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"Lady Isabel" is an English ballad known as Child Ballad 261 and Roud #3884.
Her stepmother says that Lady Isabel is said to be her father's whore, and cites that he dresses his daughter better than her, his wife. Isabel denies it, says their clothing befits their ages, and claims a lover beyond the sea. Her stepmother offers her a poisoned drink; she puts it to her own lips but is careful not to drink a drop, and gives it to Isabel, who drinks and dies. She curses her stepmother, saying she will go to heaven and her stepmother to hell; her stepmother goes mad.
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"Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" is the English common name representative of a very large class of European ballads. The subject matter is frequently associated with the genre of the Halewyn legends circulating in Europe. There are a number of variants with different names.
The Famous Flower of Serving-Men or The Lady turned Serving-Man is Child Ballad number 106 and a murder ballad. Child considered it as closely related to the ballad The Lament Of The Border Widow or The Border Widow's Lament.
"The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea" is Child ballad number 36.
"Kemp Owyne" is Child Ballad number 34.
"Hind Etin" is a folk ballad existing in several variants.
Prince Robert is Child ballad number 87, existing in several variants, and a murder ballad.
"Rose the Red and White Lily" is Child ballad number 103.
"The Fair Flower of Northumberland" is a folk ballad.
Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick or Burd Bell is a traditional folk song framed with explicit warnings about loving above your station.
The Laird o Drum is Child ballad number 236. It is found in six versions, A to F, all based on Alexander Irvine's courtship of and marriage to Margaret Coutts, his second wife.
The Bent Sae Brown is Child ballad 71.
Redesdale and Wise William is the 246th ballad from the Child Ballads. The ballad tells of a man who wagers and loses his lands over an attempt to win a woman's affection.
"The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is an English Arthurian ballad, collected as Child Ballad 31. Found in the Percy Folio, it is a fragmented account of the story of Sir Gawain and the loathly lady, which has been preserved in fuller form in the medieval poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. The loathly lady episode itself dates at least back to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. Unlike most of the Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian "King Arthur and King Cornwall" and "The Boy and the Mantle", "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is not a folk ballad but a song for professional minstrels.
"Young Andrew" is an old song catalogued as Child ballad 48.
The Knight's Ghost is Child ballad 265. It tells the story of a woman who learns that her husband has died in battle, after which she locks his men in a cellar and throws the keys in the sea. Her husband's ghost appears to ask that she release his men, assuring her they fought bravely. Francis Child drew the ballad from Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland.
Sweet William's Ghost is an English Ballad and folk song which exists in many lyrical variations and musical arrangements. Early known printings of the song include Allan Ramsay's The Tea-Table Miscellany in 1740 and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Percy believed that the last two stanzas of the version he published were later additions, but that the details of the story they recounted were original.
Lord Thomas and Lady Margaret or Clerk Tamas is a traditional folk song.
"The King's Dochter Lady Jean" is Child ballad No. 52.
Will Stewart and John is Child ballad 107, indexed as such in Francis James Child's 19th century collection of English and Scottish ballads.
Lady Isabel's Tragedy, or "The Lady Isabella's Tragedy; or, The Step-Mother's Cruelty" is a broadside ballad, which dates from, by estimation of the English Short Title Catalogue, as early as 1672 and as late as 1779—suggesting its popularity and positive reception. The ballad begins, "There was a Lord of worthy Fame." Copies of the ballad can be found at the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, University of Glasgow Library, the Huntington Library, and the Pepys Library at Magdalene College. Alternatively, online facsimiles of the ballad are available for public consumption at sites like the English Broadside Ballad Archive. The ballad has notable connections to the stories of Snow White, the myth of Philomela, and Titus Andronicus.
