268 NORDIC BALLADS

the age of twelve. Three Roses (Erk-Bohme 203, 204) is a deserted
maiden's cry of sorrow, and in the Low Country King's Daughter
(Erk-Bohme 99) poetical justice is rather heavily done by making
the faithless seducer return to beg bread at his lady's door.

Cynical ballads of intrigue are quite numerous in the German
corpus (Erk-Bohme 127-56). They are almost all known also in
the Low Countries, and they betray a French inspiration, though
they are rather picaresque than witty. James I knew a Scottish
ballad of the Man in the Hay type (Erk-Bohme 150), and the
minnesinger Gottfried von Neifen is responsible for another two
(Erk-Bohrne 130, 138). The ballads are sometimes made at the
expense of certain classes of persons supposed to be especially
amorous: millers and their wives, students, monks, and parsons
(Erk-Bohme 137, 152-6). On the other hand, nuns in love are
treated tenderly, whether fortunate or unhappy (Erk-Bohme 68,
69, 89, 90). The pieces have had a wide circulation, and in their
lyrical form (Nonnenklagen) they are especially affecting; for them
there were precedents in French. Few ballads also have such fine
airy beginnings as

I stood upon a hill-top,
I looked in a deep mere,

I saw a skiff a-swimming,
three young earls in it were.

The device of pretended death, used of a nun in a Swedish ballad,
is used in Pretended Death as Match-maker (Erk-Bohme in); for
which there was a French precedent in the old Belle Isabiaus.
Stories of resurrected wives and fiancees (Richmode von Adocht)
may have had a foundation in fact, like the Spanish Dona Angela.
The Lady of Weissenburg (Erk-Bohme 102-3) *s one °ftne most
fully developed of the ballads of passionate crimes. The event was
historical and recorded in chronicles. In 1065 Friedrich of Saxony
was murdered by the Landgrave of Thuringia for the sake of
the fair Adelheid, his wife. The ballads date probably from the
fifteenth century. They are hostile to the lady, whom they accuse
of laying the plot for her husband's murder; in some versions she
seeks to reward the slayer, but he remorsefully throws away her
ring, in others he confesses and dies, and in others he dies return-
ing to her the thirty ducats of the betrayal. The ballad-mongers
of the Low Countries connect the event with the duchy of Luxem-
burg. Hans Steutlinger, recorded in print in 1544, is a history