The title of the ballad is "Lord Randal". Right from the title the reader can understand that Randal is the main character and the word "Lord" underlines that he belongs to aristocracy. The ballad can be about rich people of aristocracy class.

The ballad is made up of ten quatrains and they consist of a dialogue between Lord Randal and his mother. The ballad used a lot of repetition, alliteration, incremental repetition and a simply language to hand down from generation to generation because it is a form of orally poem. Each stanza starts with mother's voice: she is worried and asks a lot of questions to her son. The protagonist answers to his mother in the second part of the quatrain. The use of the possessive adjective "my" before "son" and "man" makes the reader understand the relationship between the mother and his son. The adjective "handsome" and "young" underline the idea the mother has of her son. The alliteration of sound "m" recreates the feeling of suffer of the mother and the alliteration of the fourth line of the first stanza underlines the strength of Lord Randal. The protagonist has a patronizing behaviour towards his mother: indeed he uses imperative verbs.

In the first six stanzas Lord Randal explains where he has been, who has met and what has been happened. He tells his mother he has been poisoned by his "true-love" in a wood, killing also his hawks and dogs. The word "true-love" can be a rhetoric use of language because the lover had killed him.
In the sixth stanza we understand that the protagonist is dying. From the seventh stanza the mother asks to Lord Randal what he will leave to her, to his sister and to his brother. She seems to be more interested to heritage than to his son's condition because she has not any position in the family. She is worried about the future of the family because Randal was the first son.

This ballad makes underlines the life of the Middle Ages. The man has a relevant position in the aristocracy class and the woman depended by him, but not always. The woman can put on a role of prostitute like in this story where she killed the protagonist. There were different types of woman in Middle Ages: nun, wife, mother, daughter, widow or prostitute.