Dating from the fourteenth century or perhaps earlier, the English popular ballad preserves traces of archaic forms now obscure to us. One thing that is clear is that its measure, rhythm, and general pattern allow for easy repetition. To modern readers, the reiteration of refrains in songs may seem to serve aesthetics, but repetition also had a practical function: in a medieval society that was largely illiterate, songs and other mnemonic devices allowed for easy memorization of important events, histories, and legends. Other than this, agreement about the character of the popular ballad has not been unanimous.

The dispute extends beyond questions about its origins and the nature of its development. Not all scholars can comfortably settle on the traditional idea that “ballad measure” consists of quatrains with four or three stresses in each line and with an abcb or abab rhyme scheme, although most critics begin with such a description before exploring its deficiencies.(“Ballad measure” is also known as “ballad stanza,” “ballad meter,” and “hymn meter.) The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics restricts this designation to those Scottish and British ballads compiled by Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. At the heart of the disagreement is whether ballad verse is accentual or accentual-syllabic. That is, is it time-dependent (isochronous) and does it count only stresses, or is it untimed and regulated by syllable count?

A good number of nineteenth century experts believed that ballad measure actually came from 14-syllable lines used in ancient folk songs and in hymns from the Latin Mass. Because of limited space requirements on the codex page, scribes broke couplets of these long lines into four to make them fit. The internal rhyme of the original form was now laid out in separate lines. It seems unlikely to some, however, that songs tied mainly to oral tradition and sung by the illiterate would themselves be derivations of Latin church hymns. A related theory holds that the ballad measure quatrain derives from the native “fourteener” couplet, but this form is especially associated with the Renaissance. It is more in line with narrative verse than song. That is, it is stichic, not strophic.

In his 1922 study, Modern Metrical Technique as Illustrated by Ballad Meter, R. Stewart argues that ballad measure is accentual-syllabic. He reads later ballads as essentially made up of metrical feet, but he admits that the earlier the ballads, the more tentative his scheme. J. W. Hindren, in A Study of Ballad Rhythm (1936), treats the ballads strictly as songs, and therefore sees them as isochronous.

Besides “accentual” and “syllabic,” there are terms for ballad measure derived from the fact that early modern Protestant hymn writers put the Psalms to the tune and rhythm of popular ballads, and these new hymns ultimately found a place in church songbooks. The meter of these songs was then regularized, often with a key in the back of the hymnal. The most common of these was “common measure,” which is a quatrain of alternating four and three stresses, as in:

There lived a wife at Usher’s Well (iambic tetrameter)
And a wealthy wife was she; (iambic trimeter)
She had three stout and stalwart sons, (iambic tetrameter)
And sent them o’er the sea. (iambic trimeter)

As emphasized in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, a thorough and careful study of ballad measure has yet to be accomplished.

~Bill Gahan

Works Cited

Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature, v. 1. New York: The Roland Press Co.,1960.

Myers, Jack, and Don Wukasch. The Longman Anthology of Poetic Terms. Denton, TX: U. of Texas Press, 2003.

Perringer, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Shepard, Leslie. The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962.