FAIR ROSAMOND.
The celebrated mistress of Henry the Second was daughter to Walter Clifford, a baron of Herefordshire. She bore the king two sons, one of them while he was still Duke of Normandy. Before her death she retired to the convent of Godstow, and there she was buried; but Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, not courtly enough to distinguish between royal and vulgar immoralities, caused her body to be removed, and interred in the common cemetery, "lest Christian religion should grow in contempt."
The story of Queen Eleanor's poisoning her rival is not confirmed by the old writers, though they mention the labyrinth. All the romance in Rosamond's history appears to be the offspring of popular fancy. Percy has collected the principal passages from the chronicles in his preface to the ballad.
Fair Rosamond is the work of Thomas Deloney, a well-known ballad-maker who died about 1600. Our copy is the earliest that is known, and is taken from Deloney's Strange Histories, ed. of 1607, as reprinted by the Percy Society, vol. iii. p. 54. The same is found in the Crown Garland of Golden Roses, ed. 1659 (Per. Soc. vol. vi. p. 12), and in the Garland of Good Will, ed. 1678 (Per. Soc. vol. xxx. p. 1.):
and besides, with trifling variations, in A Collection of Old Ballads, i. 11, Percy's Reliques, ii. 151, and Ritson's Ancient Songs, ii. 120, from black-letter copies.
Another ballad with the title of the Unfortunate Concubine, or, Rosamond's Overthrow, is given in the collection of 1723, vol. i. p. 1. The story is also treated in the forty-first chapter of Warner's Albion's England. Warner has at least one good stanza,[3] which is more than can be said of this wretched, but very popular, production.
Some corrections have been adopted from the Crown Garland of Golden Roses.
With that she dasht her on the lips,
So dyèd double red;
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled.