Ted Hughes has a poem called 'Singers' where he mentions songs about
'the lord who abducted the miller's daughter,
The farmer who killed his wife and a king'.
These sound very familiar, but they don't exactly describe any song I know. In
particular, ballads about the murder of a king are very unusual, no doubt
because 'imagining the death of a king' was once a capital offence. Can anyone
help?
Gerald Porter
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