FOOTNOTES:
[819] See a folio intitled The Muses welcome to King James.
[820] Saturn.
[821] Janus.
[822] i.e. may it.
VI.
K. JOHN AND THE ABBOT OF CANTERBURY.
The common popular ballad of King John and the Abbot seems to have been abridged and modernized about the time of James I. from one much older, intitled, King John and the Bishop of Canterbury. The Editor's folio MS. contains a copy of this last, but in too corrupt a state to be reprinted; it however afforded many lines worth reviving, which will be found inserted in the ensuing stanzas.
The archness of the following questions and answers hath been much admired by our old ballad-makers; for besides the two copies above mentioned, there is extant another ballad on the same subject (but of no great antiquity or merit), intitled, King Olfrey and the Abbot.[823] Lastly, about the time of the civil wars, when the cry ran against the Bishops, some Puritan worked up the same story into a very doleful ditty, to a solemn tune, concerning King Henry and a Bishop, with this stinging moral: