+The Text+ is from Ravenscroft's _Deuteromelia_ (1609), reprinted almost
_verbatim_ in Tom Durfey's _Pills to Purge Melancholy_.
+The Story+ was sufficiently popular not only to have been revived, at
the end of the seventeenth century, but to have had three other 'Parts'
added to it, the whole four afterwards being combined into one
broadside.
In similar Spanish, Portuguese, and French ballads, the damsel escapes
by saying she is a leper, or the daughter of a leper, or otherwise
diseased. Much the same story is told in Danish and German ballads.