'When al this folk is gon to play,
He and Y schal steal oway,
Bituene the day and the niȝt.' (87)
Hatherof did his message. Of true love Horn was sure. He said he would come into the field with a hundred knights. A tournament follows, as in the French romance; the royal bridegroom is unhorsed, but spared; treachery is punished and forced to confession.
Now is Rimnild tuiis wedde,
Horn brouȝt hir to his bedde. (94)
That the lay or gest of King Horn is a far more primitive poem than the French romance, and could not possibly be derived from it, will probably be plain to any one who will make even a hasty comparison of the two; and that the contrary opinion should have been held by such men as Warton and Tyrwhitt must have been the result of a general theory, not of a particular examination.[163] There is, on the other hand, no sufficient reason for supposing that the English lay is the source of the other two poems. Nor do the special approximations of the ballads to the romance of Horn Child oblige us to conclude that these, or any of them, are derived from that poem. The particular resemblances are the discoloration of the ring, the elopement with the bride, in C, G, H (which is only prepared for, but not carried out, in Horn Child), and the agreement between the couplet just cited from Horn Child,
Now is Rimnild tuiis wedde,
Horn brouȝt hir to his bedde,
and the last stanza of A, B, C:
The bridegroom he had wedded the bride,
But Young Hind Horn he took her to bed. (A)
The bridegroom thought he had the bonnie bride wed,
But Young Hyn Horn took the bride to bed. (B)
Her ain bridegroom had her first wed,
But Young Hyn Horn had her first to bed. (C)
The likeness evinces a closer affinity of the oral traditions with the later English romance than with the earlier English or the French, but no filiation. And were filiation to be accepted, there would remain the question of priority. It is often assumed, without a misgiving, that oral tradition must needs be younger than anything that was committed to writing some centuries ago; but this requires in each case to be made out; there is certainly no antecedent probability of that kind.[164]