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.

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. In the sixth quatrain, as the intelligent reader can see, Lord Randal's
mother understand he is poisoned and in the next three stanzas she seems to be
more worried for her son's money than for his life. Maybe the "pater familias"
is dyed and Lord Randal was the only adult man in the family, the only who can
bring home money. The sound "d" is repeated a lot in those quatrains, this
wants to underline the desperation of the situation. The ballad ends with a
wish to his "lover". Maybe she will be hanged. The quatrain is similar to the
others, the dialogue has finished, this drastic end tells the reader that Lord Randall
is dead.