Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/262

236 Older than Straparola is the English "Sir Amadas, a rhymed romaunt," 778 lines long, dating about 1420, and printed by Henry Weber in his Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1810, vol. iii., pp. 243-275), and in John Robson's Three Early English Metrical Romances (Camden Soc., 1842, pp. 27-56). Its hero, reduced to poverty, rides forth with but forty pounds, and finds in a chapel a lady watching the unburied corpse of her husband, a merchant who for a debt of thirty pounds has been kept sixteen weeks above ground, and is to be flung to the dogs. Sir Amadas settles the debt and buries the merchant. As he rides on through the greenwood, he is joined by a white knight on a milk-white steed, who promises to procure him the hand of a neighbouring princess on condition—

He betakes himself to court, where, by the white knight's counsel, he gives himself out for the owner of a rich stranded ship, and wins the princess's hand. She has borne him a son, when suddenly the white knight reappears—

He demands half of wife and child. At first Sir Amadas demurs; but at last, convinced by his heroic wife's exhortations, he declares himself ready, and is preparing to divide them with his sword. Thereupon the white knight reveals himself as the spirit of that merchant, releases Sir Amadas from the compact, and vanishes away "as dew in sun."

So we come to "Jack the Giant-Killer," of which the earliest chap-book version (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1711; London, 1805; Paisley, c. 1814) is reprinted in J. O.