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Sir Cawline (Roud 479, Child 61) is a traditional English-language folk song. [1] A fragmentary form exists in The Percy Folio .
Sir Cawline falls love with the king's daughter and falls ill from it. She tells him that he must do some great deed to be worthy of her: he must keep watch all night on the Eldritch Hill, and the Eldritch (meaning Elf) king has meant that no man has lived through that.
Sir Cawline goes, the king challenges him, and they fight with swords. Sir Cawline strikes him down, and the king's lady pleads for his life. Sir Cawline spares him but brings back his eldritch sword as proof.
In some variants, the king agrees to the marriage at this point.
In others, a giant demands the princess, and Sir Cawline must fight him, using the eldritch sword. The king agrees to the marriage, but a false steward releases a lion to try to kill him, and Sir Cawline must kill it. Then the marriage is performed, and Sir Cawline and the princess have fifteen sons.
There are noteworthy parallels between this tale and the romance, The History of Sir Eger, Sir Graham, and Sir Gray-steel . [2]
Lionel is a character in Arthurian legend. He is the younger son of King Bors of Gaunnes and Evaine and brother of Bors the Younger. First recorded in the Lancelot-Grail cycle, he is a double cousin of Lancelot and cousin of Lancelot's younger half-brother Hector de Maris. He is also the subject of a traditional ballad.
Sir Aldingar is an English-language folk song. Francis James Child collected three variants, two fragmentary, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. All three recount the tale where a rebuffed Sir Aldingar slanders his mistress, Queen Eleanor, and a miraculous champion saves her.
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"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.
"Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor, and Marriage" is an English folk song. It recounts Robin Hood's adventures hunting and a romance with Clorinda, the queen of the shepherdesses, a heroine who did not prove able to displace Maid Marian as his sweetheart.
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Lord Maxwell’s Last Goodnight is an English-language folk ballad. It is based on the actions of John Maxwell, 9th Lord Maxwell, who killed Sir James Johnstone in 1608 as the culmination of a family feud. He fled to France and was sentenced to death in his absence, returning in secret five years later. He was apprehended and beheaded at Edinburgh on 21 May 1613.
"James Hatley" is an English-language folk ballad, existing in several variants. The ballad tells the story of a man who steals a king's keys, a story that seems to have no historical basis. The identity of the man and his fate differ depending on the ballad's variation.
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Robin Hood and the Monk is a Middle English ballad and one of the oldest surviving ballads of Robin Hood. The earliest surviving document with the work is from around 1450, and it may have been composed even earlier in the 15th century. It is also one of the longest ballads at around 2,700 words. It is considered one of the best of the original ballads of Robin Hood.
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Tom Potts is #109 of the Child Ballads, the collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century. The collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898 by Houghton Mifflin in ten volumes and later reissued in a five-volume edition.
Robin Hood and the Shepherd is a story in the Robin Hood canon which has survived as, among other forms, a late seventeenth-century English broadside ballad, and is one (#135) out of several ballads about the medieval folk hero that form part of the Child ballad collection, which is one of the most comprehensive collections of traditional English ballads.
"King Arthur and King Cornwall" is an English ballad surviving in fragmentary form in the 17th-century Percy Folio manuscript. An Arthurian story, it was collected by Francis James Child as Child Ballad 30. Unlike other Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian "The Boy and the Mantle" and "The Marriage of Sir Gawain", it is not a folk ballad but a professional minstrel's song. It is notable for containing the Green Knight, a character known from the medieval poems The Greene Knight and the more famous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he appears as "Bredbeddle", the character's name in The Greene Knight.