"The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter" is an English ballad

Ballad

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

, collected by Francis James Child

Francis James Child

Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry...

 as Child Ballad

Child Ballads

The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century...

 110.

Synopsis

A knight persuades a shepherd's daughter to give him her virginity. She chases after him to court, on foot while he is on horseback, and demands marriage. He attempts to bribe her, but she insists, and he must marry her or be executed. After the marriage, it is revealed, either by the woman herself or by Billy Blin, that she is, in fact, the daughter of royalty or high nobility; it may also be revealed that the man is a noble instead of a mere knight.

Motifs

Her pursuit of the knight, on foot while he is on horseback, also appears in Child Ballad 63, "Child Waters

Child Waters

-Synopsis:The pregnant Margaret, or Faire Ellen, is told by Child Waters that she should bide at home. In some variants, he offers her lands to support his child, and she tells him that she would rather have one kiss from him than all his lands. He tells her that she must dress his footpage and...

", where it fits a very different plot. The motif is very similar to that of the loathly lady

Loathly lady

The loathly lady is a common literary device used in medieval literature, most famously in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale. The motif was prominent in Celtic mythology and to a lesser extent Germanic mythology, where the lady often represented the sovereignty of the...

, particularly the variant found in Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".

Lise et Mainfroi, a 1740 French imitation of this ballad, has an actual shepherdess as the heroine; she announces at the altar that she is satisfied without the wedding, and the king and his court must persuade her to agree.