He, when he saw that field was lost, and all his hope was flown,
He turned him from his flying host, and took his way alone.
In a prefatory note to his version, Lockhart says that this ballad ‘appears to be one of the oldest among the great number relating to the Moorish conquest of Spain.’ This is somewhat vague, but the remark might easily lead an ingenuous reader to think that the ballad was very ancient. This is not so. There is a thirteenth-century French epic, entitled Anséis de Carthage,[13] which represents Charlemagne as establishing in Spain a vassal king named Anséis. Anséis dishonours Letise, daughter of Ysorés de Conimbre, and Ysorés takes vengeance by introducing the Arabs into Spain. Clearly this is another version of the legend concerning the dishonour of ‘La Cava,’ daughter of Count Julian (otherwise Illán or Urbán) by Roderick. Anséis is manifestly Roderick, Letise is ‘La Cava,’ Ysorés is Julian, and Carthage may be meant for Cartagena. The transmission of this story to France, and a passage in the chronicle of the Moor Rasis—which survives only in a Spanish translation made from a Portuguese version during the fourteenth century by a certain Maestro Muhammad (who dictated apparently to a churchman called Gil Pérez)—would point to the existence of ancient Spanish epics on Roderick’s overthrow. But no vestige of these epics survives.
The oldest extant romances relating to Roderick are derived from the Crónica Sarrazyna of Pedro del Corral, ‘a lewd and presumptuous fellow,’ who trumped up a parcel of lies, according to Pérez de Guzmán. Corral’s book is not all lies: he compiled it from the Crónica general, the chronicle of the Moor Rasis, and the Crónica Troyana, and padded it out with inventions of his own. But the point that interests us is that Corral made his compilation about the year 1443, and it follows that the romances derived from it must be of later date. They are much later: the oldest were not written till the sixteenth century, and therefore they are not really ancient nor popular. But some of them have a few memorable lines. For instance, in the first ballad translated by Lockhart:—
Last night I was the King of Spain—to-day no king am I;
Last night fair castles held my train,—to-night where shall I lie?
Last night a hundred pages did serve me on the knee,—
To-night not one I call mine own:—not one pertains to me.
There is charm, also, in the romance which begins with the line:—
Los vientos eran contrarios, la luna estaba crecida.[14]