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]