[Footnote 3: The Rev. J. Broadwood, of Lyne, Sussex, printed his collection "for Private Circulation only," in 1843. It was reprinted later, with additions, by Miss L. Broadwood, under the title of "Sussex Songs." (Leonard & Co., Oxford Street.)]
With regard to the approximate dates of the airs we give, all that we can say is that such as are in the ancient modes are not later than the reign of James I. How much more ancient they may be, it is impossible to determine. The melodies of the Handel and Arne, and then those of the Hooke and Dibden periods can be at once detected. Some few of the melodies we have taken down were certainly originally in one or other of the ancient modes, but in process of time have been subjected to alteration, to accommodate them to the modern ear.
Although some seventy per cent. of the airs noted from the very old singers are modal, we have not given too many of these, as the popular taste is not sufficiently educated to relish them. But such as can not perceive the beauty of the tunes that go, for instance, to "The Trees they are so high," in the rarely used Phrygian mode, "Flora, the Flower of the West," in F, "Henry Martyn," "On a May morning so early," etc., are indeed to be pitied. We have not been able to give those lengthy ballads, such as, "The Outlandish Knight," "The Brown Girl," "By the Banks of Green Willow," "The Baffled Knight," "William and the Shepherd's Daughter," "Captain Ward," "The Golden Glove," "The Maid and the Box," "The Death of Queen Jane," etc., which are too long to be sung and listened to with patience now-a-days.
In some instances we have set other words to a ballad tune, as XXXVI. One of my old singers said to me concerning this ballad, "When my little sister, now dead, these twenty years, was a child, and went up from Exeter to London with me in a carrier's van, Lor bless'y, afore railways was invented, I mind that she sang this here ballet in the waggon all the way up. We was three days about it. She was then about six years old." The ballet, by the way, is not particularly choice and suitable for a child or a grown-up girl to sing, according to our ideas.
In giving these songs to the public, we have been scrupulous to publish the airs precisely as noted down, choosing among the variants those which commended themselves to us as the soundest. But we have not been so careful with regard to the _words_. These are sometimes in a fragmentary condition, or are coarse, contain _double entendres_, or else are mere doggerel. Accordingly, we have re-written the songs wherever it was not possible to present them in their original form. This was done by the Scotch. Many an old ballad is gross, and many a broadside is common-place. Songs that were thought witty in the Caroline and early Georgian epochs, are no longer sufferable; and broadside ballads are in many cases vulgarised versions of earlier ballads that have been lost in their original forms.