Excluding ballads that involved specific historical events or people, were traditional ballads (especially Child ballads like The Elfin Knight, The Twa Sisters, Matty Groves, etc.) intended to have a sense of time and place for audiences? Were they meant to be contemporary to the listener, set in a specific historical era, or would they have been meant to evoke a nonspecific literary/mythic past?
(To put this in 100% anachronistic modern terms, would they have been interpreted by listeners as contemporary fiction, historical fiction, or as outright fantasy with no particular historical setting?)
I realize this may be too broad a question, given the huge variety of ballads, but any insight is greatly appreciated.
I was prodded into responding to this question - which is q very good question. Unfortunately, I have worked very little with ballads, but the following excerpt from my Introduction to Folklore may be of use. The answer to OP's question, to a certain extent, depends on the ballad and the subgenre to which it belongs.
The Medieval Ballad
Today, people use the word “ballad” to signify a wide variety of songs, but originally, the genre emerged in western European during the so-called twelfth-century renaissance, a time of dynamic creativity. Members of the nobility promulgated the ballad as an art form. Later, the peasantry adopted it. Throughout most of its history, the ballad was intended as dance music, the term itself deriving from the Latin word ballare meaning “to dance,” from which we have the term “ballet.” Folklorists recognize the following forms of ballad:
a. Historical ballads. These were perhaps the original form of western European ballad, and they are in nature similar to historical legends.
b. Mythological ballads. These are, in content, the counterpart of testimonial legends.
c. Religious ballads. The subject matter of these songs deals principally with martyred saints.
d. Humorous ballads. This is youngest form of ballad.
While the ballad is a genre of folklore, it is yet another means to express the same ideas that are most at home in the legend. Nineteenth-century folklorists contributed a great deal of effort collecting and organizing ballads before modernization extinguished them in oral tradition. One of the more famous published collections of ballads is F. J. Child’s English and British Popular Ballads, published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898. Axel Olrik was drawn to the subject, following a trend that directed folklorists to find ways to deal with aspects of oral tradition other than the folktale.
The One-Strophic Folk Lyric In contrast with the ballad, the one-strophic folk lyric was traditional with the peasantry, rather than invented by the aristocracy. This form of song was brief, usually consisting of four versus. They were typically dance songs and they were common throughout the Old World.
edit: I can add that I have worked with at least one ballad, what is often called the Lenore Legend. This frequently appears as a ballad, but it is catalogued as a folktale (AT 365; a narrative told as fiction) but it is frequently told (not sung) as a legend - a narrative told to be believed. So this story, which appears sometimes as a ballad, is often told about a nearby location involving people within quasi-living memory. The story involves a dead soldier who returns for his betrothed and takes her to his grave. She narrowly escapes, but then usually dies after telling people what happened to her.