Text.—The Percy Folio is the sole authority for this excellent lively ballad. It is here given as it stands in the manuscript, except for division into stanzas. Percy printed the ballad ‘verbatim,’—that is, with emendations—and also a revised version.
The Story, which exists in countless variations in many lands, is told from the earliest times in connection with the Arthurian legend-cycle. Restricting the article used as a criterion of chastity to a mantle, we find the elements of this ballad existing in French manuscripts of the thirteenth century (the romance called Cort Mantel); in a Norse translation of this ‘fabliau’; in the Icelandic Mantle Rhymes of the fifteenth century; in the Scalachronica of Sir Thomas Gray of Heton (circ. 1355); in Germany, and in Gaelic (a ballad known in Irish writings, but not in Scottish); as well as in many other versions.
The trial by the drinking-horn is a fable equally old, as far as the evidence goes, and equally widespread; but it is not told elsewhere in connection with the parallel story of the mantle. Other tests used for the purpose of discovering infidelity or unchastity are:— a crown, a magic bridge (German); a girdle (English; cp. Florimel’s girdle in the Faery Queen, Book iv. Canto 5); a bed, a stepping-stone by the bedside, a chair (Scandinavian); flowers (Sanskrit); a shirt (German and Flemish); a picture (Italian, translated to England—cp. Massinger’s The Picture (1630), where he localises the story in Hungary); a ring (French); a mirror (German, French, and Italian); and so forth.
Caxton, in his preface to Kyng Arthur (1485), says:— ‘Item, in the castel of Douer ye may see Gauwayn’s skull and Cradok’s mantel.’ Sir Thomas Gray says the mantle was made into a chasuble, and was preserved at Glastonbury.
Thomas Love Peacock says (The Misfortunes of Elphin, chap. xii.), ‘Tegau Eurvron, or Tegau of the Golden Bosom, was the wife of Caradoc [Craddocke], and one of the Three Chaste Wives of the island of Britain.’ A similar statement is recorded by Percy at the end of his ‘revised and altered’ ballad, taking it from ‘the Rev. Evan Evans, editor of the Specimens of Welsh Poetry.’
THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
1.
In the third day of May
to Carleile did come
A kind curteous child