232 NORDIC BALLADS

The ship is, as he dreaded, totally wrecked:

O our Scots nobles were richt laith
to weet their cork-heild schoone;
bot lang owre a' the play wer playd,
their hats they swam aboone.

In the ballad, however, there is nothing to say when this disaster
occurred. Some versions give Norway as the destination, and it is
a conjecture that the ballad speaks of the loss of the Maid of Nor-
way in 1290; and it is only conjecturally that we can assign this
ballad to the early years of the fourteenth century. The Scottish
evidence thus indicates that there were only a few ballads before
the sixteenth century; the apogee of this genre in Scotland is to be
placed in that era. A late date for Scottish balladry is also com-
patible with the circumstance that the adventure ballads held in
common with Denmark and Norway are more satisfactory in their
Scandinavian forms, and consequently almost all must be reckoned
imports into Scotland.

The English evidence allows for a higher antiquity, but is more
difficult to follow because of possible literary interference. Child
has a sturdy group of sixteenth-century ballads extending from
Andrew Barton to King James and Brown (167—80, from A.D. 1511—
78), and he reproduces four sea-songs from that era and the next
(285-8). This is the principal group of historical ballads, and it
would have been vastly increased had his editorial conscience
allowed him to include the Tudor political pieces by named
authors. The sixteenth century was the apogee of the historical
ballad in England as in Scotland. But there are also a considerable
number of English ballads of much earlier date. Excluding, for the
moment, Sir Aldingar (59), which refers to persons of the tenth
century, we find that Robin Hood was probably a real personage
of the twelfth century (dying in 1198), and that four ballads were
stitched into the Geste (117) before 1400. The circulation of
Robin Hood pieces is attested in 1377; nothing prevents the sup-
position that they were composed much earlier. Queen Eleanor's
Confession (156) and Sir Hugh (155) are not ballads to corroborate
the evidence of early date, though they refer to personages of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries respectively, since the former may
be of literary origin, and the latter is a religious legend. In the
fourteenth century we encounter Sir Hugh Spencer (158), Durham
Field (159), Otterburn (161), and in the fifteenth century we find