Also it seems the case that at some points in history being cultured included having the ability to compose poetry, much Elizabethan poetry was composed by the nobility or as Child might put it the 'higher orders'. The 'complaint' or lyric about courtly love and the unattainable women is a genre that continued for a long time.

But that kind of poetry was never much like ballads. It seems to have started in Moorish Spain, and spread from there to Persia and France. It typically doesn't tell much of a story and uses very complex verse forms. The Teutonic elite verse forms are maybe a parallel development but also go in for competitively complicated verbal virtuosity. Neither was a candidate for absorption into an anonymized tradition; the whole point of a courtly love lyric was having your name on it.