Many of these ballads are adapted from secular songs.
Dumfries, Annan, Kirkcudbright, Lochmaben and Sanquharthe "Five Carlins" of Burns's Election Ballads - combine to return one member to Parliament.
The ballads relating to the Cid, of which nearly two hundred are extant, are greatly inferior in merit, though some of them are not unworthy to be ranked with the best in this kind.
The only extant songs of any importance are the seventy-one Ballads of Gower (Stengel, Gower's Minnesang, 1886).
In England, besides the ballads in Percy's Reliques, William Godwin introduced the idea of an eternal witness of the course of civilization in his St Leon (1799),(1799), and his son-in-law Shelley introduces Ahasuerus in his Queen Mab.