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.
THE BAFFLED KNIGHT
1.
1.2 ‘lay’ = lea, meadow-land.
Yonder comes a courteous knight,
Lustely raking over the lay;
He was well ware of a bonny lasse,
As she came wand’ring over the way.
Then she sang downe a downe, hey downe derry (bis)