The fair Queen of France
Sent him a turquoise ring and glove,
And charged him as her knight and love
For her to break a lance:
a fatal gift, as Flodden Field proved.[65]
In the ‘Lays’ of Marie, the Princess Guilliadun, having fallen in love with Sir Eliduc, sends him as tokens a ring and a rich girdle.
In the ‘Lyfe of Ipomydon,’ the manuscript of which is in the Harleian Collection at the British Museum, the queen gives her son a ring-token:—
It befell upon a day,
The queen to her son gan say,
In privitie and in counsail,
‘Thou hast a brother withouten fail,
Privily gotten me upon,
Ere I was wedded to any mon.
But hastily he was done fro me,
I ne wot if he alive be,
And he me sent, this ender (last) year,
A rich ring of gold full clear;
An ever he any brother had,
That I should give it him, he bade;
That where he come, among high or low,
By that ring he should him know.
Than take this ring, my son, of me:
In what country that he be,
Who that knoweth this ilke ring,
He is thy brother without lesing.’
Ipomydon accepts the ring, and promises to spare no pains in searching for its original proprietor, who, after various adventures, is found in the person of Sir Campanys, with whom he has an encounter, during which the latter discovers his mother’s ring on the finger of Ipomydon.
In the romance of ‘Sir Isumbras,’ when he and his wife and child are taken prisoners by the ‘Soudan,’ the lady, before her separation from her husband and child—
———callyd hir lorde to hir agayne,
A rynge was thaire takynnynge.
The mother of Sir Perceval of Galles gives him a ring-token:—
His moder gaffe hym a ryng,
And bad he solde agayne it bryng;
‘Sonne, this salle be oure takynnynge,
For here I salle the byde.’