Remarks.—The tale is noteworthy as being distinctly mythical in character, and yet collected within the last ten years from one of the English peasantry. The conception of the moon as a beneficent being, the natural enemy of the bogles and other dwellers of the dark, is natural enough, but scarcely occurs, so far as I recollect, in other mythological systems. There is, at any rate, nothing analogous in the Grimms' treatment of the moon in their Teutonic Mythology, tr. Stallybrass, pp. 701-21.
Source.—From memory, by Mr. E. Sidney Hartland, as heard by him from his nurse in childhood.
Parallels.—Jacques de Vitry Exempla, ed. Prof. Crane, No. xiii., and references given in notes, p. 139. It occurs in Swift and in modern Italian folk-lore.
Remarks.—The Exempla were anecdotes, witty and otherwise, used by the monks in their sermons to season their discourse. Often they must have been derived from the folk of the period, and at first sight it. might seem that we had found still extant among the folk the story that had been the original of Jacques de Yitry's Exemplum. But the theological basis of the story shows clearly that it was originally a monkish invention and came thence among the folk.
Source.—Percy, Reliques. The ballad form of the story has become such a nursery classic that I had not the heart to "prose " it. As Mr. Allingham remarks, it is the best of the ballads of the pedestrian order.
Parallels.—The second of R. Yarrington's Two Lamentable Tragedies, 1601, has the same plot as the ballad. Several chapbooks have been made out of it, some of them enumerated by Halliwell's Popular Histories (Percy Soc.) No. 18. From one of these I am in the fortunate position of giving the names of the dramatis personæ of this domestic tragedy. Androgus was the wicked uncle, Pisaurus his brother who married Eugenia, and their children in the wood were Cassander and little Kate. The ruffians were appropriately named Rawbones and Woudkill. According to a writer in 3 Notes and Queries, ix. 144, the traditional burial-place of the children is pointed
