1615, December 9, John Trundle, for a ballad of ‘The King and the Tanner.’ Arber, III, 579. 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.