The ballad is a popular form of poetry. It describes the culture and the lifestyle of people during the Middle Ages. The ballad marks its origin in oral tradition. It is  anonymous because they were composed by common people. The ballad was often accompanied with music and dance and handed down from generation to generation. It is often made up of four-line stanzas, that they are called "quatrain", rhyming "ABCB". The Ballad can be a narrative poem or a dialogue between the characters. The narrative poem describes the setting, the situation of the story and the actions of the characters, instead the dialogue underlines the emotions and the characterization.

The language used in the ballad is simple because it was written by illiterate people. It has a multitude of figures of speech, such as repetition, incremental repetition, alliterative lines, assonance, consonance, and refrain. All these help to memorize the text. The ballad can be about a tragic love story or about the battles between England and Scotland. It can comprise also some relationships between the member of the family to make the reader understand the situation in the Middle Ages.