The broadside, A a, b, is found in many other collections: Pepys, III, 145, No 143; Crawford, No 94, etc. (see Ebsworth). B, the Scottish ballad (an improvement on the English), is without doubt derived from print, but not directly from A a, b. In B the maid feigns to be afraid of her master, as in A c, not of her father. From Halliwell's Notices of Fugitive Tracts, p. 37, No 49, Percy Society, vol. xxix, we learn that The Royal Garland of Protestant Delight, London, 1689, has a ballad with the title 'The witty lass of Somersetshire, or the fryer servd in his kind,' with an "answer," in the last stanza of which 'the inn-keeper, her master,' laughs at the fryer's disaster.
The tune of 'The Friar in the Well' occurs in The Dancing Master, from 1650 to 1686: Chappell's Popular Music, p. 274. Munday, in his 'Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington,' Act iv, Scene 2, 1598, refers to the 'merry jest ... how the friar fell into the well, for love of Jenny, that fair bonny belle.' A reference of Skelton's in his Colyn Cloute[foot-note] carries the story, and almost certainly the ballad, back to the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
The copy in Kinloch's Ballad Book, p. 25, was compounded by the editor from B b, c.
A maid, solicited by a friar, says that she
fears hell-fire; the friar reminds her that if she were in hell he could sing her out. She stipulates for money in advance; while the friar is gone to fetch some, she hangs (spreads) a cloth before (over) a well. The money in hand, she calls out that her father (master) is coming; the friar runs to hide behind the cloth (a screen), and falls into the well. The friar cries for help; he is left to sing himself out. Extricated after a sufficient cooling, he asks his money back, but is told that he must pay for fouling the water.
This story, one might safely say, is not beyond the "imaginary forces" of any Western people, but an open well inside of an English house is at least of unusual occurrence, and if we find something of the kind to our hand in an Eastern tale of similar character, a borrowing seems more plausible than an invention. There is a considerable class of tales, mostly Oriental, in which a chaste wife discomfits two or three would-be seducers, bringing them to shame and ridicule in the end. In some, she exacts or receives money from her suitors at the outset; in some, an allegation that her husband is coming is the pretext for her concealing them. An example in English is 'The Wright's Chaste Wife,' by Adam of Cobsam, edited for the Early English Text Society, in 1865, by Dr. Furnivall. In this, three men successively are tumbled through a trap door into an underground room. But in the Persian Tútí Náma, or Book of the Parrot, of Nakhshabí, the wife lays a bed over a dry well, her suitors are invited to sit on it, and they fall in; and here, it is not extravagant to suppose, we may have the remote source of the trick in our ballad.[foot-note]
There is a French ballad of the same general type: 'Le lourdaud moine,' Tarbé", Romancero de Champagne, II, 135; 'Le moine Nicolas,' Bujeaud, II, 284. A monk, enamored of a married woman, is appointed to come to her while her husband is away; he is told to lay off his frock, which she secures, and she takes money which he has brought. He is then sent to the door to see if the husband be coming, and is locked out. He asks to have his frock and money returned; she will keep them for her husband. The convent jeer at him when he comes back: 'Dieu bénisse la commère qui t'a joué ce tour-là!'
'Munken i Vaande,' a rather flat Danish ballad from a Manuscript of the 16th century, tells of a monk who knocks at the door of a woman whom he has been courting, and calls to her to keep her word; she tells her husband to slip under the bed, and lets the monk in; the monk hands the woman gold rings which he had promised; the goodman comes out and gives him a beating; the monk leaps out of the window and goes to his cloister; his superior asks why he has been away; he has been shriving the farmer's wife, and it has nearly cost him his life.
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