Quoth the tanner, It will breed sorrow;
For after a coller commeth a halter,
I trow I shall be hangd to morrow.
‘Be not afraid, tanner,’ said our king;
‘I tell thee, so mought I thee,
Lo, here I make thee the best esquire
That is in the North Countrie!’
(This passage is not in the first edition, of 1614, as I am informed by Mr Macmath, who has copied it for me.) Percy says that he has “restored” one of his stanzas from the last of these two. The restoration might as well have been made from Danter’s history, which he was using. There is a trifling variation from Danter in the fourth verse, as given by Selden and repeated by Percy, which is found in White’s edition.
[64] ‘The King and the Barker’ is less extravagant and more rational here; the king simply orders the barker ‘a hundred shilling in his purse.’ But both the esquiring (knighting) and the estate are found in still older poems which remain to be mentioned.
[65] A pervasive boorishness, with some coarse pleasantry, distinguishes the seventeenth-century tales disadvantageously from the older ones.