The Ballad of Chevy Chase

There are two extant English ballads known as "The Ballad of Chevy Chase", both of which narrate the same story. As ballads existed within oral tradition before being written down, other versions of this once popular song also may have existed. Moreover, many ballads continued to use the Chevy Chase tune without necessarily referring to "The Ballad of Chevy Chase."

The ballads tell the story of a large hunting party upon a parcel of hunting land (or chase) in the Cheviot Hills, hence the term, Chevy Chase. The hunt is led by Percy, the English Earl of Northumberland. The Scottish Earl of Douglas had forbidden this hunt and interpreted it as an invasion of Scotland. In response he attacked, causing a bloody battle after which only 110 people survived. Both ballads were collected in Thomas Percy's Reliques and the first of the ballads in Francis James Child's Child Ballads.

Scholar Francis J. Child as well as Thomas Percy noted similarities between this ballad and the older "The Battle of Otterburn", which refers to the historical Battle of Otterburn in 1388, although neither set of lyrics are completely historically accurate and may relate to border skirmishes up to fifty years later. Versions of either ballad often contain parallel biographical and historical information; nonetheless, the differences led Child to believe that they did not originally refer to the same occurrence.

Simpson suggests that the music of Chevy Chase was identical to the tune of Flying Flame, in which the former superseded the latter by the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Versions of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" exist in several ballad collections like: the Roxburghe Ballads, the Pepys Library, the Huntington Library Miscellaneous, the Glasgow University Library, and the Crawford Collection at the National Library of Scotland. The ballads in these collections were printed with variations between 1623 and 1760. Online facsimiles of the ballad are also available for public consumption at sites like the English Broadside Ballad Archive.

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