All the copies here printed are of the seventeenth century, and the ballad need not be put much beyond that date. Modernized editions, differing much, were issued in the century following, perhaps earlier, some of which have a Second Part, narrating the happy married life of Tom Potts, Lord Arundel, and Fair Rosamund. See Halliwell's Descriptive Notices of Popular English Histories, p. 17, No 15, Percy Society, vol. xxiii, and the notes to B.
Unequal matches are common enough in ballads and romances, and very naturally, since they are an easy expedient for exciting interest, at least with those who belong to the humbler party. We have other ballad-examples of disparagement on the female side in 'The Bonny Foot-Boy' and 'Ritchie Storie.' No offence seems to be given when King Cophetua weds the Beggar-Maid, but when the Lady of the Strachy marries the Yeoman of the Wardrobe good taste is shocked. Such events would be celebrated only by fellows of the yeoman or of the foot-boy, and surely in the present case the minstrel was not much above the estate of the serving-man. Lord Jockey's reckless liberality throughout, and Lord Phenix's in the end, is a mark of the serving-man's ideal nobleman.
Tom Potts stanches his blood with a charm in A 754, B 824, just as the sons of Autolycus do that of Ulysses in Odyssey xix, 457 f. His rejecting of his master's thirty fine horses in favor of the old white cut-tail is a ludicrous repetition of Hugh Spencer's preference of the hack he had brought over sea, and Walter of Aquitaine's predilection for his worn-out charger. See, further on, 'Hugh Spencer's Feats in France.'
There is a Lord Phenix in a sufficiently absurd ballad in Motherwell's Manuscript, 'Jamie o Lee,' p. 654; an English nobleman who steals the Queen of Scotland's jewels and lays the blame on Jamie o Lee, a page of fifteen years, being himself, for rhyme's sake, thretty three. The page worsts his accuser in a duel and makes him confess.
Mr. Macmath notes for me that Swift, in The Tale of a Tub (written about 1696), having associated Dryden's Hind and Panther with Tom Thumb, Whittington and his Cat, aud other "prime productions of our society," adduces Tommy Potts as "another piece, supposed by the same hand, by way of supple ment to the former:" Scott's edition, XI, 72.
The message to Strawberry Castle occurs also in No 65, D, E, F, and No 87 C.
B is translated by Bothe, p. 315.
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