allegorical satire on the luxury and vice of the Church, given under the
description of an imaginary paradise, in which the nuns are represented
as houris, and the black and grey monks as their paramours. 'Richard of
Alemaine' is a ballad, composed by an adherent of Simon de Montfort, Earl
of Leicester, after the defeat of the Royal party at the battle of Lewes
in 1264. In the year after that battle the Royal cause rallied, and the
Earl of Warren and Sir Hugh Bigod returned from exile, and helped the King
in his victory. In the battle of Lewes, Richard, King of the Romans, his
brother Henry III., and Prince Edward, with many others of the Royal
party, were taken prisoners.
[Note: See 'Richard of Alemaine,' Percy's Reliques, vol. ii., p. 2.]

The spirit and the allusions of this song shew that it was composed by
Leicester's party in the moment of their victory, and not after the
reaction which took place against their cause, and it must therefore
belong to the thirteenth century. To this period, too, probably belongs
a political satire, published by Ritson, and which Campbell thus charac-
terises:--'It is a ballad on the execution of the Scottish patriots, Sir
William Wallace and Sir Simon Frazer. The diction is as barbarous as we
should expect from a song of triumph on such a subject. It relates the
death and treatment of Wallace very minutely. The circumstance of his
being covered with a mock crown of laurel in Westminster Hall, which Stow
repeats, is there mentioned, and that of his legs being fastened with iron
fetters "_under his horse's wombe_" is told with savage exultation. The
piece was probably indited in the very year of the political murders which
it celebrates, certainly before 1314, as it mentions the skulking of
Robert Bruce, which, after the battle of Bannockburn, must have become
a jest out of season.'

Campbell quotes a love-ditty of this period, which is not devoid of