Lord Randal

The ballad is mainly the recording of a dialog. Its structure follows the typical four line stanza. Its questioning syntax reinforces memory and therefore the ballad was very popular and it also was easy to be handed down.

The protagonist of the text is an aristocratic young man as the intelligent reader can see from the title. Popular taste was attracted by aristocracy families and situations. In addition, the supernatural caught their attention. The setting of the ballad is the typical one of the Medieval taste: the greenwood.

The first quatrain introduces the situation. Lord Randal's mother asks her son where he has been because he looks tired and he feels like fainting. The son answers that he has been at the wood. Repetition, high density of -m sound, refrains and punctuation all together create an atmosphere of suffering and impending death. Right from the start the ballad displays the passionate relationship between mother and son during the Middle Ages: the mother addresses lord Randal as "my handsome young man" making clear he is attractive and young. Of course, the mother's sense of possessiveness is signalled by the repetitive use of the possessive adjective "my". The sound -m is recurrent: seven times in the very first stanzas. It is the typical sound of somebody who is complaining. In the second stanza almost the same from the phonological level.

Lord Randal answers his mother's curiosity: she wants to know where he has been and it appears clear that lord Randal has probably been under a spell: a negative one unfortunately. The intelligent reader can't find clear clues to decide if the semantic choice "true-love" is a parody or the result of an illusion. It appears that people from aristocracy mainly spent their time hunting that is they were not compelled  to gain a living and were generally brought up by people who were supposed to be at their service. The reader understands this immediately by the use of the imperative ten times occurring in the ballad ("make my bad soon"). Men, especially if the first child, detained power, properties and money and as a result women's  life in any family depended on the relationship they had with men. Besides the expression "make my bed soon" lets the intelligent reader suppose there is something wrong with lord Randal's health, texturally probably because lord Randal's "true-love" gave him something dangerous ("eels fried in a pan"). The food sound the typical one given by witches which is maybe masked under the veil of an attractive beautiful woman. This explains for the typical mentality of the Middle Ages, according to which women roles were clearly defined: they could be daughters, wives, mothers or nouns. If they did not conform to such standards they could be considered dangerous. In short, Medieval society established a social division between men and women that still exists and explains for the dominant main roles that civil western society still has. In contemporary society the 70% of female violence is still played inside the family and generally speaking acted by people from male gender.

This also explains why Lord Randal necessarily had to be the victim of some supernatural power, symbolically transfigured under the shape of a female witch. Witches played their spells on men in the forest where they generally performed their pagan rites to which common women and men were not invited and punished in case they decided to attend.

In the last four stanzas lord Randal's mother makes him some questions about inheritance and again the ballad displays the role of the woman in Medieval society. While lord Randal gives her mother and her sister a part of his inheritance, he gives nothing to his "true-love". Anyway the most important person and so who gets the biggest part of lord Randal's inheritance is his brother.

Therefore Lord Randal is a very interesting text to really understand the mentality of the Middle Ages, it provides the reader information about lifestyle in the social classes, the relationship between man and women inside and outside the family, the position of the oldest son, the role of witchcraft, the economic destiny of a family, the role of animals inside the family, with a distinction between animals in the aristocracy: lord Randal died together with his haunts and hawks, while the common people used to bring up animals to survive, to eat and to work.