CATALONIA 193

Arnold is, according to the ballad, an unforgivable sinner; in the
dead of night he appears to his wife, and though she defends her
children and her household, she cannot stop his grasping her and
haling her away to hell with his burning hand. The legend is
firmly fixed in the local traditions of Ripoll, and the count's house
may be seen at Parnau on the road to Candevano. Apart from this
case the dates to be inferred from ballads making historical allu-
sions are relatively modern. King Francois's Imprisonment (Mila
80) is the French ballad on this subject, and shows traces in the
language of its origin. The Capture of Nice (Mila 79) goes back to
the same period, but the bulk of the historical ballads recorded by
Mila lie between the separatist revolt of 1642 and the Carlist wars
of last century. A similar range of dates lies behind the ballads of
banditry, extending from the days of Serrallonga (fl. 1632—7) to
the late eighteenth century. They are sometimes quite stirring
adventures—as in the Servant-girl (Mila 114), who detected and
captured disguised brigands in the inn—but there is a tendency to
utter platitudes about the importance of a godly upbringing as a
way of ultimately avoiding the gibbet.

We have to assign to Catalan ballads a history covering three
epochs: from the early fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth those
of French cut prevail; from 1550, when the Castilian printed
collections were in every man's hand, there was a period of intense
castilianization; then come the vulgar and plebeian ballads of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to be distinguished
from those of the rest of Spain. Correspondences between Mila
and Doncieux and Nigra are to be associated with the ballads
of the first period, especially when supported by formal criteria.
There are poems in metres based on the French decasyllable and
alexandrine, and they obey the ruling that cadences of hemistichs
must be different. In these pieces French words are not infrequent:
words like 'xivalP, 'arjant', *boy', 'aymar' for 'chevaF, 'argent*,
cbois', 'aimer'. There are poems in the assonance e, corresponding
to the French infinitive ery and the incorrections in usage show that
these are foreign. One notes, too, that the word proper to these
poems is 'canso* (chanson), whereas 'romanso* means properly a
ballad printed on a flying sheet. (Compare the Appalachian distinc-
tion between 'love song' and 'ballet'). This is an acknowledgement
of the way in which the Castilian 'romances* penetrated Catalonia.
The method of singing, according to Mila, transforms these poems

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