ABSTRACT
The ballads were the only form of Scots literature that flourished more or less underground during the apparently so sterile seventeenth century. The earliest Scots songs of which we possess knowledge have to do with the events of the critical period, 1286-1314, and the earliest fragment of all, that of a song on the death of Alexander El, is fine in diction and nobly passionate in sentiment. How purely folk it remained is shown by the absence of anything like a real song in the poetry of the great makars, and also by the fact that the Bannatyne Manuscript contains only two pieces that have been accepted as songs. The change in social atmosphere and in literary speech after the Reformation put most of the old songs out of date, and Scots song as we know it began some time in the first half of the seventeenth century, though many of its motifs were traditional.
