In answer to J. J. Dias Marques' question about 'Alonzo the Brave', there is
an analogue in English oral tradition, often called 'The Fair Maid of
Clifton'. It was certainly widely popular in England as a broadside ballad, a
recitation and a folk tale. An oral set was 'dictated by a schoolmistress'
in Nottingham around 1835. It is printed in Katharine M. Briggs, Dictionary of
British Folk-Tales in the English Language Part B Folk Legends, Vol. 1, 449-50
>>(Routledge 1970-1). It is rather literary in style, but I don't have 'The
>>Monk' with me to compare the versions. A 'rich and comely maid' promises to
>>marry a young man Bateman, and they secretly exchange a token, a broken
>ring. Then she meets a wealthy man, Germain, and agrees to marry him.
Bateman
>>threatens revenge and hangs himself before her door on her wedding day. His
>>attempts to haunt her are at first frustrated by the protection given by her
>>unborn child, but the first night after the birth she is carried away, 'to
>>what place no creature knew, nor to this day can tell.'
The Fair Maid is not based on Monk Lewis but on a seventeenth century
>>broadside ballad 'A Godly Warning for all Maidens . . . To the Tune of, The
Ladis (sic) Fall'. A copy in the Pepys
>>collection in Cambridge (reprinted in W. G. Day's edition of the Pepys
>>ballads, 1987: 1. 504) has a good woodcut of the devil carrying the
>>unfortunate lady away to hell.
>>The broadside was evidently very popular. It was reprinted and published in
>>the eighteenth century as a prose chapbook, 'Bateman's Tragedy'. This story
is curiously similar to the very popular Scottish and English non-supernatural
ballad 'Young Beichan' or 'Bateman' in the Child collection (no. 53), but is
not the same.
I would be glad of any evidence that the Fair Maid of Clifton was ever sung.
Gerald Porter
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