A brief summary of Sir Amadas[1] the last of the six variants, must now be given. Amadas finds himself financially embarrassed, and sets forth for seven years of errantry with only forty pounds in hand. This he pays to release and bury the body of a merchant who has died in debt. When thus reduced to absolute penury, Amadas meets a White Knight, who tells him that he will aid him on condition of receiving half the gains. The hero finds a rich wreck on the seacoast, and so with new apparel goes to the court, where he wins wealth in a tourney and the princess's heart at a feast. After he marries her and has a son born to him, the White Knight reappears and demands that the accepted conditions be complied with. Hesitatingly Amadas prepares to divide first his wife and afterwards his son, but he is stayed by the stranger, who explains that he is the ghost of the dead merchant. So Amadas is at last released from misfortune and lives in happiness.
In all six of these stories we have a knight, who sets out to win a tourney in which the victor's prize is to be the hand of a princess. In all of them save Old Swedish he is represented as being impoverished by previous extravagance, in Richars, Lion de Bourges, and Rittertriuwe it being expressly stated that he had wasted his fortune by over-indulgence in his passion for jousting. On his way to the place appointed for the contest the hero pays for the burial[2] of a man whose corpse is held for debt.[3] He goes on and is approached either before (Richars, Lion de Bourges, Dianese, Old Swedish, and Sir
- ↑ For a fuller analysis see Hippe, pp. 160-164.
- ↑ In Richars, Lion de Bourges, Dianese, and Sir Amadas he pays his all, even to his equipment for war, the most logical and, on the whole, probably the earlier form of the story.
- ↑ In all except Old Swedish and Sir Amadas the man was a knight; in these he was a merchant, the husband of the woman at whose house the hero lodges.
