PEOPLE AND POETS	9
by small groups in occupying the soil. Actual dates, as we shall see
later, can be assigned for the beginning of some of the cardinal
collections. Medieval England, writes Mr. H. S. Bennett,1
was almost exclusively rural England, and rural England congregated
in small groups of people, here fifty, here a hundred, and (much less
often) here several hundreds, living in rude houses which clustered
together in some places, while in others they straggled endlessly down
the village street. Agriculture and its allied occupations engaged the
energies of everyone as they strove to win a living from the soil. These
small groups, on closer examination, are often found to be sharing
certain rights and privileges and to be discharging certain duties, under
the protection and control of a lord. There were many thousands of
these little groups throughout England, and they formed the manorial
society which existed for some hundreds of years after the Conquest.
The bonders of the Danish songs were similarly grouped round the
garth of a lord. The borderers, in Scotland or Spain, and the
meinees of Serbian princelings were like this, save that the occupa-
tion of those worthy to be mentioned in poetry was war, not agri-
culture. Such conditions did not commence everywhere in the
same age, and the dates of ballad beginnings vary correspondingly.
One has to allow also for the fact that the ballad is an art form,
which does not arise spontaneously, but more often has some
literary antecedents.
The end of medieval society comes with the practice of reading.
This was due in the West to humanism and the art of printing.
Books, suddenly much more plentiful and cheap, drew to them-
selves the middle and upper classes, abandoning the ballads to the
vulgar. Even then, however, ballad communities might survive,
though on a humbler level, thanks to difficulty of communication,
local backwardness, or some cause like professional segregation.
The conscripts of the great European armies, as we have seen,
prolong in some measure the medieval self-sufficient, homo-
geneous, analphabetic ballad societies. In the Balkans and Russia
the end of medieval conditions has come much later. The lettered
public is relatively small. One notices chiefly the drying up of
patronage in the wealthier centres, where probably the ballads were
first developed. The songs are scattered to the circumference of
culture. Those of Kiev, for instance, having been transformed by
1 Life on the English Manor: a study of peasant life, 1150-1400, Cambridge,
1937, P- 4i-
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