THE LEGEND OF SIR GUY.
(Percy's Reliques, iii. 143.)
"Published from an ancient MS. copy in the Editor's old folio volume, collated with two printed ones, one of which is in black-letter in the Pepys collection." PERCY.
An inferior copy is printed in Ritson's Ancient Songs and Ballads, ii. 193.
From an essay on the romance of Sir Guy, read by Mr. Wright before the British Archæological Association during its meeting at Warwick, we extract the following remarks in illustration of the history of the present ballad, and other similar popular heroic traditions.
"As the Teutonic tribes progressed in their migrations, and settled in new lands—and especially when they received a new faith, and made advances in civilization,—the mythic romances of their forefathers underwent remarkable modifications to adapt them to new sentiments and new manners. Among people who had forgotten the localities to which they referred, they received a new location and became identified with places and objects with which people were better acquainted, and in this manner they underwent
a new historical interpretation. It would be no uninteresting task to point out how many romantic tales that are soberly related of individuals of comparatively modern history, are merely new applications of these early myths.
"Among the romances of the Anglo-Danish cycle by no means the least celebrated is that of GUY OF WARWICK. It is one, of the few, which has been preserved in its Anglo-Norman form, since which it has gone through an extraordinary number of versions, and Chaucer enumerated it among the romances of pris, or those which in the fourteenth century were held in the highest estimation. It is doubtless one of those stories in which an ancient mythic romance has undergone the series of modifications I have been describing; a legend which had become located by popular traditions in the neighbourhood we are now visiting, in which the contests between northern chieftains are changed into tilts and tournaments, but in which the combats with dragons and giants are still preserved. Whatever may have been the name of the original hero, that which he now bears, Guy, is a French name, and could not have been given till Norman times.