[407] Cf. 'The Fair Flower of Northumberland,' B 2, E 2, pp 115 f.
[408] She does not get away without exciting the solicitude or wrath of her father, F, M, J, N, and in the first two has to use artifice.
[409] A point borrowed, it well may be, from 'Hind Horn,' E 5 f, A 10.
[410] So Torello's wife upsets the table, in Boccaccio's story: see p. 198. One of her Slavic kinswomen jumps over four tables and lights on a fifth.
[411] In C 34, M 49, she is recognized by one of the hounds which she had given him. So Bos, seigneur de Bénac, who breaks a ring with his wife, goes to the East, and is prisoner among the Saracens seven years, on coming back is recognized only by his greyhound: Magasin Pittoresque, VI, 56 b. It is scarcely necessary to scent the Odyssey here.
[412] Ridiculously changed in J 6, K 6, L 20, to a coach and three, reminding us of that master-stroke in Thackeray's ballad of 'Little Billee,' "a captain of a seventy-three." 'Little Billee,' by the way, is really like an old ballad, fallen on evil days and evil tongues; whereas the serious imitations of traditional ballads are not the least like, and yet, in their way, are often not less ludicrous.
[413] In M, to make everything pleasant, Bondwell offers the bride five hundred pounds to marry his cousin John. She says, Keep your money; John was my first love. So Bondwell is married at early morn, and John in the afternoon.
[414] Harleian MS. 2277, from which the life of Beket, in long couplets, was printed by Mr W. H. Black for the Percy Society, in 1845. The story of Gilbert Beket is contained in the first 150 vv. The style of this composition entirely resembles that of Robert of Gloucester, and portions of the life of Beket are identical with the Chronicle; whence Mr Black plausibly argues that both are by the same hand. The account of Beket's parentage is interpolated into Edward Grim's Life, in Cotton MS. Vitellius, C, XII, from which it is printed by Robertson, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, II, 453 ff. It is found in Bromton's Chronicle, Twysden, Scriptores X, columns 1052-55, and in the First Quadrilogus, Paris, 1495, from which it is reprinted by Migne, Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, CXC, cols 346 ff. The tale has been accepted by many writers who would have been better historians for a little reading of romances. Angustin Thierry sees in Thomas Beket a Saxon contending in high place, for the interests and with the natural hatred of his race, against Norman Henry, just as he finds in the yeoman Robin Hood a leader of Saxon serfs engaged in irregular war with Norman Richard. But both of St Thomas's parents were Norman; the father of Rouen, the mother of Caen. The legend was introduced by Lawrence Wade, following John of Exeter, into a metrical life of Beket of about the year 1500: see the poem in Englische Studien, III, 417, edited by Horstmann.
[415] Richard, the proud porter of the ballads, is perhaps most like himself in M 32 ff.
[416] Neither her old name nor her Christian name is told us in this legend. Gilbert Beket's wife was Matilda, according to most authorities, but Roësa according to one: see Robertson, as above, IV, 81; Migne, cols 278 f. Fox has made Roësa into Rose, Acts and Monuments, I, 267, ed. 1641.