20 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
Who was king wii> croun, 
And who him fostered fare. 
And who was bold baroun, 
As bair elders ware 
Bi fere; 
Tomas telles in toun 
Ms aventours as bai were.” 
This is a specimen of such “quaynte Inglis,” and such 
strange ryme/’ as there is no other instance of; and, with the 
other extracts i have made from this venerable relique 60) 
(which, by the way, i had neither time nor convenience to tran¬ 
scribe at length), sufficiently proves, at least to my own convic¬ 
tion, that this is the identical poem alluded to in the above pas¬ 
sage of Robert Mannyng. In further support of the author¬ 
ship, i can also cite the fragment of an ancient romance in 
French metre upon the same subject, in the possession of Mr. 
Douce, 61) in which the Scoto-English performance is appar¬ 
ently criticised under the name of Thomas. 62) The objection 
made, by some, against this opinion, is, that the poem speaks of ' 
Thomas, in the third person, as one from whom he states himself 
to have received his materials: but for this singularity (if it be 
one), the authors caprice must be responsible. It seems, in 
fact, to have been, if not the peculiar, at least the notorious 
practice, of this popular rimer: as, in two more modern poems, 
always ascribed to, but not, i believe, actually writen by him, 
he is introduced in the same manner: one of these mentioned 
by Lord Hailes, you most probably have in the Scotish 
prophecys, the other, an imperfect MS. in the Cotton library, & 
Lincoln cathedral, has not been printed. 63) Beside, Maistre 
Wace, more than once, speaks of himself in the same manner, 
tho’ at other times in the first person; and this identical ob¬ 
jection is alledged, by Bishop Watson, against the cavils of 
They seem not to have been used. 
Francis Douce (1757-1834) aided Ritson in the preparation of Biblio- 
graphia Poetica and then became estranged from him because of the shabby 
treatment he received. 
The Douce fragments were edited by Francisque Michel, Tristan: recueil 
de ce qui rest des poemes relatifs d ses aventures composes en Frangois, en 
Anglo-Normandj et en Grec dans les xii et xin sidcles, 2 vols., London, 1835, 
and described by A. E. Curdy, La Folie Tristan, an Anglo-Norman poem, 
Baltimore, 1902. ■ Scott cited extracts from the fragments (Introduction pp. 
42-4) in support of the point Ritson here makes. 
It was printed by David Laing as ‘Tomas of Ersseldoune’, in Early Pop¬ 
ular Poetry of Scotland, revised edition, London, 1895, pp. 81-111. 
