How do the ballads “the Unquiet Grave”, “The three ravens” and “The wife of Usher’s well” tell readers about the culture of the Middle Ages?

In England during the Middle Ages the population was divided into nobles and peasants. The first were the literate part of the population, they were the most comfortable and their culture can be found in poetry. The peasants instead lived in a condition of virtual servitude: they had to work every day and everything, from the mill to the pastures belonged to a local lord, but they support everything to reach the heaven. We have information of the culture of this part of the population thanks to the transposition of the ballads.

 The ballads were indeed part of the popular culture, they were composed by the folk and addressed to common people and the fact that in the present ballads are used a very simple, concrete and popular language and a very simple syntax make the intelligent reader understand the peasants were mainly illiterate, they can’t read and write.

This feature of the folk is also underlined by the fact that the ballads were ended out orally, indeed they are characterized by rhymes, refrains and alliterations, useful to help memorize them. The most important ballads, written from the 13^th to the 14^th century were collected and published later by the bishop Percy in the 18^th century.

The ballads give us important information of the close and static mentality of the middle ages. In the ballads the characters are built on the basis of stereotypes and are mere functions of the narrative, indeed they are only sketched and do not have a physical or psychological characterization. The stereotypes include in particular the role and the features the male and famine figures must have, in particular in the ballad “the wife f Usher’s well” we can find the woman as mother, that stays at home, and the male sons as workers.

Finally, in the main topics found in the present ballads, such as the supernatural and the tragic love story, the intelligent reader can  find the desire of the people, during the time not devoted to work and during the fairs, to escape from the reality and move away from daily life marked by poverty, work and hunger.