And soon he has seized on Fause Foodrage,
Wha loud for help 'gan ca'.
The slaying of Foodrage and marriage of the turtle-dow wind up the ballad. Now, is not the adoption of the term, 'gay gos-hawk' in this ballad, calculated to excite a very strong suspicion as to a community of authorship with the other, in which a gay gos-hawk figures so prominently? But this is not all. 'The boy stared wild like a gray gos-hawk,' is nearly identical with a line of Hardyknute:
Norse e'en like gray gos-hawk stared wild.
Scott was roused by this parallelism into suspicion of the authenticity of the ballad, and only tranquillised by finding a lady of rank who remembered hearing in her infancy the verses which have here been quoted. He felt compelled, he tells us, 'to believe that the author of Hardyknute copied from the old ballad, if the coincidence be not altogether accidental.' Finally, the young prince's procedure in storming the castle, is precisely that of Gil Morrice in gaining access to that of Lord Barnard:
And when he cam to Barnard's yett,
He would neither chap nor ca',
But set his bent bow to his breast,
And lightly lap the wa'.
It may fairly be said that, in ordinary literature, coincidences like this are never 'accidental.' It may be observed, much of the narration in Fause Foodrage is in a stiff and somewhat hard style, recalling Hardyknute. It was probably one of the earlier compositions of its author.