In the back cover of B. H. Bronson, The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads, we read that these ballads were written down between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century.

If we check the most important among these ballads, we find we generally have to do with songs whose first written text is from the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

So far as the knowledge on these ballads has gone, what are the most preeminent ballads that can actually be traced back to the medieval and Renaissance times?