1624, December 14, Master Pavier, John Wright, and others, a ballad, ‘King and Tanner.’ Arber, IV, 131.
The ballad mentioned in the entry under the year 1600 is unquestionably our ballad, or an earlier form of it. No copy from the first half of the seventeenth century is known to be preserved. The “delectable history” entered under the same date is extant in an edition of 1596, printed by John Danter, and in one of 1613, printed by William White.[61] The ballad, as we have it, was made by abridging the fifty-six stanzas of the history to thirty-nine, with other changes. The history itself has its predecessor, and, as Ritson remarks, its undoubted original, in ‘The King and the Barker,’[62] between which and the history, though the former has come down to us in a sadly mutilated condition, and has been freely treated in the remodelling, there still remain a few verbal correspondences. Several good points are added in the history, and one or two dropped.
‘King Edward the Fourth and Tanner of Tamworth,’ in Percy’s Reliques, 1765, II, 75, was compounded from Danter’s history, 1596, and a copy “in one sheet folio, without date, in the Pepys collection.”[63]
King Edward, while out a-hunting, sees a tanner coming along the way, and takes a fancy to accost him. Leaving his lords under a tree, he rides forward and asks the tanner the way to Drayton Basset; the tanner directs him to turn in at the first pair of gallows. The king presses for a civil answer; the tanner bids him be gone; he himself has been riding all day and is fasting. The king promises meat and drink of the best for his company to Drayton Basset; the tanner makes game of the offer, and tries to get away, but in vain. The king now proposes to change his horse for the tanner’s mare; the tanner demands a noble to boot, nor shall a cowhide which he is riding on go with the mare. The cowhide thrown on to the king’s saddle frightens the horse and the tanner is pitched off; after this he will not keep the horse, but the king in turn exacts a noble to boot. Then the king sounds his horn, and his attendants come riding in; the tanner takes the whole party to be strong thieves, but when he sees the suite fall on their knees he would be glad to be out of the company. ‘A collar! a collar’ cries the king (to make the tanner esquire, but this is inadvertently left out in the ballad). ‘After a collar comes a halter,’ exclaims the unhappy tanner. But the king is graciously pleased to pay for the sport which he has had by conferring on the tanner an estate of three hundred pound a year;[64] in return for which his grateful liegeman engages to give him clouting-leather for his shoon if ever he comes to Tamworth.
Next to adventures of Robin Hood and his men, the most favorite topic in English popular poetry is the chance-encounter of a king, unrecognized as such, with one of his humbler subjects. Even in the Robin Hood cycle we have one of these meetings (in the seventh and eighth fits of the Little Gest), but there the king visits Robin Hood deliberately and in disguise, whereas in the other tales (except the latest) the meeting is accidental.
The most familiar of these tales are ‘The King and the Tanner,’ and ‘The King and the Miller;’ the former reaching back beyond the sixteenth century, the latter perhaps not beyond the seventeenth, but modelled upon tales of respectable antiquity, of which there is a specimen from the early years of the thirteenth century.[65]
In the history or “ballad” of ‘The King and the Miller,’ or, more specifically, ‘King Henry Second and the Miller of Mansfield,’ the king, while hunting in Sherwood, loses his nobles and is overtaken by night; he meets a miller, and after some colloquy is granted a lodging; is entertained with bag-puddings and apple-pies, to which is added a course of ‘light-foot,’ a pasty of the king’s deer, two or three of which, the miller tells his guest in confidence, he always keeps in store. The nobles recover the king at the miller’s the next morning; the miller looks to be hanged when he sees them fall on their knees; the king dubs him knight. The king has relished his night with the miller so much that he determines to have more sport out of him, and commands the attendance of the new knight with his lady and his son Dick at court on St. George’s day. The three jet down to the king’s hall on their mill-horses. In the course of the dinner the king expresses a wish for some of their light-foot; Dick tells him that it is knavery to eat of it and then betray it. Sir John Cockle and Dick dance with the court-ladies, and the buffoonery ends by the king’s making the miller overseer of Sherwood, with a stipend of three hundred pound, to which he attaches an injunction to steal no more deer.[66]
Of the older poems, ‘John the Reeve’ (910 vv.) may be noticed first, because it has a nearly complete story, and also resemblance in details with ‘The King and the Tanner,’ or ‘The King and the Miller,’ which two others of perhaps earlier date have not. ‘John the Reeve’ is now extant only in the Percy MS. (p. 357, Hales and Furnivall, II, 550). Since there had been but three kings of the name of Edward (v. 16), it must have been composed, as Mr Hales has remarked, between the death of Edward III and the accession of Edward IV, 1376-1461, and forms of language show that the Percy text must be nearer the end than the beginning of this period.[67]
Edward Longshanks, while hunting, is separated from all his train but a bishop and an earl. Night comes on, and they know not where they are, and the weather is cold and rough. As they stand considering which way to turn, a stout carl rides by; they beg him to take them to some harbor. The fellow will at first have nothing to do with them, but finally shows a disposition to be accommodating if they will swear to do him no harm; all that he can promise them, however, is beef and bread, bacon a year old, and sour ale; as for a good fire, which the king would particularly like, they cannot have that, for fuel is dear. They ride on to a town, light at a comely hall, and are taken into a room with a bright fire and candles lighted. The carl, who has already described himself as John the Reeve, husbandman and the king’s bondman, inquires of the earl who the long fellow may be, and who the other in the sark: the first, he is told, is Piers, the queen’s chief falconer, the other a poor chaplain, and the earl himself a sumpterman. ‘Proud lads, and I trow penniless,’ is John’s comment; he himself, though not so fine, has a thousand pound and more. They move on to the hall, and are civilly received by the goodwife. John marshals the company, now increased by two daughters of the house, and by Hodge and Hob, two neighbors, setting the three strangers and his wife at the head of the table, his daughters farther down, and taking the end himself with his neighbors. Bean-bread, rusty bacon, lean salt beef a year old, and sour ale are brought in, and every one has a mess. The king murmurs, John says, Thou gettest no other; the king coaxes, John will not give them a morsel unless they swear never to tell of him to Edward. All three pledge their troth, and then come in fine bread, wine red and white, in silver cups, the boar’s head, capons, venison,—everything that king could have or crave. After the supper, John, Hob, and Hodge perform a rustic dance; King Edward (who gets his shins kicked) never had so merry a night. In the morning they hear mass and eat a good breakfast, for which they promise warison, and then the king takes leave and rides to Windsor. The lords have a good story to tell the queen; she prays the king to send for the reve. John is convinced that he has been beguiled by his guests, but arms himself with such as he has, and, after a huge libation with Hodge and Hob, sets forth. The porter at the palace will not let him in; John knocks him over the crown and rides into the hall. Neither before this nor then will he vail hat or hood. [The passage in which the reve discovers that Piers falconer was the king has dropped out.] John bears himself sturdily; the king can punish him, but the king is honorable and will keep his word, and may remember the promised warison. The king gives thanks for the hot capons and good wine, the queen urges that the reve should be promoted. The king, nothing loath, makes John a gentleman, and gives him his manor, a hundred pound and a tun of wine yearly, then takes a collar and creates him knight. John blenches a little at the collar; he has heard that after a collar comes a rope; but he recovers his nerve after supping off a gallon of wine at the table. It is now the bishop’s turn to do something; he promises his good offices for John’s two sons and two daughters; these, in the end, are well disposed of, and Hodge and Hob are made freemen. John ever after keeps open board for all guests that God sends him.
The tale of Rauf Coilyear,[68] shortly after 1480, has for its personages Charles the Great and a charcoal-burner. Charles, on his way to Paris from St Thomas, is isolated from his cortége by a fierce storm; night has come on and he is in a strait for shelter. By good luck Rauf makes his appearance, a churl of prodigious inurbanity, but ready to take in any good fellow that is ‘will of his way.’ Arrived at his house, Rauf calls to his wife to make a fire and kill capons. When supper is dight, the guest is told to give the goodwife his hand and take the head of the table. Charles hangs back; the churl, who has once before criticised his manners, hits him under the ear and sends him sprawling to the floor. There is a plenteous supper, in which venison is not lacking. The carl tells the king that the foresters have threatened to send him to Paris for deer stealing, but he means to have enough for himself and a guest in spite of them. Then after wine they sit by the fire and the collier tells many a tale. Charles is affable; Rauf asks him his name and where he lives; Wymond is his name, and he lives with the queen, in fact, is of her bed-chamber; if Rauf will come to court he shall have the better sale for his fuel. Charles is put to bed in a handsome room, and rises so early that he has to waken his host to take leave. He is urged not to go so soon, but to-morrow is Yule and every officer of the court must be at his post. He wishes to pay the goodwife for her good entertainment; Rauf will not hear of such a thing. Come to court to-morrow, says the king; I want coals myself. Roland and Oliver and a thousand more have been wandering all night in search of their lord, and thank God when they recover him on the road to Paris. Rauf sets out for the court with his coals, according to appointment; the king has him in mind, and sends out Roland to bring in such man as he may meet. Roland finds the collier intractable, and has to return without him. The king is displeased, and Roland is on the point of going again, when he learns from a porter that there is a man with a horse and baskets at the gate who will not be turned away. Rauf is let in; he gives his horse in charge to the porter, and pushes into the hall to find Wymond, and after being shoved about a good deal, gets sight of him, dressed in cloth of gold, and clearly a much greater man than he had called himself; he is daunted by all the splendor; if he could but get away, nothing should bring him to the court again. The king then tells the story of his night at Rauf’s, not pretermitting the earl’s rough behavior. The lords laugh, the knights are for hanging him; the king thinks he owes better thanks, and dubs Rauf knight, assigns him three hundred a year, and promises him the next fief that falls vacant.[69]