If yow wyl any more of thys,
I’ the fryarie at Richmond [137] written yt is,
In parchment gude and fyne,
How Freer Myddeltone sea hende,
Att Greta Bridge conjured a fiende,
In lykeness of a swyne.
Yt is wel knowen toe manie a man,
That Freer Theobald was warden than,
And thys fel in hys tyme.
And Chryst thayme bles both ferre and nere,
Al that for solas this doe here,
And hym that made the ryme.
Raphe of Rokeby wid ful gode wyl,
The freers of Richmond gav her tyll,
This sewe toe mende ther fare;
Freer Myddeltone by name,
He wold bring the felon hame,
That rewed hym sine ful sare.
Songs.
ARTHUR O’BRADLEY’S WEDDING.
[In the ballad called Robin Hood, his Birth, Breeding, Valour and Marriage, occurs the following line:—
And some singing Arthur-a-Bradley.
Antiquaries are by no means agreed as to what is the song of Arthur-a-Bradley, there alluded to, for it so happens that there are no less than three different songs about this same Arthur-a-Bradley. Ritson gives one of them in his Robin Hood, commencing thus:—
See you not Pierce the piper.
He took it from a black-letter copy in a private collection, compared with, and very much corrected by, a copy contained in An Antidote against Melancholy, made up in pills compounded of witty Ballads, jovial Songs, and merry Catches, 1661. Ritson quotes another, and apparently much more modern song on the same subject, and to the same tune, beginning,—