Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England, page 99 by Anonymous
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e Rokeby MS., however, are not always to be preferred; and in order to produce as full and accurate a version as the materials would yield, the following text has been founded upon a careful collation of both MSS. A few alterations have been adopted, but only when the necessity for them appeared to be self-evident; and the orthography has been rendered tolerably uniform, for there is no good reason why we should have 'sewe,' 'scho,' and 'sike,' in some places, and the more modern forms of 'sow,' 'she,' and 'such,' in others. If the MSS. were correctly transcribed, which we have no ground for doubting, they must both be referred to a much later period than the era when the author flourished. The language of the poem is that of Craven, in Yorkshire; and, although the composition is acknowledged on all hands to be one of the reign of Henry VII., the provincialisms of that most interesting mountain district have been so little affected by the spread of education, that the Felon Sewe is at the present day perfectly comprehensible to any Craven peasant, and to such a reader neither note nor glossary is
necessary. Dr. Whitaker's explanations are, therefore, few and brief, for he was thoroughly acquainted with the language and the district. Scott, on the contrary, who knew nothing of the dialect, and confounded its pure Saxon with his Lowland Scotch, gives numerous notes, which only display his want of the requisite local knowledge, and are, consequently, calculated to mislead.
The Felon Sewe belongs to the same class of compositions as the Hunting of the Hare, reprinted by Weber, and the Tournament of Tottenham, in Percy's Reliques. Scott says that 'the comic romance was a sort of parody upon the usual subjects of minstrel poetry.' This idea may be extended, for the old comic romances were in many instances not merely 'sorts of parodies,' but real parodies on compositions which were popular in their day, although they have not descended to us. We certainly remember to have met with an old chivalric romance, i