Printed from two ancient copies, one of them in black-letter in the Pepys Collection. Its title at large is, _The Children in the Wood; or, The Norfolk Gentleman's Last Will and Testament: To the tune of Rogero, &c._
[Ritson thought he had refuted Percy's statement that the play was older than the ballad by pointing out that the latter was entered in the Stationers' books in 1595, but I find in Baker's _Biographia Dramatica_ an assertion that Yarrington's play was not printed "till many years after it was written." The following is the form of the entry at Stationers' Hall, "15 Oct. 1595. Thomas Millington entred for his copie under th[e h]andes of bothe the Wardens a ballad intituled _The Norfolk Gent, his Will and Testament_ _and howe he commytted the keepinge of his children to his owne_ _brother whoe delte most wickedly with them and howe God plagued_ _him for it._" Sharon Turner and Miss Halsted favoured the rather untenable opinion that the wicked uncle was intended to represent Richard III., and therefore that the date of the ballad was much earlier than that usually claimed for it. Turner writes in his _History of England_, "I have sometimes fancied that the popular ballad may have been written at this time on Richard and his nephews before it was quite safe to stigmatize him more openly."
Wailing, or Wayland Wood, a large cover near Walton in Norfolk is the place which tradition assigns to the tragedy, but the people of Wood Dalling also claim the honour for their village.
Addison speaks of the ballad as "one of the darling songs of the common people, [which] has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their age," and points out that the circumstance
... robin-red-breast piously Did cover them with leaves,
has a parallel in Horace, who tells us that when he was a child, fallen asleep in a desert wood, the turtle doves took pity on him and covered him with leaves.
The popular belief that the robin covers dead bodies with leaves (probably founded on the habits of the bird) is of considerable antiquity. The passage in Cymbeline (act iv. sc. 2) naturally occurs as the chief illustration:--
... "the ruddock would, With charitable bill.... ... bring thee all this, Yea and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none, To winter-ground thy corse."