The Ballad History Of The Reigns Of Henry VII And Henry VIII (1908) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BALLAD HISTORY OF THE REIGNS OF HENRY VII. AND HENRY VIII. By Professor C. H. FIRTH, LL.D., V.P. Read November 21, 1907. Ballads are useful as a supplement to graver historical authorities, and throw a light upon the history of the past which we could not derive from other sources. It is generally not difficult to know what the great men of any day?the nobles, and statesmen, and men of letters?thought about the events which happened in their time. We have their letters, or their speeches, or their biographies; but it is difficult to know what the common people who formed the mass of the nation thought, and it is important to know this too. Here the ballads help us, because they were the literature of the populace, composed by men of the people for the people, reflecting popular feeling and helping to shape it. We may divide them roughly into three classes: firstly, there are the long narrative ballads which embody either traditional accounts of some past event or popular versions of some recent event, and show us what people believed to have happened; secondly, there is another class of ballads which express the feelings of the moment about the events of the day, and set forth the joy or sorrow of the people about something which was happening at the time. These are often satirical in their tone, and not easy to distinguish from the regular satirical poems of the period composed by professional writers. The narrative ballads were for the most part handed down orally or in manuscript; most of those which survive exist in manuscripts dating from the later part of the sixteenth or the early part of the seventeenth century, and were first printedby antiquarians at a later date. On the other hand, the expressions of opinion about contemporary events often found their w...