation directly to the Anglo-Scottish ballads, most notably in David Buchan's *The Ballad and the Folk*. 5 It is fair to say that this particular application of the oral-formulaic theory has been effectively refuted;6 but it is equally fair to say that the presence of ballads in printed form – in particular, the cheap printed formats of broadsides and chapbooks – is still widely regarded as, at best, a conundrum. Bohlman calls it a 'blatant paradox'.7 Print is acknowledged as a means of ballad transmission and a source of new material, but there is a general urgency to hurry the song along into oral tradition.8 The distrust of print goes all the way back to early folk song collectors such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp. 9 Likewise, Francis James Child's work on ballads was marked by an uneasy relationship with broadside print.10

4 Albert B. Lord, *The Singer of Tales*, 2nd edn, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

5 David Buchan, *The Ballad and the Folk* (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). See also James H. Jones, 'Commonplace and Memorization in the Oral Tradition of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads', *Journal of American Folklore*, 74 (1961), 97–112. Lord himself wrote briefly and inconclusively about ballads in an incomplete article, 'The Ballad: Textual Stability, Variation, and Memorization', published in Albert Bates Lord, *The Singer Resumes the Tale*, ed. Mary Louise Lord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 167–86.

6 Albert B. Friedman, 'The Oral-Formulaic Theory of Balladry – A Re-rebuttal', in *The Ballad Image: Essays Presented to Bertrand Harris Bronson*, ed. James Porter (Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore & Mythology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983), pp. 215–40. See also Flemming G. Andersen and Thomas Pettitt, 'Mrs. Brown of Falkland: A Singer of Tales?', *Journal of American Folklore*, 92 (1979), 1–24; Holger Olof Nygard, 'Mrs. Brown's Recollected Ballads', in *Ballads and Ballad Research*, ed. Patricia Conroy (Seattle: University of Washington, 1978), pp. 68–87; Kenneth A. Thigpen, Jr., 'A Reconsideration of the Commonplace Phrase and Commonplace Theme in the Child Ballads', *Southern Folklore Quarterly*, 37 (1973), 385–408.

7 Bohlman, *Study of Folk Music*, p. 28.

8 Bohlman, *Study of Folk Music*, pp. 28–30.

9 S. Baring Gould and H. Fleetwood Sheppard, *Songs and Ballads of the West* (London: Methuen, [1891–95]), p. viii; Cecil J. Sharp, *English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions* (London: Simpkin; Novello, 1907), p. 101. See also Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Eng 863, Appendix no. 5, Sabine Baring-Gould to Francis James Child, 23 August 1890, available at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/22250626.

10 Mary Ellen Brown, 'Child's Ballads and the Broadside Conundrum', in *Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800*, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 57–72.

All of this is problematic, now that the true depth and breadth of the print culture that lies behind the English and Scottish ballads is becoming apparent, thanks on the one hand to the painstaking efforts of researchers in libraries and archives, and on the other to the increasing availability of digitized images of broadside and chapbook collections and related materials. It is thought that as many as 90 per cent of the English and Scottish ballads and folk songs collected during the Romantic period and in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century could also be found in cheap print.11 Moreover, while it is widely (and quite reasonably) assumed that printers copied from one another, it is not the case that printed ballads are devoid of variation. In fact, as Dianne Dugaw was perhaps the first to demonstrate in depth, it is possible to identify just the same sorts of textual stability and change among printed ballads as are found among those collected from singers.12 Variants in printed ballads frequently take the form of lexical omissions and additions, rearrangements, substitutions, and the like, and (usually over a broader chronological and/or geographical span) it is also possible to identify instances of wholesale revision and rewriting, such as the recasting of *The Berkshire Tragedy* as *The Cruel Miller* considered in the previous chapter.

Rarely is it possible to be certain whence these printed variants originated. While some may be the result of lax typesetting, faulty copy, constraints of the printed format, and the like, others could just as easily represent more deliberate 'authorial' interventions, and it is quite likely that some of them may have been influenced by the ballad in its orally circulating form. Where something like a date or a proper name is substantially different as between one broadside ballad and another, it is difficult to imagine that the substitution was not in some way deliberate.13 Different printings of 'The Mountains High' (Roud 397), for example, name the main character variously as Reynardine, Rinordine, or Ryner Dyne. Similarly, in 'The Bold Princess Royal' (Roud 528), the date of the encounter with the pirate ship

11 Figures in this region were first advanced by Robert S. Thomson, 'The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1974), p. 274; Rainer Wehse, 'Broadside Ballad and Folksong: Oral Tradition versus Literary Tradition', *Folklore Forum*, 8 (1975), 324–34 [2–12] (p. 333 [11]). They are confirmed by researchers currently working on the material (personal communication).

12 Dianne M. Dugaw, 'Anglo-American Folksong Reconsidered: The Interface of Oral and Written Forms', *Western Folklore*, 43 (1984), 83–103.

13 See Steve Roud, 'Introduction', in *Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions*, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), forthcoming.

is usually given on broadsides as the 14th of February, but other dates are found among copies collected from singers, and at least one broadside has the 6th of January. In 'The Fatal Ramillies' (Roud 1266), the complement of the battleship appears on broadsides as seven hundred and seventy or seven hundred and twenty, which is close to the historical figure, but also as the much exaggerated seventeen hundred and seventy. If these various broadside texts were indeed copied from one another, then it would seem that the printers must have had some other model in mind when introducing such variant details – that is to say, either some consciously creative input, or some extraneous knowledge of how they thought the ballad 'ought to go'. This whole area demands further investigation and systematization – and it also demands a theoretical model of variation capable of integrating both the printed and the oral ballad.

Just to set out the ground quite clearly: there is no question here of denying that English-language ballads can be, and certainly have been, learned and passed on without the aid of written or printed copies, over the five centuries or so during which the genre has been in existence, and that this may have been a source of textual and melodic variation. Oral transmission has perhaps had a particular importance in remote regions such as Appalachia, or among social groups such as the Scottish Travellers. 14 Ballad melodies, as noted above, were rarely written down as music notation, meaning that a degree of transmission by word of mouth and learning by ear must have been more or less essential. A number of ballads stand out as not having any known record in cheap print, and therefore presumably must have been passed on by oral means. Among them are widely collected items such as 'Lord Randal' (Child 12) and 'The Maid Freed from the Gallows' (Child 95), which are strongly repetitive and incremental in nature, suggesting that they would have been particularly easy to learn and remember. Indeed, one of the most cogent reasons for rejecting the theory of oral-formulaic improvisation in relation to the English-language ballads is that it is simply not necessary: they are just not that difficult to learn by heart. A further reason is that the historical context and literary culture out of which the English-language ballads emerged

14 But see, respectively, David E. Whisnant, *All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Chris Wright, 'Forgotten Broadsides and the Song Tradition of the Scots Travellers', in *Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions*, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), forthcoming.

was entirely different from that surrounding the South Slavic epic songs that provided the material evidence for *The Singer of Tales*.

In post-Conquest England, oral and literate strands of culture were intertwined from the beginning, with a gradual shifting of emphasis away from the oral and towards the literate – given a tremendous boost, of course, by the invention of printing – being more or less complete by the end of the nineteenth century.15 The evidence for this is necessarily very diverse in form and chronology. A small selection of the key loci that witnessed the interface of oral and literate culture would include the gradual replacement of oral testimony by written documents in legal proceedings; the ubiquity of preaching as a means of conveying the written word of the Bible to the non-lettered in vernacular languages; the repetition in print from the sixteenth century onwards of classic popular fictional narratives; the pasting up in public and reading aloud of written and printed matter, ranging from official proclamations to libellous verses; the reading aloud of newspapers in coffee houses, facilitating the dissemination of news and the growth of a political culture; the symbiosis of private study and rote learning in the advancement of education and self-improvement, with or without the assistance of the church and/or state, in the industrial era.

It is extremely difficult to cite meaningful figures for the growth of literacy. 16 Using the measurable criterion of people's ability to sign

15 See, for example, Jonathan Barry, 'Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective', in *Popular Culture in England, c.1500–1850*, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 69–94; M. T. Clanchy, *From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307*, 3rd edn (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Adam Fox, *Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Barry Reay, *Popular Cultures in England, 1550–1750* (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 36–70; David Vincent, *Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For Scotland, see R. A. Houston, *Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

16 For the earlier period, see, for example, David Cressy, *Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Thomas Laqueur, 'The Cultural Origins of Popular Literacy in England, 1500–1850', *Oxford Review of Education*, 2 (1976), 255–75; R. S. Schofield, 'The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England', in *Literacy in Traditional Societies*, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 311–25; Lawrence Stone, 'Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900', *Past and Present*, no. 42 (1969), 69–139; Keith Thomas, 'The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England', in *The Written Word: Literacy in Transition*, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 97–131. For the later period, see Barry Reay, 'The Context and Meaning of Popular Literacy: Some Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Rural England', *Past and Present*, no. 131 (1991), 89–129; Vincent, *Literacy and Popular Culture*, pp. 22–32. For Scotland and northern England, see Houston, *Scottish Literacy*, pp. 20–109. There is an excellent overview of the subject in Adam Fox

their names to a document, by the 1640s perhaps 30 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women could do so, rising to 45 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively, by the mid-eighteenth century. On the same measure, England had achieved universal literacy by the outbreak of the First World War. However, writing and reading were entirely separate skills, and it is widely believed that such figures spectacularly underestimate the numbers who could read. By the mid-eighteenth century – and perhaps much earlier – probably a majority of the adult population had attained a degree of functional, pragmatic literacy, enabling them to read print to some extent. Nevertheless, literacy rates were extremely variable, being generally lower among the poorer sections of society, among women than among men, and in rural as opposed to urban areas – with rates in London, the epicentre of ballad printing, being consistently well above the national average. Throughout much of the period in question, those who encountered ballads in cheap printed form might have been just as likely to be able to read them as not – but that is a very general statement indeed.

Moreover, it is no more than a small part of the story. Access to written material was never confined to the literate alone but was made much more widely available through what Roger Chartier terms 'communities of readers'. 17 Through the agency of a literate interpreter, reading could be turned into a collective experience. That might be in the context of the church, the family, the marketplace, the school, the workplace, the coffee house, the trade organization. Right up until the early years of the twentieth century, the experience of reading most characteristically meant reading out loud, and reading was most frequently not a solitary activity at all but one rooted in human interaction and sociability.18 Some historians of literacy are now inclined to view the dichotomy of literacy *vs*. illiteracy, or literacy *vs*. orality, as little more than a nineteenth-century (or maybe eighteenth-century) ideological construct, tied to a modern construction of interiority, personality, and subjectivity.19 Perpetuated by influential theorists such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, the so-called 'great

and Daniel Woolf, eds, *The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 21–33.

17 Roger Chartier, *The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries*, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–23.

18 Vincent, *Literacy and Popular Culture*, p. 275.

19 Patricia Crain, 'New Histories of Literacy', in *A Companion to the History of the Book*, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), pp. 467–79.

divide' theory of literacy *vs*. orality actually reveals rather little about the communal reception of texts in England and Scotland, or even in western Europe at large, at an earlier time.

Instead, for virtually the whole time for which there is anything in the English language that might reasonably be termed a ballad, the picture is one of mutual interdependence of oral and written forms, and of a shared experience of texts regardless of the ability to read. Keith Thomas provides a succinct statement of the matter as it stands in early modern England: 'Literates and illiterates need not necessarily have different mental habits; and the illiterates of early modern England were in quite a different position from the non-literate inhabitants of purely oral societies. They lived in a world which was to a great extent governed by texts, even though they could not read themselves.'20 Even in post-Roman Britain, the development of a written Old English vernacular, manifest through utilitarian documents such as charters and laws, as well as the more celebrated works of poetry and heroic literature, along with the residual influence of Latin writing, testifies to the continuity of the idea of literacy.21 Early medieval England did not approach anything like what Ong would consider a state of 'primary orality'.22 (The world of *Beowulf* is probably something of a literary fiction – mentioned here largely because it seems to correspond in some degree with the putative condition of society, 'in which the people are not divided by political organization and book-culture into markedly distinct classes, in which consequently there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form an individual', that Child envisaged as necessary for the genesis of ballads.23) By the thirteenth century, for example, the replacement of oral testimony by writing in legal contexts was well established and its impact was experienced even among the peasantry.24 Across Europe, too, the growth of markets, towns, and commerce from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries was associated with the spread of new forms of documentary record-keeping.25 The assimilation

20 Thomas, 'Meaning of Literacy', p. 107.

21 Clanchy, *From Memory to Written Record*, pp. 30–35.

22 Walter J. Ong, *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word* (London: Routledge, 1988 [1982]), pp. 6, 11.

23 F. J. Child, 'Ballad Poetry', in *Johnson's New Universal Cyclopædia*, eds-in-chief Frederick A. P. Barnard and Arnold Guyot, 4 vols (New York: A. J. Johnson, 1881 [1874]), i, 365–68 (p. 365).

24 Clanchy, *From Memory to Written Record*, esp. pp. 48–53.

25 Brian Stock, *Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 [1990]), pp. 126–27. A remarkable example of everyday written

of the ideas of spoken and written language as means of communicating, preserving, and transmitting texts that these developments represent was in train well before the era of print, and must have taken place even while overall levels of actual, measurable literacy were quite low.26

Here, Brian Stock's notion of 'textual communities' is pertinent.27 Textual communities can be defined as 'microsocieties organized around the common understanding of a script'.28 Like Chartier's communities of readers, such microsocieties need not necessarily be composed of literate people, the minimal requirement being just one interpreter with some sort of access to a set of texts and the ability to pass them on to others. The physical presence of a written text was not essential: oral record, memory, and re-performance would suffice.29 Hence 'textual' rather than 'reading' communities, and the charting of a rise of 'textuality' rather than merely an increase in literacy.30 Stock envisages the process thus: as the written word gained ground in western Europe, existing oral practices realigned themselves to function in a reference system based on texts; a culture emerged that was both oral *and* written; texts were not always written down, *but they were understood as if they were* (my italics).31

This, then, is the environment in which even the earliest of the Englishlanguage ballad-like songs, such as 'Judas' (Child 23) and 'Twelfth Day', need to be situated. The presence of these two pieces within a manuscript miscellany containing items in English, French, and Latin, of probable Franciscan provenance, is indicative of the ballads' potential to function within reading/textual communities. 32 Subsequently, there is nothing in *The English and Scottish Popular Ballads* for another couple of centuries, until *c*.1450, right at the beginning of the era of print and well into an age that was, in Keith Thomas's phrase, 'to a great extent governed by texts'.

documentation is provided by the Ely Farming Memoranda, early eleventh-century farming records noted down in Old English. See Clanchy, *From Memory to Written Record*, pp. 32, 67.

26 On the further complication of the coexistence in post-Conquest England of three languages – English, Latin, and French – with distinct spoken and written functions, see Clanchy, *From Memory to Written Record*, pp. 199–225.

27 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, pp. 22–24, 150; Brian Stock, *The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 90–92.

28 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, p. 23.

29 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, p. 37.

30 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, pp. 20, 140, 146; Stock, *Implications of Literacy*, p. 7.

31 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, pp. 19–20.

32 See John C. Hirsh, 'The Earliest Known English Ballad: A New Reading of "Judas"', *Modern Language Review*, 103 (2008), 931–39.

Even today, relatively little is known for certain about ballad singing, reading, and/or recitation during the early modern period, although there are enough contemporary references to merit the assumption that ballads were ubiquitous, or at least were perceived as being so.33 There are thousands of broadsides which could be – and perhaps were intended to be – sung to named tunes, and at least some of them are the 'same' as ballads collected from singers during the folk song revivals of much later date. There are also plentiful literary references to semi-professional ballad singers (Autolycus and his kind) and ballad writers.34 There are also Addison's *Spectator* papers of the early eighteenth century, and the beginnings of the appearance of ballads in printed miscellanies. In the eighteenth century, ballads are found among anthologies that can be associated with the growth of musical entertainments in the theatres and metropolitan pleasure gardens. A string of references indicate that it was not uncommon to find broadsides pasted on walls in alehouses and domestic dwellings. Vic Gammon makes the very reasonable point that singing was the most readily available form of artistic expression for much of the population.35

Stock's specific examples of textual communities are mostly based around ideological movements, such as the Waldensians, where a group of people would coalesce around vernacular texts of the scriptures and their exposition through (unlicensed) public preaching, establishing an agreed meaning for those scriptural texts which came to comprise, for the group in question, the 'real text'.36 An example from much closer to home would be the religious revival of 1742 at Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, which culminated in outdoor meetings where tens of thousands gathered from miles around to hear the evangelist George Whitefield. 37 Like the earlier movements studied by Stock, the revival at Cambuslang was focused on the experience of hearing texts expounded through preaching. The most notable difference was that while the earlier episodes were not generally founded on an immediate continuity with a literate tradition (Peter Waldo's

33 Christopher Marsh, *Music and Society in Early Modern England* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 225.

34 Marsh, *Music and Society in Early Modern England*, pp. 238–50. See also extracts reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, *The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650*, trans. Gayna Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 253–84.

35 Vic Gammon, *Desire, Drink and Death in English Folk and Vernacular Song, 1600–1900* (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 10–11.

36 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, pp. 24–29, 146.

37 T. C. Smout, 'Born Again at Cambuslang: New Evidence on Popular Religion and Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland', *Past and Present*, no. 97 (1982), 114–27.

initial contact with the scriptures was essentially an oral experience), virtually all of the converts at Cambuslang were well able to read the Bible for themselves. At least one girl is recorded as saying, 'I used to read the Bible at my parents desire tho' I had more delight in reading story books and ballads.'38 But in so far as the shared experience can be understood in terms of the (admittedly temporary) emergence of a textual community focused around the revivalist preaching of the scriptures, the ability to read or otherwise is largely irrelevant.

While textual communities established around religious ideological movements provide a particularly potent instance for the shared engagement of a group of people with a text, it is clear that the general principle can apply to a much broader range of groups united by a general agreement over the meaning(s) of a text, or set of texts. These might embody aspects of everyday civic and cultural life – the requirements for commercial activity, for example, or the ethical values arising from a body of literature – in which similar social origins could be expected to comprise a sufficient (though not a necessary) condition for participation.39 A number of essays in *The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature* make reference to the idea of textual communities when discussing the readership and reception of Middle English literature (testimony to the far-reaching influence of Stock's concept on medieval studies), including Lollard textual networks in London and Essex; an East Anglian readers' circle centred on regional collections of saints' lives; the vernacular 'self-help' afforded by early Middle English guides to spiritual well-being; monastic communities responsible for sponsoring literary genres such as hagiography, exegesis, or biblical redactions; women's textual communities, both as they may have existed in real life and as imagined through literature; implied readerships for *Piers Plowman*, ranging from the vernacular to the university-trained; and the importance of lowland Scots in the development of a national consciousness, exemplified by Gavin Douglas's translation of the *Aeneid* shortly before the Scottish defeat at Flodden (1513).40

Then there are the several audiences for the Middle English romance, which have been characterized at different times as courtly and aristocratic,

38 Smout, 'Born Again at Cambuslang', p. 124.

39 Stock, *Listening for the Text*, p. 37.

40 David Wallace, ed., *The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 677–78, 686–87 (Lollards), 626–27 (saints' lives), 90–91 (spiritual well-being), 349–50 (religious communities), 109–21, 307, 350 (women's reading), 527–30 (*Piers Plowman*), 247 (vernacular Scots).

gentry and middle-class, popular, male or female.41 This variety arises not least because the genre was an exceptionally heterogeneous one, extending over a very long period of time, well into the age of print. Indeed, the continuing popularity of romance stories in chapbooks into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should not be overlooked.42 Clearly, different audience groups would have their own ideological interests, which would inform their shared understanding of romance stories. Regardless of social composition, the audience for romance is commonly characterized as being a 'listening' audience, and while the romances were literate compositions, they lent themselves to the whole spectrum of receptive experience from listening to singing, recitation, or reading aloud, right through to private reading.

It is accordingly not difficult to envisage textual communities united around a shared understanding and appreciation of certain ballad texts. Angela McShane, for example, argues that political ballads of the period from the beginning of the civil wars to the Glorious Revolution 'not only supplied a commentary on the upheavals of the period but provided too a political frame of reference for their often unsophisticated, but not uninformed readers'.43 There is a risk, however, of imparting too much weight to the (presumably) shared experience of ballad singing/ recitation/reading. The notion of textual community involves a significant degree of the fashioning of a group identity out of the shared experience of interpreting a text, and Richard Green has given voice to a certain scepticism about the blanket application of the idea to groups of medieval English texts and their readers/audiences.44 Instead, he suggests, the later

41 Derek Pearsall, 'Middle English Romance and its Audiences', in *Historical & Editorial Studies in Medieval & Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen*, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes, with Hans Jansen (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985), pp. 37–47; Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds, *The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance* (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 20–26; Andrew Taylor, 'Fragmentation, Corruption, and Minstrel Narration: The Question of the Middle English Romances', *Yearbook of English Studies*, 22 (1992), 38–62; Wallace, ed., *Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature*, pp. 152–76, 690–719.

42 See John Simons, 'Romance in the Eighteenth-Century Chapbook', in *From Medieval to Medievalism*, ed. John Simons (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 122–43.

43 Angela McShane Jones, '"Rime and Reason": The Political World of the English Broadside Ballad, 1640–1689' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2004), pp. 1–2. See also Angela McShane, 'Typography Matters: Branding Ballads and Gelding Curates in Stuart England', in *Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries*, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2008), pp. 19–44.

44 Richard Firth Green, 'Textual Production and Textual Communities', in *The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature, 1100–1500*, ed. Larry Scanlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 25–36.

medieval period witnessed the emergence of something more like the 'interpretive communities' of reader-response theory, the term originated by Stanley Fish to describe groups of readers who bring a shared 'horizon of expectations' to the interpretation of a text.45 That would certainly fit the potentially differing purposes in authoring and presenting medieval romances to courtly and/or gentry audiences, and the corresponding differences in the way they might be received and understood. It would fit, too, with the production and reception of political ballads. Later on, it is sometimes claimed that certain ballads could be expected to have special meaning for particular social groups. The bothy ballads sung by the farm servants of north-east Scotland, the texts of some of which relate directly to their personal and professional circumstances, provide a good example.46 The idea, sometimes expressed, that 'The Gypsy Laddie' (Child 200) should be especially dear to the hearts of Gypsy/Traveller singers might fall into the same category. Equally, ballads are as open to variety of interpretation as any other kind of verse or music.47

What this exploration of the textual environment into which the genre emerged does indicate is that, quite regardless of questions of literacy *vs*. non-literacy and written *vs*. oral transmission, ballads would be conceived and understood as texts. They were not always written down, but they were understood as if they were. It is reasonable to speak of ballad 'textuality' without reference to a specific means of transmission. Although it is even conceivable that a text learned by ear might be memorized in a manner qualitatively different from one learned by eye, these still amount only to different routes to access the same thing – like viewing an object without touching it, or handling it in the dark.

The ballad text, on this model, has an autonomy of its own – not an essentialist, New Critical, signification of its own, but an imaginary, abstract existence, separable from any intended meaning that might accompany its production (singing/recitation/printing) or its reception (listening/reading).

45 Stanley Fish, *Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

46 Peter A. Hall, 'Farm Life and the Farm Songs', in *The Greig–Duncan Folk Song Collection*, ed. Patrick Shuldham-Shaw, Emily B. Lyle, et al., 8 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; Edinburgh: Mercat Press, for the University of Aberdeen in association with the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1981–2002), iii, xxi–xxxiv.

47 New research into the history of reading, directing attention to the sheer variety of experience, potentially has much to contribute to ballad studies. See, for example, James Raven, 'New Reading Histories, Print Culture and the Identification of Change: The Case of Eighteenth-Century England', *Social History*, 23 (1998), 268–87.

A simple illustration of this can be found in the deictic or 'orientational' features of ballad language. Deictics are linguistic markers that ostensibly relate to the immediate situation of utterance and hearing (to use terms that deliberately invoke an oral situation, while considering properties that belong to written and oral texts alike), but which in actual fact relate only to imagined constructs in the mind of speaker and listener. A moment's thought will reveal that, far from introducing immediacy and presence, their effect is to distance and depersonalize the content from both speaker and listener alike.48 Examples of deictics in poetic usage include personal pronouns, anaphoric articles and demonstratives, adverbs of place and time, and the use of the historic present tense.

Thus the poetic 'I' and the activity mentioned in the common folk song incipit 'As I walked out on a midsummer morning' references neither singer nor listener but a construct – or, rather, separate constructs – in the mind of each, which may or may not largely overlap with one another and/or with a common understanding among a putative 'balladic' (ballad-singing, ballad-listening, ballad-reading, ballad-inscribing) textual community. This may be difficult to appreciate because at first blush, 'midsummer' might seem temporally objective; but it can still refer either to a specific day or to a less precisely defined season, personally experienced in many different ways. Midsummer has been associated historically, for instance, with bonfires and processions, and practices for love divination – but these customs are strictly localized (temporally as well as geographically).49 The extent to which any of these, or other, associations might actually be relevant is highly dependent on the (real and imagined) identity/ies of the 'I' of the incipit.

Consider further the opening stanza of 'The Outlandish Knight' (Child 4), one of the most widely collected of English-language ballads, as it appears on a number of printed broadsides of the nineteenth century:

An outlandish knight came from the north lands And he came a wooing to me He told me he'd take me to the north lands And there he would marry me.

48 Jonathan Culler, *Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature* (London: Routledge, 2002 [1975]), pp. 192–99. For a different perspective, see Würzbach, *Rise of the English Street Ballad* (but see the review in *Folk Music Journal*, 6.2 (1991), 238–39).

49 Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, *A Dictionary of English Folklore* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 238–39.

Connotations for *outlandish* listed in the *Oxford English Dictionary* range from 'Of or belonging to a foreign country; foreign, alien; not native or indigenous', through 'Looking or sounding foreign; unfamiliar, strange. Hence, in extended use: odd, bizarre; going beyond what is considered normal or acceptable; outrageous, extravagant', to 'Out-of-the-way, remote; far removed from civilization'.50 The English singer Shirley Collins recalled of her neighbours in Etchingham, Sussex, in the 1970s: 'Talking one day to Fanny, who was then in her eighties, about her early life, she told me she'd been courted by another man before she married Will, but couldn't marry him "because he was too outlandish". "What was so outlandish about him?" I asked, intrigued. "Oh, he came from a village about three miles away," she replied!'51 Conversely, the analogous character who gave rise to Child's standard title for the ballad type, 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight', is seemingly a supernatural being (Child 4 A) – and there are sufficiently diverse characters in romances alone for a knight to be associated with chivalry and courtly love on the one hand and violence, seduction, and betrayal on the other. Outlandish strangers like the one in *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* bring the idea of supernatural shape-shifting, as well as an element of moral examination, into such tales.52

The imagined geographical location of the 'north lands', and the sort of inhabitants who might be expected to reside there, are likewise very dependent on pre-existing spatial and social horizons. For someone living in England, the north lands might suggest Scotland; but for a native of southern England the suggestion might just be of a generic 'north of Watford', to borrow the modern idiom. Conversely, for a ballad collected in the north-east of Scotland, the north lands might have to be equated with the Highlands; even while an English reader might envisage precisely the Scottish north-east. Not to mention the possible perspectives on 'wooing' and 'marry[ing] me' which requires an act of imaginative identification on the listener's part, dependent perhaps on their own gender. But no one believes any of it literally happened to the singer.

Interpretive ideas like these have little to do with the physical presence or absence of a speaker/singer and everything to do with the horizon of

50 *OED* outlandish, *adj*. and *n*.

51 Shirley and Dolly Collins, *Love, Death & the Lady*, CD (EMI Harvest 7243 8 29860 2 7, 1994), insert notes.

52 Raymond H. Thompson, "'Muse on þi mirrour . . .': The Challenge of the Outlandish Stranger in the English Arthurian Verse Romances," *Folklore*, 87 (1976), 201–08.

expectations of the reader/listener, or of the textual or interpretive community. The physical presence of a speaker would be most unlikely to resolve any of the inherent uncertainties. It is mistaken to conceive of the ballad, whether conveyed orally or in writing, in terms of a transmission or 'informational' model of communication, whereby a sender conveys a message of their own devising through a particular channel to a receiver (with, in later modifications of the model, the possibility of a feedback loop from receiver to sender, enabling modifications of the message).53 Now essentially discarded by communication theorists in favour of a diversity of 'constructivist' approaches which recognize that in virtually all communicative situations meaning is actively constructed by both sender and receiver, the transmission model is particularly inappropriate in relation to works of imaginative literature, which exploit the potentials of linguistic excess and redundancy, which conversely constitute 'noise' in the transmission model.54 Yet the transmission model has a seductive appearance of conformity with 'common sense', and (at the risk of setting up a man of straw) it seems that it might also embody something of the immediacy and subjectivity that are sometimes thought to characterize sound or speech – and hence the iconic oral tradition – as opposed to writing.

Yet, so far as we know, oral performance and transmission of ballad texts has always taken place alongside written and printed 'performance' and transmission. Indeed, it still does, as a couple of examples – exceptional only in terms of their quality – will illustrate. The Copper family of Rottingdean, Sussex, sing songs some of which have probably been in the family for a couple of centuries and which were written down in songbooks in the 1920s and 1930s, and they still make use of a family songbook in performance even though they must surely know all the items by heart.55 The Traveller culture of north-east Scotland is to a great extent an oral one, even while many of their ballads can be identified with items printed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and members of one of the celebrated families

53 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, *The Mathematical Theory of Communication*  (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949). For a useful introduction, see Daniel Chandler, 'The Transmission Model of Communication' (1994), available at http://www. aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/trans.html.

54 Jerome J. McGann, *The Textual Condition* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 14; Peter L. Shillingsburg, *Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 108–09.

55 [The Copper Family], *The Copper Family Song Book: A Living Tradition* (Peacehaven: Coppersongs, 1995).

of Traveller singers, the Stewarts of Fetterangus, have written down their songs in order to enrich their culture and to ensure its continuity.56 In neither of these cases is writing a 'substitute' for oral performance and transmission: the two paths exist in parallel, providing complementary routes of access to the respective song traditions.

The idea that, in the sort of textual environment sketched in over the course of this chapter, those who learned texts by ear should find it more difficult to commit them accurately to memory than those who learn them by eye, would seem to be the product of a modern, almost exclusively literate, sensibility. Conversely, there is good historical evidence that, without the visual support of writing, people's mnemonic powers were often highly developed.57 The clergyman and writer Nicholas Bownd (*d*.1613) could complain that there were too many people who showed no interest in singing psalms, 'though they can sing some other vain songs very perfectly; and though they cannot reade themselues, nor any of theirs, yet will haue many Ballades set vp in their houses, that so they might learne them, as they shall haue occasion'.58 In Izaak Walton's *Compleat Angler* (1653) a proud mother promises the anglers her (admittedly fictional) daughter, 'shal sit by and sing you the good old Song of the *Hunting in Chevy Chase*, or some other good Ballad, for she hath good store of them: Maudlin hath a notable memory'.59 The eponymous hero of an eighteenth-century broadside ballad, *The Proud Pedlar*, claims: 'I never sung a Song in all my whole Life, / But I could sing it again.'60 Ballads were composed using familiar linguistic patterns, refrains, and so forth, all of which could serve as mnemonic devices, as well as endeavouring to engage a prospective audience through the choice of narrative material.61 And there is reason to think that melody and words generally have a mutually reinforcing mnemonic effect.

56 Thomas A. McKean, 'The Stewarts of Fetterangus and Literate Oral Tradition', in *The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures*, ed. Philip E. Bennett and Richard Firth Green (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 181–207.

57 Fox, *Oral and Literate Culture*, pp. 22–23, 135; Marsh, *Music and Society in Early Modern England*, pp. 255–56; Thomas, 'Meaning of Literacy', pp. 107–10; Vincent, *Literacy and Popular Culture*, pp. 60–62, 182–84, 194–95.

58 Nicholas Bownde [*sic*], *The Doctrine of the Sabbath* (London: printed by the Widdow Orwin, for Iohn Porter, and Thomas Man, 1595), p. 241 [ESTC S113231].

59 [Izaak Walton], *The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation* (London: printed by T. Maxey, for Rich. Marriot, 1653), p. 203 [ESTC R202374].

60 *The Proud Pedlar* ([London?, 1740?]) [ESTC T46054; Roxburghe Ballads 3.656].

61 Marsh, *Music and Society in Early Modern England*, pp. 284–86.

Knowledge of the Bible, in particular, was often excellent among people who could not actually read it for themselves.62 This is a particularly good instance, because it can be presumed that at least some of the imperative towards accurate memory and recall derives from the authority vested in that particular text, considered as the Word of God. With the best will in the world, ballads do not aspire to be considered the word of God, and in most instances not even the word of any particular author. Thus far, the idea of ballad textuality has been used in Stock's sense of a reference system based on access to a corpus of texts, not always written down but understood as if they were. Ballad textuality, however, must embrace not just the reference system and its routes of access, but the authority that resides in the system of texts. So, while verbatim recall of the Bible might be assumed to be a desideratum, clearly that is not necessarily the case for the ballad.

Variation is frequently stated to be the key, defining, characteristic of ballads and folk songs, and of folk literature at large. Yet the actual level of variation from one instance to another is not necessarily any greater than, say, the different published texts of modernist poets such as W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore, to name just a couple of examples from mainstream, canonical literature.63 The bulk of collected texts of a single ballad type such as 'The Outlandish Knight' (Child 4), or 'The Cruel Mother' (Child 20), or 'Barbara Allan' (Child 84), or 'The Maid Freed from the Gallows' (Child 95), or 'The Battle of Harlaw' (Child 163), or 'The Golden Vanity' (Child 286), actually vary rather little, although certainly some are more complete than others. Substantial change is usually apparent only with equally substantial chronological and geographical spread. The difference, of course, is that the authority for variation in modernist poetry is generally assumed to lie with the individual, named author,64 whereas in the case of the ballad it is often ascribed to a process, namely oral tradition. Yet if oral tradition is seen to be actually rather beside the point in relation to the transmission and reception of the English-language ballads, and if oral transmission is also perfectly capable of ensuring verbatim reproduction, then the motor for ballad variation must be located elsewhere. What is

62 Fox, *Oral and Literate Culture*, p. 22.

63 George Bornstein, *Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

64 Although the gist of Bornstein's argument, and of much recent materialist criticism, is that the shape of the text is often driven by factors beyond the author's immediate control – place and format of publication, presumed readership/audience, external political developments, and so on.

being posited here is that this motor lies in just the opposite direction from the apparent situation of modernist poetry: it lies in the *absence* of the sort of authority over the text that is deemed to belong to the individual author.

What can be envisaged for ballads – oral and written alike – is a condition very much akin to what Bernard Cerquiglini has posited to account for variation in medieval vernacular literature that cannot be readily ascribed to an individual author, under the term *variance*. 65 Cerquiglini argues that in the Middle Ages the literary work was 'a variable', usually anonymous, to which the fact of an originating authorship was less important than the continual rewriting of the work, which then 'belonged' to whoever prepared it and gave it form again.66 A state of purposeful variation – *variance* – was intrinsic not only to the transmission but to the very aesthetic of medieval vernacular literature. The varying written realizations of a medieval vernacular work represent not 'errors', scribal departures from a single text authenticated by the persona of the author, but a state of 'generalized authenticity'.67 What Cerquiglini seems to envisage is a dispersed textual authority shared across all of the renderings, and perhaps all of the possible renderings, of what can be loosely identified as the 'same' literary work.

Middle English literature is indeed generally lacking in a sense of stable textual authority, with many works being either actually or effectively anonymous, becoming varied and expanded in the course of textual transmission, and being realized in manuscripts of varying content and layout.68 Variation characterizes some of the romance texts, where it might be the consequence of scribal activity or more directly of vocal performance, in each case rerouted back into the extant written manuscripts.69 But these are all models founded in the study of written texts, notwithstanding the undoubted importance for medieval literature of oral expression and transmission, and of an oral dimension to scribal copying – scribes are thought sometimes to have worked by reading aloud,

65 Bernard Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology*, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

66 Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant*, p. 33.

67 Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant*, pp. 34, 51.

68 Tim William Machan, *Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts* (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).

69 Albert C. Baugh, 'Improvisation in the Middle English Romance', *Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society*, 103 (1959), 418–54 (esp. pp. 434–40); Nancy Mason Bradbury, *Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England* (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 1–21; Taylor, 'Fragmentation, Corruption, and Minstrel Narration', esp. pp. 43–46.

or at least sub-vocalizing, and therefore 'hearing' at least a part of their texts.70 Cerquiglini's *variance* is thus specifically distinguished from Paul Zumthor's probably rather better-known concept of *mouvance*, which is tied specifically to the precedence of the voice over writing.71

Cerquiglini, moreover, is prepared to extrapolate his conception of dispersed textual authority: 'When our literary presuppositions have become sufficiently unhinged that Shakespeare is affected, it is not hard to conceive of the disturbance gradually spreading to most of premodern writings.'72 Here he is alluding to the now widely acknowledged instability that pervades Shakespearian texts – the variant *Hamlet*s, *King Lear*s, *Macbeth*s, and so on, which mean that it is impossible to pin the play down to a single authoritative version, and instead the work we call *Hamlet*, or *King Lear*, or *Macbeth* exists only as an abstract compounded of all its instances. 'Shakespearian writing is no longer presented as a closed, original, and seminal utterance; it is constant and multiple production.'73

Certainly, this 'medieval' model for textual authority – or, rather, the absence thereof – is particularly well suited to the ballads in English. In this manner the circle can be squared: ballads can be understood as texts in Stock's sense of being not always written down but being understood as if they were, but also as texts that can accommodate variation which may be variously accidental or deliberate. Variation, in turn, though not evidently bounded by an identifiable authority such as the name of an author, is nonetheless in practice constrained by, it would seem, a mutual sense of textual community. That is to say, a shared set of understandings and expectations ensures that in practice a ballad does remain recognizable from one instance to another, one rendition to the next, and that ballad transmission is actually fairly conservative. Empirically, this means that ballad types demonstrate relative stability across time and space, even while their versions can be distinguished one from another – and that variation is present between texts transmitted orally and/or in print, without distinction.

70 H. J. Chaytor, *From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Literature* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), pp. 13–21.

71 Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant*, pp. 84–85 n. 10. See Paul Zumthor, *Essai de poétique médiévale* (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 507; Paul Zumthor, *La lettre et la voix: De la 'littérature' médiévale* (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), p. 160.

72 Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant*, p. 39.

73 Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant*, p. 39. See further John Jowett, *Shakespeare and Text* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Some ballads have remained quite recognizable, in some cases even down to verbal details, over a period of as much as half a millennium. Either end of that time span might be marked by a record in the form of writing (and at the latter end recorded sound), but frequently there is rather little evidence as to precisely what went on in between. Such ballads may have been written down and/or printed, or they may have been recalled from memory, or more probably there is a largely unknown history of interaction of these processes through time. That is to say, they were not always written down, but they could have been – the converse of which is that they were not always memorized, but they could have been. Both processes permit access to the text, and both can be expected to leave deliberate or accidental textual traces on it – formulaic language, recurrent structural patterns, deictic markers, moralizing conclusions, purposeful variants, as well as the arguably more casual effects of 'faulty' memory and typesetting, and so on and so forth. Cerquiglini asserts, 'in the Middle Ages the literary work was a variable', and his chapter title celebrates the condition as one of 'joyful excess'.74 We now know that in one sense or another *Hamlet* and *King Lear* and *Ulysses* are variables, too. The textuality of the English-language ballads was characterized by *variance* well before the idea began to adhere to such literary icons.

74 Cerquiglini, *In Praise of the Variant*, p. 33.

In a piece titled 'Of the obseruation, and vse of things', the courtier, diplomat, and essayist Sir William Cornwallis (*c*.1579–1614) wrote:

Pamphlets and lying Stories and News and twoo penny Poets, I would know them but beware of beeing familiar with them. My custome is to read these and presently to make vse of them. For they lie in my priuy; and when I come thither and haue occasion to imploy it, I read them (halfe a side at once is my ordinary), which when I haue read it, I vse in that kind that waste paper is most subiect too but to a cleanlier profit.1

There is little doubt that the early modern broadside ballads fall into Cornwallis's category, and his observations are a salutary reminder that paper itself was for a long time a physical commodity the value of which could easily outweigh the aesthetic value of whatever was printed on it.2 Still, although the need for paper for hygienic purposes remained, we might imagine that lower down the social scale a greater intrinsic value could have attached to the broadside or chapbook as physical object, a prized possession to be preserved rather than used in the privy.3

1 Don Cameron Allen, ed., *Essayes by Sir William Cornwallis, the Younger* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), p. 50. As an aside, at a later date, when the Cheap Repository Tracts were introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, the chapmen who distributed them insisted from the beginning that they be printed on soft paper, so that they would find takers even if they were never read. See William St Clair, *The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 354. Since the Cheap Repository Tracts were intended to price out the long-standing ballads and chapbooks and replace them with their own moral tales, this is a rather gratifying observation.

2 St Clair, *Reading Nation*, pp. 26–27; Margaret Spufford, *Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 48–50.

3 It is a little difficult to cite evidence on precisely this point (due to the absence of items of such small value from wills and inventories), but ownership of ballads and chapbooks among the common people of early modern England is nonetheless quite well documented. See Spufford, *Small Books and Pleasant Histories*, pp. 45–82. For a later period, see David Vincent, *Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61–62.

#### *70 The Anglo-Scottish Ballad*

Another kind of value to the physical ballad lies in the fact that broadsides were normally illustrated with woodcut images, and could thus be used to provide a cheap form of decoration.4 The practice of pasting ballads on to the walls of alehouses and domestic dwellings is well attested. Izaak Walton, for example, writes in *The Compleat Angler* (1653), 'I'll now lead you to an honest Ale-house, where we shall find a cleanly room, Lavender in the windowes, and twenty Ballads stuck about the wall'.5 Decoration did not, of course, preclude reading. In *The Spectator*, no. 85 (7 June 1711), the paper in which he goes on to discuss the ballad of 'The Children in the Wood' (Roud 288), Addison observes:

This my inquisitive Temper, or rather impertinent Humour of prying into all sorts of Writing, with my natural Aversion to Loquacity, give me a good deal of Employment when I enter any House in the Country; for I can't, for my Heart, leave a Room before I have thoroughly studied the Walls of it, and examined the several printed Papers which are usually pasted upon them.6

At a later date, the memoirs of the writer Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) recall how such ballads formed an integral part of his early education:

Even the walls of cottages and little alehouses would do something; for many of them had old English ballads, such as Death and the Lady, and Margaret's Ghost, with lamentable tragedies, or King Charles's golden rules, occasionally pasted on them. These were at that time the learning, and often, no doubt, the delight of the vulgar.7

Educated gentlemen like Addison and Cornwallis (but probably not the young Holcroft) might have read ballads silently to themselves, but throughout the period covered by these quotations and beyond, reading would have generally meant reading out loud.

The physical presence of the ballad, it seems safe to assume, must have been both unavoidable and unremarkable for virtually the whole of the time during which printed broadsides and chapbooks were in common circulation, say from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Certainly, for the booksellers and printers, and for the pedlars and chapmen who

4 Hyder E. Rollins, 'The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad', *PMLA*, 34 (1919), 258–339 (pp. 336–38); Tessa Watt, *Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 148–49, 194.

5 [Izaak Walton], *The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation* (London: printed by T. Maxey, for Rich. Marriot, 1653), p. 49 [ESTC R202374].

6 Angus Ross, ed., *Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator of Steele and Addison* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p, 362.

7 Thomas Holcroft, *Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft*, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), i, 135–36.

were responsible for their dissemination during much of their history, ballads were first and foremost material objects to be carried and sold around the country.8 The materiality of texts has become the concern of literary scholars engaged in the now well-established discipline that is sometimes termed *l'histoire du livre*, or materialist criticism, or analytical bibliography. In practice, this embraces a continuum of concerns, from the cultural and economic history of book production, distribution, and preservation, through the sociology of texts, to the signifying functions of physical characteristics such as typography, layout, design, and illustration, paper and binding, iterations of editions, and so forth.9 These last are sometimes termed 'bibliographic codes' – that is, 'the symbolic and signifying dimensions of the physical medium through which (or rather *as* which) the linguistic text is embodied'.10 The application of this approach to the ballad poses certain special problems, because in principle a single ballad text, both words and music, can simultaneously inhabit a number of material formats. Thus sound can exist in performance and in various recording media and digital files, while writing can exist as manuscript, as print, and again as digital files. This sort of multiplicity requires careful differentiation if signifying characteristics are to be elucidated from such a range of physical forms.

In the first instance, a 'text' can be defined as a unique sequence of words and pauses, or of musical notes and pauses.11 Generally, such definitions go

8 With respect to the ballad, the 'middlemen of literature' (in Robert Darnton's phrase), and in particular the chapman distribution network, would benefit from much further research. See, for example, Margaret Spufford, 'The Pedlar, the Historian and the Folklorist: Seventeenth Century Communications', *Folklore*, 105 (1994), 13–24; St Clair, *Reading Nation*, pp. 37–39; Andrew Taylor, *The Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel: Richard Sheale of Tamworth* (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 1–2, 19–28.

9 See, for example, Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, 'A New Model for the Study of the Book', in *A Potencie of Life: Books in Society*, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1993), pp. 5–43; Robert Darnton, 'What Is the History of Books?', *Daedalus*, 111.3 (1982), 65–83; D. F. McKenzie, *Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); D. F. McKenzie, *Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays*, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). The economic approach developed in St Clair, *Reading Nation*, also belongs here.

10 Jerome J. McGann, *The Textual Condition* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 56. See also Peter L. Shillingsburg, *From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 16–18.

11 This definition is pared down and adapted from Peter L. Shillingsburg, *Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice*, 3rd edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 46: 'A text is the actual order of words and punctuation as contained in any one physical form, such as manuscript, proof, or book.'

on to specify that this sequence must be contained within a single physical form – that is to say, an individual item comprising a discrete physical medium, such as a manuscript, a printed book, a phonograph cylinder, LP record, or CD. This 'vessel', as it were, that contains the text is termed a 'document'. This is very important: because it is often difficult to conceive of a text in isolation from its physical form, the 'vessel' or document that it inhabits, it is all too easy to conflate the two separate concepts of text and document. The distinction, however, is not impossible to maintain, if only because exactly the same sequence of words, or musical notes, can inhabit such different physical entities as a collector's notebook and a phonograph cylinder.12 Ideally, a collector's accurate transcription of a ballad and a sound recording of the same rendition would contain exactly the same text, but within a quite distinct physical container or document. So it is possible to abstract the text from its physical container, even if it requires some considerable exercise of the imagination in order to do so. But it is certainly very difficult then to do anything with it that does not involve either simply placing it back into the same container, or transferring it into a different one. To consider a text is in practice almost necessarily to allude also to the document within which it is contained – the 'packaging' that necessarily surrounds it – so that the unit of discussion is commonly what might be termed the 'documentary text'.13

In the case of a ballad that is simply sung or recited out loud, the physical document is comprised, not of sequential written or printed marks on paper, the contoured grooves on a phonograph cylinder, or etched pits and lands on a CD, but of sequential vibrations in air – the invisible, gaseous, but nonetheless physical substance that surrounds us. To be sure, the document that is a ballad performance is ephemeral.14 Its transience as a document, however, is nonetheless exactly comparable with that of the grooves of a phonograph cylinder, the wax substrate of which might be shaved in order

12 Shillingsburg, *Scholarly Editing*, p. 47, likewise allows that the same text can be stored in more than one place, using more than one set of signs (such as written words, impulses on magnetic tape, or digital 1s and 0s).

13 Peter L. Shillingsburg, *Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 73–74, uses the term 'material text' to refer to the union of text with document, reaffirming the necessity of the physical medium. For the present purpose, it is desirable to maintain at least a conceptual separation of text from document.

14 Towards the end of his life, Guglielmo Marconi is said to have become convinced that sounds once generated never die, but simply become fainter and fainter until they can no longer be detected.

that the cylinder could be reused.15 Likewise, the pattern of impulses on magnetic recording tape can be destroyed by demagnetizing the tape, and pencil marks on a sheet of paper are always susceptible to being erased. Perhaps it is worth drawing a distinction between these sorts of situations and that of the broadsides that, if Cornwallis is to be believed, ended up as toilet paper. All of these instances witness the destruction of a document, but in the case of those broadsides that would involve the despoilment not just of the writing but of the physical medium, the paper, itself. It is a nice distinction, between what we might call the 'textual carrier' – writing, contoured grooves, etched pits and lands – and the 'substrate' – paper, wax cylinder, magnetic tape, CD.16 The attenuation of the vibrations in air that carry a sung ballad is not quite to be equated with the degradation of the earth's atmosphere itself.

Early ethnographic collectors using the phonograph habitually treated their recordings as transient documents, the value of which was simply that they would enable the collector to derive an accurate written transcription, which, presumably, was thought of as having greater permanence (and probably precision).17 Pragmatically, Percy Grainger recommended writing down the words and melodies independently of the phonograph recordings, partly because of the danger of damage to the cylinders, partly because it is not always easy to distinguish unfamiliar words.18 The texts the cylinders contained were carefully (sometimes not so carefully) transferred from one document to another, and from one form of textual carrier to another, and the cylinders, it seems, were often subsequently discarded – a practice that neatly, albeit incidentally, illustrates the point that it is extremely difficult to dissociate text from an awareness of its physical packaging. It is possible to read at the heart of the Latin tag *littera scripta manet*, 'the written word remains', a simple preference for the stability of some physical substrates

15 This was the early practice of the American collector James Madison Carpenter, who began collecting and recording in Britain in 1928 (Washington, DC, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, Archive of Folk Culture, AFC1972/001, James Madison Carpenter Collection, MS p. 09637).

16 Shillingsburg, *Scholarly Editing*, p. 47, uses the term 'storage medium', which effectively combines textual carrier and substrate.

17 Erika Brady, *A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography* (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 62; D. K. Wilgus, *Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898* (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), p. 232.

18 Percy Grainger, 'Collecting with the Phonograph', *Journal of the Folk-Song Society*, 3.3 (no. 12) (1908), 147–242 (p. 148).

(papyrus, parchment, paper) over the fragility of others (air, wax, magnetic tape, the flimsy metal coatings of CDs).

Conversely, modern approaches to folk literature tend to embody a preference for the more vulnerable substrates associated with sound rather than writing. There are a number of interrelated reasons for this. They include, from a historical perspective, the Enlightenment 'discovery' of oral tradition and the opening up of a perceived dichotomy between orality and literacy, which has enabled oral tradition to continue to enjoy iconic status. From a more theoretical perspective, the preference for sound over writing in the study of the ballad can be considered as a (rather minor) subset of 'phonocentrism', the general precedence that, Derrida argues, has been afforded to speech over writing in Western metaphysics.19 The study of folklore, in some manifestations at least, has seen a shift away from the study of texts of any sort and towards context, performance, and ethnography.20 Finally, there is the mere fact that ballads, folktales, and the like are susceptible to vocal performance, which is the source of much aesthetic pleasure – and which in the ballad case gives access to the melody, which in its written form is frequently inaccessible to the non-specialist. Nevertheless, these are simply not very good arguments for the primacy of the substrates associated with sound over those associated with writing.

An acknowledgement of the significance of documentary media is scarcely a new idea. Marshall McLuhan's famous (if not unproblematic) dictum 'the medium is the message' provides the classic expression of this insight.21 Nevertheless, the physical packaging of ballad texts remains worthy of further consideration. Here, the work of Harold Innis, a notable influence on McLuhan, who considered the 'bias' towards either time or space that is inherent in different systems of communication, provides a useful starting point.22 Thus stone tablets bearing hieroglyphs exhibit a strong temporal bias, in that they can endure for millennia, but they cannot readily be transported from one place to another. Conversely, texts written on paper, being light and easily transportable, can be disseminated in space, but their very lightness renders them vulnerable to degradation and loss with time.

19 Jacques Derrida, *Of Grammatology*, corrected edn, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

20 Jeff Todd Titon, 'Text', in *Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture*, ed. Burt Feintuch (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 69–98.

21 Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man* (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).

22 Harold A. Innis, *The Bias of Communication* ([Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1951).

Now, this observed inverse relationship between time and space is not directly transferable to the ballad field. For example, while printed materials disseminated by chapmen and pedlars from early modern times provide one of the readiest explanations for the presence of recognizably similar sets of ballad words in widely separated places, they also provide some of the oldest records of ballads. On the other hand, broadsides rarely carry music notation, although earlier examples do mostly include the name of a tune, and the dissemination of ballad melodies through both space and time is assumed to be largely dependent on an oral/aural communication system. Paradoxically, such a system is the most ephemeral imaginable, in terms of both space and time. Communicative biases certainly are present in ballads when they occur as different kinds of physical documents, but to trace these it is necessary to consider a range of the signifying qualities that are presented by ballads as documents.

Even supposing an ideal situation where the text of a ballad (the sequence of words and pauses, and of musical notes and pauses) is identical whether carried by a written transcription or by a sound recording, and therefore what that text actually 'says' should in principle be unvarying, the documentary signals will be quite different. Most obviously, of course, the textual carriers within the two documents belong to two different semiotic systems. One employs physical marks on paper to be decoded by the human eye and brain; the other, physical arrangements (contoured grooves, patterns of magnetic impulses, etched pits and lands) to be decoded first by a mechanical apparatus and subsequently by the human ear and brain. 'Biases of the ear and eye', in Daniel Chandler's phrase,23 will therefore operate in the apprehending of even a single ballad text through different semiotic systems.

Even prior to that stage, the moment one is presented with a broadside or a CD, one is faced with a distinct set of requirements and expectations. These are instantly signalled by the packaging, even before any direct reference is made to the respective semiotic system – that is, before the broadside is read, or the CD inserted into the player. It is difficult to compile a systematic list of the ways in which different physical formats give out different signals, but one means of suggesting something of the range is to draw a few ready comparisons between some different documentary formats – in particular, phonograph recordings and printed broadsides,

23 Daniel Chandler, 'Biases of the Ear and Eye: "Great Divide" Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism' (1994), available at http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ Documents/litoral/litoral.html.

with some mention of modern digital recordings and 'pencil and paper' collecting, along with the ephemeral materiality of performance. Among the properties of documents that suggest themselves for comparison are those of (*i*) permanence, (*ii*) accessibility, (*iii*) precision, and (*iv*) information capacity.

(*i*) Unlike performance, both broadsides and phonograph cylinders constitute documents that signal a degree of permanence, although the broadsides – which, of course, have a much longer history – can more easily be seen to have stood the test of time. Yet it is likely that their cheapness and portability were initially valued more than their potential permanence. Besides their use in the privy, broadsides and all sorts of printed sheets could also be employed as wrapping paper, for book bindings, for lighting fires, and for writing on the verso and in the blank spaces, and it is generally thought that numbers of printed ballads have not survived in so much as a single copy.24 Nevertheless, time has in some degree vindicated the format. The pasting of broadsides on walls testifies to the fact that at least some contemporary consumers were aware of their potential longevity. And treated with moderate care, especially in libraries and private collections, some broadsides have readily survived four centuries or more.

A phonograph cylinder kept in a suitable conservation environment can equally be expected to last for a long time – that is, so long as it is not often played, for frequent listening to a cylinder can cause damage to both the substrate and the textual carrier. Stylus wear results in loss of signal as well as the acquisition of quantities of extraneous noise. Much the same can, in fact, be said about the effects of playing wear on acetate or vinyl records and on recording tape. Although in the domestic context the textual carrier of a CD is pretty well immune to damage from repeated playing, the protective plastic covering and lacquer film which constitute part of the substrate *in toto* are very vulnerable to scratching, which can on occasion render the whole document unreadable. From an archival point of view, moreover, substrate decay over time, as well as format obsolescence, pose real threats to the longevity of recordable optical media.25 Wax cylinders

24 St Clair, *Reading Nation*, pp. 26–28. Even now, there is no clear answer to the question of what proportion of the ballads printed in any particular historical period have survived or, conversely, been lost.

25 Kevin Bradley, *Risks Associated with the Use of Recordable CDs and DVDs as Reliable Storage Media in Archival Collections – Strategies and Alternatives*, Memory of the World Programme, Sub-Committee on Technology (Paris: UNESCO, 2006), available at http:// unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001477/147782E.pdf.

are fragile, easily broken if accidentally dropped, and subject to ageing effects and especially to mould, which can produce auditory artefacts and ultimately render the cylinder unplayable.26

In contrast, while reading a broadside necessarily entails some handling, which over a long period of time will cause damage to the substrate, short of it becoming so torn or grimy that the words cannot be read (which can happen), or its being deliberately sabotaged by overwriting, just so long as the substrate remains intact then the textual carrier is likely to remain essentially unimpaired. But the real permanence of the printed broadside lies not just in its relative durability, but in its multiplicity. Print runs for broadsides numbered at least in the thousands,27 multiplying the chances of survival of the texts inscribed thereon. The wax cylinder and its text, while quite probably treated with much greater care, might also be unique. Elizabeth Eisenstein describes the preservation of texts as perhaps the most important contribution of the printing revolution, and is at pains to point out that this derives not so much from quality as from quantity.28

(*ii*) Broadside ballads were readily accessible. They were available at low cost, usually priced at a halfpenny or a penny, and though the relative value of that sum varied over time, the price generally remained low and can be taken as an indicator of access.29 Ballads were widely distributed by pedlars and hawkers, and by the later eighteenth century they were being issued by booksellers/printers across England and Scotland (and Wales). Ballads, as noted above, were also frequently displayed in public. Broadly, accessibility was a consequence of a comparatively cheap paper substrate and the development of a printing process that permitted the multiple imposition of a textual carrier at low cost, although pricing structures within the book trade at large could be complicated by factors beyond the manufacturing costs alone.30

In contrast, phonograph recordings (of ethnographic items such as ballads – we are not concerned here with the wider, commercial phonograph and gramophone market) were relatively expensive manufactured objects, and

26 Jonathan Sterne, *The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 325–27.

27 Watt, *Cheap Print and Popular Piety*, pp. 11, 52; St Clair, *Reading Nation*, p. 340.

28 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, *The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe*, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 87–88.

29 Watt, *Cheap Print and Popular Piety*, pp. 11–12 (and see pp. 260–64); St Clair, *Reading Nation*, pp. 40, 343–44.

30 St Clair, *Reading Nation*, pp. 28–29. Some of the variety in format among ballads and chapbooks over time might be related to pricing strategies.

they required mechanical coding and decoding on a suitable, and again relatively expensive, machine.31 Several of the early folk song collectors (in fact, probably most of them) at least experimented with phonograph recording, and they shared access to the machines.32 The practicalities of transporting the heavy machine and the controlled conditions required for recording imposed spatial limitations on its use, although at various times recordings were made, for example, on the Isle of Skye and in rural Wales, as well as in various places in England. Phonograph cylinders are essentially unique items. The machines themselves were never exactly common and have now become quite rare, imposing a further limitation on the pragmatic longevity of the texts they were used to create. Although digitization has facilitated the (still relatively limited) redistribution of the recordings, it has done so only by transferring the texts to another substrate and carrier – another kind of packaging which, as already suggested, poses problems of its own in relation to the issue of permanence, even if it helps address that of accessibility. Unlike the wide geographical distribution of broadsides and chapbooks, that of phonograph recordings was strictly limited.

Recording technologies at large have accorded to sound the quality of reproducibility, which was long regarded as the particular characteristic of written words and musical notations. This has been a gradual process, however, reaching its fruition well after the close of the period of phonograph recording. On the other hand, once set up to play, in principle anyone could access phonographic sound, whereas access to a printed broadside requires that at least someone possess the basic ability to read it. To some extent, in the past this potential obstacle was bypassed by virtue of the ballads being sung or recited by their vendors, as well as through the existence of the 'reading communities' discussed in chapter three. Right up to the twentieth century, the presence of cheap print of the broadside kind – and also such things as newspapers, magazines, hand-bills, and

31 Phonographic recording machines were eventually manufactured in substantial numbers for the office dictation market (where 'dictaphone' was used as a generic term), and it was such a machine that J. M. Carpenter used for his collecting in Britain in the late 1920s/1930s.

32 C. J. Bearman, 'Percy Grainger, the Phonograph, and the Folk Song Society', *Music & Letters*, 84 (2003), 434–55; C. J. Bearman, 'The Folk-Song Society and the Phonograph', *Folk Music Journal*, 10.3 (2013), 370–74. For an interesting account of phonographic recording by collectors in Slovenia before the First World War, see Drago Kunej, '"We have plenty of words written down; we need melodies!": The Purchase of the First Recording Device for Ethnomusicological Research in Slovenia', *Traditiones* [Ljubljana], 34.1 (2005), 125–40.

so forth – signalled not so much the activity of private, silent reading, as that of communal, oral, reading aloud, recitation, or even singing. The phonograph, in contrast, remained a more socially privileged technology.

(*iii*) Phonograph recording required particular environmental conditions in order to be successful. The wax, for instance, needed to be reasonably warm in order to retain its plasticity. Cecil Sharp expressed reservations about the tendency of the phonograph to blur words and to emphasize certain consonants more than others; Anne Gilchrist made similar observations and criticized the machine's limited dynamic range.33 Modern authorities have endorsed such reservations, additionally pointing out such things as the frequency limitations of the machine.34 Even Percy Grainger, often portrayed as the champion of the phonograph, was prepared to concede some of these points.35 Thus the precision of wax cylinder recordings is strictly limited.36 On the other hand, they can certainly preserve elements of musical style, vocal ornamentation, and so forth, which are extremely difficult to represent graphically in stave notation. Grainger's phonograph recordings of Joseph Taylor and other Lincolnshire singers provide a prime illustration of this capability.37 His own complex notations of some of the same songs offer a direct point of comparison and invite debate as to whether notation on paper really is capable of attaining the same degree of precision.38

Conversely, printed broadsides generally attain a high degree of precision in the representation of ballad words. Of course, such faults as typographical errors, as well as broken or turned letters, can occur, type can fall out, or a printer can set nonsense.39 By and large, though, the verbal infidelities that do arise are not sufficient to inhibit comprehension, and

36 On the pursuit of fidelity in sound recording at large, see Sterne, *Audible Past*, pp. 215–86.

33 London, EFDSS Archives, Cecil Sharp Collection, Correspondence, Cecil Sharp to Percy Grainger, 23 May 1908 (photocopy); Anne Gilchrist Collection, AGG/8/142, Anne Gilchrist to Lucy Broadwood, 1 and 2 June 1908.

34 Bearman, 'Percy Grainger, the Phonograph, and the Folk Song Society', pp. 441–42. See further Drago Kunej, 'Digitised Early Sound Recordings as Scholarly Resources', in *Trapped in Folklore? Studies in Music and Dance Tradition and their Contemporary Transformations*, ed. Drago Kunej and Urša Šivic (Wien: Lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 181–96.

35 Grainger, 'Collecting with the Phonograph', pp. 148–49.

37 Some of these can be heard on *Unto Brigg Fair: Joseph Taylor and Other Traditional Lincolnshire Singers Recorded in 1908 by Percy Grainger*, 12-inch LP (London: Leader LEA 4050, 1972).

38 See Grainger, 'Collecting with the Phonograph'.

39 Rollins, 'Black-Letter Broadside Ballad', p. 263, observes (with perhaps a degree of licence): 'the [earlier, black-letter] broadsides abound in typographical errors hardly less grotesque and absurd than the amazing woodcuts that embellished the sheets'.

while they undeniably fall short of the aim of complete precision, they are often much less serious than the shortcomings of phonograph recordings. Broadsides do not generally carry music notation, but many of the earlier examples do carry a tune direction, 'To the tune of . . .'. This can be taken as a sufficient shorthand representation, at least for anyone familiar with the melody under the title given. A number of late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury broadsides do carry notation, although there is some reason to think that this is sometimes (though certainly not always) decorative in purpose and musically either nonsensical or misleading. Later broadsides mostly do not carry even an indication of the tune, which has to be counted as a loss. A number of popular tunes would have been accessible from other published sources, such as Playford's dance and music books, and anthologies like Johnson's *Scots Musical Museum*. Presumably, though, the general assumption was that the tune would either be known or else learned from the ballad seller.40

At that point, print and performance are closely connected. Performance, however, remains crucially dependent on individual skill, in both the handling of melody and the pronunciation of words, to transmit a ballad text with precision.  It is not a matter of chance that written or printed words and music have proven to be the favoured tools for scholarly analysis (well beyond the field of ballad studies). The precision of performance is also constrained by environmental factors such as extraneous noise, acoustic properties of the location, physical distance or barriers that might otherwise interfere with transmission of a transient, once-only signal. These are considerations that can impact upon sound recordings, too – even the most sophisticated of modern digital recordings.41

(*iv*) Both sound recordings and printed documents carry large quantities of information both integral to and supplementary or complementary to the verbal and musical text. Vocal inflections and marks of punctuation, for example, can impart elements of interpretation, such as a lift in the voice or the presence of a question mark at the end of a sentence. These things can

40 See Anthony Bennett, 'Sources of Popular Song in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems and Methods of Research', *Popular Music*, 2 (1982), 69–89 (pp. 77–78).

41 The fact that the digital signal is only ever an approximation to its analogue original, and the subsequent reconversion to analogue form involves a further approximation, may not impact discernibly upon the issue of textual precision, but should presumably trouble anyone overly concerned with 'authenticity' in the abstract.

reasonably be regarded as integral to the text. Written or printed texts often provide substantial punctuation, indicating such things as a change of speaker through the presence of quotation marks (which just occasionally can prove more ambiguous than otherwise). Conversely, the absence of audible punctuation from sound recordings might invite uncertainty or confusion, but might also preserve a fluidity that can be thought of as integral to ballad texts.

Typographic layout organizes ballad narratives into blocks of lines and stanzas which correspond (most of the time) to syntactic units – a kind of punctuation by spatial layout. At the level of the stanza, though less so at that of the line, this effect is paralleled in sound by the strophic nature of ballad tunes. Just occasionally, too, such patterns may prove disconcerting. Most ballad lines are in some degree end-stopped, with sense and metre coinciding in a pause at the line end, so that the rare case of enjambement, where the sense requires the eye to run on beyond the end of the line without a pause, can come as something of a jolt (and even more so where the syntax actually runs across a stanza break). This sort of occasion prompts a readjustment of expectations on the part of the reader, which may be either inhibited or facilitated by typography – inhibited by the stanza break, or facilitated by the absence of the expected full point. Layout, spelling, and punctuation all enable the closer interrogation of texts, and in very much the same way the details of musical notation enable the analysis of melodies.

While the symbols of musical notation and of writing or print are readily considered as integral to the texts they represent, this is not the case with all the kinds of information that can be carried by a document. The gothic typeface of a black-letter broadside, for example, which can be considered as merely ancillary to the physical nature of the textual carrier, nonetheless also signifies something about the historicity of both the document and the text it contains.42 Indeed, the entire *mise en page*, or *mise en livre*, of the broadside situates the document within the economic and ideological history of cheap print, just as the scratchiness of the sound from a phonograph recording situates the document within the early history of recording technology. Similarly, the handwriting in a manuscript or collector's notebook can signify care taken in transcription, perhaps distinguishing a fair copy from a rough copy, thus signalling the

42 See Charles C. Mish, 'Black Letter as a Social Discriminant in the Seventeenth Century', *PMLA*, 68 (1953), 627–30; St Clair, *Reading Nation*, p. 341.

relative authority of the text. Information of this kind largely takes on its significance with a historical perspective, which is akin to saying that its signification is in some sense accidental. The information capacity of documents need not necessarily be reflective of 'intention'.

Characteristics such as the vocal quality or timbre of a performance or on a recording might also be compared with the choice of typeface on a broadside. The presence of woodcuts and other decorations might be considered roughly equivalent to some of the other kinds of information that can accompany sound, such as movement, gesture, and body language. (Broadside woodcuts, it is perhaps worth observing, are entirely separable from the accompanying words and, it seems, were sometimes used as wall decorations in their own right.43) Fieldworkers often value video recording for its capacity to capture a wide range of extratextual information generated during a performance and to facilitate its analysis. These are all further examples of the capacity for documents to carry supplementary signifying information that is, strictly speaking, outside of the domain of text as it has been defined here.

Clearly, many or all of the aspects touched on in the foregoing comparative remarks could be elaborated in much more detail, but the purpose of this admittedly rather impressionistic account of permanence, accessibility, precision, and information capacity in documents is simply to point to some of the ways in which performance, print, and sound recordings bring with them their own sets of expectations. They do not conform in a straightforward manner with Innis's model of communication systems and its inverse biases towards time and space, although there is perhaps a trade-off to be discerned between time and space on the one hand, and information capacity on the other. This is especially apparent when the extratextual capacity of live performance is considered against its ephemeral nature. Conversely (from the present historical standpoint), although printed broadsides appear biased towards the dimensions of accessibility and permanence, an awareness of the importance of the broadside bibliographic code(s) expands greatly the range of information that can be read from the document.

A consequence of these sorts of comparisons, then, is to pose a challenge to the idea that primacy can necessarily be ascribed to any particular documentary format, to any one or other substrate. Scholars of an

43 Barry Reay, 'The Context and Meaning of Popular Literacy: Some Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Rural England', *Past and Present*, no. 131 (1991), 89–129 (p. 116).

ethnographic persuasion, for instance, are perhaps likely to hold that the primary manifestation of the ballad is in performance. Failing that, a sound recording might represent the primary document for the realization and preservation of the ballad text (as opposed, say, to a collector's notation). That position no doubt embodies an underlying deference to phonocentrism, but more immediately it reflects the ethnographic interest in aspects of performance (style, expression, vocal quality) that, strictly speaking, lie outside the ballad text per se. Yet, as has already been noted, written or printed words and music are the favoured tools for the critical analysis of words and melody. Other researchers might be equally interested in the physical characteristics of a collector's notation or, more likely, the typeface and illustrations of a broadside print. These are all things that are preserved in documents, and all make a substantial contribution to the historical, aesthetic, and intellectual import of the various kinds of whole. It is incomplete to consider the ballad in isolation from its 'packaging'.

The pursuit of a single ballad text through all of its potential documentary formats further demonstrates just how misleading it would be to ascribe 'intention' to it. The ballad text in this scenario is simply an intangible object that can migrate from one documentary format to another. History, it is worth observing, has quite undermined the charge that Margaret Laidlaw, James Hogg's mother, is supposed to have laid against Walter Scott: 'there war never ane o' my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel', an' ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They war made for singing an' no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair. An' the worst thing of a', they're nouther right spell'd nor right setten down.'44 The text of this famous anecdote exists in another version which omits the claim that 'ye hae broken the charm now, an' they'll never be sung mair'.45 But perhaps even more curious is the paradox it embodies (in both versions): the ballads were 'intended' only to be sung, and yet there was nonetheless a 'correct' way to transfer them into print ('right spell'd' and 'right setten down'), of which Scott was accused of having fallen short.46 The question of sound versus writing is considered in chapter five. Meanwhile, a broadside can equally serve to decorate a wall as to preserve for future generations a

44 James Hogg, *Memoir of the Author's Life* and *Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott*, ed. Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972), p. 137.

45 Hogg, *Memoir* and *Familiar Anecdotes*, p. 62.

46 See further Valentina Bold, '"Nouther right spelled nor right setten down": Scott, Child and the Hogg Family Ballads', in *The Ballad in Scottish History*, ed. Edward J. Cowan (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), pp. 116–41.

set of ballad words and at least the name of a tune. A collector's notebook may be used to analyse narrative and melody or it may simply be put away indefinitely in an archive. And while either of those paper-based documents could enable someone to sing the ballad again, either could just as easily be used to make a shopping list or to wrap a parcel – while the vibrations in the air that constituted a performance have long since attenuated beyond the possibility of detection.

One of the things that this brief consideration of material properties of the ballad is intended to underline is that the text itself – at least in the idealized scenario proposed, where it remains the same from one format to another – is to all intents and purposes intangible. Short of some kind of imaginary telepathic transfer, the text cannot be either expressed or transmitted without the packaging of a physical document, be it a performance, sound recording, printed sheet, or something else. All of those physical documents signify in different ways, so that it becomes extremely difficult to prioritize between forms of ballad 'packaging'. Rather than comprising a hierarchy of documents, then, each contributes to an intangible idea of what *is* the ballad.

Scholarship is familiar with the perspective of 'version' and 'type', and is beginning to awaken to the problems inherent in the notion of 'version' visà-vis the particular instance or intellectual item – each rendition by the same singer, or each copy of the same broadside printing, for example – which is by definition materially different and therefore distinguishable from any other. There is a parallel here with Leo Treitler's idea of 'exemplification' to describe the status of the individual, and potentially variant, written score in the ontology (that is to say, the nature and conditions of identity or being) of works in Western art music:

Obviously we can't read any one of these scores as unique identifier of the work, or denotation of the sound pattern that must be executed to produce a flawless performance of the work. Each score can do no more than exemplify the work. In some traditions exemplification is the main task of scores. In such a tradition identification and instruction are accomplished only indirectly, through exemplification. The score in such a tradition is functionally and ontologically parallel, at the same theoretical level, with the performance. The questions 'what is this piece' and 'how does it go' could both be answered either by writing out a score or by making a performance.47

47 Leo Treitler, 'History and the Ontology of the Musical Work', in *With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 298–316 (p. 312).

What Treitler is arguing here is that the individual documentary text, which in this instance comprises a score, merely 'exemplifies' the larger, abstract whole that is the musical work – which might equally be exemplified by another score, a performance, or a recording.

The crucial distinction here is between on the one hand the concrete exemplification, and on the other the work as an imagined whole. But the imaginary entity that is a musical or literary work is itself founded upon whatever exemplification(s) of it happen(s) to be available to any particular individual. This may be, for example, the originator, an editor, a reader, or a listener – whose access to particular exemplifications, and whose perspectives on the whole, can be expected to vary accordingly.48 Treitler's precise equation of score with performance places two quite different kinds of documentary text on exactly the same theoretical level, each to stand as a concrete and discrete exemplification of the work. His score and performance, in the ideal situation, might contain exactly the same sequence of musical notes and pauses (and, on occasion, words and pauses as well) – that is to say, the same text – in just the same way as, say, the idealized collector's notation and phonograph recording imagined earlier in this chapter. Yet there is little doubt that the respective documents – the score written or printed on paper, and the performance sounded through the air of the concert hall – will continue to signify in very different ways.

In 'History and the Ontology of the Musical Work', Treitler is also seeking to demonstrate that multiplicity does in fact pervade Western art music – to redress the view that works have been 'cast once and for all by a composer in a final form that is represented in a score and presented essentially unchanged in performances'.49 In fact, the 'work concept', exemplified by the music of Beethoven, is a product of the history of musical practice and aesthetics which only emerged *c*.1800.50 Nevertheless, it has become a more or less accepted principle of musical aesthetics (or at least of the aesthetics of Western art music) and it more or less effectively closes off the notion of multiplicity. Treitler maintains, however, that it is not in fact difficult to find exceptions to disprove the assumed rule that the musical work is

48 Shillingsburg, *Scholarly Editing*, pp. 42–44.

49 Treitler, 'History and Ontology', p. 301. It is only right to record that Treitler adds, in parentheses, 'Everything depends, of course, on what lies beneath that word, "essentially"' (p. 301), since every performance is necessarily in some way unique.

50 Lydia Goehr, *The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music*, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

determinate, fixed once and for all by its composer. He cites examples such as Stockhausen's *Klavierstück XI*, where the order of the sections is determined only by the performer at the moment of performance, or a particular performance of a raga by Ali Akbar Khan – and it is not difficult to imagine further examples from genres such as jazz and blues. Multiplicity, moreover, is to be found not just among items that can be realized only in live performance, that are not cast into a final form represented in a score, and where the text can reasonably be expected to vary from one instance to the next, but also among items from the mainstream of Western art music. Treitler points to pieces by Chopin, such as the *Nocturne in B major*, op. 62, no. 1, which exist (or have existed) in several variant forms, both in writing and in print, as well as in performance. Textual indeterminacy in a work like the Chopin *Nocturne* can be directly compared with that encountered in medieval chant, as well as in more modern, more 'experimental' pieces. Even in rock music, an item as it is performed can vary considerably from a supposedly 'definitive' recording.

As we saw in chapter one, these ideas of textual indeterminacy lend themselves well to the ballad situation, with regard to types and versions, and transmission and reinterpretations. What is being added to the argument here is an emphasis on the material aspect of the items that fall under the umbrella of the work. For Treitler and for Western art music, these are primarily score and performance. The ballads, too, are nothing if not multifarious in the documentary sense. When one reads a collector's manuscript notebook or a printed broadside, places a CD in the player, or attends a performance, the action is accompanied by a set of expectations that are to an important extent dependent on the nature of the substrate and textual carrier that provide the material base for the document in question. Each of these different documents offers a distinct exemplification of the ballad as work, even in the ideal instance where the text remains identical from one document to the next. In that idealized situation, the different documents all provide different access routes to the same thing, but together they render its realization increasingly rich and rounded – permanent and accessible, accurate and detailed, filled out with extratextual information, present to both eye and ear. Indeed, one reason for the resilience of ballad words and music can be posited to lie in their ability to inhabit different material formats – different documents – and to move with apparent ease between them.

Treitler also maintains that the perceived boundaries of the work are historically determined, that they can and do change with time and historical circumstance.51 Modern performers, he observes, tend not to stray from the published scores of Chopin and are usually unaware of the extent to which their predecessors did so. While the ontology of the ballad is informed by the entire range of its actual and potential documentary exemplifications, the conception is also potentially subject to change over time. Thus recorded sound is a fairly recent phenomenon, while the modern publication of ballad books scarcely matches up to the ubiquity of broadsides in, say, the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries.52 Concerning the extent of actual performances, we are sadly under-informed for the earlier periods, but it is at least worth observing that the elevation of sound to primary status in ballad ontology coincides with the long decline of broadside publication after the middle of the nineteenth century.

Prior to and after a period from, say, the end of the nineteenth century up until the Second World War, as well as being something you (or someone else) might sing, the ballad was something you could pick up and hold in your hand. Earlier, that would have taken the form of a broadside or chapbook; later, it would be a record of some kind, an LP or a CD. During that putative interval in the first part of the twentieth century, there were both publications and recordings, but, for a combination of technological and economic reasons, they were probably rather more thin on the ground. The interval in question happens to coincide with the folk song revival, when large numbers of songs were collected from a supposedly oral tradition, while many (though not all) of the collectors themselves were uneasy about such printed broadside copies as they did encounter. It is a moot point as to whether it would really be possible to draw a causal correlation between the documentary environment and the ideological impulses behind the folk song revival, but it does look as if there was at least something of a temporal correlation.53 It is certainly

51 Treitler, 'History and Ontology', p. 316.

52 A proper account of broadside history has yet to be written. For sound recording, Sterne, *Audible Past*, is excellent.

53 Yet broadsides were still in commercial circulation around the end of the nineteenth century in England, and somewhat later in Scotland, and it is quite possible that their presence was deliberately played down. This may well be one of the more accurate insights into the revival provided by the revisionist thesis. See Dave Harker, *Fakesong: The Manufacture of British 'Folksong', 1700 to the Present Day* (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 141, 182, 193–94.

easier to overlook the material nature of a singer's performance than of a broadside ballad.54 If it is correct that the perceived boundaries of the work are historically contingent – and the argument certainly appears both sensible and convincing – then it is at least worth giving some consideration to ways in which the timing of the folk song movement might have impacted on its direction and content.

54 And of a digital download than of an LP or CD – encouraging, perhaps, an illusory sense in some quarters of a late return to a pre-Gutenberg heyday.

### 5. Sound and Writing

As previous chapters have insisted, the ballad has coexisted in different media from early modern times right up to the present day. Although we know comparatively little for certain about the practice of ballad singing prior to the folk song revivals, there is no real reason to doubt that ballads were sung from an early date.1 So, for four centuries and more, we can take it that the written ballad has happily coexisted with its vocal performance. More recently, however, the assumption has gained hold that the written ballad is, or ought to be, conceptually tied to its vocal performance. This is almost certainly a twentieth-century phenomenon, attributable in no small part to Bertrand Bronson's advocacy of 'the ballad as song' and his definitional challenge: '*Question*: When is a ballad not a ballad? *Answer*: When it has no tune.'2 Bronson, however, was reacting against a scholarly legacy that had paid little attention to the music of the ballads, and he was perhaps led to overstate his case. In fact, a hierarchy of ballad documentation that seeks to privilege sound is misleading, because the ballad has always been, and remains, accessible through complementary media which fulfil different purposes and follow different conventions – all leading towards the position that different and complementary sets of instructions can quite independently facilitate access to the intangible ballad.

An earlier version of this chapter was published as 'Sound and Writing: Complementary Facets of the Anglo-Scottish Ballad', *Twentieth-Century Music*, 7 (2010), 139–65, and the material is reused with permission.