The ballad was an oral form of poetry, accompanied with a simple instrument, produced by the common people and recited and handed over from generation to generation. Popular ballads were anonymous narrative poems, written in short stanzas of two or four lines, mainly in four-line stanzas called quatrain, rhyming ABCB. There is a mixture of dialog (it expresses the emotions and makes the story more lively; it adds a lively atmosphere and it makes it real) and narration (it creates the context, the setting of the story where the tragic events take place) and the speaker does not introduce his personality.
There is an iconic use of language that draws the meaning and it is simple, popular (dialect is often used) and concrete because people, at this time, were mainly alliterative and often each stanza contains the repetition of words or lines to help the memorization of the text. In fact there is a multitude of figures of speech, such as repetition, incremental repetition, alliterative lines, assonance, consonance, and the repetition of more lines, called refrain. The style is simple.
The main topics of the ballads are tragic love stories, the super nature and the battles between England and Scotland. The universe was peopled with speaking animals, birds, fairies and witches and all these characters are magic with supernatural power.
The ballad makes understand the civilization of the Middle Ages and the relationship between the member of the families.