I’ll promise him such English balls[[189]]
As in French lands he neer did see!
g has several stanzas which are due to the hand of some improver.
Another, and much more circumstantial, ballad on Agincourt, written from the chronicles, was current in the seventeenth century. It begins, ‘A councell braue [grave] our king did hold,’ and may be seen in the Percy Manuscript, p. 241, Hales and Furnivall, II, 166, in The Crown Garland of Golden Roses (with seven stanzas fewer), ed. 1659, p. 65 of the reprint by the Percy Society, vol. xv; Pepys’ Ballads, I, 90, No 44; Old Ballads, II, 79; Pills to purge Melancholy, V, 49; etc.
The story of the Tennis-Balls is not mentioned by the French historians, by Walsingham, Titus Livius, or the anonymous biographer of Henry in Cotton MS., Julius E. IV.[[190]] It occurs, however, in several contemporary writings, as in Elmham’s Liber Metricus de Henrico Quinto, cap. xii (Quod filius regis Francorum, in derisum, misit domino regi pilas, quibus valeret cum pueris ludere potius quam pugnare, etc.), Cole, Memorials of Henry the Fifth, 1858, p. 101; but not in Elmham’s prose history. So in Capgrave, De illustribus Henricis, with a fertur, ed. Hingeston, 1858, p. 114; but not in Capgrave’s chronicle. We might infer, in these two cases, that the tale was thought good enough for verses and good enough for eulogies, though not good enough for history.
Again, in verses of Harleian MS. 565, “in a hand of the fifteenth century,” the Dolphin says to the English ambassadors:
Me thinke youre kyng he is nought [so] old
No werrys for to maynteyn.
Grete well youre kyng, he seyde, so yonge,
That is both gentill and small;