‘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. [66] There is an entry of ‘Miller and King’ (among 128 ballads), December 14, 1624; another entry, June 30, 1625: Stationers’ Registers, Arber, IV, 131, 143. The broadside is in many of the collections: ‘A pleasant ballad of King Henry second and the Miller of Mansfield,’ Roxburghe, I, 178, 228, III, 853, the first reprinted by Chappell, Roxburghe Ballads, I, 537; Pepys, I, 528, No 272; Bagford, II, 25; Wood, 401, fol. 5 b, ‘A pleasant new ballad of the Miller of Mansfield in Sherwood and K. Henry the Second,’ Wood, 254, iv, ‘The pleasant history of the Miller of Mansfield,’ etc., dated 1655; Crawford, No 491. Also, ‘Kinge and Miller,’ Percy MS., p. 235, Hales and Furnivall, II, 147 (see Appendix); Percy’s Reliques, 1765, III, 179, the MS. copy “with corrections” from the Pepys.--Not in the ballad-stanza. [67] John the Reeve is mentioned (in conjunction with Rauf Coilyear) by G. Douglas, Palice of Honour, 1501, Small, I, 65, v. 3, and by Dunbar, about 1510, Small, I, 105, v. 33; John the Reeve again by Lindsay, The Complaynt of the Papingo, 1530, Chalmers, I, 318. [68] Reprinted in Laing’s Select Remains of the Ancient Popular Poetry of Scotland, from the edition of St Andrews, 1572; thence in Charlemagne Romances, No 6, ed. S. J. Herrtage, Early English Text Society, 1882. As to the date, see Max Tonndorf, Rauf Coilyear, Halle a. S. 1893, p. 13 ff. [69] So far 767 verses of 975: the rest is not pertinent and is very poor stuff. ‘Rauf Coilyear’ is a clever piece, but I cannot think with Mr Herrtage that it is “quite original.” Its exaggerations suggest a second hand; the author means to pepper higher with his churl’s discourtesy than had been done before. The ‘marshalling’ in 183-86 recalls ‘John the Reeve,’ 342-50. [70] Printed in Hartshorne’s Ancient Metrical Tales, p. 35. Professor Kittredge has called my attention to a stanza of Occleve’s which shows that the belief that Edward III went about in disguise among his subjects prevailed not long after the king’s death.