This poem is given in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry with the following note:—
“Dispersed through Shakespeare’s plays are innumerable little fragments of Ancient ballads, the entire copies of which could not be recovered. Many of these being of the most beautiful and pathetic simplicity, the Editor was tempted to select some of them, and with a few supplemental stanzas to connect them together, and form them into a little tale, which is here submitted to the reader’s candour.”
It was a friar of orders gray
Walkt forth to tell his beades;
And he met with a lady faire
Clad in a pilgrime’s weedes.
“Now Christ thee save, thou reverend friar,
I pray thee tell to me,
If ever at yon holy shrine
My true love thou didst see?”