Part III

Part III

31 Now by [the] third part you will hear This young man, as it does appear, With care he then secur’d his chink, And to this vintner went to drink.

32 When the proud vintner did him see, He frownd on him immediately, And said, Begone, or else with speed I’ll kick thee out of doors indeed.

33 With smiles the young man he did say, Thou cruel knave, tell me, I pray, As I have here consum’d my store, What makes thee kick me out of door?

34 To me thou hast been too severe; The deeds of eight-score pounds a year I pawnd them for three hundred pound; Which I spent here; what makes thee frown?

35 The vintner said unto him, Sirrah, Bring me one hundred pounds tomorrow By nine o’clock, take them again: So get you out of doors till then.

36 He answerd, If this chink I bring, I fear thou wilt do no such thing; He said, I’ll give under mine hand A note that I to this will stand.

37 Having the note, away he goes, And straightway went to one of those Who made him drink when moneyless, And did the truth to him confess.

38 They both went to this heap of gold, Wherre in a bag he fairly told A thousand pounds in yellow boys, And to this tavern went their ways.

39 This bag they on the table set, Which made the vintner for to fret, And said, Young man, this will not do, For I was but in jest with you.

40 So then bespoke this young man’s friend, And [said], Vintner, thou mayst depend In law this note it will you cast, And he must have his land at last.

41 This made the vintner to comply, Who fetchd the deeds immediately; He had one hundred pounds, and then The young man got his deeds again.

42 At length, the vintner, for to think How he was foold out of his chink, Said, When ’tis found how I came off My neighbours will me game and scoff.

43 So, to prevent their game and laughter, The vintner, in a few days after, Being void of grace, as will appear, He cut his throat from ear to ear.

44 Thus he untimely left the world, Who to this young man prov’d a churl; Now he who followd drunkenness Lives sober and [does] his lands possess.

45 Instead of wasting all his store, As formerly, resolves no more To act the same, but does inde[e]d Poor fatherless and mother- feed.

46 ‘And let all young men, for my sake, Take care how you such havock make, For drunkenness, you plain may see, Was near my ruin for to be.’

Printed and sold in Bow-Church-Yard, London.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Cane in hand, 10^3, 22^3. This is bad enough, but not quite so bad as the woman with cane in hand, ‘Tam Lin,’ III, 505, =O= 16^2, and ‘The Kitchie-Boy,’ No 252, =E= 6^2. The mantle and cane are a commonplace. See also =E= 14 of No 252, No 76, =G= 3, and No 97, =B= 20^2.

[18] The Gallowgate port of =B a= 35 belongs to Aberdeen.

[19] Of the 212 lines of Percy’s ballad, some 80, or the substance of them, occur in the MS. copy, and half a dozen more of the 216 lines of the 4th edition.

[20] Reprinted by Dixon, Ancient Poems, Ballads, etc., p. 151, Percy Society, vol. xvii, from a chap-book.

[21] 44. Χρυσὸν ἀνὴρ εὑρὼν ἔλιπε βρόχον· αὐτὰρ ὁ χρυσὸν ὃν λίπεν οὐχ εὑρὼν ἧψεν ὃν εὗρε βρόχον.

[22] All the above tales, except Pauli’s, have been cited, in one connection or another, by Dunlop, History of Fiction, (II, 201, of Wilson’s late edition); by Benfey, Pantschatantra, I, 97 f.; or by Liebrecht, Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1868, p. 1891. Oesterley, in his note to Pauli, 16, p. 552 f., refers to three sixteenth-century story-books which I have not seen. Robert, Fables Inédites, etc., II, 232, in his note to La Fontaine, IX, 16, refers to other fabulists. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, II, 55, gives from some old magazine a story after the pattern of the Greek distich.

268

THE TWA KNIGHTS

Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 271.

A knight and a squire, sworn brothers, have a talk about fair women. ’There’s nae gude women but nine,’ says the squire. ‘My luck is the better,’ replies the knight, ‘that one of them is mine.’ The squire undertakes to win the knight’s wife within six months, if the husband will go over seas for that time; the knight is willing to give him nine months. The knight’s lands are wagered (21) against the squire’s life (23). As soon as the knight is at sea, the squire comes to the lady with an offer of money. If you were not my lord’s brother, says the lady, I would hang you on a pin before my door. The squire betakes himself to his foster-mother, sets forth his case, and offers her a heavy bribe for her aid. The false carline goes to the lady and opens her business; the lady will never wrong her lord. The carline (who is the wife’s foster-mother as well) now pretends concern about the lady’s health, which is in danger for want of sleep. She turns all the people out of the castle, lulls the dame to sleep, and introduces the squire. He wakes the lady, and tells her that she is in his power. The lady has presence of mind; it would, she says, be a sin to defile her husband’s bed, but she will come to the squire’s bed at night. She then offers her niece five hundred pounds to go to the squire in her place. The young woman was never so much disposed to say nay, but goes, notwithstanding. When the squire has had his will, he cuts off ‘her ring but and her ring-finger.’ The maids come from the hay, the young men from the corn, and the lady tells them all that has passed. She will tie her finger in the dark, and hopes to loose it in the light. The knight returns, and is greeted by the squire as a landless lord. The ring and ring-finger are exhibited in proof. Thereupon the knight gives a dinner, to which he asks the squire and his wife’s parents. He throws his charters across the table and bids his wife farewell forever. It is now time for the lady to loose in the light the finger which she had tied in the dark. Come here, my lord, she says. No smith can join a finger. My niece ‘beguiled the squire for me.’ They lay before the niece a sword and a ring, and she is to have her choice, to stick the squire with the sword, or to wed him with the ring. Thrice she puts out her hand as if to take the sword, but she ends with taking up the ring.

This ballad can have had no currency in Scotland, and perhaps was known only through print. A similar one is strictly traditional in Greece, and widely dispersed, both on the mainland and among the islands.

=Romaic.= =A.= Νεοελληνικὰ’ Ανάλεκτα, I, 80, No 16, 75 vv., Melos. =B.= ‘Τὸ στοίχημα τοῦ βασιλιᾶ καὶ τοῦ Μαυριανοῦ,’ Jeannaraki, p. 231, No 294, 76 vv., Crete. =C.= ‘Ὁ Μαυριανὸς καὶ ὁ βασιλεύς,’ Zampelios, p. 719, No 6, 61 vv., Corcyra (?); repeated in Passow, p. 355, No 474, Kind’s Anthologie, p. 56. =D.= ‘Τοῦ Μαυριανοπούλου,’ Manousos, II, 56, 51 vv., Corcyra (?). =E.= ‘Ὁ Μαυριανὸς κ’ ὁ βασιλεᾶς,’ Pappadopoulos in Πανδώρα, XV, 417, 23 vv., Cargese, Corsica; repeated in Legrand, p. 302, No 136. =F.= Δελτίον τῆς ἱστορικῆς καὶ ἐθνολογικῆς ἑταιρίας τής Ἑλλάδος, I, 551, No 5, 35 vv., Peloponnesus. =G.= ‘Ὁ Σταυριανὸς καὶ ὁ βασιλιᾶς,’ Melandrakes, in the same, III, 345, 54 vv., Patmos. =H.= ‘Τὸ Στοίχημα,’ Kanellakes, Χιακά ἀλάεκτα, p. 8, No 5, 50 vv., Chios. =I a.= Bartholdy, Bruchstücke zur nähern Kenntniss des heutigen Griechenlands, 1805, p. 434, 78 vv., translation without text. =b.= ‘Maurogène,’ Lemercier, I, 167, translation without text, neighborhood of Arta. =J.= ‘Στοίχημα Διονῦ καὶ Χαντσαρλῆ,’ Chasiotes, p. 142, No 14, 26 vv., Epirus.

The personages are Μαυριανός, =B-E=, Μαυγιανός, =A=, Mavrogeni, =I=, Σταυριανός, =G=, Γιάννος, =F=, Κωσταντῆς, =H=; his sister, =A-I=, Αρετή;, =D=, Μάρω, =F=, Λιερή, =G=, and in =I b= (unless the name is supplied by the editor), Cymodore; a king, anonymous except in =J=, Διονύς, in which also the other two parties are husband (ὁ χαντσιαρλῆς, the chancellor) and wife.

At the king’s table there is talk of women fair or foul. Maurianos extols his sister (the chancellor his wife, =I=), whom gifts cannot seduce. What shall be your forfeit, asks the king, if I seduce her? Maurianos stakes his head, =A-I=, and the girl is to be the king’s slave, =H=; the king, his kingdom and crown, =A=, =B=, his property, =C=, =F=. There is a mutual wager of nine towers of silver, =J=. The young man is to be a prisoner till the morning, =I=. The king begins, in =A=, =B=, by engaging the services of witches eighteen, witches fifteen, or bawds eighteen, witches fifteen. They ply their magic early and late: forty days to get up her stair, other four-and-forty to get sight of the girl, =A=. They address her with flatteries, but are rebuffed, =A=, =B=. The king sends rich presents, =A=, =C-I=; beasts laden with silver and money, nine, twelve, twenty and again ten. The girl receives them with professions of pleasure; her brother will return the compliment to the giver. It is explained that no return is looked for; the presents are from the king, who desires to pass the night with her. (In =J= the king goes straight to the wife, and says that he has her husband’s permission.) The lady affects to put herself at the king’s disposition. She appeals to her maid-servants, =A=, =B=; first her “nurses,” then her maids, =C=; one servant, and then another, =H=. Which of them will enable her to keep her word, change clothes with her, and pass the night with the king? Only Maria, the youngest of all (of forty, =B=), is willing to stead her mistress in this strait, =A-C=. In =D-G=, =I=, =J=, there is but one nurse or servant, and she assents, or follows her mistress’s directions as a matter of course. The servant is to have the king’s present in =D=. The substitute is elaborately combed and dressed, with a gold band round her hair, and a beautiful ring on her finger. At midnight, or before dawn, the king cuts off the finger that has the ring, =A=, =I=, her finger, =B=, =F=, =G=, =H= (fingers, =B=, v. 43), little finger, =D=, =E=; takes the ring from her finger, =C=, all the rings from her fingers, =J=. He also cuts off her hair (braid), with its golden band, =B= (braids, v. 43), =C=, =I=, her hair (braid), with the golden flowers, =A=, with the pearl, =H=, right braid, =D=, braid, =F=, =G=, =I=, extremity of her braid, =E=. These are to serve as tokens; he puts them in his handkerchief, =A=, =D=. He takes his trophies to the assembly. Maurianos has lost his wager, and is to be hanged. Where is Maurianos, the braggart, and where his precious sister, whom no gifts could seduce? Word comes to the sister. She dresses herself beautifully, and makes her way into the assembly; she would fain know why they are to hang Maurianos. ‘I have seduced his sister,’ says the king, ‘and I will hang Maurianos.’ The girl demands tokens. ‘I cut off her finger, with the golden sapphire; I cut off her hair, with the golden flowers (band).’ She extends her hand; the earth is filled with sapphires. ‘See, lords! are fingers of mine wanting?’ She flings out her hair; the earth is filled with flowers. ‘See, lords! is a braid of mine wanting?’ (=A=, =B=, and the rest to the same effect.) Then she turns to the king. ‘It fits you no more to play the king,’ =A=, =B=. ‘You have slept with my slave, and my slave you shall be,’ =C-I=. ‘Take my mule and go fetch wood.’ In =A=, =B=, the king has to marry Maria. In =F=, John becomes king (as a consequence of winning the wager). In =I=, the people depose the king and make Maurianos’s sister queen.

There are numerous tales in which a man wagers heavily upon a woman’s (generally his wife’s) constancy, and, upon plausible evidence, which in the end proves to be nugatory, is adjudged to have lost.[23] We are concerned only with a small section of these stories, characterized by the circumstances that the woman whose virtue is questioned puts another woman in her place in the encounter with the assailant, and that the proofs of success offered are a finger, finger-ring, and head, or braid, of hair[24] (one of these, or more).

A rhymed tale of the thirteenth century, ‘Von zwein Kaufmannen,’ by Ruprecht von Würzburg,[25] has the following story, evidently French by origin. Bertram, a merchant of Verdun, who has been happily married for ten years, is required in the course of business to go to a fair at Provins. While he is sitting at table in an inn with other merchants, Hogier, the host, sets his guests to talking of their wives, and three of them give a very bad account of their domestic experiences. Bertram, when urged to take his turn, professes himself the most fortunate of men, for his wife (Irmengard) is, for beauty, sense, modesty, manners, the flower of womankind. The host declares that the man is mad, and offers to stake all his goods against Bertram’s that he will seduce this peerless wife within six months. The wager is accepted, and Bertram, to afford an opportunity, sends his wife word that he shall be gone from home longer than he had intended. Hogier goes to Verdun and takes a lodging opposite to Bertram’s house. He begins with presents and messages to Irmengard; she treats these with contempt, and threatens to make a complaint to her friends. He gives bounties to the servants, who sing his praises to their mistress till they are told that they will be thrashed if they continue. He then gives a pound to Irmengard’s favorite maid, Amelin, and commissions her to offer a hundred mark if he may have his will; and the wife proving to be both firm and indignant, he raises his offer to two hundred mark, and finally to a thousand for one night. Not only the maid, but Irmengard’s own father and her husband’s father, to whom she successively appeals, urge her to take this large sum, and assure her that she will incur her husband’s resentment if she does not. A way out of her difficulties now occurs to her (which the author of the poem represents as an express suggestion from God). She asks the maid if she will give Hogier a night for the consideration of a hundred mark; Amelin is ready so to do for half the money. Hogier is told to pay in his thousand, and an appointment is made. Irmengard receives him in Amelin’s garb, and Amelin in Irmengard’s. In the morning Hogier asks for some jewel as a keepsake, and the maid having nothing to give him, he cuts off one of her fingers. He now calls upon Bertram to pay his forfeit. Bertram has some doubt whether he has not been tricked. It is mutually agreed that the matter shall be settled at a banquet which Bertram is to give at Verdun. Bertram, upon his return home, cannot conceal a deep depression. His wife asks him the cause, and he opens his mind to her; she bids him be of good cheer, for all Hogier’s goods are theirs. At the banquet Hogier states his case, and produces the finger in confirmation of his claim. Irmengard, asked what answer she has to make, humorously replies that she is sorry for her misbehavior, but all her friends, there present, had advised her to commit it. She then shows her hands, both unmarred. Amelin comes in and complains of the treatment she has received. Hogier owns that he has lost, and desires to become Bertram’s ‘poor man.’ Amelin is given him as wife, with her hundred mark for a dowry. Here we have wager, substitution, finger cut off, as in the Scottish ballad and most of the Romaic versions, and the loser marries the maid, as in the Scottish ballad and Romaic =A=, =B=.

The Mabinogi of Taliesin, “in its present form not older than the thirteenth century,” has the incidents of the substitution of the maid-servant, the finger and finger-ring, with the modification that the wife’s general high character, and not simply her continence, is impugned and vindicated.

At a Christmas feast in the palace of King Maelgwn, the company were discoursing of the unequalled felicity of the king, upon whom heaven had bestowed, with every other good gift, a queen whose virtues exceeded those of all the noble ladies in the kingdom. Elphin, Maelgwn’s nephew, said, None but a king may vie with a king; otherwise he would say that his own wife was as virtuous as any lady in the kingdom. Maelgwn was not there to hear this boast, but it was duly reported to him, and he ordered Elphin to be thrown into prison, pending a test of Elphin’s wife which he deputed his graceless son, Rhun, to make. Taliesin, Elphin’s bard, warned the lady that Rhun would try to put some disgrace upon her, and advised that one of the servants should personate her mistress when Rhun came to the house. Accordingly, a kitchen-maid was dressed up in her mistress’s clothes, and was seated at the supper-table, her hands loaded with rings. Rhun made his appearance and was welcomed by the disguised menial. He fell to jesting with her, put a powder into her drink, which cast her into a sound sleep, and cut off her little finger, on which was Elphin’s signet-ring. The king assembled his councillors, had Elphin brought in from prison, and showed him the finger, which (so Rhun had averred) had been cut from his wife’s hand the preceding night, while she was sunk in a drunken sleep. Elphin could not deny that the ring was his, but he gave three incontrovertible reasons why the finger could not be his wife’s, one of these being that the ring was too large to stay on his wife’s thumb, yet too small to go over the joint of the little finger of the hand from which it had been cut; and the fact was put beyond question by Taliesin’s afterwards bringing in Elphin’s wife at a state-dinner, and displaying her unmutilated hand.[26]

A lively play of Jakob Ayrer’s (about 1600) has the wager, the substitution, the ring offered in evidence (as in Romaic =C=, =G=), the marriage with the maid.

Claudius, master of the hunt to the Prince of Calabria, on the eve of his departure on a voyage, is heard by two courtiers, Leipolt and Seübolt, soliloquizing on the excellences of his wife, Frigia, her housekeeping, virtue, and love for him. They wager all their goods against his that they will bring the woman to do their will. One undertakes to present her wedding-ring, the other her necklace, in proof of the achievement. Leipolt and Seübolt, always acting severally, attempt to buy the services of Jahn Türck, a quick-witted and loyal servant of Claudius. He tells everything to his mistress, and by his advice she dresses two of her maids in her clothes and lets them meet the men, warning them to keep within bounds. Leipolt and Seübolt, each finding the supposed lady coy, are content to secure the means of winning their wager, and, by Frigia’s connivance (who, it seems, had come to knowledge of the wager through Jahn), one of them receives her ring, the other her necklace, as pretended love-tokens. Claudius comes home. Leipolt informs the prince of the wager, and asks Claudius whether he knows the ring and will pay; Seübolt brings out the necklace. Claudius gives all for lost. The prince sends for Frigia. She challenges the courtiers to say that she has misbehaved with them. They own that they have never laid eyes on her, but they recognize the maids when they are brought in, still in their mistress’s clothes. Frigia explains in detail. The prince addresses his councillors (for such they are) in terms of exemplary severity, and adjudges them to marry the maids, making over one third of their property to these and another to Claudius, or to lose their heads. (Compare the Scottish ballad at the end.) They prefer to keep their heads.[27]

A Danish ballad, very popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has the wager (only on the part of the assailant), but the story takes a different turn from the foregoing, for the irresistible knight has simply a conversation with the lady, in which he meets with a definitive repulse.

‘Væddemaalet,’ ‘Herr Lave og Herr Iver Blaa,’ Grundtvig, IV, 302, No 224, =A-L=, Kristensen, I, 319, No 118, X, 137, No 36; Prior, III, 28, No 104. Lange (Lave) and Peder (Iver) sit at the board talking of wives and fair maids. Peder asserts that the maid lives not in the world whom he cannot cajole with a word. Lange knows the maid so virtuous that neither words nor gold can beguile. Peder wagers life (gold, goods, house, land) and neck (halsbane) that she shall be his by the morrow. He rides straightway to Ingelil, Thorlof’s daughter, and makes love to her in honorable phrase. Ingelil reminds him of two ladies who have received the same professions from him and been betrayed. If she will be his dear, every finger shall wear the red gold: her father has nine gold rings, and would give them all to her if she wished. If she will be his, she shall have a train of servants, out and in: she is not halt or blind, and can go out and in by herself. If he cannot have his will with her, it will cost him his white halsbane: much better so than that he should cheat her, or any honorable maid. Peder rides away sorrowful, for lost is gold and his white halsbane besides.[28] We have already had the Scottish counterpart of this ballad, with variations for better or worse, in ‘Redesdale and Wise William,’ IV, 383, No 246, =A-C=.

* * * * *

1 There were twa knights in fair Scotland, And they were brothers sworn; They made a vow to be as true As if they’d been brothers born.

2 The one he was a wealthy knight, Had lands and buildings free; The other was a young hynde squire, In rank of lower degree.

3 But it fell ance upon a day These squires they walkd alone, And to each other they did talk About the fair women.

4 ‘O wed a may,’ the knight did say, ‘For your credit and fame; Lay never your love on lemanry, Bring nae gude woman to shame.’

5 ‘There’s nae gude women,’ the squire did say, ‘Into this place but nine;’ ‘O well falls me,’ the knight replied, ‘For ane o them is mine.’

6 ‘Ye say your lady’s a gude woman, But I say she is nane; I think that I could gain her love Ere six months they are gane.

7 ‘If ye will gang six months away, And sail upon the faem, Then I will gain your lady’s love Before that ye come hame.’

8 ‘O I’ll gang till a far countrie, And far beyond the faem, And ye winna gain my lady’s love Whan nine lang months are gane.’

9 When the evening sun did set, And day came to an end, In then came the lady’s gude lord, Just in at yon town’s end.

10 ‘O comely are ye, my lady gay, Sae fair and rare to see; I wish whan I am gane away Ye keep your mind to me.’

11 She gae ’m a bason to wash in, It shin’d thro a’ the ha; But aye as she gaed but and ben She loot the saut tears fa.

12 ‘I wonder what ails my gude lord He has sic jealousie; Never when we parted before, He spak sic words to me.’

13 When cocks did craw, and day did daw, This knight was fair at sea; Then in it came the young hynde squire, To work him villanie.

14 ‘I hae a coffer o gude red gowd, Another o white monie; I woud gie you ’t a’, my gay lady, To lye this night wi me.’

15 ‘If ye warna my lord’s brother, And him sae far frae hame, Even before my ain bower-door I’d gar hang you on a pin.’

16 He’s gane frae the lady’s bower, Wi the saut tear in his ee, And he is to his foster-mother As fast as gang coud he.

17 ‘There is a fancy in my head That I’ll reveal to thee, And your assistance I will crave If ye will grant it me.

18 ‘I’ve fifty guineas in my pocket, I’ve fifty o them and three, And if ye’ll grant what I request Ye’se hae them for your fee.’

19 ‘Speak on, speak on, ye gude hynde squire, What may your asking be? I kenna wha woud be sae base As nae serve for sic a fee.’

20 ‘O I hae wagerd wi my brother, When he went to the faem, That I woud gain his lady’s love Ere six months they were gane.

21 ‘To me he laid his lands at stake Tho he were on the faem, I wudna gain his lady’s love Whan nine lang months were gane.

22 ‘Now I hae tried to gain her love, But finds it winna do; And here I’m come, as ye her know, To seek some help frae you.

23 ‘For I did lay my life at stake, Whan my brother went frae hame, That I woud gain his lady’s love Whan he was on the faem.’

24 But when the evening sun was set, And day came to an end, In it came that fause carline, Just in at yon town’s end.

25 ‘O comely are ye, my gay lady, Your lord is on the faem; Yon unco squire will gain your love, Before that he come hame.’

26 ‘Forbid it,’ said the lady fair, ‘That eer the like shoud be, That I woud wrang my ain gude lord, And him sae far at sea.’

27 ‘O comely are ye, my gay lady, Stately is your fair bodie; Your lovely visage is far chang’d, That is best known to me.

28 ‘You’re sair dune out for want o sleep Sin your lord went to sea; Unless that ye do cease your grief, It will your ruin be.

29 ‘You’ll send your maids unto the hay, Your young men unto the corn; I’ll gar ye sleep as soun a sleep As the night that ye were born.’

30 She sent her maids to ted the hay, Her men to shear the corn, And she gard her sleep as soun a sleep As the night that she was born.

31 She rowd that lady in the silk, Laid her on holland sheets; Wi fine enchanting melodie, She lulld her fast asleep.

32 She lockd the yetts o that castle Wi thirty locks and three, Then went to meet the young hynde squire To him the keys gae she.

33 He’s opend the locks o that castle, Were thirty and were three, And he’s gane where that lady lay, And thus to her said he.

34 ‘O wake, O wake, ye gay lady, O wake and speak to me; I hae it fully in my power To come to bed to thee.’

35 ‘For to defile my husband’s bed, I woud think that a sin; As soon as this lang day is gane, Then I shall come to thine.’

36 Then she has calld her niece Maisry, Says, An asking ye’ll grant me, For to gang to yon unco squire And sleep this night for me.

37 ‘The gude red gowd shall be your hire, And siller’s be your fee; Five hundred pounds o pennies round, Your tocher it shall be.’

38 She turnd her right and round about, And thus to her did say; O there was never a time on earth So fain’s I woud say nay.

39 But when the evening sun was set, And day drawn to an end, Then Lady Maisry she is gane, Fair out at yon town-end.

40 Then she is to yon hynde squire’s yates, And tirled at the pin; Wha was sae busy as the hynde squire To lat that lady in!

41 He’s taen her in his arms twa, He was a joyfu man; He neither bade her meat nor drink, But to the bed he ran.

42 When he had got his will o her, His will as he lang sought, Her ring but and her ring-finger Away frae her he brought.

43 With discontent straight home she went, And thus lamented she; Says, Wae be to yon young hynde squire! Sae ill as he’s used me.

44 When the maids came frae the hay, The young men frae the corn, Ben it came that lady gay, Who thought lang for their return.

45 ‘Where hae ye been, my maidens a’, Sae far awa frae me? My foster-mother and lord’s brother Thought to hae beguiled me.

46 ‘Had not she been my foster-mother, I suckd at her breast-bane, Even before my ain bower-door, She in a gleed shoud burn.

47 ‘The squire he thought to gain my love, He’s got but Lady Maisry; He’s cutted her ring and her ring-finger, A love-token for to be.

48 ‘I’ll tie my finger in the dark, Where nae ane shall me see; I hope to loose it in the light, Amang gude companie.’

49 When night was gane, and birds did sing, And day began to peep, The hynde squire walkd alang the shore, His brother for to meet.

50 ‘Ye are welcome, welcome, landless lord, To my ha’s and my bowers; Ye are welcome hame, ye landless lord, To my lady white like flowers.’

51 ‘Ye say I am a landless lord, But I think I am nane, Without ye show some love-token Awa frae her ye’ve tane.’

52 He drew the strings then o his purse, And they were a’ bludie; The ring but and the ring-finger Sae soon as he lat him see.

53 ‘O wae be to you, fause hynde squire, Ane ill death mat ye dee! It was too sair a love-token To take frae my ladie.

54 ‘But ae asking of you, hynde squire, In your won bowers to dine;’ ‘With a’ my heart, my brother dear, Tho ye had asked nine.’

55 Then he is to his lady’s father, And a sorrow man was he: ‘O judge, O judge, my father dear, This judgment pass for me.

56 ‘What is the thing that shoud be done Unto that gay lady Who woud gar her lord gae landless, And children bastards to be?’

57 ‘She shoud be brunt upon a hill, Or hangd upon a tree, That woud gar her lord gang landless, And children bastards be.’

58 ‘Your judgment is too rash, father; Your ain daughter is she That this day has made me landless; Your squire gaind it frae me.

59 ‘Yet nevertheless, my parents dear, Ae favour ye’ll grant me, And gang alang to my lost ha’s, And take your dine wi me.’

60 He threw the charters ower the table, And kissd the yates o tree; Says, Fare ye well, my lady gay, Your face I’ll never see.

61 Then his lady calld out to him, Come here, my lord, and dine; There’s nae a smith in a’ the land That can ae finger join.

62 ‘I tied my finger in the dark, Whan nae ane did me see; But now I’ll loose it in the light, Amang gude companie.

63 ‘Even my niece, Lady Maisry, The same woman was she; The gude red gowd shall be her hire, And likeways white monie.

64 ‘Five hundred pounds o pennies round Her tocher then shall be, Because she did my wills obey, Beguild the squire for me.’

65 Then they did call this young hynde squire To come right speedilie, Likeways they calld young Lady Maisry, To pay her down her fee.

66 Then they laid down to Lady Maisry The brand but and the ring; It was to stick him wi the brand, Or wed him wi the ring.

67 Thrice she minted to the brand, But she took up the ring; And a’ the ladies who heard o it Said she was a wise woman.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] The cutting off the hair from a woman substituted occurs in the fabliau ‘Des Tresces,’ Barbazan et Méon, IV, 393, Montaiglon et Raynaud, IV, 67, and Méon, Nouveau Recueil, I, 343, Montaiglon et Raynaud, V, 132 (a different version); Boccaccio, Decameron, VII, 8; ‘Der verkêrte Wirt,’ von der Hagen’s Gesammtabenteuer, II, 337, No 43: all varieties of one story. See also ‘Der Reiger,’ p. 157 of the same volume of von der Hagen, No 31, and the literary history of No 43, at p. XLII.--Bédier, Les Fabliaux, p. 149 ff., refers to several other examples.Return to passage

[24] The more important of the stories which lack the distinctive traits of the Scottish and Romaic ballads are: Roman de la Violette, thirteenth century (ed. Michel, 1834); Roman du Comte de Poitiers, thirteenth century (ed. Michel, 1831); Li Contes du Roi Flore et de la bielle Jehane, thirteenth century, Moland et d’Héricault, 1856, p. 85, and Monmerqué et Michel, Théâtre Français au Moyen Age, 1842, p. 417; Miracle de Nostre Dame, Conment Ostes, roy d’Espaingne, perdi sa terre par gagier contre Berengier, etc., Monmerqué et Michel, as before, p. 431, and Miracles de Nostre Dame, G. Paris et U. Robert, IV, 319; an episode in Perceforest, vol. iv, cc. 16, 17, retold by Bandello, Part I, Nov. 21 (R. Köhler, in Jahrbuch für Rom. u. Eng. Lit., VIII, 51 ff.); the story of Bernabò da Genova da Ambruogiuolo ingannato, Boccaccio, Decameron, II, 9, repeated in Shakspere’s Cymbeline and many other pieces. Popular tales with the wager are: Campbell, West Highlands, II, 1, No 18; J. W. Wolf’s Deutsche Hausmärchen, p. 355; Simrock, Deutsche Märchen, p. 235 (ed. 1864), No 51; Pröhle, Kinder- und Volksmärchen, No 61, p. 179 (see also p. XLII); Das Ausland, 1856, p. 1053, Roumanian; Miklosich, Märchen u. Lieder der Zigeuner der Bukowina, p. 49, No 14; Bernoni, Fiabe veneziane, p. 1, No 1; Gonzenbach, I, 38, No 7; Pitrè, Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti siciliani, II, 142, 165, Nos 73, 75; Imbriani, Novellaja fiorentina, p. 483. (Some of these have been cited by Köhler, some by Landau.) See, in general, the Grimms, Altdeutsche Wälder, I, 35 ff., II, 181 f.; von der Hagen’s Gesammtabenteuer, introduction to No LXVIII, especially III, XCI-CIX; R. Köhler, as above, and in Orient u. Occident, II, 315; Landau, Quellen des Dekameron, 1884, p. 135 ff.; R. Ohle, Shakespeares Cymbeline und seine romanischen Vorläufer, Berlin, 1890.Return to passage

[25] Altdeutsche Wälder, I, 35; von der Hagen, Gesammtabenteuer, III, 357.Return to passage

[26] Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion, Part VII, pp. 364-83, or p. 477 ff. of the edition of 1877; an abstract in E. Jones’s Bardic Museum, p. 19.Return to passage

[27] Ayrers Dramen, herausgegeben von A. von Keller, IV, 2279, No 30; Comedia von zweyen fürstlichen räthen die alle beede umb eines gewetts willen umb ein weib bulten, u. s. w.Return to passage

[28] There is another Danish ballad in which two knights wager on a maid’s fidelity, but it is of entirely different tenor, the maid being lured by a magical horn: ‘Ridderens Runeslag,’ Grundtvig, II, 285, No 73, =A-B=, ‘Ridder Oles Lud,’ Kristensen, II, 108, 353, No 34, =A-C=; Prior, III, 34, No 105.Return to passage

269

LADY DIAMOND

=A.= ‘Lady Daisy,’ Aytoun’s Ballads of Scotland, II, 173, 1859.

=B.= ‘Lady Dayisie,’ from an old lady’s collection formerly in possession of Sir Walter Scott,[29] now belonging to Mr Macmath, Edinburgh.

=C.= Sharpe’s Ballad Book, p. 12, 1823.

=D.= ‘Lady Diamond,’ Buchan’s MSS, II, 164; ‘Lady Diamond, the King’s Daughter,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 206; ‘Ladye Diamond,’ Dixon, Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 71, Percy Society, vol. xvii.

=E.= ‘Robin, the Kitchie-Boy,’ Joseph Robertson, “Adversaria,” p. 66.

Diamond (Daisy, Dysmal, Dysie), only daughter of a great king, is with child by a very bonny kitchen-boy. The base-born paramour is put to death, and, by the king’s order, his heart is taken to the princess in a cup of gold. She washes it with the tears which run into the cup, =A=, =B=, =C=, and dies of her grief. Her father has a sharp remorse, =A=, =C=; his daughter’s shame looks pardonable, when he considers the beauty of the man he has slain, =A=.

=B= is blended with ‘Willie o Winsbury,’ No 100; cf. =B= 4-9, and No 100, =A= 2-7, =B= 1-5, etc. In ‘Willie o Winsbury’, =B=, the princess’s name is Dysmill. =A= 12, =B= 11 of ‘Lady Diamond’ also recall ‘Willie o Winsbury.’

In =C=, =D=, the kitchen-boy is smothered between two feather-beds.

Isbel was the princess’s name in a copy obtained by Motherwell, but not preserved. Motherwell’s Note-Book, p. 7; C. K. Sharpe’s Correspondence, II, 328.

The ballad is one of a large number of repetitions of Boccaccio’s tale of Guiscardo and Ghismonda, Decamerone, IV, 1. This tale was translated in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, 1566 (ed. Jacobs, I, 180), and became the foundation of various English poems and plays.[30] Very probably it was circulated in a chap-book edition in Great Britain, as it was in Germany (Simrock, Volksbücher, VI, 153).

Prince Tancredi has an only daughter (cf. =A=, =B=, =C=, 1), whose name is Ghismonda (Diamond, =C=, Dysmal, =B=, Dysie, =D=, Daisy, =A=). She has a secret amour with a young man of inferior condition (valetto, di nazione assai umile; giovane di vilissima condizione, says Tancredi), sunk in the ballad to the rank of kitchen-boy. This young man, Guiscardo, is, however, distinguished for manners and fine qualities; indeed, superior in these to all the nobles of the court. In the ballad he is a very bonny boy (preferred to dukes and earls, =B=, =C=). Guiscardo is strangled (or suffocated); the bonny boy is smothered between two feather-beds in =B= 8, =C= 7. The bonny boy’s heart is cut out and sent to the king’s daughter in a cup of gold, in the ballad; she washes it with the tears that run from her eyes into the cup. Ghismonda, receiving Guiscardo’s heart in a gold cup, sheds a torrent of tears over it, pours a decoction of poisonous herbs into the cup (ove il cuore era da molte delle sue lagrime lavato), and drinks all off, then lies down on her bed and awaits her death. Tancredi, repenting too late of his cruelty, has the pair buried with honors in one tomb.[31]

=Italian. A.= ‘Il padre crudele,’ Widter und Wolf, Volkslieder aus Venetien, p. 72, No 93. A king has an only daughter, Germonia. She has twelve servants to wait upon her, and other twelve to take her to school, and she falls in love with the handsomest, Rizzardo. They talk together, and this is reported to the king by Rizzardo’s fellow-servants. The king shuts Rizzardo up in a room, bandages his eyes, cuts his heart out, puts it in a gold basin, and carries it to his daughter. ‘Take this basin,’ he says; ‘take this fine mess, Rizzardo’s heart is in it.’ Germonia reproaches him for his cruelty; he tells her, if he has done her an offence, to take a knife and do him another. She does not care to do this; however, if he were abed, she would. In a variant, she goes out to a meadow, and ‘poisons herself with her own hands.’

=B.= ‘Flavia,’ Sabatini, Saggio di Canti popolari romani, in Rivista di Letteratura popolare, Rome, 1877, p. 17 f., and separately, 1878, p. 8 f. Flavia has thirteen servants, and becomes enamored of one of these, Ggismónno. His fellows find out that the pair have been communing, and inform the king. ‘Ságra coróna’ orders them to take Ggismónno to prison, and put him to death. They seat him in a chair of gold, and dig out his heart, lay the heart in a basin of gold, and carry it to Flavia, sitting at table, saying, Here is a mess for you. She retires to her chamber, lies down on her bed, and drinks a cup of poison.

=C.= ‘Risguardo belo e Rismonda bela,’ Bernoni, Tradizioni pop. veneziane, p. 39. A count has an only daughter, Rismonda. She has twelve servants, and falls in love with the handsomest, who waits at table,--the handsome Risguardo. She asks him to be her lover; he cannot, for if her father should come to know of such a thing he would put him to death in prison. The knowledge comes to the father, and Risguardo is put into prison. One of his fellows looks him up after a fortnight, and after a month cuts out his heart, and takes it to Rismonda; ‘here is a fine dish, the heart of Risguardo.’ Rismonda, who is sitting at table, goes to her chamber; her father comes to console her; she bids him leave her. If I have done you wrong, he says, take this sword and run it through me. She is not disposed to do this; she will write three letters and die.

All these come from the Decameron, IV, 1. The lover is sunk to a serving-man, as in the Scottish ballad. The names are fairly well preserved in =A=, =C=; in =B= the lover gets his name from the princess, and she is provided with one from the general stock.

=Swedish.= ‘Hertig Fröjdenborg och Fröken Adelin,’ broadside, 48 stanzas, Stockholm, 1757; Afzelius, I, 95, No 19, ed. Bergström och Höijer, I, 81, No 18, 47 sts; Lagus, Nyländska Folkvisor, I, 30, No 8 =a=, 47 sts; Djurklou, Ur Nerikes Folkspråk, p. 96, 22 sts; Dybeck, Runa, 1869, p. 34, 37 sts, of which only 8 are given; Lagus, as above, =b=, 2 sts, =c=, 1 st.; Aminson, Bidrag, I, 1st heft, p. 31, No 6, 2d heft, p. 16, 1 st. each; unprinted fragments, noted by Olrik, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, V, II, 216 f. The broadside is certainly the source or basis of all the printed copies, and probably of an unpublished fragment of twenty-eight stanzas obtained by Eva Wigström in 1882 (Olrik); some trifling variations are attributable to editing or to tradition.

Adelin is in the garden, making a rose chaplet for Fröjdenborg, who, seeing her from his window, goes to her and expresses the wish that she were his love. Adelin begs him not to talk so; she fears that her father may overhear. False maid-servants tell the king that Fröjdenborg is decoying his daughter; the king orders him to be put in chains and shut up in the dark tower. There he stays fifteen years. Adelin goes to the garden to make Fröjdenborg a garland again. The king sees from his window what she is about, orders her into his presence (he has not cared to see her for fifteen years), and angrily demands what she has been doing in the garden. She says that she has been making a rose garland for Fröjdenborg. ‘Not forgotten him yet?’ ‘No; nor should I, if I lived a hundred years.’ ‘Then I will put a stop to this love.’ Fröjdenborg is taken out of the tower; his hair and beard are gray, but he declares that the fifteen years have seemed to him only a few days. They bind Fröjdenborg to a tree, and kill him as boors slaughter cattle. They lay him on a board, and gut (slit) him as boors gut (slit) a fish. The false maids take his heart and dress the lady a dainty dish. She has a misgiving, and asks what she has eaten. They tell her it is her lover’s heart; then, she says, it shall be my last meal. She asks for drink: she will drink to Fröjdenborg, she will drink herself dead. Her heart breaks; word is carried to her father; God a mercy! he cries, I have betrayed my only child. The two are buried in one grave, from which springs a linden; the linden grows over the church ridge; one leaf enfolds the other.

=Danish.= ‘Hertug Frydenborg,’ in about forty copies from recent tradition and a broadside of the eighteenth century, but not found in old manuscripts: Olrik, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, V, II, 216, No 305, =H-A=, and Kristensen, XI, 117, No 46. Of these, =E i=, obtained in 1809, had been printed by Nyerup og Rasmussen, Udvalg af danske Viser, II, 238, No 71. Others are in Kristensen’s Skattegraveren, I, 33, No 113, III, 148, Nos 835-38, and in Kristensen’s Jyske Folkeminder, II, 207, No 61 =A-D= (‘Ridderens Hjærte’), and X, 213, 385, 360, No 52 =A-E=, No 94 =B=.

One half of these texts, as Olrik remarks, are of Swedish origin, and even derived from the Swedish broadside; others have marks of their own, and one in particular, which indicates the ultimate source of the story in both the Swedish and the Danish ballad. This source appears to be the Decameron, IV, 1, as in the Scottish and Italian ballads. The points of resemblance are: A princess, an only daughter, has a lover; her father disapproves, and throws the lover into prison (where he remains fifteen years in the ballad, only a day or two in the tale). The lover is taken from prison and put to death, and his heart is cut out. (The heart is not sent to the princess in a golden vessel, as in the Decameron, IV, 1, and the Scottish and Italian ballads, but is cooked, and given her to eat, and is eaten; and she says, when informed that she has eaten her lover’s heart, that it shall be her last food.) In most of the Scandinavian ballads the princess calls for wine (mead), and ‘drinks herself to death.’ But in =C= it is expressly said that she drinks poisoned wine, in =E a=, =c=, =k=, poisonous wine, in =D= that she puts a grain of poison in the cruse. (In =E l= they mix the lover’s blood in wine; she takes two draughts, and her heart bursts.)

A husband giving his wife her lover’s heart to eat is a feature in an extensive series of poems and tales, sufficiently represented for present purposes by the ninth tale in the fourth day of the Decameron, and no further explanation is required of the admixture in the Scandinavian ballad.[32]

In Danish =A a=, =b=, =h=, =o=, =B b=, two lilies spring from the common grave of the lovers, and embrace or grow together. In =E k=, =l=, =F b=, =e=, =f=, and Kristensen, XI, No 46, the lovers are buried apart (she south, he north, of kirk, etc.), a lily springs from each, and the two grow together.

=Low and High German, Dutch.= =A.= ‘Brennenberg,’ 12 stanzas, Uhland, I, 158, No 75 A, Niederdeutsches Liederbuch, No 44, conjectured to be of the beginning of the seventeenth century. ‘Der Bremberger,’ Böhme, p. 87, No 23 B (omitting sts 3, 4); Simrock, Die deutschen Volkslieder, p. 14, No 5, Die geschichtlichen deutschen Sagen, p. 325, No 105 (omitting sts 1-4, and turned into High German). =B.= ‘Ein schöner Bremberger,’ 8 stanzas, flying-sheet, 8°, Nürnberg, Valentin Newber, about 1550-70, Böhme, No 23 A; Wunderhorn, ed. Erk, 1857, IV, 41, modernized. =C.= ‘Van Brandenborch,’ 6 stanzas, Antwerpener Liederbuch, 1544, ed. Hoffmann, p. 120, No 81; Hoffmann’s Niederländische Volkslieder, 1856, p. 34, No 7 (omitting st. 6); Uhland, No 75 B. =D a.= Grasliedlin, 1535, one st., Böhme, No 23 a; Uhland, No 75 C. =b.= The same, heard on the Lower Rhine, 1850, Böhme, No 23 b.

‘Brunenborch,’ Willems, No 53, p. 135, 21 stanzas, purports to be a critical text, constructed partly from copies communicated to the editor (“for the piece is to this day sung in Flanders”), and partly from =C=, =A=, =D a=, and Hoffmann, No 6.[33] It is not entitled to confidence.

All the versions are meagre, and =A= seems to be corrupted and defective at the beginning.[34]

A youth, =B= 2, has watched a winter-long night, brought thereto by a fair maid, =A= 1, 3, =B= 1, to whom he has devoted his heart and thoughts, and with whom he wishes to make off, =A=, =B=. Ill news comes to the maid, =B= 2, that her lover is a prisoner, and has been thrown into a tower. There Brennenberg (=A=, der Bremberger, =B=, Brandenborch, =C=, der Brandenburger, =D a=) lay seven years or more, till his head was white and his beard was gray. They laid him on a table and slit him like a fish,[35] cut out his heart, dressed it with pepper, and gave it to the fairest, =A=, the dame, =B=, the dearest, =C=, to eat. ‘What have I eaten that tasted so good?’ ‘Brennenberg’s heart,’ =A=. ‘If it is his heart, pour wine for me, and give me to drink.’ She set the beaker to her mouth, and drank it to the bottom, =B=. The first drop she drank, her heart broke into a dozen bits, =A=, =C=. (Their love was pure, such as no one could forbid, =A= 11; the same implied in =A= 12, =C= 5.)

The German-Dutch ballad, though printed two hundred years before any known copy of the Swedish-Danish, is much less explicit. The lady is certainly a maid in =B=, and she is a maid in =A= if the first stanza is accepted as belonging to the ballad. Then it should be her father who proceeds so cruelly against her. The wine-drinking, followed by speedy death, may come, as it almost certainly does in some of the Scandinavian ballads, from the story of Ghismonda; and therefore the German-Dutch ballads, as they stand, may perhaps be treated as a blending of the first and the ninth tale of Boccaccio’s fourth day. But there is a German meisterlied, printed, like =B=, =C=, =D a=, in the sixteenth century, which has close relation with these ballads, and much more of Boccaccio’s ninth tale in it: ‘Von dem Brembergers end und tod,’ von der Hagen’s Minnesinger, IV, 281, Wunderhorn, 1808, II, 229, epitomized in the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen, II, 211, No 500. The knight Bremberger has loved another man’s wife. The husband cuts off his head, and gives his heart to the lady to eat. He asks her if she can tell what she has eaten. She would be glad to know, it tasted so good. She is told that it is Bremberger’s heart. She says she will take a drink upon it, and never eat or drink more. The lady hastens from table to her chamber, grieves over Bremberger’s fate, protesting that they had never been too intimate, starves herself, and dies the eleventh day. The husband suffers great pangs for having ‘betrayed’[36] her and her deserving servant, and sticks a knife into his heart.[37]

The incident of a husband giving his wife her lover’s heart to eat occurs in a considerable number of tales and poems in literature, and in all is obviously of the same source.

Ysolt, in the romance of Tristan, twelfth century, sings a lai how Guirun was slain for love of a lady, and his heart given by the count to his wife to eat. (Michel, III, 39, vv. 781-90.)

Ramon de Castel Rossillon (Raimons de Rosillon) cut off the head of Guillems de Cabestaing, lover of his wife, Seremonda (Margarita), took the heart from the body, ‘fetz lo raustir e far pebrada,’ and gave it to his wife to eat. He then told her what she had been eating (showing her Cabestaing’s head), and asked her if it was good. So good, she said, that she would never eat or drink more; hearing which, her husband rushed at her with his sword, and she fled to a balcony, let herself fall (threw herself from a window), and was killed. (Chabaneau, Les Biographies des Troubadours en langue provençale, pp. 99-103, MSS of the thirteenth and the fourteenth century.) Nearly the same story, ‘secondo che raccontano i provenzali,’ in the Decameron, IV, 9, of Messer Guiglielmo Rossiglione and Messer Guiglielmo Guardastagno. The lady says that she liked very much the dish which she had eaten, and the husband, No wonder that you should like when it was dead the thing which you liked best of all when it was living: what you have eaten was Guardastagno’s heart. God forbid, replies the lady, that I should swallow anything else after so noble a repast; then lets herself drop from a high window.

In Konrad von Würzburg, ‘Das Herz,’ ‘Das Herzmäre,’ 1260-70, five or six hundred verses, a knight and a lady are inflamed with a mutual passion (tugendhafter mann, reines weib). The lady’s husband conceives that he may break this up by taking her to the Holy Land. In that case, the knight proposes to follow; but the lady prevails upon him to go before her husband shall take this step, with the object of lulling his jealousy and stopping the world’s talk. The knight goes, and dies of the separation. As his end was approaching, he had ordered his attendant to take out his heart, embalm it, enclose it in a gold box, and carry it to the lady. The husband lights upon the emissary, takes away the box, directs his cook to make a choice dish of the heart, and has this set before his wife for her exclusive enjoyment. He asks her how she finds it, and she declares that she has never eaten anything so delicious. She is then told that she has eaten the knight’s heart, sent her by him as a token. God defend, she exclaims, that any ordinary food should pass my mouth after so precious victual, and thereupon dies (von der Hagen’s Gesammtabenteuer, I, 225). The same story is introduced as an “example” in a sermon-book: ‘Quidam miles tutpiter adamavit uxorem alterius militis.’[38] The lady kills herself.

Again, in a romance of eight thousand verses, of the Châtelain de Couci and la Dame de Faiel (of the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century), with the difference that the châtelain takes the cross, is wounded with a poisoned arrow, and dies on his way to France. (Jakemon Sakesep, Roman du Châtelain de Couci, etc., ed. Crapelet, 1829.) From this romance was derived The Knight of Curtesy and the Fair Lady of Faguell (in which the lady is chaste to her lord as is the turtle upon the tree), five hundred verses, Ritson’s Metrical Romanceës, III, 193, from an edition by William Copland, “before 1568;” also a chap-book, curiously adapted to its time, ‘The Constant but Unhappy Lovers,’ London, 1707 (cited by Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, II, 191).

Descending to tradition of the present time, we find in the adventures of Rájá Rasálu, as told in verse and prose in the north of India, surprising agreements with Boccaccio’s tale: =a=. Temple’s Legends of the Panjâb, I, 64 f., 1883. =b.= The same, III, 240 f., 1886. =c.= Swynnerton in the Folk-Lore Journal, I, 143 ff., 1883, and in The Adventures of Rájá Rasálu, 1884, pp. 130-35. =d.= Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, II, 192, from a book privately printed, 1851. Rájá Rasálu kills his wife’s lover, tears out his heart, =a=, heart and liver, =d=, takes of his flesh, =b=, =c=, roasts and gives to his wife to eat. She finds the meat is very good, =a=, no venison was ever so dainty, =c=. The king retorts, You enjoyed him when he was living; why should you not relish his flesh now that he is dead? and shows her the body of his rival. She leaps from the palace wall and is killed (=c= only). (Rájá Rasálu is assigned to our second century.)

A Danish ballad in Syv’s collection, 1695, has one half of the story. A king has a man for whom his wife has a fancy chopped up and cooked and served to the queen. She does not eat. (‘Livsvandet,’ Grundtvig, II, 504, No 94 =A=, Prior, I, 391.)

Very like the Indian and the Provençal sage, but with change of the parts of husband and wife, is what Mme d’Aulnoy relates as having been enacted in the Astorga family, in Spain, in the seventeenth century. The Marchioness of Astorga kills a beautiful girl of whom her husband is enamored, tears out her heart, and gives it to her husband in a stew. She asks him if the dish was to his taste, and he says, Yes. No wonder, says the wife, for it was the heart of the mistress whom you loved so much; and then produces the gory head. (Mémoires de la Cour d’Espagne, La Haye, 1691, I, 108.)

Going back to the twelfth century, we come, even at that early date, upon one of those extravagances, not to say travesties, which are apt to follow successful strokes of invention. Ignaure loves and is loved by twelve dames. The husbands serve his heart to their twelve wives, who, when they are apprised of what has passed, duly vow that they will never eat again after the precious mess which they have enjoyed. (Lai d’Ignaurès, ed. Monmerqué et Michel.) There are relics of a similar story in Provençal and in German, and a burlesque tale to the same effect was popular in Italy: Le Cento Novelle Antiche, of about 1300, Biagi, Le Novelle Antiche, 1880, p. 38, No 29.[39]

A kitchen-boy plays a part of some consequence in several other ballads. A kitchen-boy is the hero of No 252, IV, 400, a very poor ballad, to be sure. There is a bad tell-tale of a kitchen-boy in ‘Lady Maisry,’ =A=, No 65, II, 114, and there is a high-minded kitchen-boy in ‘The Lady Isabella’s Tragedy.’[40] ‘A ballett, The Kitchen-boyes Songe’ (whatever this may be), is entered as licensed to John Alde in the Stationers’ Registers, 1570-71, Arber, I, 438. In about half of the versions of ‘Der grausame Bruder’ (see II, 101 f.), the king of England presents himself as a küchenjung to the brother of a lady whom he asks in marriage after a clandestine intimacy.

* * * * *

=A= is translated by Knortz, Schottische Balladen, p. 22, No 9.

A

Aytoun’s Ballads of Scotland, II, 173, 1859, from the recollection of a lady residing at Kirkaldy.

1 There was a king, and a very great king, And a king of meikle fame; He had not a child in the world but ane, Lady Daisy was her name.

2 He had a very bonnie kitchen-boy, And William was his name; He never lay out o Lady Daisy’s bower, Till he brought her body to shame.

3 When een-birds sung, and een-bells rung, And a’ men were boune to rest, The king went on to Lady Daisy’s bower, Just like a wandering ghaist.

4 He has drawn the curtains round and round, And there he has sat him down; ‘To whom is this, Lady Daisy,’ he says, ‘That now you gae so round?

5 ‘Is it to a laird? or is it to a lord? Or a baron of high degree? Or is it William, my bonnie kitchen-boy? Tell now the truth to me.’

6 ‘It’s no to a laird, and it’s no to a lord, Nor a baron of high degree; But it’s to William, your bonnie kitchen-boy: What cause hae I to lee?’

7 ‘O where is all my merry, merry men, That I pay meat and fee, That they will not take out this kitchen-boy, And kill him presentlie?’

8 They hae taen out this bonnie kitchen-boy, And killd him on the plain; His hair was like the threads o gold, His een like crystal stane; His hair was like the threads o gold, His teeth like ivory bane.

9 They hae taen out this bonnie boy’s heart, Put it in a cup o gold; ‘Take that to Lady Daisy,’ he said, ‘For she’s impudent and bold;’ And she washd it with the tears that ran from her eye Into the cup of gold.

10 ‘Now fare ye weel, my father the king! You hae taen my earthly joy; Since he’s died for me, I’ll die for him, My bonnie kitchen-boy.’

11 ‘O where is all my merry, merry men, That I pay meat and wage, That they could not withold my cruel hand, When I was mad with rage?

12 ‘I think nae wonder, Lady Daisy,’ he said, ‘That he brought your body to shame; For there never was man of woman born Sae fair as him that is slain.’

B

From “The Old Lady’s Collection,” formerly in the possession of Sir Walter Scott, No 41.

1 Ther was a king, an a worthy king, [An a king] of birth an fame; He had an only dear daughter, An Dayesie was her name.

2 Ther was a boy about the house, Bold Roben was his name; He would not stay out of Dayese’s bour, Till he brought her body [to] shame.

3 When bells was rung,. .. . An a’ man bon to rest, The king went up to Lady Dayese’s bour, He was an unwelcom gast.

4 ‘O Lady Dayesë, dear, d[ea]r Dayisie, What gars ye gae sae round? We yer tua sides high an yer bellie bige, Fra yer face the couller is gane.’

5 ‘O have ye loved? or have ye lang-sought? Or die ye goo we barn?’ ‘It’s all for you, fair father, That ye stayed so long in Spain.’

6 ‘It’s aff ye take yer berry-broun goon, An ye lay it on a ston, An I will tell you in a very short time If ye loued any man or no[n].’

7 It’s aff she has tane her berry-broun goon, An laid it on a ston; We her tua sides high, her belley turned bigg, Fra her face the couller was gane.

8 ‘O is it to lord? or is to lard? Or till a man of mean? Or is it to Bold Roben, the kittchen-boy? Nou, Dayisie, dinne lea[n].’

9 ‘It’s no to leard, nor [to] lord, Nor to a man of mean, But it’s to Bold Robien, our kittchen-boy; Fatt neads me for to lea[n]?’

10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It’s the morn befor I eat or drink His heart-blude I sall see.’

11 He’s tean Bold Robien by the hand Lead him across the green; His hear was leak the very threeds of goud, His face shone leak the moon.

12 He’s tane out this bonny boy’s hear[t] Into a cupe of gold, Had it to Lady Dayese’s bour, Says, No[u], Dayesë, behold!

13 ‘O welcom to me my heart’s delight! Nou welcom to me my joy! Ye have dayed for me, an I’ll day for ye, Tho ye be but the kittchen-boy.’

14 She has taen out the coup of gold, Lead it belou her head, An she wish it we the tears ran doun fra her eays, An or midnight she was dead.

15 She has tean out the coup of gold, Laid it belou her hear, An she wish it we the tears ran don fra her eays, An alass! spak never mare.

C

Sharpe’s Ballad Book, No 4, p. 12, as sung by Mary Johnston, dairy maid at Hoddam Castle.

1 There was a king, and a glorious king, And a king of mickle fame, And he had daughters only one, Lady Dysmal was her name.

2 He had a boy, and a kitchen-boy, A boy of mickle scorn, And she lovd him lang, and she loved him aye, Till the grass oergrew the corn.

3 When twenty weeks were gone and past, O she began to greet! Her petticoat grew short before, And her stays they wadna meet.

4 It fell upon a winter’s night The king could get nae rest; He cam unto his daughter dear, Just like a wandring ghaist.

5 He cam into her bed-chalmer, And drew the curtains round: ‘What aileth thee, my daughter dear? I fear you’ve gotten wrong.’

6 ‘O if I have, despise me not, For he is all my joy; I will forsake baith dukes and earls, And marry your kitchen-boy.’

7 ‘Go call to me my merry men all, By thirty and by three; Go call to me my kitchen-boy, We’ll murder him secretlie.’

8 There was nae din that could be heard, And neer a word was said, Till they got him baith fast and sure Between twa feather-beds.

9 ‘Go cut the heart out of his breast, And put it in a cup of gold, And present it to his Dysmal dear, For she is baith stout and bold.’

10 They’ve cut the heart out of his breast, And put it in a cup of gold, And presented it to his Dysmal dear, Who was baith stout and bold.

11 ‘O come to me, my hinney, my heart, O come to me, my joy! O come to me, my hinney, my heart My father’s kitchen-boy!’

12 She’s taen the cup out of their hands, And set it at her bed-head; She washd it wi the tears that fell from her eyes, And next morning she was dead.

13 ‘O where were ye, my merry men all, Whom I paid meat and wage, Ye didna hold my cruel hand When I was in my rage?

14 ‘For gone is a’ my heart’s delight, And gone is a’ my joy; For my dear Dysmal she is dead, And so is my kitchen-boy.’

D

Buchan’s MSS, II, 164.

1 There was a king, and a curious king, And a king of royal fame, He had ae daughter, he had never mair, Lady Diamond was her name.

2 She’s fa’en into shame, and lost her good name, And wrought her parents ’noy; And a’ for her layen her love so low, On her father’s kitchen-boy.

3 One night as she lay on her bed, Just thinking to get rest, Up it came her old father, Just like a wandering ghaist.

4 ‘Rise up, rise up, Lady Diamond,’ he says, ‘Rise up, put on your gown; Rise up, rise up, Lady Diamond,’ he says, ‘For I fear ye go too roun.’

5 ‘Too roun I go, ye blame me no, Ye cause me not to shame; For better love I that bonny boy Than all your well-bred men.’

6 The king’s calld up his wall-wight men, That he paid meat and fee: ‘Bring here to me that bonny boy, And we’ll smore him right quietlie.’

7 Up hae they taken that bonny boy, Put him between twa feather-beds; Naething was dane, _nae_thing was said, Till that bonny boy was dead.

8 The king’s taen out a broad, broad sword, And streakd it on a strow, And thro and thro that bonny boy’s heart He’s gart cauld iron go.

9 Out he has taen his poor bloody heart, Set it on a tasse of gold, And set it before Lady Diamond’s face, Said, Fair lady, behold!

10 Up she has taen this poor bloody heart, And holden it in her hand: ‘Better loved I that bonny, bonny boy Than all my father’s land.’

11 Up she has taen his poor bloody heart And laid it at her head; The tears away frae her eyes did fly, And ere midnight she was dead.

E

Joseph Robertson, “Adversaria,” p. 66; noted down from a female servant, July 15, 1829.

1 It was a king, and a verra greit king, An a king o muckle fame, An he had a luvelie dauchter fair, An Dysie was her name.

2 She fell in love wi the kitchie-boy, An a verra bonnie boy was he, An word has gane till her father dear, An an angry man was he.

3 ‘Is it the laird? or is it the lord? Or a man o high degree? Or is it to Robin, the kitchie-boy? O Dysie mak nae lee.’

4 ‘It’s nae the laird, nor is it the lord, Nor a man o high degree, But it’s to Robin, the kitchie-boy; What occasion hae I to lee?’

5 ‘If it be to Robin, the kitchie-boy, As I trust weel it be, The morn, afore ye eat meal or drink, Ye’ll see him hanged hie.’

6 They have taen Robin out, His hair was like threads o gold; That verra day afore it was night, Death made young Dysie cold.

* * * * *

=B.= Written without division into stanzas or verses.

3^2. to bed.

8^4. didde lea.

=C.= “Mary Johnston, our dairymaid at Hoddam Castle, used to sing this. It had a very pretty air, and some more verses which I have now forgot.” Sharpe’s Ballad-Book, 1880, p. 128.

=D.= A little scotticized by Buchan in printing, and still more by Dixon.

9^2. tasse is tarse in my transcript; probably miscopied.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] See a letter from Scott to C. K. Sharpe, in Mr Allardyce’s edition of Sharpe’s letters, II, 264.Return to passage

[30] See Dunlop’s History of Fiction, ed. Wilson, II, 91; von der Hagen’s Gesammtabenteuer, I, CXXII f.; Clarence Sherwood, Die neu-englischen Bearbeitungen der Erzählung Boccaccios von Ghismonda und Guiscardo, Berlin, 1892; Varnhagen in Literaturblatt, December, 1892, p. 412 ff.Return to passage

[31] The too late repentance and the burial of the two lovers in one grave occur, also, in Decameron, IV, 9, presently to be spoken of.Return to passage

[32] There is a mixture of Decameron, IV, 1 and 9 (with arbitrary variations), in Palmerin of England (ch. 87, II, 328, of Southey’s edition of the English translation). Artibel visited the Princess Brandisia in a tower, ascending by a rope. One night he was taken. He was shut up till the princess was delivered of a child (cf. the Scottish ballad). Then the father took Artibel’s heart and sent it to Brandisia in a cup. She filled the cup with her tears, and sent the cup of tears to her father, reserving the heart, dressed herself in her bravest apparel, and cast herself headlong from the tower.Return to passage

[33] This is a Dutch ballad of Brennenberg without the extraction of the heart, MS. of the end of the fifteenth century. (Sts 1, 2 resemble, =A= 3, 4.) A fair lady offers Brunenburch a rose garland; a knight observes this, goes to his master, and tells him, Brunenburch has been sleeping with your wife. Brunenburch is imprisoned in a tower, and after a time sent to the gallows. The lady rides to the gallows. She has seven bold brothers, who will avenge his death. Brunenburch affirms and reaffirms his innocence. The lady vows never to braid her hair, etc. (Cf. II, 156 f.) Frydenborg is hanged in Danish =A d=, =n=, =E b=, and his heart then taken out.Return to passage

[34] In =A= 3, 4, which (as also =A= 1 and =B= 1) are in the first person, a fair maid offers the singer a rose garland. This warrants no inference of community with the Scandinavian ballad. The passage probably does not belong in the ballad. Compare the beginning of Hoffmann, No 6, and a song of John I of Brabant, Willems, p. 13, No 5.Return to passage

[35] ‘Recht so einem wildenschwin,’ =A= 8, brings to mind ‘quel cuor di cinghiare,’ in Decameron, IV, 9, but, considering the ‘recht wo einen visch’ of =A= 7, may be judged an accidental correspondence.Return to passage

[36] It is to be noted that the father reproaches himself for ‘betraying’ his only child in the Swedish ballad, and in Danish =A= 1, =F a=, =c=, =d=.Return to passage

[37] A meisterlied, of about 1500 (Böhme), noted by Goedeke, Grundriss, § 139, No 7 c, has not been reprinted.Return to passage

[38] Sermones Parati, No 124, ninth Sunday after Trinity: cited by M. Gaston Paris, Histoire Littéraire de la France, XXVIII, 382 f.Return to passage

[39] The older literature is noted, with his usual fulness, by von der Hagen, Gesammtabenteuer, I, CXVI-XXI. See, also, Dunlop’s History of Fiction, ed. Wilson, II, 95 f. M. Gaston Paris has critically reviewed the whole matter, with an account of modern French imitations of the romance of the Châtelain de Couci, in Histoire Littéraire de la France, XXVIII, 352-90. See, also, his article in Romania, XII, 359 ff.Return to passage

[40] See Percy’s Reliques, 1765, III, 154, and Ebsworth, Roxburghe Ballads, VI, 650. It is in many of the collections of black-letter broadsides besides the Roxburghe, as Pepys, Wood, Crawford, etc. Though perhaps absolutely the silliest ballad that ever was made, and very far from silly sooth, the broadside was traditionally propagated in Scotland without so much change as is usual in such cases: ‘There livd a knight in Jesuitmont.’ Scotch Ballads, Materials for Border Minstrelsy, No 22 e, Abbotsford, in the handwriting of William Laidlaw, derived from Jean Scott; ‘The Knight in Jesuite,’ Campbell MSS, II, 63; ‘There was a knight in Jessamay,’ Motherwell’s MS. p. 399, from Agnes Laird, of Kilbarchan. Percy’s ballad is translated by Bodmer, I, 167, and by Döring, p. 91. The tragedy is said to be localized at Radcliffe, Lancashire: Harland, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire, ed. 1879, p. 46, Roby’s Traditions of Lancashire, 1879, I, 107, both citing Dr Whitaker’s History of Whalley.Return to passage

270

THE EARL OF MAR’S DAUGHTER

‘The Earl of Mar’s Daughter,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 49; Motherwell’s MS. p. 565.

The Earl of Mar’s daughter spies a dove on a tower, and promises him a golden cage if he will come to her. The dove lights on her head, and she takes him into her bower. When night comes, she sees a youth standing by her side. The youth explains that his mother, a queen versed in magic, had transformed him into a dove that he might charm maids. He is a dove by day, a man at night, and will live and die with her. In the course of seven years seven sons are born, all of whom are successively committed to the care of the queen their grandmother. After the twenty-third year a lord comes to court the lady. She refuses him: she will live alone with her bird. Her father swears that he will kill this bird, and Cow-me-doo prudently takes refuge with his mother, who welcomes home her ‘young son Florentine,’ and calls for dancers and minstrels. Cow-me-doo Florentine will have none of that; the situation is too serious. The morrow the mother of his seven sons is to be wedded; instead of merry-making, he desires to have twenty stout men turned into storks, his seven sons into swans, and himself into a goshawk. This feat is beyond his mother’s (quite limited) magic, but it is done by an old woman who has more skill. The birds fly to Earl Mar’s castle, where the wedding is going on. The storks seize some of the noble guests, the swans bind the bride’s best man to a tree, and in a twinkling the bride and her maidens are carried off by the birds. The Earl of Mar reconciles himself with his daughter.

There is a Scandinavian ballad which Grundtvig has treated as identical with this, but the two have little in common beyond the assumption of the bird-shape by the lover. They are, perhaps, on a par for barrenness and folly, but the former may claim some age and vogue, the Scottish ballad neither.

=Danish.= ‘Ridderen i Fugleham,’ Grundtvig, II, 226, No 68, =A-C= (=C= is translated by Prior, III, 206); ‘Herr Jon som Fugl,’ Kristensen, I, 161, No 59, X, 23, No 11, =A=, =B=. In Grundtvig’s =A= (MS. of the sixteenth century), the son of the king of England wooes a maid, sending her rich presents. Her mother says he shall never have her daughter, and this message his envoys take back to him. He is angry, and has a bird’s coat forged for him out of nine gold rings (but his behavior thereafter is altogether birdlike). He sits on the ridgepole of the maid’s bower and sings. The maid exclaims, Christ grant thou wert mine! thou shouldst drink naught but wine, and sleep in my arms. I would send thee to England, as a gift to my love. She sits down on the ground; the bird flies into her bosom. She takes the bird into her bower; he throws off his bird-coat, and is recognized. The maid begs him to do her no shame. ‘Not if you will go to England with me,’ he answers, takes her up, and wings his way thither. There he marries her, and gives her a crown and a queen’s name.

In Grundtvig =B=, the bird is a falcon. The maid will have no man that cannot fly. Master Hillebrand, son of the king of England, learns this fact, and has a bird’s coat made for him, enters the room where man had never been before, sleeps under white linen, and in the morning is a knight so braw. (Here the story ends.)

In =C=, the maid will have no man that cannot fly, and Master Hillebrand orders a bird’s coat to be made for him (what could be more mechanical!), flies into the maid’s bower, and passes the night on the pole on which she hangs her clothes. In the morning he begins to sing, flies to the bed, and plays with the maid’s hair. If you could shed your feathers, says the maid, I would have no other man. Keep your word, says the bird; give me your hand, and take my claw. She passes her word; he throws off his feathers, and stands before her a handsome man. By day, says the maid, he is to fly with the birds, by night to sleep in her bed. He perches so long on the clothes-pole that Ingerlille has a girl and a boy. When her father asks who is their father, she tells him the positive truth; she found them in a wood. When the bird comes back at night, she says that he must speak to her father; further concealment is impossible. Master Hillebrand asks the father to give him his daughter. The father is surprised that he should want a maid that has been beguiled; but if he will marry her she shall have a large dowry. The knight wants nothing but her.

Kristensen’s copies do not differ materially. 11 =A= in his tenth volume (a very brief ballad) drops or lacks the manufacture of the bird-coat. Grundtvig’s =D-G= drop the bird quite.

The ballad occurs in Swedish, but in the form of a mere abstract; in Arwidsson, II, 188, No 112, MS. of the sixteenth century. A maid will have no man but one that can fly. A swain has wings made from five gold rings; he flies over the rose-wood, over the sea, sits on a lily-spray and sings, flies till he sleeps in the maid’s bosom.

A Färöe copy is noted by Grundtvig as in the possession of Hammershaimb, resembling his =B=, but about twice as long.

The lover in bird-shape is a very familiar trait in fiction, particularly in popular tales.

In Marie de France’s Lai d’Yonec, a lover comes in at his mistress’s window in the form of a hawk; in ‘Der Jungherr und der treue Heinrich,’ von der Hagen, Gesammtabenteuer, No 64, III, 197, MS. of 1444, as a bird (by virtue of a stone of which he has possessed himself).[41] In Hahn, No 102, II, 130 (Albanian), a dove flies in at a princess’s window, and is changed to man’s shape by dipping in a dish of milk; Hahn, No 7, I, 97==Pio, No 5, dove (through a hole in the ceiling, dips in a basin of water); Δελτίον τῆς ἱστορικῆς καὶ ἐθνολογικῆς ἑταιρίας τῆς Ἑλλάδος, I, 337, golden eagle (through a window, in rose water); Schneller, No 21, p. 49, dove (dips in a basin of water); Coelho, Contos pop. portuguezes, No 27, p. 65, bird (dips in a basin of water); Braga, Contos tradicionães, No 31, I, 68, bird (dips in a basin of water); Pitrè, Fiabe, etc., No 18, I, 163, green bird (pan of milk, then pan of water); Bernoni, Fiabe, No 17, p. 87 (milk and water, milk, rose-water); Visentini, No 17, p. 95, dove; Gonzenbach, No 27, I, 167, green bird (through a hole in the wall); Nicolovius, p. 34, Asbjørnsen, Norske Folkeeventyr, Ny Samling, 1871, No 10, p. 35==Juletræet, 1851, p. 52, falcon; Grundtvig, Danske Folkeæventyr, No 14, p. 167, Madsen, Folkeminder, p. 19 (‘The Green Knight’), bird; Berntsen, Folke-Æventyr, No 13, II, 86, bird; Comtesse d’Aulnoy, L’Oiseau bleu,’ Cabinet des Fées, II, 67, king turned into bird for seven years.[42]

* * * * *

Translated by Gerhard, p. 44; Knortz, Lieder u. Romanzen Alt-Englands, p. 207, No 62.

* * * * *

1 It was intill a pleasant time, Upon a simmer’s day, The noble Earl of Mar’s daughter Went forth to sport and play.

2 As thus she did amuse hersell, Below a green aik tree, There she saw a sprightly doo Set on a tower sae hie.

3 ‘O Cow-me-doo, my love sae true, If ye’ll come down to me, Ye’se hae a cage o guid red gowd Instead o simple tree:

4 ‘I’ll put gowd hingers roun your cage, And siller roun your wa; I’ll gar ye shine as fair a bird As ony o them a’.’

5 But she hadnae these words well spoke, Nor yet these words well said, Till Cow-me-doo flew frae the tower And lighted on her head.

6 Then she has brought this pretty bird Hame to her bowers and ha, And made him shine as fair a bird As ony o them a’.

7 When day was gane, and night was come, About the evening tide, This lady spied a sprightly youth Stand straight up by her side.

8 ‘From whence came ye, young man?’ she said; ‘That does surprise me sair; My door was bolted right secure, What way hae ye come here?’

9 ‘O had your tongue, ye lady fair, Lat a’ your folly be; Mind ye not on your turtle-doo Last day ye brought wi thee?’

10 ‘O tell me mair, young man,’ she said, ‘This does surprise me now; What country hae ye come frae? What pedigree are you?’

11 ‘My mither lives on foreign isles, She has nae mair but me; She is a queen o wealth and state, And birth and high degree.

12 ‘Likewise well skilld in magic spells, As ye may plainly see, And she transformd me to yon shape, To charm such maids as thee.

13 ‘I am a doo the live-lang day, A sprightly youth at night; This aye gars me appear mair fair In a fair maiden’s sight.

14 ‘And it was but this verra day That I came ower the sea; Your lovely face did me enchant; I’ll live and dee wi thee.’

15 ‘O Cow-me-doo, my luve sae true, Nae mair frae me ye’se gae;’ ‘That’s never my intent, my luve, As ye said, it shall be sae.’

16 ‘O Cow-me-doo, my luve sae true, It’s time to gae to bed;’ ‘Wi a’ my heart, my dear marrow, It’s be as ye hae said.’

17 Then he has staid in bower wi her For sax lang years and ane, Till sax young sons to him she bare, And the seventh she’s brought hame.

18 But aye as ever a child was born He carried them away, And brought them to his mither’s care, As fast as he coud fly.

19 Thus he has staid in bower wi her For twenty years and three; There came a lord o high renown To court this fair ladie.

20 But still his proffer she refused, And a’ his presents too; Says, I’m content to live alane Wi my bird, Cow-me-doo.

21 Her father sware a solemn oath Amang the nobles all, ‘The morn, or ere I eat or drink, This bird I will gar kill.’

22 The bird was sitting in his cage, And heard what they did say; And when he found they were dismist, Says, Wae’s me for this day!

23 ‘Before that I do langer stay, And thus to be forlorn, I’ll gang unto my mither’s bower, Where I was bred and born.’

24 Then Cow-me-doo took flight and flew Beyond the raging sea, And lighted near his mither’s castle, On a tower o gowd sae hie.

25 As his mither was wauking out, To see what she coud see, And there she saw her little son, Set on the tower sae hie.

26 ‘Get dancers here to dance,’ she said, ‘And minstrells for to play; For here’s my young son, Florentine, Come here wi me to stay.’

27 ‘Get nae dancers to dance, mither, Nor minstrells for to play, For the mither o my seven sons, The morn’s her wedding-day.’

28 ‘O tell me, tell me, Florentine, Tell me, and tell me true, Tell me this day without a flaw, What I will do for you.’

29 ‘Instead of dancers to dance, mither, Or minstrells for to play, Turn four-and-twenty wall-wight men Like storks in feathers gray;

30 ‘My seven sons in seven swans, Aboon their heads to flee; And I mysell a gay gos-hawk, A bird o high degree.’

31 Then sichin said the queen hersell, ‘That thing’s too high for me;’ But she applied to an auld woman, Who had mair skill than she.

32 Instead o dancers to dance a dance, Or minstrells for to play, Four-and-twenty wall-wight men Turnd birds o feathers gray;

33 Her seven sons in seven swans, Aboon their heads to flee; And he himsell a gay gos-hawk, A bird o high degree.

34 This flock o birds took flight and flew Beyond the raging sea, And landed near the Earl Mar’s castle, Took shelter in every tree.

35 They were a flock o pretty birds, Right comely to be seen; The people viewd them wi surprise, As they dancd on the green.

36 These birds ascended frae the tree And lighted on the ha, And at the last wi force did flee Amang the nobles a’.

37 The storks there seized some o the men, They coud neither fight nor flee; The swans they bound the bride’s best man Below a green aik tree.

38 They lighted next on maidens fair, Then on the bride’s own head, And wi the twinkling o an ee The bride and them were fled.

39 There’s ancient men at weddings been For sixty years or more, But sic a curious wedding-day They never saw before.

40 For naething coud the companie do, Nor naething coud they say But they saw a flock o pretty birds That took their bride away.

41 When that Earl Mar he came to know Where his dochter did stay, He signd a bond o unity, And visits now they pay.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] The ‘Vogelritter’ mentioned by Prior, III, 207, is this same story. See Mone, Uebersicht der niederländischen Volksliteratur, p. 90, No 59.Return to passage

[42] Most of the above are cited by R. Köhler, notes in Warnke’s ed. of Marie’s Lais, p. LXXXVIII f. For the dipping in water, etc., see Tam Lin, I, 338.Return to passage

271

THE LORD OF LORN AND THE FALSE STEWARD

=A.= ‘Lord of Learne,’ Percy MS., p. 73; Hales and Furnivall, I, 180.

=B.= ‘A pretty ballad of the Lord of Lorn and the Fals Steward.’ =a.= Wood, 401, fol. 95 b. =b.= Roxburghe, I, 222; Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Chappell, II, 55. =c.= Pepys, I, 494, No 254.

Also in the Roxburghe collection, III, 534, without printer’s name; Ewing, Nos 264, 265; Crawford, No 716. All the broadsides are of the second half of the seventeenth century.

‘The Lord of Lorne and the false Steward’ was entered, with two other ballads, to Master Walley, 6 October, 1580; ‘Lord of Lorne’ to Master Pavier and others (among 128 pieces), 14 December, 1624. Arber, II, 379; IV, 131.[43]

=A.= The young Lord of Lorn, when put to school, learns more in one day than his mates learn in three. He returns home earlier than was expected, and delights his father with the information that he can read any book in Scotland. His father says he must now go to France to learn the tongues. His mother is anxious that he should have a proper guardian if he goes, and the ‘child’ proposes the steward, who has impressed him as a man of fidelity. The Lady of Lorn makes the steward a handsome present, and conjures him to be true to her son. If I am not, he answers, may Christ not be true to me. The young lord sails for France, very richly appointed. Once beyond the water, the steward will give the child neither penny to spend nor meat and drink. The child is forced to lie down at some piece of water to quench his thirst; the steward pushes him in, meaning to drown him. The child offers everything for his life; the steward pulls him out, makes him put off all his fine clothes and don a suit of leather, and sends him to shift for himself, under the name of Poor Disaware. A shepherd takes him in, and he tends sheep on a lonely lea.

The steward sells the child’s clothes, buys himself a suit fit for a lord, and goes a-wooing to the Duke of France’s daughter, calling himself the Lord of Lorn; the duke favors the suit, and the lady is content. The day after their betrothal, the lady, while riding out, sees the child tending his sheep, and hears him mourning. She sends a maid to bring him to her, and asks him questions, which he answers, not without tears. He was born in Scotland, his name is Poor Disaware; he knows the Lord of Lorn, a worthy lord in his own country. The lady invites him to leave his sheep, and take service with her as chamberlain; the child is willing, but her father objects that the lord who has come a-wooing may not like that arrangement. The steward comes upon the scene, and is angry to find the child in such company. When the child gives his name as Poor Disaware, the steward denounces him as a thief who had robbed his own father; but the duke speaks kindly to the boy, and makes him his stable-groom. One day, when he is watering a gelding, the horse flings up his head and hits the child above the eye. The child breaks out, Woe worth thee, gelding! thou hast stricken the Lord of Lorn. I was born a lord and shall be an earl; my father sent me over the sea, and the false steward has beguiled me. The lady happens to be walking in her garden, and hears something of this; she bids the child go on with his song; this he may not do, for he has been sworn to silence. Then sing to thy gelding, and not to me, she says. The child repeats his story, and adds that the steward has been deceiving both her and him for a twelvemonth. The lady declares that she will marry no man but him that stands before her, sends in haste to her father to have her wedding put off, and writes an account of the steward’s treachery to the old lord in Scotland. The old lord collects five hundred friends of high degree, and goes over to France in search of his son. They find him acting as porter at the duke’s palace. The men of worship bow, the serving-men kneel, the old lord lights from his horse and kisses his son. The steward is just then in a castle-top with the duke, and sees what is going on below. Why are those fools showing such courtesy to the porter? The duke fears that this means death for one of them. The castle is beset; the steward is captured, is tried by a quest of lords and brought in guilty, is hanged, quartered, boiled, and burned. The young Lord of Lorne is married to the duke’s daughter.

=B.= =B= is an abridgment of an older copy. The story is the same as in =A= in all material particulars. The admiration of the schoolmaster and the self-complacency of his pupil in =A= 2, 3, =B= 3, are better justified in =B= by a stanza which has perhaps dropped out of =A=:

There’s nere a doctor in all this realm, For all he goes in rich array, [But] I can write him a lesson soon To learn in seven years day.

The last six stanzas are not represented in =A=, and the last two are glaringly modern; but there is a foundation for 62-64 in a romance from which the story is partly taken, the History of Roswall and Lillian.[44]

‘Roswall and Lillian.’ Roswall was son to the king of Naples. Happening one day to be near a prison, he heard three lords, who had been in durance many years for treason, putting up their prayers for deliverance. He was greatly moved, and resolved to help them out. The prison-keys were always hidden for the night under the king’s pillow. Roswall possessed himself of them while his father was sleeping, set the lords free, and replaced the keys. The escape of the prisoners was reported the next morning, and the king made a vow that whoever had been instrumental to it should be hanged; if he came within the king’s sight, the king would even slay him with his own hands. It soon came to light that the guilty party was none other than the prince. The queen interceded for her son, but the king could not altogether disregard his vow: the prince must be kept out of his sight, and the king promptly decided that Roswall should be sent to reside with the king of Bealm, under charge of the steward, a stalwart knight, to whom the queen promised everything for good service. As the pair rode on their way, they came to a river. The prince was sore athirst, and dismounted to take a drink. The steward seized him by the feet as he bent over the water, and vowed to throw him in unless he would swear an oath to surrender his money and credentials, and become servant where he had been master. To these hard terms Roswall was forced to consign. When they were near the king of Bealm’s palace, the steward dropped Roswall’s company, leaving him without a penny to buy his dinner; then rode to the king, presented letters, and was well received. Roswall went to a little house hard by, and begged for harbor and victuals for a day. The mistress made him welcome. She saw he was from a far country, and asked his name. Dissawar was his name; a poor name, said the old wife, but Dissawar you shall not be, for I will help you. The next day Roswall was sent to school with the dame’s son. He gave his name as Dissawar again to the master; the master said he should want neither meat nor teaching. Roswall had been a remarkable scholar at home. Without doubt he astonished the master, but this is not said, for the story has been abridged here and elsewhere. In about a month, the steward of the king of Bealm, who had observed his beauty, courtesy, and good parts, carried him to the court of Bealm, where Roswall made himself a general favorite. The princess Lillian, only child of the king of Bealm, chose him to be her chamberlain, fell in love with him, and frankly offered him her heart, an offer which Roswall, professing always to be of low degree, gratefully accepted.

At this juncture the king of Bealm sent messengers to Naples proposing marriage between his daughter Lillian and the young prince who had been commended to him. The king of Naples assented to the alliance, and deputed lords and knights to represent him at the solemnity. The king of Bealm proclaimed a joust for the three days immediately preceding the wedding. Lillian’s heart was cold, for she loved none but Dissawar. She told Dissawar that he must joust for his lady; but he said that he had not been bred to such things, and would rather go a-hunting. A-hunting he went, but before he got to work there came a knight in white weed on a white steed, who enjoined him to take horse and armor and go to the jousting, promising that he should find plenty of venison when he came back. Roswall toomed many a saddle, turned the steward’s heels upward, made his way back to the wood, in spite of the king’s order that he should be stopped, resumed his hunting-gear, took the venison, which, according to promise, was waiting for him, and presented himself and it to his lady. The order is much the same on the two succeeding days. A red knight equips Roswall for the joust on the second day, a knight in gold on the third. The steward is, on each occasion, put to shame, and in the last encounter two of his ribs are broken.

When Roswall came back to the wood after the third jousting, the three knights appeared together and informed him that they were the men whom he had delivered from prison, and who had promised to help him if help he ever needed. They bade him have no fear of the steward. Lillian had suspected from the second day that the victor was Roswall, and when he returned to her from his third triumph she intimated that if he would but tell the whole truth to her father their mutual wish would be accomplished. But Roswall kept his counsel--very whimsically, unless it was out of respect to his oath--and Lillian was constrained to speak for herself, for the marriage was to be celebrated on the fourth day. She asked her father in plain terms to give her Dissawar for her husband. The king replied, not unkindly, that she could not marry below her rank, and therefore must take the prince who had been selected for her; and to the steward she was married, however sorely against her will. In the course of the wedding-dinner, the three Neapolitan lords entered the hall, and saluted the king, the queen, and Lillian, but not the bridegroom. The king asked why they did no homage to their prince; they replied that they did not see their prince, went in search of Roswall, and brought him in. The force of the oath, or the consciousness of an obligation, must have been by this time quite extinct, for Roswall divulged the steward’s treacherous behavior, and announced himself as the victor at the jousts. The steward was hanged that same day; then they passed to the kirk and married Roswall and Lillian. There was dancing till supper and after supper, the minstrels played with good will, and the bridal was kept up for twenty days.

Roswall and Lillian belongs with a group of popular tales of which the original seems to have been characterized by all or many of the following marks: (1) the son of a king liberates a man whom his father has imprisoned; (2) the penalty for so doing is death, and to save his life the prince is sent out of the country, attended by a servant; (3) the servant forces the prince to change places and clothes with him; (4) presents himself at a king’s court as prince, and in his assumed quality is in a fair way to secure the hand of the king’s daughter; (5) the true prince, figuring the while as a menial (stable-groom, scullion, gardener’s lad), is successful, by the help of the man whom he has liberated, in a thrice-repeated contention (battle, tourney, race), or task, after which he is in a position to make known his rank and history; (6) the impostor is put to death, and the prince (who has, perhaps, in his humbler capacity, already attracted her notice and regard) marries the princess.[45]

Two Slavic tales, a Bosnian and a Russian, come as near as any to the story of our romance.

A king who has caught a wild man shuts him up, and denounces death to any one that shall let him out. The king’s son’s bedroom is just over the place in which the wild man is confined. The prince cannot bear to hear the continual wailings which come up, and he sets the prisoner free. The prince confesses what he has done; the king is persuaded by his advisers to banish his son rather than to enforce the penalty which he had decreed; the prince is sent off to a distant kingdom, attended by a servant. One day the prince was seized with thirst while travelling, and wished to get a drink from a well; but there was nothing to draw water with, and he ordered his servant to let him down to the surface of the water, holding him the while by the legs. This was done; but when the prince had drunk to his satisfaction, the servant refused to draw him up until he had consented to change places and clothes, and had sworn besides to keep the matter secret. When they arrived at the court of the king designated by the father, the sham prince was received with royal honors, and the true prince had to consort with servants.... After a time, the king, wishing to marry off his daughter, proclaimed a three days’ race, open to all comers, the prize to be a golden apple, and any competitor who should win the apple each of the three days to have the princess. Our prince had fallen in love with the young lady, and was most desirous to contend. The wild man had already helped him in emergencies here passed over, and did not fail him now. He provided his deliverer with fine clothes and a fine horse. The prince carried off the apple at each of the races, but disappeared as soon as he had the prize in hand. All the efforts of the king to find out the victor were to no purpose, but one day the princess met the prince in his serving-man’s dress, and saw the apples shining from his breast. She told her father. The prince did not feel himself bound to further secrecy; he told everything; the king gave him the princess, and the servant was properly disposed of.[46]

Ivan, the tsar’s son, releases from confinement Bulat, a robber, whom the tsar has kept in prison three and thirty years. Bulat tells Ivan to call him by name in case of future need, and he will not fail to appear. Ivan travels in foreign countries with his servant, and feeling thirsty of a warm day tells his servant to get him water from a deep well to which they have come; Ivan will hold him by a rope tied firmly about him, so that he can go down into the well without danger. The servant represents that he is the heavier of the two, too heavy for his master to hold, and that for this reason it would be better for Ivan himself to go for the water. Ivan is let down into the well, and having drunk his fill calls to his servant to draw him up. The servant refuses to draw him up unless Ivan will swear to give him a certificate in writing that he is master, and Ivan servant. The paper is given; they change clothes, and proceed on their journey, and come to Tsar Pantui’s kingdom. Here the servant is received as a tsar’s son, and when he tells Tsar Pantui that the object of his coming is to woo his daughter, the tsar complies with much pleasure. Ivan, at the servant’s suggestion, is put to low work in the kitchen. Before long the kingdom is invaded, and the tsar calls upon his prospective son-in-law to drive off the enemy, for which service he shall receive the princess, but without it, not. The false Ivan begs the true Ivan to take the invaders in hand, and he assents without a word. Ivan calls for Bulat: one attacks the hostile army on the right, the other on the left, and in an hour they lay a hundred thousand low. Ivan returns to his kitchen. A second invasion, and a third, on a larger and larger scale, ensue, and Ivan and Bulat repulse the enemy with greater and greater loss. Ivan each time goes back to his kitchen; his servant has all the glory, and after the third and decisive victory marries the princess. Ivan gets permission from the cook to be a spectator at the wedding-banquet. The tsar’s daughter, it must now be observed, had overheard the conference between the pseudo-prince and Ivan, and even that between Ivan and Bulat, and had hitherto, for inscrutable reasons, let things take their course. But when she saw Ivan looking at the feast from behind other people, she knew him at once, sprang from the table, brought him forward, and said, This is my real bridegroom and the savior of the kingdom; after which she entered into a full explanation, with the result that the servant was shot, and Ivan married to the tsar’s daughter.[47]

Other tales of the same derivation, but deficient in some points, are: (=A.=) Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens, IV, 385, ‘Der Peri.’ (=B.=) Straparola, Piacevoli Notti, v, 1 (‘Guerrino, son of the king of Sicily’). (=C.=) Grimms, K.- und Hausmärchen, No 136, II, 242, ed. 1857, ‘Der Eisenhaus.’ (=D.=) Sommer, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Sachsen und Thüringen, p. 86, No 2, ‘Der eiserne Mann.’ (=E.=) Milenowsky, Volksmärchen aus Böhmen, p. 147, ‘Vom wilden Manne.’[48]

(1) The son of a king liberates a prisoner (peri, wild or iron man), =A-E=. (The keys are under his mother’s pillow, =B=, =C=.) (2) The prince goes to another kingdom, =A-D= with attendance, =E= without. (3) His attendant forces the prince to change places and clothes, only =A=. (Advantage is taken of the helplessness of the hero when let down into the well to force exchange of parts, in the Servian Tales of Dj. K. Stefanović, 1871, p. 39, No 7, Jagić, Archiv, I, 271; Meyer, Albanian Tales, No 13, in Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte, XII, 137; Franzisci, Cultur-Studien in Kärnten, p. 99, and, nearly the same, Dozon, Contes Albanais, No 12, p. 83.) (5) The hero, serving as kitchen-boy or gardener’s lad, =C=, =D=, =E=, defeats an invading army, =C=, =D=, =E=, wins a prize three successive days, =C=, =E=, is successful in three tasks, =A=, =B=; and all these feats are performed by the help of the prisoner whom he set free. The variation of the color of armor and horses occurs in =C=, =E=, an extremely frequent trait in tales and romances; see Ward, Catalogue of Romances, etc., 734 f., Lengert, XVII, 361. (Very striking in the matter of the tournaments is the resemblance of the romance of Ipomedon to Roswall and Lillian. Ipomedon, like Roswall, professes not to have been accustomed to such things, and pretends to go a-hunting, is victorious three successive days in a white, red, black suit, on a white, bay, black steed, vanishes after the contest, and presently reappears as huntsman, with venison which a friend had been engaged in securing for him.) (6) The treacherous attendant is put to death, =A=. The hero of course marries the princess in all the tales.

The points in the romance which are repeated in the ballad are principally these: The young hero is sent into a foreign country under the care of his father’s steward. The steward, by threatening to drown him while he is drinking at a water-side, forces him to consent to an exchange of positions, and strips him of his money; then passes himself off as his master’s son with a noble personage, who eventually fixes upon the impostor as a match for his only daughter. The young lord, henceforth known as Dissawar,[49] is in his extremity kindly received into an humble house, from which he soon passes into the service of the lady whose hand the steward aspires to gain. The lady bestows her love upon Dissawar, and he returns her attachment. In the upshot they marry, the false steward having been unmasked and put to death.

What is supplied in the ballad to make up for such passages in the romance as are omitted is, however, no less strictly traditional than that which is retained. Indeed, were it not for the name Dissawar, the romance might have been plausibly treated, not as the source of the ballad, but simply as a kindred story; for the exquisite tale of ‘The Goose Girl’ presents every important feature of ‘The Lord of Lorn,’ the only notable difference being that the young lord in the ballad exchanges parts with the princess in the tale, an occurrence of which instances have been, from time to time, already indicated.

In ‘Die Gänsemagd,’ Grimms, No 89, II, 13, ed. 1857, a princess is sent by her mother to be wedded to a bridegroom in a distant kingdom, with no escort but a maid. Distressed with thirst, the princess orders her maid to get down from her horse and fetch her a cup of water from a stream which they are passing. The maid refuses; she will no longer be servant, and the princess has to lie down and drink from the stream. So a second and a third time: and then the servant forces her mistress, under threat of death, to change horses and clothes, and to swear to keep the matter secret at the court to which they are bound. There the maid is received as princess, while the princess is put to tending geese with a boy. The counterfeit princess, fearing that her mistress’s horse, Falada, may tell what he has observed, induces the young prince to cut off Falada’s head. The princess has the head nailed up on a gate through which she passes when she takes out the geese, and every morning she addresses Falada with a sad greeting, and receives a sad return. The goose-boy tells the old king of this, and the next day the king hides behind the gate and hears what passes between the goose-girl and Falada. The king asks an explanation of the goose-girl when she comes back in the evening, but the only answer he elicits is that she has taken an oath to say nothing. Then the king says, If you will not tell me your troubles, tell them to the stove; and the princess creeps into the oven and pours out all her grief: how she, a king’s daughter, has been made to change places with her servant, and the servant is to marry the bridegroom, and she reduced to tend geese. All this the king hears from outside of the room through the stovepipe, and he loses no time in repeating it to his son. The false maid is dragged through the streets in a barrel stuck full with nails, and the princess married to the prince to whom she had been contracted.

The passage in the ballad in which the Lord of Lorn relates to the gelding, within hearing of the duke’s daughter, the injuries which he had sworn to conceal has, perhaps, suffered some corruption, though quibbling as to oaths is not unknown in ballads. The lady should be believed to be out of earshot, as the king is thought to be by the goose-girl. Unbosoming one’s self to an oven or stove is a decidedly popular trait; “the unhappy and the persecuted betake themselves to the stove, and to it bewail their sufferings, or confide a secret which they may not disclose to the world.”[50] An entirely similar passage (but without an oath to secrecy) occurs in Basile’s Pentamerone, II, 8, where a girl who has been shamefully maltreated by her uncle’s wife tells her very miserable story to a doll, and is accidentally overheard by the uncle. The conclusion of the tale is quite analogous to that of the goose-girl.

* * * * *

A

Percy MS., p. 73, Hales and Furnivall, I, 180.

1 It was the worthy Lord of Learen, He was a lord of a hie degree; He had noe more children but one sonne, He sett him to schoole to learne curtesie.

2 Lear[n]ing did soe p_ro_ceed w_i_th that child, I tell you all in veretie, He learned more vpon one day Then other children did on three,

3 And then bespake the schoole-m_aster_, Vnto the Lo_rd_ of Learne said hee, I thinke thou be some stranger borne, For the holy gost remaines w_i_th thee.

4 He said, I am noe stranger borne, Forsooth, m_aster_, I tell it to thee; It is a gift of Almighty God W_hi_ch he hath giuen vnto mee.

5 The schoole-m_aster_ turnd him round about, His angry mind he thought to asswage, For the child cold answer him soe quicklie, And was of soe tender yeere of age.

6 The child he caused a steed to be brought, A golden bridle done him vpon; He tooke his leaue of his schoolfellows, And home the child that he is gone.

7 And when he came before his father, He ffell low downe vpon his knee: ‘My blessing, father, I wold aske, If Christ wold grant you wold gine it me.’

8 ‘Now God thee blesse, my sonne and my heire, His servant in heauen _tha_t thou may bee! What tydings hast thou brought me, child, Thou art comen home so soone to mee?’

9 ‘Good tydings, father, I haue you brought, Goo[d tydings] I hope it is to thee; The booke is not in all S[c]ottlande But I can reade it before yo_u_r eye.’

10 A ioyed man his father was, Euen the worthy Lo_rd_ of Learne: ‘Thou shalt goe into Ffrance, my child, The speeches of all strange lands to learne.’

11 But then bespake the child his mother, The Lady of Learne and then was shee; Saies, Who must be his well good guide, When he goes into that strange country?

12 And then bespake that bonnie child, Vntill his father tenderlie; Saies, Father, I’le haue the hend steward, For he hath beene true to you and mee.

13 The lady to concell the steward did take, And counted downe a hundred pound there; Saies, Steward, be true to my sonne and my heire, And I will giue thee mickle mere.

14 ‘If I be not true to my m_aster_,’ he said, ‘Christ himselfe be not trew to mee! If I be not true to my lord and m_aster_, An ill death _tha_t I may die!’

15 The Lo_rd_ of Learne did apparell his child W_i_th bruche, and ringe, and many a thinge; The apparrell he had his body vppon, Thé say was worth a squier’s liuinge.

16 The parting of the younge Lo_rd_ of Learne W_i_th his ffather, his mother, his ffellows deere, Wold haue made a manis hart for to change, If a Iew borne that he were.

17 The wind did serue, and thé did sayle Over the sea into Ffrance land; He vsed the child soe hardlie, He wold let him haue neuer a penny to spend.

18 And meate he wold let the child haue none, Nor mony to buy none, trulie; The boy was hungry and thirsty both; Alas! it was the more pitty.

19 He laid him downe to drinke the water _Tha_t was soe low beneathe the brime; He [that] was wont to haue drunke both ale and wine Then was faine of the water soe thinne.

20 And as he was drinking of the water _Tha_t ran soe low beneath the brime, Soe ready was the false steward To drowne the bonny boy therin.

21 ‘Haue mercy on me, worthy steward! My life,’ he said, ‘lend it to mee, And all _tha_t I am heire vpon,’ Saies, ‘I will giue vnto thee.’

22 Mercy to him the steward did take, And pulld the child out of the brime; Euer alacke, the more pittye! He tooke his clothes euen from him.

23 Saies, Doe thou me of that veluett gowne, The crimson hose beneath thy knee, And doe me of thy cordiuant shoone, Are buckled w_i_th the gold soe free.

24 ‘Doe thou me off thy sattin doublett, Thy shirtband wrought w_i_th glistering gold, And doe mee off thy golden chaine, About thy necke soe many a fold.

25 ‘Doe thou me off thy veluett hat, W_i_th fether in _tha_t is soe ffine; All vnto thy silken shirt, _Tha_t’s wrought with many a golden seam.’

26 The child before him naked stood, W_i_th skin as white as lilly flower; For [t]his worthy lords bewtie He might haue beene a ladye’s paramoure.

27 He put vpon him a lether cote, And breeches of the same beneath the knee, And sent that bony child him froe, Service for to craue, truly.

28 He pulld then forth a naked sword _Tha_t hange full low then by his side; ‘Turne thy name, thou villaine,’ he said, ‘Or else this sword shall be thy guide.’

29 ‘What must be my name, worthy steward? I pray thee now tell it me:’ ‘Thy name shalbe Pore Disaware, To tend sheepe on a lonelye lee.’

30 The bonny child he went him froe, And looked to himselfe, truly; Saw his apparrell soe simple vppon; O Lo_rd_! he weeped tenderlye.

31 Vnto a shepard’s house _tha_t childe did goe, And said, S_i_r, God you saue and see! Doe you not want a servant-boy, To tend yo_u_r sheepe on a lonelie lee?

32 ‘Where was thou borne?’ the shepard said, ‘Where, my boy, or in what country?’ ‘S_i_r,’ he said, ‘I was borne in fayre Scottland, _Tha_t is soe farr beyond the sea.’

33 ‘I haue noe child,’ the shepard sayd; ‘My boy, thoust tarry and dwell w_i_th mee; My liuinge,’ he sayd, ‘and all my goods, I’le make thee heire [of] after mee.’

34 And then bespake the shepard’s wife, To the Lo_rd_ of Learne thus did she say; ‘Goe thy way to our sheepe,’ she said, ‘And tend them well both night and day.’

35 It was a sore office, O Lo_rd_, for him _Tha_t was a lord borne of a great degree! As he was tending his sheepe alone, Neither sport nor play cold hee.

36 Let vs leaue talking of the Lo_rd_ of Learne, And let all such talking goe; Let vs talke more of the false steward, That caused the child all this woe.

37 He sold this Lo_rd_ of Learne’s his clothes For fiue hundred pound to his pay [there], And bought himselfe a suite of apparrell Might well beseeme a lo_rd_ to weare.

38 When he _tha_t gorgeous apparrell bought, That did soe finelie his body vppon, He laughed the bony child to scorne _Tha_t was the bonny Lo_rd_ of Learne.

39 He laughed _tha_t bonny boy to scorne; Lo_rd_! pitty it was to heare; I haue herd them say, and soe haue you too, _Tha_t a man may buy gold to deere.

40 When _tha_t he had all _tha_t gorgeous apparrell, _Tha_t did soe finelie his body vpon, He went a woing to the Duke’s daughter of France, And called himselfe the Lo_rd_ of Learne.

41 The Duke of Ffrance heard tell of this, To his place _tha_t worthy lo_rd_ was come, truly; He entertaind him w_i_th a quart of red Renish wi[ne], Saies, Lo_rd_ of Learne, thou art welcome to me.

42 Then to supp_er_ that they were sett, Lords and ladyes in their degree; The steward was sett next the Duke of France; An vnseemlye sight it was to see.

43 Then bespake the Duke of Ffrance, Vnto the Lo_rd_ of Leearne said hee there, Sayes, Lo_rd_ of Learne, if thou’le marry my daught[er], I’le mend thy liuing fiue hundred pound a yeere.

44 Then bespake _tha_t lady fayre, Answered her ffather soe alone, That shee would be his marryed wiffe If he wold make her lady of Learne.

45 Then hand in hand the steward her he tooke, And plight _tha_t lady his troth alone, _Tha_t she shold be his marryed wiffe, And he wold make her the ladie of Learne.

46 Thus _tha_t night it was gone, The other day was come, truly; The lady wold see the robucke run, Vp hills and dales and forrest free.

47 Then shee was ware of the younge Lo_rd_ of Learne Tending sheepe vnder a bryar, trulye, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

48 And thus shee called vnto her maids, And held her hands vp thus an hie; Sayes, Feitch me yond shepard’s boy, I’le know why he doth mourne, trulye.

49 When he came before _tha_t lady fayer, He fell downe vpon his knee; He had beene so well brought vpp He needed not to learne curtesie.

50 ‘Where wast thou borne, thou bonny boy? Where or in what countrye?’ ‘Madam, I was borne in faire Scottland, _Tha_t is soe farr beyond the sea.’

51 ‘What is thy name, thou bonny boy? I pray thee tell it vnto mee;’ ‘My name,’ he sayes, ‘is Poore Disaware, That tends sheepe on a lonely lee.’

52 ‘One thing thou must tell mee, bonny boy, W_hi_ch I must needs aske of thee, Dost not thou know the young Lo_rd_ of Learne? He is comen a woing into France to me.’

53 ‘Yes, _tha_t I doe, madam,’ he said, And then he wept most tenderlie; ‘The Lo_rd_ of Learne is a worthy lo_rd_, If he were at home in his oune country.’

54 ‘What ayles thee to weepe, my bonny boy? Tell me or ere I part thee froe:’ ‘Nothing but for a friend, madam, _Tha_t’s dead from me many a yeere agoe.’

55 A loud laughter the ladie lought, O Lo_rd_! shee smiled wonderous hie: ‘I haue dwelled in France since I was borne; Such a shepard’s boy I did neuer see.

56 ‘Wilt thou not leaue thy sheepe, my child, And come vnto service vnto mee? And I will giue thee meate and fee, And my chamberlaine thou shalt bee.’

57 ‘Then I will leaue my sheepe, madam,’ he sayd, ‘And come into service vnto thee, If you will giue me meate and fee, Yo_u_r chamberlaine _tha_t I may bee.’

58 When the lady came before her father, Shee fell low downe vpon her knee; ‘Grant me, father,’ the lady said, ‘This boy my chamberlaine to be.’

59 ‘But O nay, nay,’ the duke did say, ‘Soe my daughter it may not bee; The lo_rd_ _tha_t is come a woing to you Will be offended w_i_th you and mee.’

60 Then came downe the false steward, W_hi_ch called himselfe the Lo_rd_ of Learne, trulie; When he looked that bonny boy vpon, An angry man i-wis was hee.

61 ‘Where was thou borne, thou vagabond? Where?’ he sayd, ‘and in what country?’ Says, I was borne in fayre Scotland, _Tha_t is soe far beyond the sea.

62 ‘What is thy name, thou vagabond? Haue done qu[i]cklie, and tell it to me;’ ‘My name,’ he sayes, ‘is Poore Disaware, I tend sheep on the lonelie lee.’

63 ‘Thou art a theefe,’ the steward said, ‘And soe in the end I will prooue thee;’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

64 Then be-spake the ladie fayre, ‘Peace, Lord of Learne! I doe pray thee; Ffor if noe loue you show this child, Noe favor can you haue of mee.’

65 ‘Will you beleeue me, lady faire, When the truth I doe tell yee? Att Aberdonie, beyond the sea, His father he robbed a hundred three.’

66 But then bespake the Duke of France Vnto the boy soe tenderlie; Saies, Boy, if thou loue harsses well, My stable-groome I will make thee.

67 And thus _tha_t _tha_t did passe vppon Till the twelve monthes did draw to an ende; The boy applyed his office soe well Euery man became his freind.

68 He went forth earlye one morning To water a gelding at the water soe free; The gelding vp, and with his head He hitt the child aboue his eye.

69 ‘Woe be to thee, thou gelding,’ he sayd, ‘And to the mare _tha_t foled thee! Thou hast striken the Lo_rd_ of Learne A litle tinye aboue the eye.

70 ‘First night after I was borne, a lo_rd_ I was, An earle after my father doth die; My father is the worthy Lo_rd_ of Learne, And child he hath noe more but mee; He sent me over the sea with the false steward, And thus that he hath beguiled mee.’

71 The lady [wa]s in her garden greene, Walking with her mayds, trulye, And heard the boy this mourning make, And went to weeping, trulie.

72 ‘Sing on thy song, thou stable groome, I pray thee doe not let for mee, And as I am a true ladie I wilbe trew vnto thee.’

73 ‘But nay, now nay, madam!’ he sayd, ‘Soe _tha_t it may not bee; I am tane sworne vpon a booke, And forsworne I will not bee.’

74 ‘Sing on thy song to thy gelding, And thou doest not sing to mee; And as I am a true ladie I will euer be true vnto thee.’

75 He sayd, Woe be to thee, gelding, And to the mare _tha_t foled thee! For thou hast strucken the Lo_rd_ of Learne A litle aboue mine eye.

76 First night I was borne, a lord I was, An earle after my father doth dye; My father is the good Lo_rd_ of Learne, And child he hath noe other but mee; My father sent me over [the sea] w_i_th the false steward, And thus _tha_t he hath beguiled mee.

77 ‘Woe be to the steward, lady,’ he sayd, ‘Woe be to him verrily! He hath beene about this twelve months day For to deceiue both thee and mee.

78 ‘If you doe not my councell keepe, _Tha_t I haue told you w_i_th good intent, And if you doe it not well keepe, Ffarwell! my life is at an ende.’

79 ‘I wilbe true to thee, Lo_rd_ of Learne, Or else Christ be not soe vnto me; And as I am a trew ladye, I’le neuer marry none but thee.’

80 Shee sent in for her father, the Duke, In all the speed _tha_t ere might bee; ‘Put of my wedding, father,’ shee said, ‘For the loue of God, this monthës three.

81 ‘Sicke I am,’ the ladye said, ‘O sicke, and verry like to die! Put of my wedding, father Duke, Ffor the loue of God, this monthës three.’

82 The Duke of France put of this wedding Of the steward and the lady monthës three, For the ladie sicke shee was, Sicke, sicke, and like to die.

83 Shee wrote a letter w_i_th her owne hand, In all the speede _tha_t euer might bee; Shee sent [it] over into Scottland, _Tha_t is soe ffarr beyond the sea.

84 When the messenger came beffore the old Lo_rd_ of Learne, He kneeled low downe on his knee, And he deliuered the letter vnto him, In all the speed _tha_t euer might bee.

85 [The] first looke he looked the letter vpon, Lo! he wept full bitterly; The second looke he looked it vpon, Said, False steward, woe be to thee!

86 When the Ladye of Learne these tydings heard, O Lo_rd_! shee wept soe biterlye: ‘I told you of this, now good my lord, When I sent my child into that wild country.’

87 ‘Peace, Lady of Learne,’ the lord did say, ‘For Christ his loue I doe pray thee; And as I am a christian man, Wroken vpon him _tha_t I wilbe.’

88 He wrote a letter w_i_th his owne hand, In all the speede _tha_t ere might bee; He sent it into the lords in Scottland, _Tha_t were borne of a great degree.

89 He sent for lords, he sent for k_nigh_ts, _Th_e best that were in the countrye, To go w_i_th him into the land of France, To seeke his sonne in _tha_t strange country.

90 The wind was good, and they did sayle, Fiue hundred men into France land, There to seeke _tha_t bonny boy _Tha_t was the worthy Lo_rd_ of Learne.

91 They sought the country through and through, Soe farr to the Duke’s place of Ffrance land; There they were ware of _tha_t bonny boy, Standing w_i_th a porter’s staffe in his hand.

92 Then the worshippfull, thé did bowe, The serving-men fell on their knee, They cast their hatts vp into the ayre For ioy _tha_t boy _tha_t they had seene.

93 The Lo_rd_ of Learne then he light downe, And kist his child both cheeke and chinne, And said, God blesse thee, my sonne and my heire! The blisse of heauen _tha_t thou may winne!

94 The false steward and the Duke of France Were in a castle-topp, trulie; ‘What fooles are yond,’ says the false steward, ‘To the porter makes soe lowe curtesie?’

95 Then bespake the Duke of Ffrance, Calling my Lo_rd_ of Learne, trulie; He sayd, I doubt the day be come _Tha_t either you or I must die.

96 Thé sett the castle round about, A swallow cold not haue flone away; And there thé tooke the false steward That the Lo_rd_ of Learne did betray.

97 And when they had taken the false steward, He fell lowe downe vpon his knee, And craued mercy of the Lo_rd_ of Learne For the villanous dedd he had done, trulye.

98 ‘Thou shalt haue mercy,’ said the Lo_rd_ of Learne, ‘Thou vile traitor, I tell to thee, As the lawes of the realme they will thee beare, Wether it bee for thee to liue or dye.’

99 A quest of lords _tha_t there was chosen, To goe vppon his death, trulie; There thé iudged the false steward, Whether he was guiltie, and for to dye.

100 The forman of the iury he came in, He spake his words full lowd and hie; Said, Make thee ready, thou false steward, For now thy death it drawes full nie.

101 Sayd he, If my death it doth draw nie, God forgiue me all I haue done amisse! Where is _tha_t lady I haue loued soe longe? Before my death to giue me a kisse.

102 ‘Away, thou traitor!’ the lady said, ‘Auoyd out of my company! For thy vild treason thou hast wrought, Thou had need to cry to God for mercye.’

103 First they tooke him and h[a]ngd him halfe, And let him downe before he was dead, And quartered him in quarters many, And sodde him in a boyling lead.

104 And then they tooke him out againe, And cutten all his ioynts in sunder, And burnte him eke vpon a hyll; I-wis thé did him curstlye cumber.

105 A loud laughter the lady laught, O Lord! she smiled merrylie; She sayd, I may praise my heauenly k_ing_ That euer I seene this vile traytor die.

106 Then bespake the Duke of France, Vnto the right Lo_rd_ of Learne sayd he there; Says, Lo_rd_ of Learne, if thou wilt marry my daught[er] I’le mend thy liuing fiue hundred a yeere.

107 But then bespake _tha_t bonie boy, And answered the Duke quicklie, I had rather marry yo_u_r daughter w_i_th a ring of go[ld] Then all the gold _tha_t ere I blinket on w_i_th mine eye.

108 But then bespake the old Lo_rd_ of Learne, To the Duke of France thus he did say, Seeing our children doe soe well agree, They shalbe marryed ere wee goe away.

109 The Lady of Learne shee was sent for Throughout Scottland soe speedilie, To see these two children sett vpp In their seats of gold full royallye.

B

=a.= Wood, 401, fol. 95 b. =b.= Roxburghe, I, 222, III, 534; Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Chappell, II, 55. =c.= Pepys, I, 494, No 254 (from a transcript in Percy’s papers).

1 It was a worthy Lord of Lorn, He was a lord of high degree, He sent [his son] unto the schoole, To learn some civility.

2 He learned more learning in one day Then other children did in three; And then bespake the schoolmaster Unto him tenderly.

3 ‘In faith thou art the honestest boy That ere I blinkt on with mine eye; I hope thou art some easterling born, The Holy Ghost is with thee.’

4 He said he was no easterling born, The child thus answered courteously; My father is the Lord of Lorn, And I his son, perdye.

5 The schoolmaster turned round about, His angry mood he could not swage; He marvelled the child could speak so wise, He being of so tender age.

6 He girt the saddle to the steed, The bridle of the best gold shone; He took his leave of his fellows all, And quickly he was gone.

7 And when he came to his father dear He kneeled down upon his knee; ‘I am come to you, fathe[r],’ he said, ‘God’s blessing give you me.’

8 ‘Thou art welcome, son,’ he said, ‘God’s blessing I give thee; What tidings hast thou brought, my son, Being come so hastily?’

9 ‘I have brought tidings, father,’ he said, ‘And so likëd it may be, There’s never a book in all Scotland But I can read it, truly.

10 ‘There’s nere a doctor in all this realm, For all he goes in rich array, I can write him a lesson soon To learn in seven years day.’

11 ‘That is good tidings,’ said the lord, ‘All in the place where I do stand; My son, thou shalt into France go, To learn the speeches of each land.’

12 ‘Who shall go with him?’ said the lady; ‘Husband, we have no more but he;’ ‘Madam,’ he saith, ‘my head steward, He hath bin true to me.’

13 She cal’d the steward to an account, A thousand pound she gave him anon; Sayes, Good Sir Steward, be as good to my child, When he is far from home.

14 ‘If I be fals unto my young lord, Then God be [the] like to me indeed!’ And now to France they both are gone, And God be their good speed.

15 They had not been in France land Not three weeks unto an end, But meat and drink the child got none, Nor mony in purse to spend.

16 The child ran to the river’s side; He was fain to drink water then; And after followed the fals steward, To put the child therein.

17 ‘But nay, marry!’ said the child, He asked mercy pittifully, ‘Good steward, let me have my life, What ere betide my body.’

18 ‘Now put off thy fair cloathing And give it me anon; So put thee of thy s’lken shirt, With many a golden seam.’

19 But when the child was stript naked, His body white as the lilly-flower, He might have bin seen for his body A prince’s paramour.

20 He put him in an old kelter coat And hose of the same above the knee, He bid him go to the shepherd’s house, To keep sheep on a lonely lee.

21 The child did say, What shall be my name? Good steward, tell to me; ‘Thy name shall be Poor Disawear, That thy name shall be.’

22 The child came to the shepheard’s house And asked mercy pittifully; Sayes, Good sir shepheard, take me in, To keep sheep on a lonely lee.

23 But when the shepheard saw the child, He was so pleasant in his eye, ‘I have no child, I’le make thee my heir, Thou shalt have my goods, perdie.’

24 And then bespake the shepheard’s wife, Unto the child so tenderly; ‘Thou must take the sheep and go to the field, And keep them on a lonely lee.’

25 Now let us leave talk of the child, That is keeping sheep on a lonely lee, And we’l talk more of the fals steward, And of his fals treachery.

26 He bought himself three suits of apparrell, That any lord might a seem[d] to worn, He went a wooing to the Duke’s daughter, And cal’d himself the Lord of Lorn.

27 The duke he welcomed the yong lord With three baked stags anon; If he had wist him the fals steward, To the devill he would have gone.

28 But when they were at supper set, With dainty delicates that was there, The d[uke] said, If thou wilt wed my daughter, I’le give thee a thousand pound a year.

29 The lady would see the red buck run, And also for to hunt the doe, And with a hundred lusty men The lady did a hunting go.

30 The lady is a hunting gon, Over le and fell that is so high; There was she ware of a shepherd’s boy, With sheep on a lonely lee.

31 And ever he sighed and made moan, And cried out pittifully, ‘My father is the Lord of Lorn, And knows not wha[t]’s become of me.’

32 And then bespake the lady gay, And to her maid she spake anon, ‘Go fetch me hither the shepherd’s boy; Why maketh he all this moan?’

33 But when he came before the lady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He was not to learn his courtesie:

34 ‘Where was thou born, thou bonny child? For whose sake makst thou all this mone?’ ‘My dearest friend, lady,’ he said, ‘Is dead many years agon.’

35 ‘Tell thou to me, thou bonny child, Tell me the truth and do not lye, Knost thou not the yong lord of Lorn, Is come a wooing unto me?’

36 ‘Yes, forsooth,’ then said the child, ‘I know the lord then, veryly; The young lord is a valliant lord At home in his own country.’

37 ‘Wilt leave thy sheep, thou bonny child, And come in service unto me?’ ‘Yes, forsooth,’ then said the child, ‘At your bidding will I be.’

38 When the steward lookt upon the child, He bewraild him villainously: ‘Where wast thou born, thou vagabone? Or where is thy country?’

39 ‘Ha don! ha don!’ said the lady gay, She cal’d the steward then presently; ‘Without you bear him more good will, You get no love of me.’

40 Then bespake the false steward Unto the lady hastily: ‘At Aberdine, beyond the seas, His father robbëd thousands three.’

41 But then bespake the lady gay Unto her father courteously, Saying, I have found a bonny child My chamberlain to be.

42 ‘Not so, not so,’ then said the duke, ‘For so it may not be, For that young L[ord] of Lorn that comes a wooing Will think somthing of thee and me.’

43 When the duke had lookt upon the child, He seemd so pleasant to the eye, ‘Child, because thou lovst horses well, My groom of stables thou shalt be.’

44 The child plied the horses well A twelve month to an end; He was so courteous and so true Every man became his fri[e]nd.

45 He led a fair gelding to the water, Where he might drink, verily; The great gelding up with his head And hit the child above the eye.

46 ‘Wo worth thee, horse!’ then said the child, ‘That ere mare foalëd thee! Thou little knowst what thou hast done; Thou hast stricken a lord of high degree.’

47 The d[uke’s] daughter was in her garden green, She heard the child make great moan; She ran to the child all weeping, And left her maidens all alone.

48 ‘Sing on thy song, thou bonny child, I will release thee of thy pain;’ ‘I have made an oath, lady,’ he said, ‘I dare not tell my tale again.’

49 ‘Tell the horse thy tale, thou bonny child, And so thy oath shall savëd be;’ But when he told the horse his tale The lady wept full tenderly.

50 ‘I’le do for thee, my bonny child, In faith I will do more for thee; For I will send thy father word, And he shall come and speak with me.

51 ‘I will do more, my bonny child, In faith I will do more for thee, And for thy sake, my bonny child, I’le put my wedding off months three.’

52 The lady she did write a letter, Full pittifully with her own hand, She sent it to the Lord of Lorn Whereas he dwelt in fair Scotland.

53 But when the lord had read the letter His lady wept most tenderly: ‘I knew what would become of my child In such a far country.’

54 The old lord cal’d up his merry men, And all that he gave cloth and fee, With seven lords by his side, And into France rides he.

55 The wind servd, and they did saile So far into France land; They were ware of the Lord of Lorn, With a porter’s staff in his hand.

56 The lords they moved hat and hand, The servingmen fell on their knee; ‘What folks be yonder,’ said the steward, ‘That makes the porter courtesie?’

57 ‘Thou art a false thief,’ said the L[ord] of Lorn, ‘No longer might I bear with thee; By the law of France thou shalt be ju[d]gd, Whether it be to live or die.’

58 A quest of lords there chosen was, To bench they came hastily, But when the quest was ended The fals steward must dye.

59 First they did him half hang, And then they took him down anon, And then put him in boyling lead, And then was sodden, brest and bone.

60 And then bespake the Lord of Lorn, With many other lords mo; ‘Sir Duke, if you be as willing as we, We’l have a marriage before we go.’

61 These children both they did rejoyce To hear the lord his tale so ended; They had rather to day then to morrow, So he would not be offended.

62 But when the wedding ended was There was delicious dainty cheer; I’le tell you how long the wedding did last, Full three quarters of a year.

63 Such a banquet there was wrought, The like was never seen; The king of France brought with him then A hundred tun of good red wine.

64 Five set of musitians were to be seen, That never rested night nor day, Also Italians there did sing, Full pleasantly with great joy.

65 Thus have you heard what troubles great Unto successive joyes did turn, And happy news among the rest Unto the worthy Lord of Lorn.

66 Let rebels therefore warnëd be How mischief once they do pretend; For God may suffer for a time, But will disclose it in the end.

* * * * *

=A.=

2^4. on 3.

5^4. agee.

9^2. to mee.

10^4. to learne the speeches of all strange lands.

13^2. 100^{li}_{:}.

16^3. ? mams in MS. Furnivall.

19^2. brimn.

19^4. thime.

22^3. euen alacke.

24^3. a long s in the MS. between me and off. =F.=

25^2. thats.

25^4. golden swaine. =B.= seam.

35^3. tenting.

36^3. falst.

37^2. 500^{li}_{:}: pay [there]. Cf. 43^2, 105^2.

43^4. 500^{l}_{:}.

46^3. rum.

47^{1, 2}, 48^{1, 2}, make a stanza in the MS., and 52^{3, 4}, 53, are written together. 47-53 have been arranged upon the supposition that two verses (about the boy’s mourning) have dropped out after 47^{1, 2}.

48^{1, 2}. A tag after d in maids, hands may not mean s. =F.=

53^4. One stroke too many for oune in MS. =F.=

54^1. One stroke too many for bony, or too few for bonny, in the MS. =F.=

60^4. I-wis.

61^1. thou was.

63^{1, 2}, 64, are written together in the MS.

64^1. he spake.

65^4. 100: 3.

67^2. 12.

69^4. the knee. Cf. 68^4, 75^4.

70^4. his child. Cf. 76^4.

74^4. euer. Either ieuer in MS. or the letter before e crossed out. =F.=

75^{1, 2} are written with 74, 75^{3, 4} with 76^{1, 2}, in the MS.

75^1. to thy.

76^5. Cf. 70^5.

77^1. to thee.

77^3. beene aboue: 12.

79^2. soe may be true: half the line is pared away. =F.=

80^4, 81^4, 82^2. 3.

90^2. 500.

92^2. knees.

92^4. Perhaps did see.

93^2. chime.

93^4. wiine.

95^3. daubt.

98^3. they. The y is in a modern hand. =F.=

100^2. hiye.

106^4. 500.

107^4. mine. One stroke too few in the MS. =F.=

109^1. They: for sent.

109^3. 2. And for & always.

=B.= The tune is Green Sleeves.

=a.= Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, and W. Gilbertson.

=b.= Printed by and for A. M[ilbourne], and sold by the booksellers of London.

=c.= Printed for J. Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passinger.

=a, b, c.=

1^3. =b, c.= sent his son.

2^1. =b, c.= learning wanting.

2^3. =b, c.= And thus.

2^4. =c.= To him.

3^2. =b, c.= with my.

4^3. =a.= Lord of Lord.

5^2. =b.= he thought to asswage.

5^4. =b.= so tender of.

6^2. =a.= of his (?) gold. =b=, =c=. of the best gold.

7^2. =c.= on his.

7^4. =b.= give to.

8^1. =b=, =c=. my son.

8^2. =c.= I the give.

9^2. =b.= if that well liked.

9^{3,4}. =b=, =c=. Wanting.

10^1. =b=, =c=. all the.

11^3. =b.= to France.

12^2. =b=, =c=. have none.

12^3. =b.= said he.

13^3. =b=, =c=. as wanting.

13^4. =b=, =c=. while he.

14^1. =b.= false to.

14^2. =b.= may God justly punish me indeed. =c.= the like.

15^2. =b=, =c=. to an.

16^1. =b=, =c=. run. =b.= river.

16^2. =b.= the water.

17^4. =b.= eer else.

19^2. =b=, =c=. as white.

19^4. =b.= princess’s.

20^1. =b=, =c=. him on.

20^2. =a.= thee.

20^4. =a.= love lodely: =b.= keep them on a love lovely: =c.= love lovely.

21^1. =b=, =c=. child said.

21^3. =a=, =b=, =c=. poor dost thou wear. =A.= disaware.

22^3. =b=, =c=. sir wanting.

22^4, 24^4, 25^2, 30^4. =a, b, c.= love lovely. =A.= lonelye lee. Perhaps, lone, lone, lee.

23^2. =b, c.= in the.

24^1. =a.= wise. =b=, =c=. bespoke.

24^2. =c.= thee sheep. =b.= to field.

24^4. =a=, =c=. And get. =b.= keep.

25^1. =b=, =c=. talking.

25^3. =c.= we will.

26^2. =b.= a lord. =b=, =c=. have seemd.

27^3. =c.= himself.

27^4. =b=, =c=. he should.

28^2. =b=, =c=. were.

28^3. =b.= you will.

28^4. =b=, =c=. pounds.

29^3. =b=, =c=. an.

30^2. =a=, =c=. Feansell. =b.= feanser.

30^3. =b=, =c=. aware.

31^1. =b.= And often: made great moan.

31^4. =c.= what is.

32^2. =b=, =c=. unto her maid anon.

33^{1, 4}. =a=, =b=, =c=. Two lines wanting.

34^1. =b.= wast born. =c.= wast thou born.

35^1. =b.= to wanting.

35^2. =c.= the wanting.

35^4. =b=, =c=. he is.

36^1. =a.= foorsooth. =c.= forsooth saith the.

37^3. =c.= the wanting.

38^2. =b=, =c=. bewailed. =c.= villaniously.

38^3. =b=, =c=. vagabond.

39^1. =a=, =b=, =c=. Ha down. =b=, =c=. gay wanting.

40^1. =a.= stewardly.

41^1. =c.= than.

42^3. =b.= the Lord. =c.= young =D=.

42^4. =b=, =c=. think no good. =b.= of me nor thee.

43^1. =b.= had wanting.

43^2. =b.= in the.

43^4. =b=, =c=. stable.

44^4. =a=, =c=. become. =b.= became.

45^2. =a.= may. =b=, =c=. might.

45^3. =b=, =c=. great wanting. =b.= his heel.

46^1. =a.= thou horse. =b.= thee. =c.= the.

46^2. =b=, =c=. ever.

47^1. =a=, =c=. =D.= daughter.

49^1. =a.= Mell: lonny.

49^4. =b=, =c=. wept most.

50^{3, 4}, 51^{1, 2}. =b, c.= Wanting.

52^1. =b=, =c=. she wanting: letter then.

52^4. =a.= dwells. =b=, =c=. dwelt.

54^4. =b.= unto.

55^3. =b.= aware.

56^4. =c.= maketh.

57^1. =b=, =c=. quoth the.

59^2. =b.= they wanting.

60^2. =a.= more. =b=, =c=. mo.

61^3. =b=, =c=. than.

62^2. =b=, =c=. delicate, dilicate.

63. =a.= Before 63: Such a banquet there was wrought, the like was seen I say.

64^1. =a.= fet. =b=, =c=. set.

65^1. =b=, =c=. how troubles.

65^3. =b=, =c=. amongst.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Edward Guilpin, in his Skialethia, or A Shadow of Truth, 1598, has this couplet:Return to passage

Yet like th’ olde ballad of the Lord of Lorne, Whose last line in King Harrie’s days was borne. Chappell, Popular Music, p. 228.

It is possible that Guilpin meant that the last line (stanza?) showed the ballad to be of Henry VIII’s time; but he may have meant exactly what he says, that the last line was of Henry VIII’s time. We do not know what the last line of the copy intended by Guilpin was, and all we learn from the couplet is that ‘The Lord of Lorn’ was called an old ballad before the end of the sixteenth century.

[44] ‘A Pleasant History of Roswall and Lillian,’ etc., Edinburgh, 1663, reprint by David Laing, Edinburgh, 1822. Edited, with collation of the later texts and valuable contributions to the traditional history of the tale, by O. Lengert, Englische Studien, XVI, 321 ff., XVII, 341 ff.Return to passage

[45] The Grimms have indicated some of the tales belonging to this group, in their notes to No 136 and No 89. Others have been added by Lengert in Englische Studien. A second group, which has several of the marks of the first, is treated by Köhler, with his usual amplitude, in Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte, XII, 142-44. Abstracts of many tales of both groups, including all that I have cited, are given by Lengert.--See further in Additions, p. 280 f.Return to passage

[46] ‘Kraljev sin,’ ‘The King’s Son,’ Bosanske narodne pripovjedke, 1870, No 4, p. 11, Serbian Folk-Lore, Madam Csedomille Mijatovies, ‘One good turn deserves another,’ p. 189.Return to passage

[47] Dietrich, Russische Volksmärchen, No 10, p. 131; Vogl, Die ältesten Volksmärchen der Russen, p. 55. ‘Sługobyl,’ Gliński, Bajarz polski, I, 166, ed. 1862, Chodzko, Contes des paysans et des patres slaves, p. 193, is an abridged form of the same story, with a traditional variation at the beginning, and in the conclusion a quite too ingenious turn as to the certificate.Return to passage

[48] Also, Waldau, Böhmisches Märchenbuch, p. 50, after Franz Rubeš.Return to passage

[49] I can make no guess that I am willing to mention as to the derivation and meaning of Dissawar. The old woman in the romance, v. 249 ff., says, ‘Dissawar is a poor name, yet Dissawar you shall not be, for good help you shall have;’ and the schoolmaster, v. 283 ff., says, ‘Dissawar, thou shalt want neither meat nor laire.’ It would seem that they understood the word to mean, “in want.” Some predecessor of the romance may by and by be recovered which shall put the meaning beyond doubt.Return to passage

[50] Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 1875, I, 523 and note. “In 1585, a man that had been robbed, and had sworn silence, told his story to a stove in a tavern.” A boy who has come to knowledge of a plot, and has been sworn to secrecy on pain of death, unburdens his mind to a stove. Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, No 513, II, 231.Return to passage

272

THE SUFFOLK MIRACLE

‘The Suffolk Miracle.’ =a.= Wood, E. 25, fol. 83. =b.= Roxburghe, II, 240; Moore’s Pictorial Book of Ancient Ballad Poetry, p. 463.

Also Pepys, III, 332, No 328; Crawford, No 1363; Old Ballads, 1723, I, 266.

A young man loved a farmer’s daughter, and his love was returned. The girl’s father sent her to his brother’s, forty miles off, to stay till she should change her mind. The man died. A month after, he appeared at the uncle’s at midnight, and, as he came on her father’s horse and brought with him her mother’s travelling gear, he was allowed to take the girl away with him. As they rode, he complained of headache, and the girl bound her handkerchief about his head; he was cold as clay. In two hours they were at her father’s door. The man went to put up the horse, as he said, but no more was seen of him. The girl knocked, and her father came down, much astonished to see her, and still more astonished when she asked if her lover, known by the father to be dead, had not been sent to bring her. The father went to the stable, where the girl said the man would be; there was nobody there, but the horse was found to be ‘all on a sweat.’ After conferences, the grave was opened, and the kerchief was found about the head of the mouldering body. This was told to the girl, and she died shortly after.

This piece could not be admitted here on its own merits. At the first look, it would be classed with the vulgar prodigies printed for hawkers to sell and for Mopsa and Dorcas to buy. It is not even a good specimen of its kind. Ghosts should have a fair reason for walking, and a quite particular reason for riding. In popular fictions, the motive for their leaving the grave is to ask back plighted troth, to be relieved from the inconveniences caused by the excessive grief of the living, to put a stop to the abuse of children by stepmothers, to repair an injustice done in the flesh, to fulfil a promise; at the least, to announce the visitant’s death. One would not be captious with the restlessness of defeated love, but what object is there in this young man’s rising from the grave to take his love from her uncle’s to her father’s house? And what sense is there in his headache?

I have printed this ballad because, in a blurred, enfeebled, and disfigured shape, it is the representative in England of one of the most remarkable tales and one of the most impressive and beautiful ballads of the European continent. The relationship is put beyond doubt by the existence of a story in Cornwall which comes much nearer to the Continental tale.[51]

Long, long ago, Frank, a farmer’s son, was in love with Nancy, a very attractive girl, who lived in the condition of a superior servant in his mother’s house. Frank’s parents opposed their matching, and sent the girl home to her mother; but the young pair continued to meet, and they bound themselves to each other for life or for death. To part them effectually, Frank was shipped for an India voyage. He could not write, and nothing was heard of him for nearly three years. On All-hallows-Eve Nancy went out with two companions to sow hemp-seed. Nancy began the rite, saying:

Hemp-seed, I sow thee, Hemp-seed, grow thee! And he who will my true-love be Come after me And shaw thee.

This she said three times, and then, looking back over her left shoulder, she saw Frank indeed, but he looked so angry that she shrieked, and so broke the spell. One night in November a ship was wrecked on the coast, and Frank was cast ashore, with just enough life in him to ask that he might be married to Nancy before he died, a wish which was not to be fulfilled. On the night of his funeral, as Nancy was about to lock the house-door, a horseman rode up. His face was deadly pale, but Nancy knew him to be her lover. He told her that he had just arrived home, and had come to fetch her and make her his bride. Nancy was easily induced to spring on the horse behind him. When she clasped Frank’s waist, her arm became stiff as ice. The horse went at a furious pace; the moon came out in full splendor. Nancy saw that the rider was in grave-clothes. She had lost the power of speech, but, passing a blacksmith’s shop, where the smith was still at work, she recovered voice and cried, Save me! with all her might. The smith ran out with a hot iron in his hand, and, as the horse was rushing by, caught the girl’s dress and pulled her to the ground. But the rider held on to the gown, and both Nancy and the smith were dragged on till they came near the churchyard. There the horse stopped for a moment, and the smith seized his chance to burn away the gown with his iron and free the girl. The horseman passed over the wall of the churchyard, and vanished at the grave in which the young man had been laid a few hours before. A piece of Nancy’s dress was found on the grave. Nancy died before morning. It was said that one or two of the sailors who survived the wreck testified that Frank, on Halloween, was like one mad, and, after great excitement, lay for hours as if dead, and that when he came to himself he declared that if he ever married the woman who had cast the spell, he would make her suffer for drawing his soul out of his body.[52]

A tale of a dead man coming on horseback to his inconsolable love, and carrying her to his grave, is widely spread among the Slavic people (with whom it seems to have originated) and the Austrian Germans, was well known a century ago among the northern Germans, and has lately been recovered in the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, and Brittany. Besides the tale in its integrity, certain verses which occur in it, and which are of a kind sure to impress the memory, are very frequent, and these give evidence of a very extensive distribution. The verses are to this effect:

The moon shines bright in the lift, The dead, they ride so swift, Love, art thou not afraid?

to which the lovelorn maid answers,

How fear, when I am with thee?[53]

There are also ballads with the same story, one in German, several in Slavic, but these have not so original a stamp as the tale, and have perhaps sprung from it.

The following will serve as specimens of the tale in question; many more may certainly be recovered:

=Great Russian.= 1-5, Sozonovič, Appendix, Nos 1, 2, 7, 8, 9.[54] =Little Russian.= 6-8, Trudy, II, 411, 413, 414, Nos 119-21; 9, Dragomanof, p. 392; 10-15, Sozonovič, Appendix, Nos 4-6, 10-12; 16, Bugiel, in the Slavic Archiv, XIV, 146. =White Russian.= 17, 18, Sozonovič, Appendix, No 3; Dobrovolśkij, Ethnographical Collection from Smolensk, p. 126, No 58. =Servian.= 19, Krauss, in Wisła, IV, 667. =Croat.= 20, 21, Strohal, pp. 114, 115, Nos 20, 21. =Croat-Slovenian.= 22-24, Valjavec, Narodne Pripovjedke, p. 239; Plohl-Herdvigov, I, 127, 129. =Slovenian.= 25, 26, Krek, in the Slavic Archiv, X, 357, 358. =Polish.= 27, Zamarski, p. 121; 28, Grudziński, p. 15; 29, Lach-Szyrma, Pamiętnik Naukowy, 1819, I, 358; 30, Kolberg, Lud, XIV, 181; 31, Treichel, in Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, II, 144; 32, Chełchowski, II, 40-42, No 59; 33, Siarkowski, in Zbiór wiadomości do antropologii krajowéj, III, III (21). =Bohemian.= 34, Sumlork, I, 608; 35, Erben, Kytice z básní, p. 23 (ballad founded on tale). =Slovak.= 36, Dobśinsky, pp. 23-30 (three versions). =Wendish.= 37, Schulenburg, Wendische Volkssagen, p. 137 (fragment). =Lithuanian.= 38, Leskien u. Brugman, p. 160, No 2, p. 497, No 43. =Magyar.= 39, Pap, Palóc Népköltemények, p. 94, also Arany and Gyulai, I, 207, No 52, and 569, Aigner, in Gegenwart, 1875, No 12. =Gypsy.= 40, Wlisłocki, Volksdichtungen der siebenbürgischen u. südungarischen Zigeuner, p. 283, No 43. =German=, High and Low. 41, Sztodola, in Herrmann, Ethnologische Mittheilungen aus Ungarn. col. 341 f. (Ofen); 42-45, Vernaleken, Mythen u. Bräuche des Volkes in Oesterreich, pp. 76 f., 79 f., Nos 6-9 (Lower Austria); 46-48, A. Baumgarten, Aus der volksmässigen Ueberlieferung der Heimat (Geburt, Heirat, Tod), pp. 135, 136, 136 f. (Upper Austria); 49, Boeckel, in Germania, XXXI, 117 (Baden); 50, 51, Jahn, Volkssagen aus Pommern u. Rügen, pp. 404, 406, No 515, I, II; 52, J. F. Cordes, in The Monthly Magazine, 1799, VIII, 602 f. (Glandorf, Lower Saxony); 53, Müllenhof, Sagen, etc., p. 164, No 224 (Ditmarsch). =Netherlandish.= 54-56, Pol de Mont, in Volkskunde, II, 129-31. =Danish.= 57, Grundtvig, Danmarks g. Folkeviser, III, 873. =Icelandic.= 58, Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur, I, 280 ff.; Maurer, Isländische Volkssagen, p. 73 f.

A lover, who has long been unheard of, but whose death has not been ascertained, roused from his last sleep by the grief of his mistress (which in some cases drives her to seek or accept the aid of a spell), comes to her by night on horseback and induces her to mount behind him. As they ride, he says several times to her, The moon shines bright, the dead ride swift, art not afraid? Believing him to be living, the maid protests that she feels no fear, but at last becomes alarmed. He takes her to his burial-place, and tries to drag her into his grave; she escapes, and takes refuge in a dead-house (or house where a dead man is lying). The lover pursues, and calls upon the dead man within the house to give her up, which in most cases, for fellowship, he prepares to do. At the critical moment a cock crows, and the maid is saved.

Some of the tales are brief and defective, some mixed with foreign matter. The predominant traits, with a few details and variations, may be briefly exhibited by a synoptical analysis.

A pair of lovers are plighted to belong to each other in life and death, 50, 51, 57; whichever dies first is to visit the other, 48; the man, at parting, promises to come back, alive or dead, 25, 26. The man dies in war, 1, 2, 10, 14, 15, 17, 20-22, 25-29, 31, 32, 36, 39, 42, 45-52; the maid, her lover not returning, grieves incessantly, 4, 6-13, 15-18, 28, 29, 32, 49, 53. (The return of the lover is enforced by a spell, recommended or conducted by an old woman, 22, 28, 36, 39, 41, 45, advised by a priest, 20, 21, worked by the maid, 33; a dead man’s head, bones, carcass, boiled in a pot, 15-17, 20, 21, 22, 27, 39, a piece of the man’s clothing, 28, a cat burned in a red-hot oven, 33.) The man comes on horseback, mostly at night; she mounts with him, 1-5, 8-12, 14-23, 25-32, 36-44, 46, 48-53, 56-58, taking with her a bundle of clothes, smocks, etc., 1, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 32, 35, 36, 38. (There are two horses, 45; they go off in coach or wagon, 6, 7, 13, 24, 33; stag for horse, 47; afoot, 35, 54.) As they go, the man says or sings once or more, The moon shines bright, the dead ride fast, art thou afraid? and she answers that with him she has no fear. The verses occur in some form in all copies but 2, 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, 29, 32, 33, 38, 40, 51, and are mostly well preserved. (It is a voice from the churchyard in 38.)

Arrived at a grave in a churchyard, the man bids the maid to go in, 2, 4-6, 8, 10-17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 32, 36, 39; she says, You first, 2, 4-6, 8, 11-17, 23, 24, 32, 36, 39; she will first throw him her things, and then come, 14; she throws in her bundle of things, 1, 5, 23, 24, 26, 32, 36; hands them to him one after another, 6, 7, 16, 17; tells him to take her by the hands, and reaches out to him the sleeves of her gown, 2, 12; gives him the end of a piece of linen or of a ball of thread to pull at, 16, 19; asks him to spread her kerchief in the grave to make the frozen ground softer, 27, all this to gain time. He tears her things in the grave, 9, 13, 24; he seizes her apron, clutches her clothes, to drag her in, 4, 8, 21, 22, 25, 43, 44, 47, 48 (in 4 she cuts the apron in two, in 8 tears her gown off, in 25, 43, 44, 48, her apron parts); she runs off, 1-9, 11, 13-17, 20-27, 29, 30, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50; she throws down articles of dress to delay his pursuit, he tears them, 9, 13, 18, 38.

The maid takes refuge in a dead-house (or house in which there is a dead body, or two, or three), 1-4, 6, 8, 11-15, 17, 18, 20-22, 24-27, 29, 30, 32, 34-36, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46 (malt-kiln, 5, house of vampire, 16). She climbs on to the stove, or hides behind it, 6-8, 11, 13-16, 21, 24, 26, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41. The dead lover calls to the dead in the house to open, hand her out, 4, 6, 8, 11, 17, 20-22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 57 (to seize the girl, 11; to tear her to pieces, 24); the dead man within is disposed to help his comrade, makes an effort so to do, 11, 29, 34, 41, 45, 46; opens the door, 6, 21, 36, 39; is prevented from helping because the maid has laid her cross, scapular, on his coffin, 4, 17; (two dead, because she has laid her rosary on the feet of one, her prayer-book on the feet of the other, 32;) the maid throws at him beads from her rosary, which check his movements until the string is exhausted; the maid puts up three effectual prayers, 35; Ave sounds, 48; by the maid’s engaging his attention with a long tale, 38; because his wife or a watcher knocks him on the head, and orders him to lie where he is, 20, 30; because his wife has turned him over on his face, 57. In a few cases the dead man within inclines to protect the maid, 1, 22, 25; the two get into a fight, 1, 13-15, 17, 26, 36 (quarrel, 7). The cock crows, and the dead fall powerless, return to their places, turn to pitch, vanish, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13-15, 17, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34-36, 39, 41, 45, 46, and the maid is saved.[55]

In some of the tales of this section the maid is not so fortunate: in 6, the two dead take her by the legs and tear her asunder; in 21, the lover tears her, the dead man in the house having surrendered her. In 39, the lover, having been let in, says to the other dead man, Let us tear her to pieces, and is proceeding to do so, but is stopped by the cock. She dies of shock, or after a few days, 8, 11, 13, 16, 17, 29, 31, 32, 36.

The maid’s escape assured, in one way or another, the man calls to her, Your good luck: I would have taught you to weep for the dead (he had been tearing her things in the grave, and her shift, which she had dropped to delay his pursuit), 9. Your body would have been rent into as many bits as your smocks (a bit was found on every grave in the churchyard), 22, 35. I would have torn you into a thousand tatters. I was all but saved, and have had to come so far! Then he warned her never again to long for the dead, 42. I would have taught you to disturb the dead, 41. It was her luck, for she would have been torn into a thousand bits, like her apron. Let this be a warning to you, says Our Lady to the girl, never to mourn so much again for the dead, for he had a hard journey to make, 43. He tore a portion of her gown into a thousand pieces, and laid one on every grave, saying, You were not so much a simpleton to mourn for me as I was not to tear you to pieces, 30. There was on every grave a bit of her gown, from which we may see how it would have fared with her, 31.

Resentment for the disturbance caused by the maid’s excessive grief is expressed also in 6, Since you have wept so much for me, creep into my grave; in 12, she has troubled him by her perpetual weeping, he will take her where he dwells; in 20, Another time do not long for my dead body; in 27, You have mourned for me, now sleep with me; in 32, the maid’s continual weeping is a burden to her lover in his grave. In 40, the remonstrance is affectionate and like (suspiciously like) that of Helgi and of Sir Aage (II, 235).

In some copies the story closes at the grave, 2, 10, 19, 23, 28, 40, 43, 44, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58; many of these, however, are brief and defective. The man lays himself in the grave, which closes, she flies, 23; he descends into the grave and tries to draw her in by her apron, the apron tears, she faints, and is found lying on the ground the next morning, 43; he descends into the grave and tries to draw her after him, she resists, the grave closes, and she remains without, 47; he disappears, she is left alone, 49, 52. She goes into the grave, remains there, and dies, 10; the grave opens, he pushes or drags her in, 54; both disappear in the grave, 56; the horse rushes three times round in a ring, and they are nowhere, 53; she is killed by the man, her flesh torn off, and her bones broken, 51.

The maid finds herself in a strange land, 44, 47; she is among people of different language, 26, 28, 29, 45; nobody knows of the place which she says she came from, 27; she is a long time in getting home, and nobody knows her then, 25; she is years in going home (from two to nine), 20, 22, 28, 46.

The man and woman are a married pair in 2, 3, 23, 44, 45; in 44, the woman has married a second time, contrary to a mutual agreement. 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, have a taint of vampirism, and in 2 a stake is driven through the body of the man after he has returned to his grave, as was done with vampires.

In 31, the maid throws herself from the horse, the man, holding to her gown, tears off a large piece of it, and bits of the gown are found on every grave the next day; so in the Cornish tale, when the maid is pulled from the horse, the man retains a portion of her gown, and a piece is found on his grave. In 27, the maid’s kerchief is found in the man’s grave, and serves to corroborate her story; so in the Suffolk tale, with the handkerchief which the maid had bound round the man’s head. 55, a brief and corrupted copy, compares very well with the Suffolk tale for pointlessness. The man comes on his father’s horse, takes the girl on, and rides with her all round the village. Towards morning he brings the maid back to her chamber, and the horse to the stable, and goes where he came from.

Ballads. Little =Russian.= 1, 2, Golovatsky, I, 83, No 40; II, 708, No 12. =Slovenian.= 3, Valjavec, as before, preface, p. IV. =Polish.= 4, Grudziński, p. 25, ‘Helene,’ Galicia; 5, Max Waldau (G. v. Hauenschild) in Deutsches Museum, 1851, I, 136, No 5, Kreis Ratibor, Oberschlesien; 6, Mickiewicz, ‘Ucieczka’ (Works, Paris, 1880, I, 74), based on a ballad sung in Polish in Lithuania. =Bohemian=, Moravian. 7, Erben, 1864, p. 471; 8, Bartoš, 1882, p. 150; 9, 10, Sušil, p. 791, p. 111, No 112. =Gypsy.= 11, Wlisłocki, as before, p. 104, South Hungary. =German.= 12, Schröer, Ein Ausflug nach Gottschee, Wiener Akademie, Sitzb. d. phil.-hist. Classe, LX, 235.[56]

As I have already said, the ballads seem less original than the tales; that is, to have been made from tales, as ‘The Suffolk Miracle’ was. 5, 7, 10, are of the vulgar sort, like the English piece, 7 having perhaps received literary touches. In none of them does the maid fly and the man pursue; the catastrophe is at the grave.

The lovers have sworn mutual faith, 5, 10; the maid wishes that the man may come back, dead or living, 3, 10, 12; even from hell, 6.

The man has fallen in war, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12.

A spell is employed to bring him back, 1, 2, 6, 9.

He comes on a horse, 3, 4, 6-8, 11, 12; in a wagon, 5, 10; on foot, 1, 2, 9.

The verses found in the tales occur in 3 (three times), 4, 5, 6, 12; in 10, a voice from the clouds cries, What hast thou done, to be going off with a dead man?

She is taken to a graveyard. The grave closes over the man, she is left without, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12; both go into the grave, 4, 6, 7, 11.

She breathes out her soul on the grave, 3; she finds herself in the morning in a strange land, of different speech, is seven years in going home, 12.

1, 2, 9, are varieties of one ballad. The man asks the maid to go out with him to the dark wood, 1; to the cherry-tree (trees), 2, 9. After a time, he tells her to go back, he is no longer her lover, but a devil; she turns to dust, 1; the cock crows, he tells her to go home and not look round, to thank God for the cock, because he should have cut off her head, he is no longer her lover but a devil, 2. In 9, the man says his head aches badly, for, after mouldering six years, she had forced him to rise by her spell. The maid tells her mother that her lover is buried under the cherry-trees, mass is said for him; he returns to give thanks for his redemption from hell.[57]

Reverting now to the English tales, we perceive that the Cornish is a very fairly well-preserved specimen of the extensive cycle which has been epitomized. Possibly the full moonshine is a relic of the weird verses which occur in so many copies. The hemp-seed rite is clearly a displacement and perversion of the spell resorted to in five Slavic and two German copies to compel the return of the dead man. It has no sense otherwise, for the maid did not need to know who was to be her lover; she was already bound to one for life and death. The ballad was made up from an imperfect and confused tradition. In pointlessness and irrationality it easily finds a parallel in the 55th tale, as already remarked. The hood and safeguard brought by the ghost represent the clothes which the girl takes with her in numerous copies. Remembering the 9th ballad, where the revenant complains of a headache, caused by the powerful enchantment which had been brought to bear on him, we may quite reasonably suppose that the headache in ‘The Suffolk Miracle,’ utterly absurd to all appearance, was in fact occasioned by a spell which has dropped away from the Suffolk story, but is retained in the Cornish.

M. Paul Sébillot has recently (in 1879) taken down, in that part of Brittany where French is exclusively spoken, a tale which is almost a repetition of the English ballad, and which for that reason has been kept by itself, ‘Les Deux Fiancés,’ Littérature orale de la Haute-Bretagne, p. 197. A young man and a maid have plighted themselves to marry and to be faithful to one another even after death. The young man, who is a sailor, goes on a voyage, and dies without her learning the fact. One night he leaves his tomb, and comes on a white mare, taken from her father’s stable, to get the girl, who is living at a farm at some distance from her own home. The girl mounts behind him: as they go he says, The moon is bright, death is riding with you, are you not afraid? and she answers, I am not afraid, since you are with me. He complains of a headache; she ties her handkerchief round his head. They arrive at the girl’s home; she gets down and knocks. To an inquiry, Who is there? she replies, Your daughter, whom you sent for by my husband that is to be. I have come on horseback with him, and lent him my handkerchief on the way, since he had none. He is now in the stable attending to the horse. They go to the stable and find the mare in a sweat, but no man. The girl then understands that her lover is dead, and she dies, too. They open the man’s grave to bury the two together, and find the girl’s handkerchief on his head. This is the English ballad over again, almost word for word, with the difference that the lover dies at sea, and that the substance of the notable verses is preserved.

In marked and pleasing contrast with most of the versions of the tale with which we have been dealing, in so many copies grotesque and ferocious, with a lover who, from impulses not always clear, from resentment sometimes that his comfort has been disturbed by her unrestrained grief, sometimes that she has been implicated in forcing him by magic to return to the world which he had done with, is bent on tearing his lass to pieces, is a dignified and tender ballad, in which the lovers are replaced by brother and sister. This ballad is found among the Servians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians, and is very common among the Greeks, both of the mainland and the islands.

=Servian.= Karadžić, II, 38, No 9, ‘Yovan and Yelitza;’ Talvj, Volkslieder der Serben, 1853, I, 295; Dozon, Chansons p. bulgares, p. 321; Bowring, Servian Popular Poetry, p. 45. Davidović, pp. 10-14, ‘Yovo and Mara,’ No 7; Krek, in Magazin f. d. Litt. d. In- u. Auslandes, p. 652, No 8.

=Bulgarian.= Dozon, Chansons p. bulgares, p. 130, No 7, p. 319. Kačanovskij, p. 120, No 48; Krek as above, p. 653 f., No 10, ‘Lazar and Yovana.’ Miladinof, 1861, 1891, p. 145, No 100, ‘Lazar and Petkana;’ Krek, p. 653, No 9. Miladinof, p. 317, No 200, ‘Elin Doika;’ Rosen, Bulgarische Volksdichtungen, p. 247, No 103. ‘Elin Doina,’ Popov, in Periodičesko Spisanie, II, 162, lacks the last half; Krek, p. 654, No 11. ‘Yana,’ Miladinof, p. 339, No 229, Rosen, p. 116, No 32, diverges considerably from the others.

=Romaic.= Twenty copies, including all previously published, Polites, in Δελτίον τῆς ἱστορ. κ. ἐθνολ. ἑταιρ. τ. Ἑλλάδος, II, 193-261, 552-57, 1885-87. Kanellakes, Χιαχὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, p. 37, No 27, p. 58, No 49, 1890. Ζωγραφεῖος Ἀγών, I, 308, No 30, 397, No 17, 1891. ‘Constantine and Arete’ (mostly). C. B. Sheridan, The Songs of Greece, p. 207; C. C. Felton, in English and Scottish Ballads, Boston, 1860, I, 307; Lucy M. J. Garnett, Greek Folk-Songs, etc., 1885, p. 126.

=Albanian.= (‘Garentina,’ = Arete.) De Rada, Rapsodie, etc., p. 29 (I, xvii); Dozon, Ch. p. bulgares, p. 327, De Grazia, C. p. albanesi, p. 138. Camarda, Appendice al Saggio, etc., p. 98 (fragment, last half), p. 102. Dora d’ Istria, Revue des Deux Mondes, LXIII, 407. La Calabria, II, 55, 1890.--Tale, Metkos, Ἀλβανικὴ Μέλισσα, p. 189, No 12, translated in Dozon, Contes albanais, p. 251.[58]

A mother has nine sons and an only daughter. The daughter is sought in marriage; the mother and eight of her sons wish to match her in their neighborhood, but the youngest son (whom it will be convenient to call Constantine) has his way, and she is given to a suitor from a distant country (often Babylon). The brothers are to visit their sister often (Slavic); Constantine promises to bring her to his mother should there be special occasion. A fatal year comes, and all the brothers die of the plague (in a few cases they are killed in war). The mother chants laments at the graves of the eight, strews flowers, burns candles, gives alms for their souls; at Constantine’s grave she tears her hair. She curses Constantine for the distant marriage, and demands of him her daughter. God takes pity (on mother, sister, or son). The stone over his grave (his coffin, a board for the grave, his shroud, a cloud) is turned into a horse; he goes to his sister and informs her that she is wanted by her mother. The sister will put on gold for joy or black for grief; she is to come as she stands. (He tries to prevent her going, in the Servian copies, where his object is to pay the promised visit.) On the way the sister notes that Constantine is gray with mould, he smells of earth, his skin is black, his eyes are dull, his hair is dusty, his hair or teeth fallen out; why is this? He has been at work in the ground, has been building nine white houses, there has been dust, wind, and rain on the road, he has had long watches, sore sickness. He smells of incense, too; that is because he has been at church lately. Birds call out in human voice as they pass, What wonder is this, the living travelling with the dead! (Thrice in Romaic, 9, 10, and the Albanian tale, twice in Romaic 13.) The sister asks Constantine if he hears what the birds are saying; he hears, they are birds, let them talk. They near their mother’s house; a church is hard by. Constantine bids his sister go on; he must say a prayer in the church, or pay a votive candle, find a ring which he lost there, see to his horse; he disappears. The house is locked, the windows shut, there is every sign of desolation and neglect. The daughter knocks; the mother, from within, cries, Avaunt, Death! I have no more children! The daughter cries, It is I.[59] Who brought you? Constantine. Constantine is dead; (has been dead three days, forty days, five months, twelve years!) The mother opens, they die in a mutual embrace (the mother dies, one dies within, one without).

‘Le Frère de Lait,’ Villemarqué, Barzaz Breiz, No 22, p. 163, ed. 1867, has no claim to be associated with these ballads, the only feature in which it has similarity not being genuine. Compare ‘La Femme aux deux Maris,’ Luzel, Gwerziou Breiz-Izel, I, 266-71, two versions, and II, 165-69, two more; and see Luzel, De l’authenticité des chants du Barzaz-Breiz, p. 39.

1 A wonder stranger ne’r was known Then what I now shall treat upon. In Suffolk there did lately dwell A farmer rich and known full well.

2 He had a daughter fair and bright, On whom he plac’d his chief delight; Her beauty was beyond compare, She was both virtuous and fair.

3 A young man there was living by, Who was so charmëd with her eye That he could never be at rest, He was with love so much possest.

4 He made address to her, and she Did grant him love immediately; Which when her father came to hear, He parted her and her poor dear.

5 Forty miles distant was she sent, Unto his brother’s, with intent That she should there so long remain Till she had chang’d her mind again.

6 Hereat this young man sadly grievd, But knew not how to be relievd; He sighd and sobd continually That his true love he could not see.

7 She by no means could to him send Who was her heart’s espousëd friend; He sighd, she grievd, but all in vain, For she confin’d must still remain.

8 He mournd so much that doctor’s art Could give no ease unto his heart; Who was so strang[e]ly terrified, That in short time for love he dyed.

9 She that from him was sent away Knew nothing of his dying-day, But constant still she did remain; To love the dead was then in vain.

10 After he had in grave been laid A month or more, unto this maid He comes about middle of the night, Who joyd to see her heart’s delight.

11 Her father’s horse, which well she knew, Her mother’s hood and safeguard too, He brought with him to testifie Her parents’ order he came by.

12 Which when her unckle understood, He hop’t it would be for her good, And gave consent to her straightway That with him she should come away.

13 When she was got her love behind, They passd as swift as any wind, That in two hours, or little more, He brought her to her father’s door.

14 But as they did this great haste make, He did complain his head did ake; Her handkerchief she then took out, And tyed the same his head about.

15 And unto him she thus did say: ‘Thou art as cold as any clay; When we come home, a fire wee’l have;’ But little dreamt he went to grave.

16 Soon were they at her father’s door, And after she ne’r see him more; ‘I’le set the horse up,’ then he said, And there he left this harmless maid.

17 She knockt, and strait a man he cryed, ‘Who’s there?’ ‘’Tis I,’ she then replyed; Who wondred much her voice to hear, And was possest with dread and fear.

18 Her father he did tell, and then He stared like an affrighted man: Down stairs he ran, and when he see her, Cry’d out, My child, how cam’st thou here?

19 ‘Pray, sir, did you not send for me, By such a messenger?’ said she: Which made his hair stare on his head, As knowing well that he was dead.

20 ‘Where is he?’ then to her he said; ‘He’s in the stable,’ quoth the maid. ‘Go in,’ said he, ‘and go to bed; I’le see the horse well littered.’

21 He stared about, and there could hee No shape of any mankind see, But found his horse all on a sweat; Which made him in a deadly fret.

22 His daughter he said nothing to, Nor no one else, though well they knew That he was dead a month before, For fear of grieveing her full sore.

23 Her father to his father went Who was deceasd, with this intent, To tell him what his daughter said; So both came back unto this maid.

24 They askd her, and she still did say ’Twas he that then brought her away; Which when they heard they were amaz’d, And on each other strang[e]ly gaz’d.

25 A handkerchief she said she tyed About his head, and that they tryed; The sexton they did speak unto, That he the grave would then undo.

26 Affrighted then they did behold His body turning into mould, And though he had a month been dead, This kercheif was about his head.

27 This thing unto her then they told, And the whole truth they did unfold; She was thereat so terrified And grievd, she quickly after dyed.

28 Part not true love, you rich men, then; But, if they be right honest men Your daughters love, give them their way, For force oft breeds their lives’ decay.

* * * * *

The Suffolk Miracle, or, A relation of a young man who a month after his death appeared to his sweetheart and carryed her behind him fourty miles in two hours time and was never seen after but in the grave.

To the tune of My bleeding heart, etc.

London: Printed for W. Thackery and T. Passenger. [1689. The date added by Wood.]

Roxburghe and Crawford: Printed by and for A. M[ilbourne], and sold by the booksellers of Pye-corner

Pepys: Printed for F. C[oles], T. V[ere], J. W[right], J. C[lark], W. T[hackeray], T. P[assinger].

* * * * *

=a.=

14^3, 25^1. handcherchief.

16^4. he set (O. B. left).

17^2. whose.

22^1. too.

24^4. others.

25^4. undoe.

=b.=

3^1. There was a young man.

4^1. addresses.

4^3. But when.

16^4. he set.

19^1. did not you.

19^3. hair stand.

27^2. did wanting.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] Mr W. E. A. Axon, in his Lancashire Gleanings, p. 261, speaks of the story of the Spectre Bridegroom as having been current in the neighborhood of Liverpool in the last century, both in an oral and a printed form. But it is plain that what was current, either way, was simply ‘The Suffolk Miracle.’ Of this I have a copy learned in the north of Ireland in 1850 (and very much changed as to form), in which the scene is laid “between Armagh and County Clare.”Return to passage

[52] Popular Romances of the West of England, collected and edited by Robert Hunt, First Series, pp. 265-72, dating from about 1830.Return to passage

[53] A portion (or portions) of a Low German tale of this class, the verses and a little more, was the basis of Bürger’s ‘Lenore,’ composed in 1773. (As to the particulars of the traditional basis, Erich Schmidt seems to me undoubtedly right: Charakteristiken, p. 219 f.) At the end of the last century, when ‘Lenore’ became well known in England through half a dozen translations, it was maintained that Bürger had taken the idea of his ballad from ‘The Suffolk Miracle,’ with which he was supposed to have become acquainted through the copy in Old Ballads, 1723. See The Monthly Magazine, 1796, II, 603. But it is nearly certain that Bürger had not seen, and never saw, the “Old Ballads” of 1723. In 1777 Boie made him acquainted with a book of that title, but this was in all probability Evans’s first collection, which appeared in that year. See Strodtmann, Briefe von und an G. A. Bürger, II, 85, 87. Bürger knew ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ from Percy’s Reliques, and took a hint or two from that, besides the lover’s name.Return to passage

[54] I. Sozonovič, Bürger’s ‘Lenore,’ and the related matter in European and Russian popular poetry, Warsaw, 1893 (in Russian). Professor Wollner has furnished me translations of some twenty-five pieces in Sozonovič. See, for German versions of many of the Slavic tales and ballads, Wollner, in Archiv für slavische Philologie, VI, 243-59; Krek, in the same, X, 357-59, and in Magazin für die Litteratur des In- u. Auslandes, 1887, CXII, 629-32, 650-54; Grudziński, Lenore in Polen, 1890, p. 13 ff.; Treichel, in Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, II, 144.Return to passage

[55] 30, 31, 32, 50, have curious popular traits. In 30, 32, the dead man (men) within being unable to render aid, the lover calls to yarn spun on Thursday (on Thursday after the evening meal) to open. A watchman tells the yarn to stay where it was hanged; the girl cuts the skein in two with an axe. In 31 there is no corpse in the house; the lover calls on a ball of thread and a broom, ‘ohne Seele’ (with no centre-piece, no handle) to open. In 50 the dead man within cannot help the man without because a broom is standing on its handle; so the man without calls on a skein of yarn, a pot-hook, a ball of thread, to open. For various reasons these appeals prove bootless.Return to passage

[56] For German versions of most of the Slavic pieces, Grudziński, as before, p. 27; Wollner, as before, pp. 250, 255 f., 258; Krek, as before, p. 652. 7 also in A. Waldau’s Böhmische Granaten, II, 254, No 354.Return to passage

‘Lenore’ in Wunderhorn, II, 19, 1808, is to be rejected as spurious, on internal and external evidence. See Pröhle, G. A. Bürger, Sein Leben und seine Dichtungen, 1856, p. 100 f.

[57] In 11 we have to do with a married pair, as in several of the tales. In tale 44 the woman has been twice married, and her first husband comes for her.Return to passage

[58] No filiation is implied in the above arrangement of the ballads.Return to passage

[59] The mother demands tokens of her identity, Romaic 11, 12, 21, 22, Albanian 4, 5. Cf. II, 215Return to passage

273

KING EDWARD THE FOURTH AND A TANNER OF TAMWORTH

=a.= Wood, 401, fol. 44, Bodleian Library.

=b.= Douce, I, 109, Bodleian Library.

=c.= Roxburghe, I, 176, 177; Chappell, Roxburghe Ballads, I, 529.

The ballad is also in the Pepys collection, II, 129, No 113, and there are two copies in the Euing collection, Nos 273, 274.

The following entries occur in the Stationers’ Registers:

1564, September or October, William Greffeth licenced to print a book intituled ‘The story of Kynge Henry the IIIJ^th and the Tanner of Tamowthe.’ Arber, I, 264.

1586, August 1, Edward White, ‘A merie songe of the Kinge and the Tanner.’ Arber, II, 451.[60]

1600, October 6, William White, by the consent of Widow Danter, ‘A merye, pleasant and delectable history betwene Kinge Edward the IIIJ^{th} and a Tanner of Tamworthe,’ and, by like consent of the Widow Danter, “the bal[l]ad of the same matter that was printed by her husband John Danter.” Arber, III, 173.

1615, December 9, John Trundle, for a ballad of ‘The King and the Tanner.’ Arber, III, 579.

1624, December 14, Master Pavier, John Wright, and others, a ballad, ‘King and Tanner.’ Arber, IV, 131.

The ballad mentioned in the entry under the year 1600 is unquestionably our ballad, or an earlier form of it. No copy from the first half of the seventeenth century is known to be preserved. The “delectable history” entered under the same date is extant in an edition of 1596, printed by John Danter, and in one of 1613, printed by William White.[61] The ballad, as we have it, was made by abridging the fifty-six stanzas of the history to thirty-nine, with other changes. The history itself has its predecessor, and, as Ritson remarks, its undoubted original, in ‘The King and the Barker,’[62] between which and the history, though the former has come down to us in a sadly mutilated condition, and has been freely treated in the remodelling, there still remain a few verbal correspondences. Several good points are added in the history, and one or two dropped.

‘King Edward the Fourth and Tanner of Tamworth,’ in Percy’s Reliques, 1765, II, 75, was compounded from Danter’s history, 1596, and a copy “in one sheet folio, without date, in the Pepys collection.”[63]

King Edward, while out a-hunting, sees a tanner coming along the way, and takes a fancy to accost him. Leaving his lords under a tree, he rides forward and asks the tanner the way to Drayton Basset; the tanner directs him to turn in at the first pair of gallows. The king presses for a civil answer; the tanner bids him be gone; he himself has been riding all day and is fasting. The king promises meat and drink of the best for his company to Drayton Basset; the tanner makes game of the offer, and tries to get away, but in vain. The king now proposes to change his horse for the tanner’s mare; the tanner demands a noble to boot, nor shall a cowhide which he is riding on go with the mare. The cowhide thrown on to the king’s saddle frightens the horse and the tanner is pitched off; after this he will not keep the horse, but the king in turn exacts a noble to boot. Then the king sounds his horn, and his attendants come riding in; the tanner takes the whole party to be strong thieves, but when he sees the suite fall on their knees he would be glad to be out of the company. ‘A collar! a collar’ cries the king (to make the tanner esquire, but this is inadvertently left out in the ballad). ‘After a collar comes a halter,’ exclaims the unhappy tanner. But the king is graciously pleased to pay for the sport which he has had by conferring on the tanner an estate of three hundred pound a year;[64] in return for which his grateful liegeman engages to give him clouting-leather for his shoon if ever he comes to Tamworth.

Next to adventures of Robin Hood and his men, the most favorite topic in English popular poetry is the chance-encounter of a king, unrecognized as such, with one of his humbler subjects. Even in the Robin Hood cycle we have one of these meetings (in the seventh and eighth fits of the Little Gest), but there the king visits Robin Hood deliberately and in disguise, whereas in the other tales (except the latest) the meeting is accidental.

The most familiar of these tales are ‘The King and the Tanner,’ and ‘The King and the Miller;’ the former reaching back beyond the sixteenth century, the latter perhaps not beyond the seventeenth, but modelled upon tales of respectable antiquity, of which there is a specimen from the early years of the thirteenth century.[65]

In the history or “ballad” of ‘The King and the Miller,’ or, more specifically, ‘King Henry Second and the Miller of Mansfield,’ the king, while hunting in Sherwood, loses his nobles and is overtaken by night; he meets a miller, and after some colloquy is granted a lodging; is entertained with bag-puddings and apple-pies, to which is added a course of ‘light-foot,’ a pasty of the king’s deer, two or three of which, the miller tells his guest in confidence, he always keeps in store. The nobles recover the king at the miller’s the next morning; the miller looks to be hanged when he sees them fall on their knees; the king dubs him knight. The king has relished his night with the miller so much that he determines to have more sport out of him, and commands the attendance of the new knight with his lady and his son Dick at court on St. George’s day. The three jet down to the king’s hall on their mill-horses. In the course of the dinner the king expresses a wish for some of their light-foot; Dick tells him that it is knavery to eat of it and then betray it. Sir John Cockle and Dick dance with the court-ladies, and the buffoonery ends by the king’s making the miller overseer of Sherwood, with a stipend of three hundred pound, to which he attaches an injunction to steal no more deer.[66]

Of the older poems, ‘John the Reeve’ (910 vv.) may be noticed first, because it has a nearly complete story, and also resemblance in details with ‘The King and the Tanner,’ or ‘The King and the Miller,’ which two others of perhaps earlier date have not. ‘John the Reeve’ is now extant only in the Percy MS. (p. 357, Hales and Furnivall, II, 550). Since there had been but three kings of the name of Edward (v. 16), it must have been composed, as Mr Hales has remarked, between the death of Edward III and the accession of Edward IV, 1376-1461, and forms of language show that the Percy text must be nearer the end than the beginning of this period.[67]

Edward Longshanks, while hunting, is separated from all his train but a bishop and an earl. Night comes on, and they know not where they are, and the weather is cold and rough. As they stand considering which way to turn, a stout carl rides by; they beg him to take them to some harbor. The fellow will at first have nothing to do with them, but finally shows a disposition to be accommodating if they will swear to do him no harm; all that he can promise them, however, is beef and bread, bacon a year old, and sour ale; as for a good fire, which the king would particularly like, they cannot have that, for fuel is dear. They ride on to a town, light at a comely hall, and are taken into a room with a bright fire and candles lighted. The carl, who has already described himself as John the Reeve, husbandman and the king’s bondman, inquires of the earl who the long fellow may be, and who the other in the sark: the first, he is told, is Piers, the queen’s chief falconer, the other a poor chaplain, and the earl himself a sumpterman. ‘Proud lads, and I trow penniless,’ is John’s comment; he himself, though not so fine, has a thousand pound and more. They move on to the hall, and are civilly received by the goodwife. John marshals the company, now increased by two daughters of the house, and by Hodge and Hob, two neighbors, setting the three strangers and his wife at the head of the table, his daughters farther down, and taking the end himself with his neighbors. Bean-bread, rusty bacon, lean salt beef a year old, and sour ale are brought in, and every one has a mess. The king murmurs, John says, Thou gettest no other; the king coaxes, John will not give them a morsel unless they swear never to tell of him to Edward. All three pledge their troth, and then come in fine bread, wine red and white, in silver cups, the boar’s head, capons, venison,--everything that king could have or crave. After the supper, John, Hob, and Hodge perform a rustic dance; King Edward (who gets his shins kicked) never had so merry a night. In the morning they hear mass and eat a good breakfast, for which they promise warison, and then the king takes leave and rides to Windsor. The lords have a good story to tell the queen; she prays the king to send for the reve. John is convinced that he has been beguiled by his guests, but arms himself with such as he has, and, after a huge libation with Hodge and Hob, sets forth. The porter at the palace will not let him in; John knocks him over the crown and rides into the hall. Neither before this nor then will he vail hat or hood. [The passage in which the reve discovers that Piers falconer was the king has dropped out.] John bears himself sturdily; the king can punish him, but the king is honorable and will keep his word, and may remember the promised warison. The king gives thanks for the hot capons and good wine, the queen urges that the reve should be promoted. The king, nothing loath, makes John a gentleman, and gives him his manor, a hundred pound and a tun of wine yearly, then takes a collar and creates him knight. John blenches a little at the collar; he has heard that after a collar comes a rope; but he recovers his nerve after supping off a gallon of wine at the table. It is now the bishop’s turn to do something; he promises his good offices for John’s two sons and two daughters; these, in the end, are well disposed of, and Hodge and Hob are made freemen. John ever after keeps open board for all guests that God sends him.

The tale of Rauf Coilyear,[68] shortly after 1480, has for its personages Charles the Great and a charcoal-burner. Charles, on his way to Paris from St Thomas, is isolated from his cortége by a fierce storm; night has come on and he is in a strait for shelter. By good luck Rauf makes his appearance, a churl of prodigious inurbanity, but ready to take in any good fellow that is ‘will of his way.’ Arrived at his house, Rauf calls to his wife to make a fire and kill capons. When supper is dight, the guest is told to give the goodwife his hand and take the head of the table. Charles hangs back; the churl, who has once before criticised his manners, hits him under the ear and sends him sprawling to the floor. There is a plenteous supper, in which venison is not lacking. The carl tells the king that the foresters have threatened to send him to Paris for deer stealing, but he means to have enough for himself and a guest in spite of them. Then after wine they sit by the fire and the collier tells many a tale. Charles is affable; Rauf asks him his name and where he lives; Wymond is his name, and he lives with the queen, in fact, is of her bed-chamber; if Rauf will come to court he shall have the better sale for his fuel. Charles is put to bed in a handsome room, and rises so early that he has to waken his host to take leave. He is urged not to go so soon, but to-morrow is Yule and every officer of the court must be at his post. He wishes to pay the goodwife for her good entertainment; Rauf will not hear of such a thing. Come to court to-morrow, says the king; I want coals myself. Roland and Oliver and a thousand more have been wandering all night in search of their lord, and thank God when they recover him on the road to Paris. Rauf sets out for the court with his coals, according to appointment; the king has him in mind, and sends out Roland to bring in such man as he may meet. Roland finds the collier intractable, and has to return without him. The king is displeased, and Roland is on the point of going again, when he learns from a porter that there is a man with a horse and baskets at the gate who will not be turned away. Rauf is let in; he gives his horse in charge to the porter, and pushes into the hall to find Wymond, and after being shoved about a good deal, gets sight of him, dressed in cloth of gold, and clearly a much greater man than he had called himself; he is daunted by all the splendor; if he could but get away, nothing should bring him to the court again. The king then tells the story of his night at Rauf’s, not pretermitting the earl’s rough behavior. The lords laugh, the knights are for hanging him; the king thinks he owes better thanks, and dubs Rauf knight, assigns him three hundred a year, and promises him the next fief that falls vacant.[69]

‘King Edward Third and the Shepherd,’ MS. of about 1450, Cambridge University Library, Ff. 5. 48 b, 1090 vv.[70]

The king, while taking his pleasure by a river-side one morning, meets Adam, a shepherd, and engages in talk with him. The shepherd complains of the king’s men, who help themselves to his beasts, sheep, hens, and geese, and at best pay with a tally. Edward is concerned for the king’s good fame; he is a merchant, but has a son with the queen who can get any boon of her, and the shepherd shall have what is due him. That is four pound two, says Adam, and you shall have seven shillings for your service. It is arranged that the shepherd shall come to court the next day and ask the porter for Joly Robyn. The king is kept a long time by the shepherd’s stories, but not too long, for when he is invited to come home and take a bit to eat he accepts with pleasure. They see many a coney, hart, and hind, on their way, and the king tries to put up Adam, who has been bragging of his skill with the sling, to kill a few; but the man, as he says, knows very well the danger of poaching, and never touches anything but wild fowl. Of these they have all sorts at their meal, and two-penny ale. Before they set to drinking, Adam instructs the king in an indispensable form: he that drinks first must call out ‘passilodion,’ and the respondent ‘berafrynd.’ Edward praises the dinner, but owns to a hankering for a little game. Can you keep a secret? asks the shepherd; indeed he can. Upon this assurance, Adam fetches pasties of rabbits and deer; of these he is wont to kill more than he himself needs, and sends presents to gentlemen and yeomen, who in return furnish him with bread, ale, and wine. Wine follows: Edward calls ‘passilodion;’ Adam is ready with ‘berafrynd.’ The king now takes leave, but before he goes the shepherd shows him a room underground well stored with venison and wine, and they have one draught more. The next day the shepherd goes to court and asks the porter for Joly Robyn. The king has prepared his lords for the visit, and directed them to call him by that name. Adam is paid his four pound two, and offers Robyn the promised seven shillings for his mediation. Robyn will take nothing; he would do much more than that for love; Adam must dine with him, and is placed at the head of a table. The king sends the prince to Adam for a bout of passilodion; Adam says the merchant has betrayed him, and wishes he were out of the place. A squire is now ordered to tell Adam that Joly Robyn is the king. Adam puts down his hood, which up to this time he would do for nobody,[71] falls on his knees, and cries mercy. The rest is wanting, but we may be certain that Adam was knighted and presented with an estate.

‘King Edward and the Hermit,’ MS. Ashmole 6922, of about 1450, a fragment of 522 vv.[72]

The king, hunting in Sherwood, follows a remarkably large deer till he loses himself. By the favor of St Julian, he discovers a hermitage; he asks quarters for the night; the hermit lives on roots and rinds, and such a lord would starve with him, but he yields to urgency. The guest must take such as he finds, and that is bread and cheese and thin drink. King Edward expresses his surprise that the hermit should not help himself out with the deer; the hermit is much too loyal for that, and besides, the peril is to be considered. Still the king presses for venison; no man shall know of it; the hermit, convinced that he is safe with his company, brings out venison, salt and fresh, and then a four-gallon pot. The king is taught to drink in good form; when one calls ‘fusty bandyas,’ the other must come in with ‘stryke pantere;’ and thus they lead holy life. Such cheer deserves requital; if the hermit will come to court, where his guest is living, he has only to ask for Jack Fletcher, and they two will have the best that is there; the ‘frere,’ though not eager to close with this proposal, says he will venture a visit. To show Jack more of his privity he takes him into his bedroom and gives him a bow to draw; Jack can barely stir the string; the frere hauls to the head an arrow an ell long. Then, wishing that he had a more perfect reliance on Jack’s good faith, the hermit exhibits his stock of venison, after which they go back to their drinking, and keep it up till near day. They part in the morning; the king reminds his host of the promised visit, and rides straight for home. His knights, who have been blowing horns for him all night in the forest, are made happy by hearing his bugle, and return to the town. This is all that is preserved, but again we may be confident that King Edward made the hermit an abbot.

That the hermit had some habilitation for such promotion appears from a story told by Giraldus Cambrensis two hundred years before the apparent date of any of these poems.[73]

King Henry Second, separated from his men in hunting, came to a Cistercian house at nightfall and was hospitably received, not as king (for this they knew not), but as a knight of the king’s house and retinue. After a handsome supper, the abbot asked his help in some business of the fraternity on which he was to visit the king the next day, and this was readily promised. The abbot, to improve his guest’s good disposition, had his health drunk in many a cup of choice wine, after the English fashion; but instead of the customary salutation or challenge ‘wes heil!’[74] called ‘pril!’ The king, who would have answered ‘drinc heil!’ was at a loss how to respond; he was told that ‘wril!’ was the word. And so with ‘pril’ and ‘wril’ they pursued their compotation, monks, freres, guests, servants, deep into the night. The next morning the king rejoined his party, who had been much alarmed at losing him. Order was given that when the abbot came he should be immediately admitted, and it was not long before he made his appearance, with two of his monks. The king received him graciously, all that he asked was granted; the abbot begged leave to retire, but the king carried him off to luncheon and seated him by his side. After a splendid meal, the king, lifting a big cup of gold, called out, ‘Pril, father abbot!’ The abbot, staggering with shame and fear, begged his grace and forgiveness. The king swore by God’s eyes that as they had eaten and drunk together in good fellowship the night before, so should it be to-day; and it should be ‘pril’ and ‘wril’ in his house as it had been at the convent. The abbot could not but obey, and stammered out his ‘wril,’ and then king and abbot, knights and monks, and, at the king’s command, everybody in hall and court, kept up unremittingly a merry and uproarious interchange of ‘pril’ and ‘wril.’

Of all the four old poems we may repeat what Percy has said of ‘John the Reeve,’ that “for genuine humor, diverting incidents, and faithful pictures of rustic manners, they are infinitely superior to all that have been since written in imitation,” meaning by these the broadside ballads or histories.[75] A brief account of such of these as have not been spoken of (all of very low quality) is the utmost that is called for.

‘The Shepherd and the King.’[76] King Alfred, disguised in ragged clothes, meets a shepherd, and all but demands a taste of his scrip and bottle. The shepherd will make him win his dinner, sword and buckler against sheep-hook. They fight four hours, and the king cries truce; ‘there is no sturdier fellow in the land than thou,’ says the king; ‘nor a lustier roister than thou,’ says the shepherd. The shepherd thinks his antagonist at best a ruined prodigal, but offers to take him as his man; Alfred accepts the place, is equipped with sheep-hook, tar-box, and dog, and accompanies his master home. Dame Gillian doubts him to be a cut-throat, and rates him roundly for letting her cake burn as he sits by the fire.[77] Early the next morning Alfred blows his horn, to the consternation of Gill and her husband, who are still abed. A hundred men alight at the door; they have long been looking for their lord. The shepherd expects to be hanged; both he and his wife humbly beg pardon. Alfred gives his master a thousand wethers and pasture ground to feed them, and will change the cottage into a stately hall.

‘King James and the Tinker.’[78] King James, while chasing his deer, drops his nobles, and rides to an ale-house in search of new pleasures, finds a tinker there, and sets to drinking with him. The tinker has never seen the king, and wishes he might; James says that if he will get up behind him he shall see the king. The tinker fears that he shall not know the king from his lords; the nobles will all be bare, the king covered. When they come to the greenwood the nobles gather about the king and stand bare; the tinker whispers, ‘they are all gallant and gay, which, then, is the king?’ ‘It must be you or I,’ answers James, for the rest are all uncovered. The tinker falls on his knees, beseeching mercy; the king makes him a knight with five hundred a year. (Compare the story of James Fifth of Scotland and John Howieson, Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, ch. 27.)

‘The King and the Forester.’[79] King William the Third, forbidden to hunt by a forester who does not recognize him, tries in vain to bribe the man, makes himself known, presents the forester with fifty guineas, and appoints him ranger.

‘The Royal Frolick, or, King William and his Nobles’ Entertainment at the Farmer’s House on his return from the Irish wars.’[80] King William, ‘returning to London from Limerick fight,’ stops at a farm-house ‘for merriment sake,’ and asks country cheer for himself and his nobles. The farmer and his wife have gone to the next market-town to see the king pass, and their daughter alone is at home. She serves bacon and eggs, all that she has; the king throws her ten guineas, and one of his lords adds two for loyal sentiments which the girl had expressed. In a Second Part the farmer and his wife, when they return, learn that the king is at their house, are ordered into his presence, and are rewarded for the meal which had been furnished.[81]

‘The King and the Cobbler’ (a prose history).[82] King Henry Eighth, visiting the watches in the city, makes acquaintance with a cobbler, and is entertained in the cobbler’s cellar; invites the cobbler to court, directing him to inquire for Harry Tudor, etc.; settles upon him land in the Strand worth fifty pound a year, which land is to be called Cobler’s Acre.

* * * * *

Campbell, West Highland Tales, IV, 142, says that he has a Gaelic tale like ‘The Miller of Mansfield.’

A Belgian story of the Emperor Charles Fifth and a broom-maker has all the typical points of the older cycle, and, curiously enough, Charles Fifth instructs the broom-maker to bring a load of his ware to the palace to sell, as Charles the Great does in the case of Rauf Coilyear: Maria von Ploennies, Die Sagen Belgiens, p. 251.

The same collection, p. 246 f., has the story of the man who wished to see the king (an anecdote of Charles Fifth and a peasant). This story turns up again in Thiele’s ‘Kongen og Bonden,’ Danmarks Folkesager, I, 62 (1843). Christian the Fourth, after a long walk, takes a seat in the cart of a countryman who is on his way to the castle. The countryman wishes that he might see the king; the king will be the only man to keep his hat on; the countryman says, It must be you or I.

After the older pattern is this Russian story, Afanasief, VII, 233, No 32 (given me by Professor Wollner). A tsar who has lost himself while hunting passes the night with a deserter in a robbers-hut in a wood. They draw lots who shall stand guard, and the lot falls to the tsar, to whom the soldier gives his side-arms. Notwithstanding many warnings, the tsar dozes on his post, and at last the soldier, first punishing him a little, packs him off to sleep. The robbers come, one by one, and are shot by the soldier. The next day the deserter shows the tsar his road, and afterwards pays the tsar a visit at court, discovers who his comrade was, and is made general.

The Emperor Maximilian Second, while walking in a wood, comes upon a charcoal-burner; they have a talk, and the emperor is invited to share the man’s dumplings. Maximilian asks the charcoal-burner to pay him a visit when he comes to the city, lets him see the princes and the empress, and gives him a luncheon. There is no éclaircissement at the time. In the end the charcoal-burner and his family are employed in the imperial garden.[83]

Robert Dodsley made a very pleasing little sentimental drama out of ‘The King and the Miller of Mansfield’ (1737), and from this play (perhaps through a translation, ‘Le Roi et le Meunier,’ made before 1756), Sédaine took the substance of ‘Le Roi et le Fermier,’ 1762, and Collé the idea of ‘La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV, 1774.’ Goldoni’s musical drama, ‘Il re alla caccia’ (King Henry IV of England), produced a year after Sédaine’s play, seems to have been suggested by it: vol. 37 of the edition of Venice, 1794.

* * * * *

Percy’s ballad is translated by Bodmer, I, 172.

* * * * *

1 In summer time, when leaves grew green, and birds were singing on every tree, King Edward would a hunting ride, some pastime for to see.

2 Our king he would a hunting ride, by eight a clock of the day, And well was he ware of a bold tanner, came riding on the way.

3 A good russet coat the tanner had on, fast buttoned under his chin, And under him a good cow-hide, and a mare of four shilling.

4 ‘Now stand you here, my good lords all, under this trusty tree, And I will wend to yonder fellow, to know from whence came he.

5 ‘God speed, God speed,’ then said our king; ‘thou art welcome, good fellow,’ quoth he; ‘Which is the way to Drayton Basset I pray thee shew to me.’

6 ‘The ready way to Drayton Basset, from this place as thou dost stand, The next pair of gallows thou comst to thou must turn up [on] thy right hand.’

7 ‘That is not the way,’ then said our king, ‘the ready way I pray thee shew me;’ ‘Whether thou be thief or true man,’ quoth the tanner, ‘I’m weary of thy company.

8 ‘Away, with a vengeance,’ quoth the tanner, ‘I hold thee out of thy wit, For all this day have I ridden and gone, And I am fasting yet.’

9 ‘Go with me to Drayton Basset,’ said our king, ‘no daintyes we will lack; We’l have meat and drink of the best, And I will pay the shot.’

10 ‘Godamercy for nothing,’ said the tanner, ‘thou shalt pay for no dinner of mine; I have more groats and nobles in my purse then thou hast pence in thine.’

11 ‘God save your goods,’ then said the king, ‘and send them well to thee!’ ‘Be thou thief or true man,’ quoth the tanner, ‘I am weary of thy company.

12 ‘Away, with a vengeance,’ quoth the tanner, ‘of thee I stand in fear; The aparrell thou wearst on thy back May seem a good lord to wear.’

13 ‘I never stole them,’ said our king, ‘I swear to thee by the rood;’ ‘Thou art some ruffian of the country, thou rid’st in the midst of thy good.’

14 ‘What news dost thou hear?’ then said our king, ‘I pray what news do you hear?’ ‘I hear no news,’ answered the tanner, ‘but that cow-hides be dear.’

15 ‘Cow-hides? cow-hides?’ then said our king, ‘I marvell what they be;’ ‘Why, art thou a fool?’ quoth the tanner, ‘look, I have one under me.’

16 ‘Yet one thing now I would thee pray, so that thou wouldst not be strange; If thy mare be better then my steed, I pray thee let us change.’

17 ‘But if you needs with me will change, As change full well may ye, By the faith of my body,’ quoth the tanner, ‘I look to have boot of thee.’

18 ‘What boot wilt thou ask?’ then said our king, ‘what boot dost thou ask on this ground?’ ‘No pence nor half-pence,’ said the tanner, ‘but a noble in gold so round.’

19 ‘Here’s twenty good groats,’ then said the king, ‘so well paid see you be;’ ‘I love thee better then I did before, I thought thou hadst nere a peny.

20 ‘But if so be we needs must change, as change thou must abide, Though thou hast gotten Brock my mare, thou shalt not have my cow-hide.’

21 The tanner took the good cow-hide, that of the cow was hilt, And threw it upon the king’s saddle, That was so fairly guilt.

22 ‘Now help me, help me,’ quoth the tanner, ‘Full quickly that I were gone, For when I come home to Gillian my wife she’l say I’m a gentleman.’

23 The king took the tanner by the leg, he girded a fart so round; ‘You’r very homely,’ said the king, ‘were I aware, I’d laid you o th’ ground.’

24 But when the tanner was in the king’s saddle astonëd then he was; He knew not the stirrops that he did wear, whether they were gold or brass.

25 But when the steed saw the black cow-tale wag, for and the black cow-horn, The steed began to run away, as the divel the tanner had born.

26 Untill he came unto a nook, a little beside an ash; The steed gave the tanner such a fall his neck was almost brast.

27 ‘Take thy horse again, with a vengeance,’ he said, ‘with me he shall not abide;’ ‘It is no marvell,’ said the king, and laught, ‘he knew not your cow-hide.

28 ‘But if that we needs now must change, as change that well we mought, I’le swear to you plain, if you have your mare, I look to have some boot.’

29 ‘What boot will you ask?’ quoth the tanner, ‘What boot will you ask on this ground?’ ‘No pence nor half-pence,’ said our king, ‘but a noble in gold so round.’

30 ‘Here’s twenty [good] groats,’ said the tanner, ‘and twenty more I have of thine; I have ten groats more in my purse, we’l drink five of them at the wine.’

31 The king set a bugle-horne to his mouth, that blew both loud and shrill, And five hundred lords and knights came riding over a hill.

32 ‘Away, with a vengeance,’ quoth the tanner, ‘with thee I’le no longer abide; Thou art a strong thief, yonder be thy fellows, they will steal away my cow-hide.’

33 ‘No, I protest,’ then said our king, ‘for so it may not be; They be the lords of Drayton Basset, come out of the North Country.’

34 But when they came before the king full low they fell on their knee; The tanner had rather then a thousand pound he had been out of his company.

35 ‘A coller! a coller!’ then said the king, ‘a coller!’ then did he cry; Then would he have given a thousand pound he had not been so nigh.

36 ‘A coller? a coller?’ then quoth the tanner, ‘it is a thing which will breed sorrow; For after a coller commeth a halter, and I shall be hanged tomorrow.’

37 ‘No, do not fear,’ the king did say; ‘for pastime thou hast shown me, No coller nor halter thou shalt have, but I will give thee a fee.

38 ‘For Plompton Park I will give thee, with tenements three beside, Which is worth three hundred pound a year, to maintain thy good cow-hide.’

39 ‘Godamercy, Godamercy,’ quoth the tanner; ‘for this good deed thou hast done, If ever thou comest to merry Tamworth, thou shalt have clouting-leather for thy shone.’

* * * * *

=a, b.= A pleasant new ballad of King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth, as he rode a hunting with his nobles towards (=b=, to) Drayton Bass[et]. To an excellent new tune.

=a.= Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, and W. Gilbertson.

=b.= London, printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright.

=c.= A pleasant new ballad betweene King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth, as hee rode upon a time with his nobles on hunting towards Drayton Basset.... London, Printed by A. M. (probably Alexander Milbourne, 1670-97).

=a.=

1^1. grow.

1^2. birds sitting.

7^3, 36^1. qd.

8^2, 37^4. the.

13^4. of the.

18^3. no half pence said our king.

20^4. shalt noo.

23^2. guirded.

29^2. in this.

29^4. gould.

30^3. groat.

35^1. A choller, a coller.

35^2, 36^{1, 3}, 37^3. choller.

38^2. besides.

39^4. clout-leather.

=b.=

1^1. grow.

1^2. birds were singing.

2^1. he wanting.

3^2. to his.

6^4. up on.

7^3. be a: or a.

11^1. said our.

13^4. the wood.

14^2. pray thee: dost thou.

16^2. would.

17^1. if thou.

17^4. have some boot.

18^1. boot will you have.

18^3. nor half pence said the tanner.

19^1. said our.

19^2. see thou.

20^4. not have.

21^2. off.

22^1. Now help me up, quoth.

22^3. For wanting.

23^2. guirded.

23^4. I had.

24^1. But wanting.

24^2. astonished.

25^2. and before the.

26^1. into.

26^2. an oak.

26^4. almost broke.

28^1. now wanting.

28^2. change well now we might.

29^2. on this.

30^1. twenty good.

30^3. groats.

34^3. he gave a.

35^{1, 2}, 36^{1, 3}, 37^3. collar.

36^1. then wanting.

36^2. which wanting.

38^2. beside.

39^4. clout-leather.

=c.=

1^1. grew.

1^2. birds sitting.

2^4. come.

4^1. good my lords.

5^4. pray you shew it to.

6^1. ready wanting.

6^2. this way.

6^4. upon the left.

7^2. readiest.

8^3. all wanting.

9^3. For wee’l.

9^4. for the.

10^1. quoth the.

11^1. our king.

11^3. said the.

13^2. to you.

13^4. of thy.

14^1. doe you.

16^1. thing of thee I.

16^2. would.

16^4. pray you.

17^1. thou needs: wilt.

18^1. the king.

18^2. wilt thou.

18^3. nor half pence said the tanner.

19^2. see that you.

20^1. we must needs.

20^2. we must.

20^4. not have.

21^1. he tooke.

22^1. helpe, helpe me up.

23^2. girded.

23^3. then said.

23^4. I’de a laid.

24^2. that he.

28^1. wee must needs now change here.

28^2. well that we mote.

28^4. I doe looke.

29^1. wilt thou.

29^2. wilt thou: on this.

29^3. said the.

29^4. but in gold twenty pound.

30^1. twenty groats.

30^2. I had.

30^3. groats.

31^3. Then five.

34^3. a hundred.

34^4. of their.

35^{1,2}, 36^{1,3}, 37^3. coller.

35^2. that he did cry.

36^1. then wanting.

36^2. that is a thing will.

38^1. will thee give.

38^2. with the: beside.

38^3. five hundred.

The Pepys copy was printed for J. W[right], J. C[larke], W. T[hackeray], and T. P[assinger]. Euing, No 273, for F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clarke; No 274, for F. Coles, T. Vere, and W. Gilbertson (as =a=). Heber’s copy for F. Coles (1646-74).