English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 5 of 5

JOHN THOMSON AND THE TURK

Leyden (1801) says that he had “heard the whole song when very young.”[1] Motherwell’s copy was probably given him by Buchan.

John Thomson has been fighting against the Turks for more than three years, when he is surprised by receiving a visit from his wife, who walks up to him in a rich dress, as if Scotland were just round the corner. The lady stays several days, and then gives her husband to understand that she is going home. He recommends her to take a road across the lea, for by doing this she will escape wild Hind Soldan and base Violentrie. It is not so much an object with the lady to avoid these Turks as John Thomson supposes. The Soldan, it turns out, has been slain; but she goes straight to Violentrie. After a twelvemonth John Thomson sends a letter to Scotland, “to see about his gay lady.” An answer is returned that her friends have not laid eyes on her in all that time. John Thomson disguises himself as a palmer and hies to Violentrie’s castle, where he finds his lady established. Learning that the palmer has come from the Scots’ army in Greece, she asks whether one of the chieftains has seen his wife lately, and is told that it is long since the knight in question parted with his wife, and that he has some fear lest the lady should have been captured by his foes. The lady declares that she is where she is by her own will, and means to stay. The palmer throws off his disguise, begs to be hidden from Violentrie, and is put down in a dark cellar. Violentrie soon arrives and calls for his dinner, casually remarking that he would give ten thousand sequins for a sight of the Scot who has so often put him to flight. The lady takes him at his word, and calls up John Thomson. The Turk demands what he would do if their positions were exchanged. “Hang you up,” the Scot replies, with spirit, “and make you wale your tree.” Violentrie takes his captive to the wood. John Thomson climbs tree after tree, ties a ribbon to every branch, and puts up a flag as a sign to his men: all which the Turk thinks no harm. Then John Thomson blows his horn. Three thousand men come tripping over the hill and demand their chief. The Turk begs for mercy, and gets such as he would have given: they burn him in his castle, and hang the lady.

This ridiculous ballad is a seedling from an ancient and very notable story, which has an extensive literature, and has of late been subjected to learned and acute investigation.[2] It may be assumed with confidence that the story was originally one of King Solomon and his queen, of whom it is related in Russian, Servian, and German. In the course of transmission, as ever has been the wont, names were changed, and also some subordinate circumstances; in Portuguese, Solomon is replaced by Ramiro II, king of Leon; in a French romance by the Bastard of Bouillon. It is, however, certain that the Solomon story was well known to the French, and as early as the twelfth century.[3] Something of the same story, again, is found in König Rother and in the Cligès of Crestien de Troies, both works of the twelfth century, and in various other poems and tales.

The tale of the rape of Solomon’s wife and of the revenge taken by Solomon is extant in Russian in three byliny (or, we may say, ballads), taken down from recitation in this century, and in three prose versions preserved in MSS of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The byliny[4] relate that Tsar Vasily of Constantinople (or Novgorod), while feasting with his nobles, demands of them to find him a wife who shall be his fair match in stature, beauty, wit, and birth. One of the company undertakes to get for his master Salamanija (Salomonida), the beautiful wife of Salomon, Tsar of Jerusalem (or of Constantinople), and effects the business by enticing her on board of a ship to see fine things, an artifice of frequent occurrence in ballads. Salomon sets out to retrieve his wife, attended by a large army (which he conceals in a grove), presents himself at Vasily’s palace as a pilgrim (or other humble personage), is recognized by his wife, and shut up in a box. When Vasily comes back from hunting, Salamanija tells him what has chanced, and advises the instant execution of Salomon, which is resolved on. Salomon is to be beheaded, but he begs that he may be hanged, and that three nooses, of rope, bast, and silk, may be provided. Under the gallows Salomon asks to be allowed to sound his horn. Salamanija objects, but is overruled. He blows thrice; his army comes at the third sounding. Vasily is hanged in the silken noose, Salamanija in the rope, and the man that carried her off in the bast.

One of the prose tales narrates these transactions as follows. The wife of Solomon, king of Jerusalem, is stolen from him by his brother Kitovras, through the agency of a magician, who, in the character of a merchant, excites Solomon’s admiration for a magnificent purple robe. Solomon buys the robe, and invites the seeming merchant to his table. During the repast the magician envelops the king and his people in darkness, brings a heavy slumber upon the queen and her people, and carries her off in his arms to his ship. Solomon, learning that his wife is in the possession of Kitovras, proceeds against him with an army, which he orders to come to his help when they shall hear his horn sound the third time. Clad as an old pilgrim or beggar, he enters Kitovras’s garden, where he comes upon a girl with a gold cup, who is about to draw water. He asks to drink from the king’s cup. The girl objects, for, if reported to the king, such a thing would be the death of both of them; but the gift of a gold ring induces her to consent. The queen sees the ring on the girl’s hand, and asks who gave it to her. An old pilgrim, she replies. No pilgrim, says the queen, but my husband, Solomon. Solomon is brought before the queen, and asked what he has come for. To take off your head, he answers. To your own death, rejoins the queen; you shall be hanged. Kitovras is sent for, and pronounces this doom. Solomon reminds Kitovras that they are brothers, and asks that he may die in regal style; that Kitovras and the queen shall attend the execution, with all the people of the city; and that there shall be ample provision of food and drink: all which is granted. At the gallows he finds a noose of bast; he begs that two other nooses may be provided, one of red silk, one of yellow, so that he may have a choice, and this whim is complied with. Always urging their brotherhood, Solomon, at three successive stages, asks the privilege of blowing his horn. The army is at hand upon the third blast, and is ordered to kill everybody. Kitovras and the queen are hanged in the silken nooses, the magician in the bast.[5]

The variations of the other versions are mostly not material to our purpose. In one, King Por takes the place of Kitovras; in the third, the king of Cyprus. In the latter, Solomon asks to be hanged upon a tree, a great oak. The king of Cyprus begs for a gentle death, and his veins are opened. The queen is dismembered by horses.

A Servian popular tale runs thus. Solomon’s wife fell in love with another king, and not being able to escape to him on account of the strict watch which was kept over her, made an arrangement with him that he should send her a drink which should make her seem to be dead. Solomon, to test the reality of her death, cut off her little finger, and seeing no sign of feeling, had her buried. The other king sent his people to dig her up, restored animation, and took her to wife. When Solomon found out what had been done, he set out for the king’s palace with a body of armed men, whom he left in a wood, under orders to hasten to his relief when they heard the blast of a trumpet, each man with a green bough in his hand. The king was out a-hunting, the queen at home. She wiled Solomon into a chamber and locked him up, and when the king came back from the chase told him to go into the room and cut Solomon down, but to enter into no talk, since in that case he would certainly be outwitted. Solomon laughed at the king and his sword: that was not the way for a king to dispose of a king. He should take him to a field outside the city, and let a trumpet sound thrice, so that everybody that wished might witness the spectacle; then he would find that the very greenwood would come to see one king put another to death. The king was curious to know whether the wood would come, and adopted Solomon’s suggestion. At the first sound of the trumpet, Solomon’s men set forward; at the second they were near at hand, but could not be distinguished because of the green boughs which they bore.[6] The king, convinced that the wood was coming, ordered a third blast. Solomon was rescued; the king and his court were put to the sword.[7]

A Little Russian story of Solomon and his wife is given by Dragomanof, Popular Traditions and Tales, 1876, p. 103, translated in Revue des Traditions Populaires, II, 518, by E. Hins. Solomon takes a wife from the family of a heathen tsar. She hates him, and concerts an elopement with a heathen tsarevitch. She pretends to be dead. Solomon burns her hands through and through with a red-hot iron. She utters no sound, is buried in the evening, and immediately disinterred and carried off by her paramour. Solomon goes to the tsarevitch’s house, attended by three armies, a black, a white, and a red (which are, of course, kept out of sight), and furnished with three pipes. The tsarevitch has a gallows set up, and Solomon is taken out to be hanged. He obtains liberty first to play on his pipes. The sound of the first brings the white army, that of the second the red, that of the third the black. The tsarevitch is hanged, the tsaritsa dragged at a horse’s tail.

A like story is narrated in German in a passage of about two hundred and fifty verses, which is appended to the Wit-Combat, or Dialogue, of Solomon and Morolf; and again, with much interpolation and repetition, in a later strophic poem of more than four thousand lines. Both pieces are extant in manuscripts and print of the fifteenth century, but their original is considerably earlier.

In the briefer and earlier of the two German versions, Solomon’s wife has bestowed her love on a nameless heathen king, and wishes to escape to him, but cannot bring this about. She feigns to be sick, and the heathen (with whom she has been in correspondence) sends two minstrels to her, who pretend to be able to cure sick folk with their music. They obtain admission to the queen, give her an herb which throws her into a death-like sleep, and carry her off to their master. Morolf, at King Solomon’s entreaty, sets forth to find the queen, and, after traversing many strange lands, succeeds. Solomon, under his guidance and advice, and properly supported by an armed force, goes to the castle where the queen is living; leaves his men in an adjoining wood, under command to come to him when they hear his horn blow; and, disguised as a pilgrim, begs food at the castle. His wife knows him the moment she lays eyes on him, and tells the heathen that it is Solomon. The heathen, overjoyed, says to Solomon, If I were in your hands, what should be my death? Would God it were so! answers the king. I would take you to the biggest wood, let you choose your tree, and hang you. So shall it be, says the heathen, calls his people, takes Solomon to the wood, and bids him choose his tree. I shall not be long about that, says Solomon; but, seeing that I am of kingly strain, grant me, as a boon, to blow my horn three times. The queen objects; the heathen says, Blow away. At the third blast Morolf arrives with Solomon’s men. The heathen and all his people are slain; the queen is taken back to Jewry, and put to death by opening her veins in a bath.[8]

The longer poem has several additional incidents which recur in our ballad, and others which link it with other forms of the story. Salme, Solomon’s wife, is daughter of an Indian king (Cyprian, cf. the third Russian prose tale), and has been stolen from her father by Solomon. Fore, a heathen king, in turn steals Salme from the king of Jerusalem. Morolf is not the sharp-witted boor of the other piece, but Solomon’s brother. When Solomon goes to Fore’s castle, he is kindly received by that king’s sister, and she remains his fast friend throughout. He tells her that he is a sinful man, upon whom has been imposed a penance of perpetual pilgrimage. Brought before the queen, Solomon tries to make Salme come back to him. She lets him know that she loves Fore three times as well as him, and to Fore will she stick. Solomon is put into some side room. Fore comes home and sits down to table with Salme, and she informs him that Solomon is in his power. The army consists of three divisions, a black, a white, and a wan (bleich), nearly as in the Little Russian tale. The reason which Solomon alleges for wishing to blow his horn is to give notice to St Michael and the angels to come and take his soul in charge. Fore is hanged. Salme is disposed of as before, but not until after she has eloped with another king. Solomon marries Fore’s sister after Salme’s death.[9]

The adventure of Solomon will be recognized in what is recounted in Portuguese genealogies of the fourteenth century concerning King Ramiro Second of Leon († 950).[10] King Ramiro, smitten with passion for a beautiful Moorish lady, got himself invited to the castle of her brother Alboazar, at Gaya, and plumply asked for her. He would make her a Christian and marry her. Alboazar replied that Ramiro had a wife and children already. Ramiro could not deny this, but his queen was, it seems, conveniently near of kin to him, and Holy Church would allow a separation. The Moor swore that he never would give his sister to Ramiro. Ramiro, under cover of a darkness produced by an astrologer in his service, carried her off to Leon and had her baptized with the name Artiga. Alboazar, in revenge, availed himself of a favorable opportunity to lay hands on Aldora, Ramiro’s queen, and took her to his castle of Gaya. Ramiro, with five galleys crowded with his vassals, ran in at San João de Foz, near Gaya. He had taken the precaution to cover his galleys with green cloth, and he laid them under the boughs of trees with which the place was covered, so that they were not to be seen. Having landed his men, he left them under the command of his son, D. Ordonho, with directions that they should keep well hidden and not stir from the spot till they should hear his horn, but then come with all speed, and himself putting on mean clothes (panos de tacanho, de veleto) over sword, mail, and horn, went and lay down at a spring near the castle. One of the queen’s women came out to fetch water for her mistress. Ramiro, feigning to be unable to rise, asked her for a drink, which she offered him. He put into his mouth the half of a ring which he had divided with his queen, and dropped it into the vessel. The queen saw the half-ring and knew it, and elicited from her maid that she had met a sick beggar, who had asked for a drink. The man was sent for. ‘What brings you here, King Ramiro?’ demanded the queen. ‘Love for you,’ said he. ‘No love for me; you care more for Artiga,’ she retorted. Ramiro was put into a back room, and the door was locked. Presently Alboazar came into the queen’s chamber. The queen said to him, What would you do to Ramiro if you had him here? Put him to death cruelly (What he would do to me, kill him), responded the Moor. He is locked up in that room, said the queen, and you can proceed at your will.

Ramiro heard all this, and saw that he had never had more need to use his wits. He called in a loud voice to Alboazar: I wronged you by carrying off your sister. I confessed my sin to my priest, and he required of me as penance to go to you in this vile garb, and put myself in your power; and if you wished to take my life, I was to submit to death in a shameful place, and the fact and cause of my death were to be proclaimed by a horn to all your people. Now I have to ask that you would collect your sons, your daughters, your kinsfolk, and the people of this town, in a cattle-yard (curral), put me up high, and let me blow this horn that I wear, until breath and life fail. So you will have your revenge, and I shall save my soul. Alboazar began to feel compassion for Ramiro. Aldora exclaimed at his weakness and folly. Ramiro, she said, was revengeful and cunning, and sparing him was rushing into destruction; whereby the Moor was brought to say, You know that if you had me in your hands, I should not escape. I will do what you ask, for the salvation of your soul. So Alboazar took Ramiro to the yard, which had high walls and but one gate, and the queen, her dames and damsels, the Moor’s sons and kinsfolk, and the town’s people, were there. Ramiro was put on a pillar, and told to blow till life left his body; and he blew with all his might. D. Ordonho came with the king’s vassals and beset the gate. Ramiro drew his sword and split Alboazar’s head. The queen and her ladies were spared, but every other creature in the yard was slain, including four sons and three daughters of Alboazar, and no stone was left standing in Gaya. Ramiro put the queen and her women aboard the galleys. Aldora was found weeping. Ramiro asked the cause. Because you have killed the Moor, a better man than yourself, was her answer. This was thought too much to be borne. The queen was tied to a millstone and thrown into the sea. Ramiro married Artiga.[11]

There is a poem on this theme by João Vaz (Lisbon, 1630, reprinted by Braga, 1868), which points to a different source than the genealogies. Ramiro takes the sister of King Almanzor captive in war, and becomes enamored of her, in consequence of which Gaya, Ramiro’s wife, elopes with Almanzor. Gaya receives Ramiro with feigned kindness when he comes to the castle, then betrays him (as in the French romance).[12]

Almeida-Garrett composed a little romance out of the story as here given, with the name Zahara for Alboazar’s sister, and Gaia for Ramiro’s wife, and making Ramiro cut off Gaia’s head before he throws her into the water: ‘Miragaia,’ Romanceiro, I, 181, ed. 1863. He informs us that he has interwoven in his poem some verses from popular tradition. A ballad of Ramiro, or at least some remnant of one, appears still to be in existence. Madame de Vasconcellos (1880) had heard two lines of it.

Li Bastars de Buillon, a romance of the fourteenth century, repeats the chief incidents of the foregoing accounts, agreeing in details sometimes with one, sometimes with another.[13] Ludie, daughter of the emir of Orbrie, is to marry Corsabrin, king of Mont Oscur. The Bastard of Bouillon, who has heard of the beauty of the Saracen princess, conceives a sudden fancy for her. He besieges and takes the city of Orbrie, kills the emir, and compels Ludie to submit to baptism and to marriage with himself. She takes advantage of an absence of the Bastard to escape to Corsabrin, who makes her his queen. The Bastard, bent on vengeance, sails to Mont Oscur, and in the adjacent woods lights on a charcoal-man who is going to the castle in the way of his business. He kills the charcoal-man and puts on his clothes, and in this habit, with a well-blackened face, has no difficulty in obtaining entrance to the residence of Corsabrin. His men he has left in the wood under command of his counsellor and lieutenant, Hugh. Corsabrin is hawking, but the Bastard falls in with Ludie, who affects to be glad of his coming, and offers to go off with him if he will forgive her and do her no harm. A bath would seem to be in order. Ludie has one prepared for the Bastard, and while he is engaged in taking it, sends for Corsabrin, who comes in upon the young Frank with sixty men. Ludie enjoins her rightful husband to show no mercy. The Saracen will not do so infamous a thing as to put his enemy to death in a bath, but assures his wife that the Bastard shall die à guise de martir. A rich dress is furnished the Bastard, and Corsabrin then says, On your oath, now, what death should I die, were I in your power? Sire, says the Bastard, why should I dissemble? I promise you, I would take you to a wood, and I would hang you to the highest tree I could find. By Mahound! says the king, so will I do with you. The Bastard is taken to a wood, with a rope round his neck. Corsabrin’s people look out the highest tree. The Bastard is made to go up, higher and higher, the hangman drawing the rope all too tight the while, till the king says, Now. At the last moment the Bastard calls out to Corsabrin that he is a knight of high birth, and ought not to die like a rogue, but as a man of mark dies among the Franks. And how is that? asks the Saracen. They give him a horn, and he blows four or five times to summon the angels to come for his soul. Then he says a prayer. Then they strangle him or behead him. A horn is sent up to the Bastard, and he blows lustily. Hugh hears, and rides in hot haste to the call. The Bastard makes the most of his grace; his prayer is very long. He sees that a fight is going on below, and knocks the hangman dead from the tree with his fist, then comes down from the tree and joins in the fray. Hugh runs Corsabrin through with a lance, Ludie is taken captive, and every other living being in the castle is slain. Hugh begs as a reward for his services that he may have the disposal of Ludie. The Bastard accords the boon, with a recommendation to mercy: ‘arse fu li royne c’on appella Ludie.’

The escaping to a lover by taking a drug which causes apparent death, and the test of molten lead or gold, in the German poems, and in Cligès, 6000 ff., are found in ‘The Gay Goshawk,’ No 96, II, 355 ff. The test is also employed in one form of the Russian prose narratives: Vesselofsky, in the Slavic Archiv, VI, 409.

A portion of the story is preserved in Scandinavian ballads, with very distinct marks of Russian origin.

Swedish. ‘Jungfru Solfager,’ Arwidsson, I, 177, No 25: A from a MS. of the sixteenth century, B from recitation.

A. Solfager is a handsome woman, so handsome as to endanger her husband Sir David’s life. Fearing that she may be carried off, David in some way marks or stamps her hand with a gold cross, that she may be known thereby. As Solfager is standing at the castle gate, Novgorod’s (Nougård’s) king comes riding up. He asks if her husband is at home; Sir David went away the day before, and will not come back for a year. The king tells her that if she will plight herself to him she shall always wear gold shoes; Solfager answers that she loves David dearly. The king gives her a drink, two drinks; she swoons, and falls to the ground; she is laid on a bier, taken to the kirk-yard, and buried. The king (David in the text, absurdly) has kept his eye on their doings; he digs her up, and carries her out of the land. David, disguised as a pilgrim, goes to the king of Novgorod’s palace, and asks to be housed as a poor pilgrim. The king invites him in. David takes his place with other pilgrims; Solfager breaks bread for them. [Her hand is gloved.] David asks why she does not break bread with a bare hand; she calls him an old fool, and bids him eat or go. The king, from his bed, inquires what the pilgrim is saying. ‘Lie down, my lord,’ answers Solfager; ‘what a fool says is no matter.’ They all fall asleep in their places; Solfager follows Sir David home.

B. Solfot looks at her face in the water. ‘God help me for my beauty!’ she exclaims, ‘surely I shall come to a strange land.’ Her husband, the Danish king, tells her that he shall write a cross in her right hand, by which he shall find her again. While Solfot is combing her hair out of doors, the Ormeking asks her if she has a golden crown to put on it; she has four and five, all the gift of the king of the Danes. Ormeking gives her a drink which turns her black and blue; Solfot is laid in the ground; Ormeking knows well where, takes her up, carries her off to his own place, and gives her seven drinks; she stands up as good as ever. Daneking dons pilgrim’s clothes and goes to Ormeking’s. Solfot, as northern ladies wont, is combing her hair out of doors. Daneking asks for a pilgrim’s house; there is one on the premises, where poor pilgrims use (like King Claudius) to take their rouse. The pilgrims stand in a ring; Solfot is to dispense mead to them in turn. Daneking dashes his gloves on the board: ‘Is it not the way here that ladies deal mead with bare hands?’ Ormeking dashes his gloves on the board: ‘That was a bold word for a pilgrim!’ ‘If that was a bold word for a pilgrim,’ says Daneking, ‘it was bolder yet to dig Solfot out of the ground.’ Then he puts Solfot on his horse and rides away.

There are also two unprinted nineteenth-century copies in Professor G. Stephens’s collection.

Norwegian. ‘Sólfager og Ormekongin,’ Landstad, p. 503, No 56, from a woman’s singing. They stamp a gold cross on (or into? the process is not clear) Sólfager’s hand, that she may be recognized in a strange country. The Ormeking (or King Orm) comes riding while Sólfager is sunning her hair. ‘Trick King David,’ he says, ‘and bind yourself to me.’ ‘Never shall it be,’ she replies, ‘that I give myself to two brothers.’ He administers to her three potions, she swoons; word comes to King David that she is dead; they bury her. Ormeking does not fail to carry off the body. King David goes to Ormeking’s land in pilgrim’s garb, with pilgrim’s staff; as he enters the court Sólfager is undoing her hair. [Then there is a gap, which may be easily filled up from the Swedish story.] ‘Is it the custom here to cut bread with gloved hand?’ She takes off his pilgrim’s hat, and takes his yellow locks in her hand. ‘When you say you are a pilgrim, you must be lying to me.’ ‘Even so,’ he answers, ‘but I am your dear husband, as you easily may see. Will you go home with me?’ ‘Gladly,’ she says, ‘but I am afraid of Ormeking.’ King David takes Ormeking’s horse and rides home with his wife. When Ormeking comes back, Sólfager is away. (A final stanza does not belong to the story.)

There are other unprinted copies which will appear in a contemplated edition of Norwegian ballads by Sophus Bugge and Moltke Moe.

Danish. Eight unprinted MS. copies of the seventeenth century and a flying sheet of the date 1719. The ballad will be No 472 of Danmarks gamle Folkeviser.[14] A fragment of five stanzas (of dialogue relative to the gloved hand) is given by Kristensen, Jyske Folkeminder, X, 331, No 82.

It will be observed that the ravisher is king of Novgorod in Swedish A, as in one of the Russian epics, and that he is the brother of King David in the Norwegian ballad as he is of King Solomon in the Russian prose tale. The sleeping-draught, burial, and digging up are in the Servian tale, and something of them in the Little Russian tale, as also in the earlier German poem.

For the boon of blowing the horn see No 123, ‘Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar,’ and No 140, ‘Robin Hood rescuing Three Squires,’ III, 122, 177, ff.; also Heiðreks Saga, Rafn, Fornaldar Sögur, I, 458-61 (14), 529 f. (9); Vesselofsky, in the Slavic Archiv, VI, 404 f.; and Wollner’s note, Abschiedblasen, Brugman’s Litauische Märchen, p. 552.

August 1, 1586, there was allowed to Yarrat James as one of six ballads ‘A merrie jest of John Tomson and Jakaman his wife,’ Arber, Stationers’ Registers, II, 450. This ballad is preserved in the Roxburghe collection, I, 254, 255, Ballad Society’s edition, II, 136, and, so far as I have observed, there only. It is subscribed M. L., initials which Mr Chappell was unable to identify, and it was imprinted at London for Edward Wright. The Roxburghe copy was reprinted by R. H. Evans, Old Ballads, 1810, I, 187. The title is

It is dated in the Museum catalogue 1635?. This is an extremely vapid piece, and has no manner of connection with ‘John Thomson and the Turk.’ In Halliwell’s Notices of Popular English Histories, p. 91, Percy Society, vol. xxiii, there is one, No 108, of ‘John Thompson’s Man, or a short survey of the difficulties and disturbances that may attend a married life,’ etc., 24 pp., 12°. There is a copy in the Abbotsford Library.

‘To be John Thomson’s man’[15] is a Scottish proverb signifying to be submissive to a wife, or, more generally, to be complaisant. “John Thomson’s men” are “still ruled by their wives:” Colville’s Whig’s Supplication, or, The Scotch Hudibras, cited by Motherwell. “Samson was the greatest fool that ever was born, for he revealed his secrets to a daft hussie. Samson, you may well call him Fool Thompson, for of all the John Thomson’s men that ever was he was the foolest:” The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, etc., London, 1692 (cited by Motherwell, from the edition of 1768, in a MS. note, Appendix, p. x, in a copy of the Minstrelsy which belonged to Mr R. A. Ramsay.) Some begging verses of Dunbar to the King have the refrain, ‘God gif ye war Johne Thomsoneis man.’ (Other quotations in Leyden, p. 370, Motherwell, Appendix, p. ix.)[16]

THE EARL OF MAR’S DAUGHTER

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.

THE LORD OF LORN AND THE FALSE STEWARD

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:

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.

B.

THE SUFFOLK MIRACLE

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:

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:

to which the lovelorn maid answers,

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.

a.

b.

KING EDWARD THE FOURTH AND A TANNER OF TAMWORTH

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.

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.

b.

c.

THE KING AND THE BARKER

Library of the University of Cambridge, MS. Ee. iv, 35. 1, fol. 19 b. Written mostly in couplets of long lines, sometimes in stanzas of four short lines, with omissions, transpositions, and other faults.

It will be observed that neither in this tale nor in the “history” which follows does the tanner become aware that he has been dealing with “our kyng.” In both he calls the king “good fellow” to the very last. What happens at the meeting with Lord Basset, 30, is not made quite intelligible. It must be that Lord Basset and his men fall on their knees, but the conviction that “this” is the king seems to make no great difference in the tanner’s bearing.

Explycyt þe Kyng and the Barker.

KING EDWARD THE FOURTH AND A TANNER OF TAMWORTH

A merrie, pleasant and delectable Historie, betvveene King Edvvard the fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth, as he rode vpon a time with his nobles a (b, on) hunting toward Drayton Basset:

Verie pleasant and merrie to read.

a. Printed at London by John Danter, 1596. (8 pages.)

b. At London, printed by W. White, 1613. (8 pages.)

b has for a heading The King and the Tanner.

a.

b.

KING HENRY II AND THE MILLER OF MANSFIELD