There are ballads both in Northern and Southern Europe which have a certain amount of likeness with 'The Clerk's Twa Sons,' but if the story of all derives from one original, time has introduced great and even unusual variations. A very well known German ballad ('Das Schloss in Oesterreich,' Bohme's Erk, No. 61), found also in the Low Countries and in Scandinavia, has the following story. A youth is lying in a dungeon, condemned to be hanged. His father comes to the town and they exchange words about the severity of his prison. The father then goes to the lord of the place and offers three hundred florins as a ransom.
Ransom is refused: the boy has a gold chain on his neck which will be his death. The father says that the chain was not stolen, but the gift of a young lady, who reared the boy as a page, or what not. There is no dear-bought love in the case. The father, standing by the gallows, threatens revenge, but his son deprecates that: he cares not so much for his life as for his mother's grief. Within a half year, more than three hundred men pay with their lives for the death of the boy. A Catalan and Italian ballad (Milá, Romancerillo, No. 208; Nigra, No. 4) has resemblances with the Scottish and the German, and may possibly be a common link. Three students meet three girls, and attempt some little jests with them: ask them for a kiss, or throw some pebbles at them; or meet one girl on a bridge and kiss her. For this the girls have them arrested by an accommodating catchpoll, and they are hanged by a peremptory judge. This Southern ballad is originally French (see Journal des Savants, Sept.-Nov., 1889, p. 614).
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