The Christian folk, awestruck, sent for the Provost. The boy was taken out of the pit, amid piteous lamentations, “singing his song alway,” and was carried in procession to the Abbey, his mother swooning by the bier. The Jews were punished for their crime “with torment and with shameful death”; they were first drawn by wild horses and afterwards hanged. Meanwhile, this Innocent was borne to his grave, and when sprinkled with holy water spoke and sang, “O Alma Redemptoris mater!” The abbot, “who was a holy man as monks are, or else ought to be,” began to adjure the child by the holy Trinity to tell him what was the cause of its singing, “sith that thy throte is cut, to my seminge?” The child answers: “‘My throte is cut unto my nekkeboon,’ and I should have died long ago. But Jesus Christ wills that his glory last and be remembered. So I am permitted to sing ‘O Alma’ loud and clear.” He relates how Christ’s mother sweet, whom he had always loved, came to him and, laying a grain upon his tongue, bade him sing this anthem. Thereupon the holy monk, drawing out the boy’s tongue, removed the grain, and forthwith the boy gave up the ghost softly. The martyr’s “litel body sweet” was laid in a tomb of clear marble. The _Prioresses Tale_ ends with an apostrophe to young Hugh of Lincoln “sleyn also with cursed Jewes, as it is notable,” and a request that he should pray for us “sinful folk unstable.” Amen. Bishop Percy, in his _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_, has preserved the Scottish ballad of _The Jew’s Daughter_, which turns on an incident bearing a close resemblance to Chaucer’s tale, although it seems to be based on the alleged murder at Trent, in 1475, of a boy called Simon.[127] The name of the victim, on the legend reaching England, may quite easily have been changed into the familiar Hugh. The Scottish version is as follows: “The rain rins doune through Mirry-land toune, Sae dois it doune the Pa: Sae dois the lads of Mirry-land toune, Quhan they play at the ba’. Than out and cam the Jewis dochter, Said, Will ye cum in and dine? ‘I winnae cum in, I cannae cum in, Without my play-feres mine.’” However, the boy is enticed with an apple “reid and white” and stabbed in the heart with a little pen-knife by the Jew’s daughter, who then laughingly lays him out on a dressing board, dresses him like a swine, puts him in “a cake of lead” and casts him into a filthy draw-well. Lady Helen, the boy’s mother, misses him in the evening and runs to the “Jewis castel,” calling upon her “bonny Sir Hew.” He answers from the bottom of the well. And so one century religiously handed down to the next its fictions and its prejudices.