Jock the Leg and a merchant (packman, pedlar) put up at the same tavern. Jock makes free to order a good supper at the merchant's expense; the packman gives notice that he will not pay a penny beyond his own shot. They go to bed in rooms separated by a locked door, but before the merchant is well asleep Jock appears at his feet and rouses him; it is more than time that they were on their road. The merchant will not stir a foot till daylight; he cannot go by Barnisdale or Coventry for fear that Jock the Leg should take his pack. His self-imposed comrade promises to see him safely through these places, but when they come to dangerous ground avows himself as Jock the Leg, and demands the pack. The merchant puts his pack under a tree, and says he will fight for it till daylight; they fight; the robber finds a more than equal match, cries Hold! and begs the boon of a blast on his horn, to which the merchant contemptuously accedes. Four-and-twenty bowmen come to Jock's help. The merchant offers to give up his pack if the six best of these, and Jock, the seventh, can drive him one foot from it. The seven make the attempt and fail. The merchant, holding his pack in one hand, slays five of the six with his broadsword, and knocks over the other.
Jock declares him to be the boldest swordsman he has ever fought with; if he were equally good with the bow, he should have service with Jock's master in the greenwood. The merchant would not join a robber-band. Jock proposes a barter of deerskins for fine linen. The merchant wants no stolen deerskins. 'Take your pack,' says Jock, 'and wherever we meet we shall be good comrades.' 'I'll take my pack,' says the uncompromising merchant, 'and wherever we meet I'll call thee a rank thief.'
This piece, but for names (and Jock the Leg is only a thin shrouding for Little John), might have gone with the Robin Hood ballads. It was composed, probably, in the last half of the eighteenth century, and for hawkers' purposes, but it is a better ballad, imitation as it is, than some of the seventeenth-century broadsides of the same class (which is indeed saying very little). The fight for the pack, 13, 14, 20, we have in 'The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood' (also a late ballad), No 132, 6, 7, 10; the "asking" of a blast on the horn and the scornful reply, 16, 17, in 'Robin Hood and the Shepherd,' No 135, 15, 16, with verbal similarity in the first case. (17 is all but a repetition of No 123, B 26, and No 140, B 25.)
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