Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance

Sheale is known to have been a minstrel of Tamworth, and it would appear that much of this MS. (including certain poems, no doubt his own) is in his handwriting--probably the book belonged to him. But the supposition that he was author of the _Hunting of the Cheviot_, Child dismisses as 'preposterous in the extreme.'

The other version, far better known as _Chevy Chase_, is that of the Percy Folio, published in the _Reliques_, and among the Pepys, Douce, Roxburghe, and Bagford collections of ballads. For the sake of differentiation this may be called the broadside form of the ballad, as it forms a striking example of the impairment of a traditional ballad when re-written for the broadside press. Doubtless it is the one known and commented on by Addison in his famous papers (Nos. 70 and 74) in the _Spectator_ (1711), but it is not the one referred to by Sir Philip Sidney in his _Apologie_. Professor Child doubts if Sidney's ballad, 'being so evill apparelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that