47. gard.
C.
The verses are given incidentally in a preface to another ballad. Between 1 and 2: The kind fair one puts his horse into the stable and takes himself to her bower, where she gives him ‘the good white bread and blood-red wine,’ and a part of her bed. In the morning, when he proposes to depart, she naturally enough asks [as in st. 2].
300
BLANCHEFLOUR AND JELLYFLORICE
‘Blancheflour and Jellyflorice,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 125; Motherwell’s MS., p. 588.
A maid who has been some years in a lady’s service aspires to something higher; she seeks and obtains a place with a queen, ‘to sew the seams of silk.’ The queen warns her to keep herself from the young prince, but the pair become familiar, and the queen has her mounted on a wild horse without a bridle, expecting to dispose of her summarily in this way. But the prince takes her from the horse and declares that he will marry her within the month.
Buchan suspects that some “poetaster” has remodelled the story of the romance of Florice and Blancheflour, “modernizing it to suit the climate of his time,” that is, perhaps, turning a princess into a sempstress. The only thing in the romance that is even remotely like what we find in the ballad is that Florice saves Blancheflour from the death which his father had contrived for her in order to part the lovers, and this passage does not occur in the English versions of the romance.
There is a Flemish ballad, so to call it, composed from the romance: Coussemaker, p. 177, No 51, Baecker, Chansons historiques de la Flandre, p. 121; Oude Liedekens in Bladeren, L. van Paemel, Gend, No 17.
1