Taking the, peoples lowest in civilization, we find that the Australian blacks and the American Red Indians have several kinds of songs, usually sung in dances, whether festive or religious or magical. They have magic chants, and even hymns, often unintelligible to those who sing them in the dance, either because the language is obsolete, or because the songs have been borrowed from tribes of alien speech. It is clear that in Europe, too, the ballad was originally a dancing song ("ballad" is from _ballare_, to dance), and where a story was told, that was given in recitative, while the dancers followed each line of narrative with a chorus or refrain, such as There were three ladies lived in a bower, _Oh wow! bonnie._ And they went out to pu' a flower _On the bonnie banks o' Fordie._ The story told in the recitative, in surviving examples, was probably, at first, composed by one author, versifying a popular tale, of unknown antiquity, or narrating some recent event. Even now in the remoter isles of the Hebrides, various singers, each in turn, improvise and chant verses, and thus a kind of ballad is made collectively. But it is plain that for each of our oldest surviving narrative ballads there must have been one original author, whether his theme was an old story or a recent occurrence,--on the Borders usually a cattle raid, the escape of a prisoner, or a battle. There would be no _professional_ poet, as Queen Mary's ally, Bishop Leslie of Ross tells us, in his "History of Scotland," "the Borderers themselves make their own ballads, about the deeds of their ancestors, or crafty raids or forays". Such unwritten songs would be altered by every singer, as time went by, so that these ballads as they stand are thoroughly popular and "masterless," many hands have combined to bring them into their present state. The Robin Hood ballads, or songs about Robin Hood, are mentioned by Piers Plowman as popular among the peasants at the end of the fourteenth century. They would be sung in connexion with the very ancient festivities of May Day, held in England and Scotland, when money was collected, rather roughly, from spectators and passers-by. Now Wynkyn de Worde, the successor of Caxton as a printer, published a "Lytil Geste" of Robin Hood (about 1490). But we are not obliged to suppose that the songs known to Piers Plowman were borrowed from the "long Geste" of Robin Hood; more probably the "Geste" was derived from the popular traditions and rhymes of the May Day show of Robin Hood. How far these ballads as they now exist have been organized and improved upon by a professional minstrel it is hard to say. In any case the older ballads are worthy of merry England. The ballads of King Arthur are manifestly popularized and reduced to the simple ballad form from the long literary romances, and are probably the work of lowly professional minstrels.