N. ‘Little Harry Hughes and the Duke’s Daughter,’ Newell, Games and Songs of American Children, p. 75.

O. G. A. Sala, Illustrated London News, LXXXI, 415, October 21, 1882, and Living London, 1883, p. 465.

P. Halliwell, Ballads and Poems respecting Hugh of Lincoln, p. 37, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales, p. 192: two stanzas.

Q. ‘The Jew’s Daughter,’ Motherwell’s Note-Book, p. 54: two stanzas.

R. ‘Sir Hew, or, The Jew’s Daughter,’ Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xvii, VII: one stanza.

The copy in Pinkerton’s Tragic Ballads, 1781, p. 50, is made up of eight stanzas of D and six of B, slightly retouched by the editor; that in Gilchrist’s collection, 1815, I, 210, is eight stanzas of D and nine of A; that in Stenhouse’s edition of Johnson’s Museum, IV, 500, “communicated by an intelligent antiquarian correspondent,” is compounded from A, B, D, E and Pinkerton, with a little chaff of its own; that printed by W. C. Atkinson, of Brigg, Lincolnshire, in the London Athenæum, 1867, p. 96, is Pinkerton’s, with two trifling changes. Allen, History of the County of Lincoln, 1834, p. 171 (repeating Wilde, Lincoln Cathedral, 1819, p. 27, as appears from Notes and Queries, 4th Series, II, 60), says that a complete manuscript of the ballad was once in the library of the cathedral, and cites the first stanza, which differs from Pinkerton’s only in having “Mary Lincoln” for “merry Lincoln.”

The several versions agree in the outline of the story, and in many of the details. According to A, boys who are playing football are joined by Sir Hugh, who kicks the ball through the Jew’s window. Sir Hugh sees the Jew’s daughter looking out of the window, and asks her to throw down the ball. She tells him to come and get it; this he is afraid to do, for fear she may do to him “as she did to his father.” The Jew’s daughter entices him in with an apple, leads him through nine dark doors, lays him on a table, and sticks him like a swine; then rolls him in a cake of lead, and throws him into a draw-well fifty fathoms deep, Our Lady’s draw-well. The boy not returning at eve, his mother sets forth to seek him; goes to the Jew’s castle, the Jew’s garden, and to the draw-well, entreating in each case Sir Hugh to speak. He answers from the well, bidding his mother go make his winding-sheet, and he will meet her at the back of merry Lincoln the next morning. His mother makes his winding-sheet, and the dead corpse meets her at the back of merry Lincoln: all the bells of Lincoln are rung without men’s hands, and all the books of Lincoln are read without man’s tongue.

The boy’s name is Sir Hugh in A-F, etc.; in K the name is corrupted to Saluter, and in the singular and interesting copy obtained in New York, N, to Harry Hughes, the Jew’s Daughter in this becoming the Duke’s Daughter. The place is Merry Lincoln in A, D, L (Lincoln, J; Lincolnshire, Q); corrupted in B, C, to Mirryland town,[[122]] in E to Maitland town; changed to Merry Scotland, I, J, O, which is corrupted to Merrycock land, K; in G, H, old Scotland, fair Scotland. The ball is tossed [patted] into the Jew’s garden, G, H, I, L, M, O, P, where the Jews are sitting a-row, I, O. The boy will not come in without his play-feres, B, C, D, F, G, I, J, K; if he should go in, his mother would cause his heart’s blood to fall, etc., G, I, K.[[123]] The boy is rolled in a cake [case] of lead, A-E (L, b?); in a quire of tin, N. The draw-well is Our Lady’s only in A (L, b?); it is the Jew’s in C, D; it is a [the] deep draw-well, simply, in B, E, F, G; a little draw-well, N, a well, O; fifty fathoms deep, A-F, N; G, eighteen fathoms, O, five and fifty feet. In G, the Jew’s daughter lays the Bible at the boy’s head, and the Prayer-Book at his feet (how came these in the Jew’s house?) before she sticks him; in I, K, the Bible and Testament after; in I, the Catechism in his heart’s blood. In H, the boy, at the moment of his death, asks that the Bible may be put at his head, and the Testament at his feet, and in M, wants “a seven-foot Bible” at his head and feet. In E, F, the boy makes this request from the draw-well (“and pen and ink at every side,” E), and in N with the variation that his Bible is to be put at his head, his “busker” at his feet, and his Prayer-Book at his right side. In O there is a jumble:

‘Oh lay a Bible at my head,

And a Prayer-Book at my feet,