The scop invented and the glee-man
recited heroic legends and other tales to our Anglo-Saxon forefathers.
These were followed by the minstrels and other tellers of tales
written for the people. They frequented fairs and merrymakings,
spreading the knowledge not only of tales in prose or ballad form, but
of appeals also to public sympathy from social reformers.
As late as the year 1822, Allan Cunningham, in publishing a collection
of "Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry," spoke
from his own recollection of itinerant story-tellers who were welcomed
in the houses of the peasantry and earned a living by their craft.
The earliest story-telling was in recitative. When the old
alliteration passed on into rhyme, and the crowd or rustic fiddle took
the place of the old "gleebeam" for accentuation of the measure and
the meaning of the song, we come to the ballad-singer as Philip Sidney
knew him. Sidney said, in his "Defence of Poesy," that he never heard
the old song of Percy and Douglas, that he found not his heart moved
more than with a trumpet; and yet, he said, "it is sung but by some
blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so
evil apparelled in the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would
it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?" Many an old
ballad, instinct with natural feeling, has been more or less
corrupted, by bad ear or memory, among the people upon whose lips it
has lived.
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