THE BAFFLED KNIGHT
The Text is from Ravenscroft’s Deuteromelia (1609), reprinted almost verbatim in Tom Durfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy.
The Story was sufficiently popular not only to have been revived, at the end of the seventeenth century, but to have had three other ‘Parts’ added to it, the whole four afterwards being combined into one broadside.
In similar Spanish, Portuguese, and French ballads, the damsel escapes by saying she is a leper, or the daughter of a leper, or otherwise diseased. Much the same story is told in Danish and German ballads.