Chap-Books
and
Folk-Lore Tracts.

Edited by
G. L. Gomme, F.S.A.
and
H. B. Wheatley, F.S.A.

First Series.

I.

There seems to be some considerable reason for believingthat the hero of this story was a reality. The story tells usthat he lived in the marsh of the Isle of Ely, and that hebecame “a brewer’s man” at Lyn, and traded to Wisbeach.This little piece of geographical evidence enables us to fix thestory as belonging to the great Fen District, which occupied thenorth of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.

The antiquary Thomas Hearne has gone so far as to identifythe hero of tradition with a doughty knight of the Crusaders.Writing in the Quarterly Review (vol. xxi. p. 102), Sir FrancisPalgrave says:—

“Mr. Thomas Hickathrift, afterwards Sir Thomas Hickathrift,Knight, is praised by Mr. Thomas Hearne as a ‘famouschampion.’ The honest antiquary has identified this well-knownknight with the far less celebrated Sir Frederick deTylney, Baron of Tylney in Norfolk, the ancestor of theTylney family, who was killed at Acon, in Syria, in the reignof Richard Cœur de Lion. Hycophric, or Hycothrift, as themister-wight observes, being probably a corruption of Frederick.[ii]This happy exertion of etymological acumen is not wholly dueto Hearne, who only adopted a hint given by Mr. Philip leNeve, whilome of the College of Arms.”

There does not seem to be the slightest evidence for Hearne’sidentification any more than there is for his philological conclusions,and we may pass over this for other and more reliableinformation.

We must first of all turn to the story itself, as it has comedown to us in its chapbook form. It is divided into two parts.The first part of the story is the earliest; the second partbeing evidently a printer’s or a chapman’s addition. Ourreprint of the former is taken from the copy in the PepysianLibrary at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and which wasprinted probably about 1660-1690; the latter is taken from theBritish Museum copy, the date of which, according to theMuseum authorities, is 1780.

In trying to ascertain something as to the date of the storyapart from that of its printed version, it will therefore benecessary to put out of consideration the second portion. Thishas been written by some one well acquainted with the originalfirst part, and with the spirit of the story; but in spite of thisthere is undoubted evidence of its literary origin at a date laterthan the first part. But turning to the first part there are twoexpressions in this early Pepysian version which have notbeen repeated in the later editions—those of the eighteenthcentury; and these two expressions appear to me to indicate a[iii]...