Tudor Responses to the Cheviot Ballads

The Otterburn ballads long ago lost the popularity that once made them synonymous with ballad singing in general. As we have seen, the name Chevy Chase survives in the United States largely by coincidence, and no version of the ballad ever seems to have entered the American folk tradition. Nor have the Otterburn ballads been favoured by modern literary taste, which prefers ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ and the ‘Twa Corbies’. There are fine modern recordings of the version recovered by Sir Walter Scott, but not many of them. Hearing Gordeanna McCulloch's slow, mournful rendition to a tune preserved by Northumbrian pipers, or the versions of Tony Cuffe or Steve Lawrence, all three of whom cut the ballad to seven or eight crucial stanzas, one can recognize its dramatic force, but modern listeners may still be puzzled as to why this particular ballad should once have stood so far ahead of all the rest and moved people so deeply. Yet it must have. Although the ballad's emotional force is but one point in Sidney's defence of creative fiction, that point depends upon his readers finding his response plausible.

Although Sidney's reference to the ‘old song of Percy and Douglas’ has been quoted innumerable times by literary historians and ballad scholars, it is worth considering the passage in context.