King Estmere [Child 60]

DESCRIPTION: King Estmere, aided by his brother Adler Younge, seeks to wed the daughter of King Adland. He wins her troth; at threat of losing her to rival (heathen) king of Spain, he attends the wedding in guise of a harper, kills his rival, and wins the bride.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1750 (Percy folio)
KEYWORDS: courting marriage disguise trick royalty
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Child 60, "King Estmere" (1 text)
Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume II, pp. 600-607, "King Estmere" (2 texts, by necessity from Percy's Reliques rather than the Percy Folio)
Percy/Wheatley-ReliquesOfAncientEnglishPoetry I, pp. 85-98, "King Estmere" (1 text)
Quiller-Couch-OxfordBookOfBallads 41, "King Estmere" (1 text)
Gummere-OldEnglishBallads, pp. 270-279+358-359, "King Estmere" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Iona & Peter Opie, The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, pp. 100-108, "King Estmere" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSPercyFolio}, The Percy Folio, London, British Library MS. Additional 27879, page 249 [the pages containing this piece are now missing and cannot be checked, so we have only Percy's unreliable transcription]
Roud #3970
NOTES [525 words]: According to Fowler, p. 158 n. 25, this is one of eighteen ballads in the Child collection found only in the Percy Folio. As a result, this ballad does not exist in any proper copy. Although it was originally found in the Percy manuscript, Percy himself tore it out (apparently to give to the printer or someone, but not until he had rewritten it in his pompous style (Groom, pp. 231, 46), and the pages have been lost. Thus the only reference is the text printed in the Reliques -- and, from Percy's comments and his patently false claim to have another copy, it seems clear that he touched that up somewhere. Nor do Percy's two editions agree entirely.
The Opies, Wilson, p. 131, and Chambers, p. 181, all note an item mentioned in The Complaynt of Scotland (1549), "quhou the king of est mure land mareit the kyngis docher of vest mure land." Possibly the same story -- but who knows? Murray's introduction to the Compaynt (Complaynt, p. lxxvi) mentions the possibiity but is not sure. The title does seem to imply that "Estmere" is the "East Moor" -- i.e. the lands east of the West Moor, or Westmoreland. Which would be Northumberland or maybe Durham. Of course, neither Northumberland nor Durham had a King -- Northumbria had an Earl, until the county was upgraded to a Dukedom, and Durham was governed primarily by its bishop.
Unless one is prepared to go back to Anglo-Saxon times, anyway, and assume that King Estmere is the king of the nation of Northumbria (effectively destroyed around 850 C.E. by the Vikings). In which case Adland/Westmoor is the Kingdom of Strathclyde. But, of course, there was no nation of Spain back then; indeed, the Iberian Peninsula was still under Islamic rule....
The Percy Folio has another piece, "Kinge Adler" (Hales/Furnival-BishopPercysFolioManuscript, volume II, pp. 296-300) which Hales and Furnival suggest may be about Estmere's brother, since Adler was a character in "King Estmere." But, of course, we must reckon with the fact that Percy rewrote "King Estmere"; for all we know, Percy brought in Adler from "King Adler."
Shippey, p. 52, says that the philologist Sophus Bugge related this to the Old Norse saga Hervarar Saga -- which might be of interest because Christopher Tolkien, the son of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited and translated the saga as The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise in 1960. This link would be of great scholarly interest if true, but we can never be certain, because we don't know how much of the ballad as we have it is traditional and how much is Percy (and, even if we had the Percy Folio original, we know that it in its turn contained a lot of rewritten ballads and chopped-down romances).
The idea of king-as-minstrel has a long pedigree in English, going back to the romance of "Sir Orfeo" and the related ballad "King Orfeo" [Child 19]. The King in Disguise is also an ancient idea (Thompson motif K1812); see the notes to "King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth" [Child 273]. The combination of the king disguised as a minstrel is perhaps not so ancient, but "Prince Disguised as Minstrel" is Thompson R24.2; clearly there is precedent for the idea. - RBW
Bibliography

Chambers: E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1945, 1947
Complaynt: James A. H. Murray, editor, The Complaynt of Scotland, volume I (Introduction plus Chapters I-XIII), Early English Text Society, 1872 (I use the 1906 reprint; the Complaynt was published in 1549)
Fowler: David C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, Duke University Press, 1968
Groom: Nick Groom, The Making of Percy's Reliques, Oxford English Monographs, 1999
Shippey: Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, revised edition, Houghton-Mifflin, 2003
Wilson: R. M. Wilson: The Lost Literature of Medieval England, Philosophical Library, 1952

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