“Alas! madam,” replied the King, with feigned sorrow, “what you ask is impossible, for but three days ago he was broken on the wheel.”
“Whoso goes to Coadelan to-day will turn away from it with grief, for the ashes are black upon the hearth and the nettles crowd around the doorway—and still,” the ballad ends naïvely, “still the wicked world goes round and the poor folk weep with anguish, and say, ‘Alas that she is dead, the mother of the poor.’”
The Return from England
There is a good deal of evidence to show that a considerable body of Bretons accompanied the invading army of William the Conqueror when he set forth with the idea of gaining the English crown. They were attached to his second battle corps, and many of them received land in England. A ballad which, says Villemarqué, bears every sign of antiquity deals with the fortunes of a young Breton, Silvestik, who followed in the train of the Conqueror. The piece is put into the mouth of the mother of Silvestik, who mourns her son’s absence, and its tone is a tender and touching one.
“One night as I lay on my bed,” says the anxious mother, “I could not sleep. I heard the girls at Kerlaz singing the song of my son. O God, Silvestik, where are you now? Perhaps you are more than three hundred leagues from here, cast on the great sea, and the fishes feed upon your fair body. Perhaps you may be married now to some Saxon damsel. You were to have been wed to a lovely daughter of this land, Mannaïk de Pouldergat, and you might have been among us surrounded by beautiful children, dwelling happily in your own home.
THE FINDING OF SILVESTIK
“I have taken to my door a little white dove which sits in a small hollow of the stone. I have tied to his neck a letter with the ribbon of my wedding-dress and have sent it to my son. Arise, my little dove, arise on your two wings, fly far, very far across the great sea, and discover if my son is still alive and well.”