e 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. It is to be considered,
however, that the old broader pronunciation of some letters developed
some syllables and the swiftness of speech slurred over others,
which will account for many an apparent halt in the music of what was
actually, on the lips of the ballad-singer, a good metrical line.

"Chevy Chase" is, most likely, a corruption of the French word
chevauchee, which meant a dash over the border for destruction and
plunder within the English pale. Chevauchee was the French equivalent
to the Scottish border raid. Close relations between France and Scotland
arose out of their common interest in checking movements towards their
conquest by the kings of England, and many French words were used with a
homely turn in Scottish common speech. Even that national source of joy,
"great chieftain of the pudding-race," the haggis, has its name from
the French hachis. At the end of the old ballad of "Chevy Chase," which
reads the corrupted word into a new sense, as the Hunting on the Cheviot
Hills, there is an identifying of the Hunting of the Cheviot with the
Battle of Otterburn:--

"Old men that knowen the ground well enough call it the Battle of
Otterburn.
At Otterburn began this spurn upon a Monenday;
There was the doughty Douglas slain, the Percy never went away."

The Battle of Otterburn was fought on the 19th of August 1388. The
Scots were to muster at Jedburgh for a raid into England. The Earl
of Northumberland and his sons, learning the strength of the Scottish
gathering, resolved not to oppose it, but to make a counter raid into
Scotland. The Scots heard of this and divided their force. The
main body, under Archibald Douglas and ot