Ah, but Haimet and Barat quickly conquered their fear. What, such master thieves be frightened by a mere ghost? They warily returned to their fire.

“What’s this? No corpse?”

“And no bacon! Since when do ghosts eat bacon?”

“Travers!” they cried together.

“Come, brother,” Haimet said, “we’re not done yet!”

They stole back up onto the roof of Travers’ farmhouse and wormed down into the thatch to watch the bacon simmering in the caldron. And as soon as Travers and his wife turned away, Haimet lowered a curved, sharpened stick, delicately caught the bacon on its hooked end, and began to raise his prize. But Haimet could only lift that heavy bacon slowly, and Travers turned back just in time to see it vanishing into the thatch.

“Hey, up there!” he shouted. “Haimet! Barat! I may not be a thief, but I’m no fool, either. We could be at this till Judgment Day and never reach an end. Peace?”

“Peace,” floated down two amused voices from the thatch.

“So be it. Come down, you two—as my guests.”

And so the matter of the bacon was at last resolved. As was the bacon.

Crime doesn’t pay

Not all stories in the repertoires of medieval minstrels were about the romances and high deeds of the nobility. Though it might just as well have been performed for a noble audience as a common one, this thirteenth-century French variant on the master thief theme—like most good master thief tales—comes from honest peasant stock.