Regarding romances, whilst it's relatively quiet here I am leafing through the Percy Folio Manuscripts looking for interesting bits. The scholarship of the editors, Hales and Furnivall, is astounding. I'm not reading every word of every romance as I'm looking for other things and some are 40 pages long, but whilst I'm coming across commonplace phrases and lines I'm not seeing much in the way of whole stanzas. Although they are very different in some ways to the ballads many of them are written in ballad metres. What is curious then is that almost no ballads as we know them have any evidence of existence prior to c1450. Some of their stories certainly were in existence, but not in ballad form. Off the top of my head the only romance I can call to mind that was rewritten as a ballad was Hind Horn but that also still exists in story form anyway. I'm sure there were others.