German Ballads: Translated and Edited (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Excerpt from German Ballads: Translated and Edited

Few remarks are more often quoted than Fletcher of Saltoun's, Let me make the ballads of a country, and I care not who makes its laws. But the laws of Fletcher's own country at one time took an unfair advantage over the ballads. For in Calvinistic Scotland of the sixteenth century, these metrical romances were considered as altogether profane and ungodly, and no marriage could be celebrated unless the contracting parties deposited £10 as caution-money that they would have no minstrels at the wedding. Under the Regent Morton, printing a ballad was punishable with death, and in I 579 two luckless poets were actually hanged for the high crime and misdemeanour of making ballads. What Morton and Knox would have done with the still more criminal translator of ballads it is impossible to say.

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