Amelin comes in and complains of the treatment she has received. Hogier owns that he has lost, and desires to become Bertram’s ‘poor man.’ Amelin is given him as wife, with her hundred mark for a dowry. Here we have wager, substitution, finger cut off, as in the Scottish ballad and most of the Romaic versions, and the loser marries the maid, as in the Scottish ballad and Romaic =A=, =B=. The Mabinogi of Taliesin, “in its present form not older than the thirteenth century,” has the incidents of the substitution of the maid-servant, the finger and finger-ring, with the modification that the wife’s general high character, and not simply her continence, is impugned and vindicated. At a Christmas feast in the palace of King Maelgwn, the company were discoursing of the unequalled felicity of the king, upon whom heaven had bestowed, with every other good gift, a queen whose virtues exceeded those of all the noble ladies in the kingdom. Elphin, Maelgwn’s nephew, said, None but a king may vie with a king; otherwise he would say that his own wife was as virtuous as any lady in the kingdom. Maelgwn was not there to hear this boast, but it was duly reported to him, and he ordered Elphin to be thrown into prison, pending a test of Elphin’s wife which he deputed his graceless son, Rhun, to make. Taliesin, Elphin’s bard, warned the lady that Rhun would try to put some disgrace upon her, and advised that one of the servants should personate her mistress when Rhun came to the house. Accordingly, a kitchen-maid was dressed up in her mistress’s clothes, and was seated at the supper-table, her hands loaded with rings. Rhun made his appearance and was welcomed by the disguised menial. He fell to jesting with her, put a powder into her drink, which cast her into a sound sleep, and cut off her little finger, on which was Elphin’s signet-ring. The king assembled his councillors, had Elphin brought in from prison, and showed him the finger, which (so Rhun had averred) had been cut from his wife’s hand the preceding night, while she was sunk in a drunken sleep. Elphin could not deny that the ring was his, but he gave three incontrovertible reasons why the finger could not be his wife’s, one of these being that the ring was too large to stay on his wife’s thumb, yet too small to go over the joint of the little finger of the hand from which it had been cut; and the fact was put beyond question by Taliesin’s afterwards bringing in Elphin’s wife at a state-dinner, and displaying her unmutilated hand.[26] A lively play of Jakob Ayrer’s (about 1600) has the wager, the substitution, the ring offered in evidence (as in Romaic =C=, =G=), the marriage with the maid.