ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AMERICA 231

tion of the old ballads taken to America at that time or a little later.
There must have been heavy losses of medieval material. As no
distinction was made between new and old, doubtless there are
apparently old ballads (such as some of the Robin Hood cycle)
which are really quite modern inventions. Discriminating collectors
were unknown until we pass the date of Percy's ReliqueSj and even
then they were unsystematic. The evidence offered by Child's
collection is more debatable than that of Danmarks gamle Folkc-
viser, and it is more hazardous to come to any negative conclusion.
The entire group of Scottish Border ballads, from Johnnie
Armstrong (169) to Parcy Reed (193), belongs to the sixteenth cen-
tury, together with Mary Hamilton, Edom oj Gordon, The Bonny
Earl oj Murray, The Laird o' Logie, Willie Macintosh, and perhaps
Out laze Murray (173, 178, 181-3, 305). They are followed by
thirteen ballads on Scottish battles and tragedies of the seventeenth
century (194-206), and three from the eighteenth (208-10). There
are other Scottish ballads, of a more domestic nature, which can
be referred to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Against
these we can set only a handful of early pieces: Sir Patrick Spens
(58), Gude Wallace (157, based on Blind Harry y c. 1460), the
Scottish Otterburn ballads (of uncertain date), and Harlaw (163).
Only Harlaw gives a reasonably secure date. The event occurred
in 1411, and it was of immediate local interest to Aberdonians.
The ballad is of the sort which arises directly out of the experience
it narrates, and we are, in any case, certain that it existed in 1549.
Sir Patrick Spens is, in its style, the finest of the Scottish ballads.
The words work on the imagination right from the conventional,
yet ominous, opening:

The king sits in Dumferling toune,
drinking the blude-reid wine.

He chooses a captain for his ship, and sends him his written com-
mands :

The first line that Sir Patrick red,

a loud lauch lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick red,

the teir blinded his ee.

*O wha is this has don this deid,

this ill deid don to me,
to send me out this time o' the yeir,

to sail upon the se?J