The best qualified judges are not agreed as to the typographical origin of a: see Dickson, Introduction of the Art of Printing into Scotland, Aberdeen, 1885, pp 51 ff, 82 ff, 86 f. Mr. Laing had become convinced before his death that he had been wrong in assigning this piece to the press of Chepman and Myllar. The date of b may be anywhere from 1492 to 1534, the year of W. de Worde's death. Of c Ritson says, in his corrected preface to the Gest, 1832, I, 2: By the favor of the Reverend Dr. Farmer, the editor had in his hands, and gave to Mr. Douce, a few leaves of an old 4to black letter impression by the above Wynken de Worde, probably in 1489, and totally unknown to Ames and Herbert. No reason is given for this date.[foot-note] I am not aware that any opinion has been expressed as to the printer or the date of d, e. W. Copland's edition, f, if his dates are fully ascertained, is not earlier than 1548. Ritson says that g is entered to Edward White in the Stationers' books, 13 May, 1594. "A pastorall plesant commedie of Robin Hood & Little John, &c," is entered to White on the 14th of May of that year, Arber, II, 649: this is more likely to have been a play of Robin Hood.
a, b, f, g, are deficient at 71, 3391, and misprinted at 49, 50, repeating, it may be, the faults of a prior impression, a appears, by internal evidence, to be an older text than b.[foot-note] Some obsolete words of the earlier copies have been modernized in f, g,[foot-note] and deficient lines have been supplied. A considerable number of Middle-English forms remain[foot-note] after those successive renovations of reciters and printers which are presumable in such cases. The Gest may have been compiled at a time when such forms had gone out of use, and these may be relics of the ballads from which this little epic was made up; or the whole poem may have been put together as early as 1400, or before. There are no firm grounds on which to base an opinion.
No notice of Robin Hood has been down to this time recovered earlier than that which was long ago pointed out by Percy as occurring in Piers Plowman, and this, according to Professor Skeat, cannot be older than about 1377.[foot-note] Sloth, in that poem, says in his shrift that he knows "rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf, erle of Chestre,"[foot-note] though but imperfectly acquainted with his paternoster: B, passus v, 401 f, Skeat, ed. 1886, I, 166. References to Robin Hood, or to his story, are not infrequent in the following century.
In Wyntoun's Chronicle of Scotland, put at about 1420, there is this passage, standing quite by itself, under the year 1283:
Disorderly persons undertook, it seems, to imitate Robin Hood and his men. In the year 1417, says Stowe, one, by his counterfeit name called Fryer Tucke, with many other malefactors, committed many robberies in the counties of Surrey and Sussex, whereupon the king sent out his writs for their apprehension: Annals, p. 352 b, ed. 1631.[foot-note] A petition to Parliament, in the year 1439, represents that one Piers Venables, of Derbyshire, rescued a prisoner, "and after that tyme, the same Piers Venables, havynge no liflode ne sufficeante of goodes, gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers, beynge of his clothinge, ... and, in manere of insurrection, wente into the wodes in that contré, like as it hadde be Robyn-hode and his meyné:" Rotuli Parliamentorum, V, 16.[foot-note]
Bower, writing 1441-47, describes the lower orders of his time as entertaining themselves with ballads both merry and serious, about Robin Hood, Little John, and their mates, and preferring them to all others;[foot-note] and Major, or Mair, who was born not long after 1450, says in his book, printed in 1521, that Robin Hood ballads were in vogue over all Britain.[foot-note]
Sir John Paston, in 1473, writes of a servant whom he had kept to play Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and who was gone into Bernysdale: Fenn, Original Letters, etc., II, 134, cited by Ritson.
Gutch cites this allusion to Robin Hood ballads "from Manuscript Porkington, No 10, f. 152, written in the reign of Edward IV:"
And again, the name simply, from "a song on Woman, from Manuscript Lambeth, 306, fol. 135, of the fifteenth century":
These passages show the popularity of Robin Hood ballads for a century or more before the time when the Gest was printed, a popularity which was fully established at the beginning of this period, and unquestionably extended back to a much earlier day. Of these ballads, there have come down to us in a comparatively ancient form the following: those from which the Gest (printed, perhaps, before 1500) was composed, being at least four, Robin Hood, the Knight and the Monk, Robin Hood, Little John and the Sheriff, Robin Hood and the King, and Robin Hood's Death (a fragment); 'Robin Hood and the Monk,' No 118, more properly Robin Hood rescued by Little John, Manuscript of about 1450, but not for that older than the ballads of the Gest; 'Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn,' No 119, Percy Manuscript c. 1650; 'Robin Hood's Death,' No 120, Percy Manuscript and late garlands; 'Robin Hood and the Potter,' No 121, Manuscript of about 1500, later, perhaps, than any other of the group.[foot-note] Besides these there are thirty-two ballads, Nos 122-153. For twenty-two of these we have the texts of broadsides and garlands of the seventeenth century,[foot-note] four of the same being also found in the Percy Manuscript; eight occur in garlands, etc., of the last century, one of these same in the Percy Manuscript, and another in an eighteenth-century Manuscript; one is derived from a suspicious nineteenth-century Manuscript, and one from nineteenth-century tradition. About half a dozen of these thirty-two have in them something of the old popular quality; as many more not the least smatch of it. Fully a dozen are variations, sometimes wearisome, sometimes sickening, upon the theme 'Robin Hood met with his match.' A considerable part of the Robin Hood poetry looks like char-work done for the petty press, and should be judged as such. The earliest of these ballads, on the other hand, are among the best of all ballads, and perhaps none in English please so many and please so long.
That a considerable number of fine ballads of this cycle have been lost will appear all but certain when we remember that three of the very best are found each in only one manuscript.[foot-note]
Robin Hood is absolutely a creation of the ballad-muse. The earliest mention we have of him is as the subject of ballads. The only two early historians who speak of him as a ballad-hero, pretend to have no information about him except what they derive from ballads, and show that they have none other by the description they give of him; this description being in entire conformity with ballads in our possession, one of which is found in a Manuscript as old as the older of these two writers.
Robin Hood is a yeoman, outlawed for reasons not given but easily surmised, "courteous and free," religious in sentiment, and above all reverent of the Virgin, for the love of whom he is respectful to all women. He lives by the king's deer (though he loves no man in the world so much as his king) and by levies on the superfluity of the higher orders, secular and spiritual, bishops and archbishops, abbots, bold barons, and knights,[foot-note] but harms no husbandman or yeoman, and is friendly to poor men generally, imparting to them of what he takes from the rich. Courtesy, good temper, liberality, and manliness are his chief marks; for courtesy and good temper he is a popular Gawain. Yeoman as he is, he has a kind of royal dignity, a princely grace, and a gentleman-like refinement of humor. This is the Robin Hood of the Gest especially; the late ballads debase this primary conception in various ways and degrees.
This is what Robin Hood is, and it is equally important to observe what he is not. He has no sort of political character, in the Gest or any other ballad. This takes the ground from under the feet of those who seek to assign him a place in history. Wyntoun, who gives four lines to Robin Hood, is quite precise. He is likely to have known of the adventure of King Edward and the outlaw, and he puts Robin under Edward I, at the arbitrary date of 1283, a hundred and forty years before his own time. Bower, without any kind of ceremony, avouches our hero to have been one of the proscribed followers of Simon de Montfort, and this assertion of Bower is adopted and maintained by a writer in the London and Westminster Review, 1840, XXXIII, 424.[foot-note] Major, who probably knew some ballad of Richard I and Robin Hood, offers a simple conjecture that Robin flourished about Richard's time, "circa hæc tempora, ut auguror," and this is the representation in Matthew Parker's 'True Tale,' which many have repeated, not always with ut auguror; as Scott, with whom no one can quarrel, in the inexpressibly delightful Ivanhoe, and Thierry in his Conquête de l'Angleterre, Book xi, IV, 81 ff, ed. 1830, both of whom depict Robin Hood as the chief of a troop of Saxon bandits, Thierry making him an imitator of Hereward. Hunter, again, The Ballad-Hero, Robin Hood, p. 48, interprets the King Edward of the Gest as Edward II, and makes Robin Hood an adherent of the Earl of Lancaster in the fatal insurrection of 1322. No one of these theories has anything besides ballads for a basis except Hunter's. Hunter has an account-book in which the name Robin Hood occurs; as to which see further on, under stanzas 414-450 of the Gest. Hereward the Saxon, Fulk Fitz Warine, Eustace the Monk, Wallace, all outlaws of one kind or another, are celebrated in romantic tales or poems, largely fabulous, which resemble in a general way, and sometimes in particulars, the traditional ballads about Robin Hood;[foot-note] but these outlaws are recognized by contemporary history.
The chief comrades of Robin Hood are: Robin Hood and the Monk, Little John, Scathlok (Scarlok. Scarlet), and Much; to these the Gest adds Gilbert of the White Hand and Reynold, 292 f. A friar is not a member of his company in the older ballads. A curtal, or cutted friar, called Friar Tuck in the title, but not in the ballad, has a fight with Robin Hood in No 123, and is perhaps to be regarded as having accepted Robin's invitation to join his company; this, however, is not said. Friar Tuck is simply named as one of Robin's troop in two broadsides, No 145, No 147, but plays no part in them. These two broadsides also name Maid Marian, who appears elsewhere only in a late and entirely insignificant ballad, No 150.[foot-note]
Friar Tuck is a character in each of two Robin Hood plays, both of which we have, unluckily, only in a fragmentary state. One of these plays, dating as far back as 1475, presents scenes from Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn, followed, without any link, by others from some ballad of a rescue of Robin Hood from the sheriff; to which extracts from still other ballads may have been annexed. In this play the friar has no special mark; he simply makes good use of his bow. The other play, printed by Copland with the Gest, not much before 1550, treats more at length the story of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, and then that of Robin Hood and the Potter, again, and naturally, without connection. The conclusion is wanting, and the play may have embraced still other ballads. The Friar in this is a loose and jovial fellow, and gave the hint for Scott's Clerk of Copmanhurst.[foot-note]
The second of the Robin Hood plays is described in the title as "very proper to be played in May-games." These games were in the sixteenth century, and, it would seem, before, often a medley of many things. They were not limited to the first day of May, or even to the month of May; they might occur in June as well. They were not uniform, and might include any kind of performance or spectacle which suited the popular taste. "I find," says Stow, "that in the moneth of May, the citizens of London, of all estates, lightlie in every parish, or sometimes two or three parishes joyning together, had their several Mayinges, and did fetch in Maypoles, with divers warlike shewes, with good archers, morrice-dancers, and other devices for pastime all the day long; and towards the evening they had stage-playes and bonefires in the streetes."[foot-note] In the Diary of Henry Machyn we read that on the twenty-sixth of May, 1555, there was a goodly May-game at St. Martins in the Field, with giant and hobby-horses, morris-dance and other minstrels; and on the third day of June following, a goodly May-game at Westminster, with giants and devils, and three morris-dancers, and many disguised, and the Lord and Lady of the May rode gorgeously, with divers minstrels playing. On the thirtieth of May, 1557, there was a goodly May-game in Fenchurch Street, in which the Nine Worthies rode, and they had speeches, and the morris-dance, and the Sowdan, and the Lord and Lady of the May, and more besides. And again, on the twenty-fourth of June, 1559, there was a May-game, with a giant, the Nine Worthies, with speeches, a goodly pageant with a queen, St. George and the Dragon, the morris-dance, and afterwards Robin Hood and Little John, and Maid Marian and Friar Tuck, and they had speeches round about London. (Pp 89, 137, 201.)[foot-note]
In the rural districts the May-game was naturally a much simpler affair. The accounts of the chamberlains and churchwardens of Kingston upon Thames for Mayday, 23 Henry VII-28 Henry VIII, 1507-36, contain charges for the morris, the Lady, Little John, Robin Hood, and, Maid Marian; the accounts for 21 Henry VII-1 Henry VIII relate to expenses for the Kyngham, and a king and queen are mentioned, presumably king and queen of May; under 24 Henry VII the "cost of the Kyngham and Robyn Hode are entered together."[foot-note]
"A simple northern man" is made to say in Albion's England, 1586:
Tollet's painted window (which is assigned by Douce to about 1460-70, and, if rightly dated, furnishes the oldest known representation of a May-game with the morris) has, besides a fool, a piper and six dancers, a May-pole, a hobby-horse, a friar, and a lady, and the lady, being crowned, is to be taken as Queen of May.
What concerns us is the part borne by Robin Hood, John, and the Friar in these games, and Robin's relation to Maid Marian. In Ellis's edition of Brand's Antiquities, I, 214, note h, we are told that Robin Hood is styled King of May in The Book of the Universal Kirk of Scotland. This is a mistake, and an important mistake. In April, 1577, the General Assembly requested the king to "discharge [prohibit] playes of Robin Hood, King of May, and sick others, on the Sabboth day." In April, 1578, the fourth session, the king and council were supplicated to discharge "all kynd of insolent play is, as King of May, Robin Hood, and sick others, in the moneth of May, played either be bairnes at the schools, or others"; and the subject was returned to in the eighth session. We know from various sources that plays, founded on the ballads, were sometimes performed in the course of the games. We know that archers sometimes personated Robin Hood and his men in the May-game.[foot-note] The relation of Robin Hood, John, and the Friar to the May-game morris is obscure. "It plainly appears," says Ritson, "that Robin Hood, Little John, the Friar, and Maid Marian were fitted out at the same time with the morris-dancers, and consequently, it would seem, united with them in one and the same exhibition," meaning the morris. But he adds, with entire truth, in a note: "it must be confessed that no other direct authority has been met with for constituting Robin Hood and Little John integral characters of the morris-dance."[foot-note] And further, with less truth so far as the Friar is concerned: "that Maid Marian and the Friar were almost constantly such is proved beyond the possibility of a doubt." The Friar is found in Tollet's window, which Douce speaks of, cautiously, as a representation of an English May-game and morris-dance. The only "direct authority," so far as I am aware, for the Friar's being a party in the morris-dance (unconnected with the May-game) is the late authority of Ben Jonson's Masque of the Metamorphosed Gipsies, 1621, cited by Tollet in his Memoir; where it is said that the absence of a Maid Marian and a friar is a surer mark than the lack of a hobby-horse that a certain company cannot be morris-dancers.[foot-note] The lady is an essential personage in the morris.[foot-note] How and when she came to receive the appellation of Maid Marian in the English morris is unknown. The earliest occurrence of the name seems to be in Barclay's fourth Eclogue,[foot-note] "subjoined to the last edition of The Ship of Foles, but originally printed soon after 1500:" Ritson, I, lxxxvii, ed. 1832. Warton suggested a derivation from the French Marion, and the idea is extremely plausible. Robin and Marion were the subject of innumerable motets and pastourelles of the thirteenth century, and the hero and heroine of a very pretty and lively play, more properly comic opera, composed by Adam de la Halle not far from 1280. We know from a document of 1392 that this play was annually performed at Angers, at Whitsuntide, and we cannot doubt that it was a stock-piece in many places, as from its merits it deserved to be. There are as many proverbs about Robin and Marion as there are about Robin Hood, and the first verse of the play, derived from an earlier song, is still (or was fifty years ago) in the mouths of the peasant girls of Hainault.[foot-note] In the May-game of June, 1559, described by Machyn, after many other things, they had "Robin Hood and Little John," and "Maid Marian and Friar Tuck," some dramatic scene, pantomime, or pageant, probably two; but there is nothing of Maid Marian in the two (fragmentary) Robin Hood plays which are preserved, both of which, so far as they go, are based on ballads. Anthony Munday, towards the end of the sixteenth century, made a play, full of his own inventions, in which Robert, Earl of Huntington, being out-lawed, takes refuge in Sherwood, with his chaste love Matilda, daughter of Lord Fitzwaters, and changes his name to Robin Hood, hers to Maid Marian.[foot-note] One S.G., a good deal later, wrote a very bad ballad about the Earl of Huntington and his lass, the only ballad in which Maid Marian is more than a name. Neglecting these perversions, Maid Marian is a personage in the May-game and morris who is not infrequently paired with a friar, and sometimes with Robin Hood, under what relation, in either case, we cannot precisely say. Percy had no occasion to speak of her as Robin's concubine, and Douce none to call her Robin's paramour.
That ballads about Robin Hood were familiar throughout England and Scotland we know from early testimony. Additional evidence of his celebrity is afforded by the connection of his name with a variety of natural objects and archaic remains over a wide extent of country.
"Cairns on Blackdown in Somersetshire, and barrows near to Whitby in Yorkshire and Ludlow in Shropshire, are termed Robin Hood's pricks or butts; lofty natural eminences in Gloucestershire and Derbyshire are Robin Hood's hills; a huge rock near Matlock is Robin Hood's Tor; an ancient boundary stone in Lincolnshire is Robin Hood's cross; a presumed loggan, or rocking-stone, in Yorkshire is Robin Hood's penny-stone; a fountain near Nottingham, another between Doncaster and Wakefield, and one in Lancashire are Robin Hood's wells; a cave in Nottinghamshire is his stable; a rude natural rock in Hope Dale is his chair; a chasm at Chatsworth is his leap; Blackstone Edge, in Lancashire, is his bed; ancient oaks, in various parts of the country, are his trees."[foot-note] All sorts of traditions are fitted to the localities where they are known. It would be an exception to ordinary rules if we did not find Robin Hood trees and Robin Hood wells and Robin Hood hills. But, says Wright, in his essay on the Robin Hood ballads (p. 208), the connection of Robin Hood's name with mounds and stones is perhaps one of the strongest proofs of his mythic character, as if Robin Hood were conceived of as a giant. The fact in question is rather a proof that those names were conferred at a time when the real character of Robin Hood was dimly remembered. In the oldest ballads Robin Hood is simply a stout yeoman, one of the best that ever bare bow; in the later ballads he is repeatedly foiled in contests with shepherds and beggars. Is it supposable that those who knew of him even at his best estate, could give him a loggan for a penny-stone? No one has as yet undertaken to prove that the ballads are later than the names.[foot-note] Mounds and stones bear his name for the same idle reason that "so many others have that of King Arthur, King John, and, for want of a better, that of the devil."[foot-note]
Kuhn, starting with the assumption that the mythical character of Robin Hood is fully established (by traditions posterior to the ballads and contradictory to their tenor), has sought to show that our courteous outlaw is in particular one of the manifestations of Woden. The hobby-horse, which, be it borne in mind, though now and then found in the May-game or morris-dance, was never intimately associated, perhaps we may say never at all associated, with Robin Hood, represents, it is maintained, Woden. The fundamental grounds are these. In a Christmas, New Year, or Twelfth Day sport at Paget's Bromley, Staffordshire, the rider of the hobby-horse held a bow and arrow in his hands, with which he made a snapping noise. In a modern Christmas festivity in Kent, the young people would affix the head of a horse to a pole about four feet in length, and tie a cloth round the head to conceal one of the party, who, by pulling a string attached to the horse's lower jaw, produced a snapping noise as he moved along. This ceremony, according to the reporter, was called a hoodening, and the figure of the horse a hooden, "a wooden horse."[foot-note] The word hooden, according to Kuhn, we may unhesitatingly expound as Woden; Hood is a corruption of "Hooden," and this Hooden again conducts us to Woden.
The sport referred to is explained in Pegge's Alphabet of Kenticisms (collected 1735-36), under the name hooding, as a country masquerade at Christmas time, which in Derbyshire they call guising, and in other places mumming; and to the same effect in the Rev. W.D. Parish's Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect (soon to be published) under hoodening, which word is an obvious corruption, or secondary form, of hooding. The word hooding, applied to the sport, means just what it does in the old English hooding-cloth, a curtain; that is, a covering, and so a disguise by covering. It is true that wooden is pronounced hooden,[foot-note] or ooden, in Kent, and that the hobby-horse had a wooden head, but it is quite inconceivable that the sport should receive its name from a circumstance so subordinate as the material of which the horse was made. Such an interpretation would hardly be thought of had not hooding in its proper sense long been obsolete. That this is the case is plain from two facts: the hooding used to be accompanied with carol-singing, and the Rev. Mr. Parish informs us that carol-singing on Christmas Eve is still called hoodening at Monckton, in East Kent. The form Hooden, from which Robin's name is asserted by Kuhn to be corrupted, is invented for the occasion. I suppose that no one will think that the hobby-horse-rider's carrying a bow and arrows, in the single instance of the Staffordshire sport, conduces at all to the identifying of Robin Hood with the hobby-horse. Whether the Hobby-Horse represents Woden is not material here. It is enough that the Hobby-Horse cannot be shown to represent Robin Hood.[foot-note]
I cannot admit that even the shadow of a case has been made out by those who would attach a mythical character either to Robin Hood or to the outlaws of Inglewood, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesly.[foot-note]
Ballads of other nations, relating to classes of men living in revolt against authority and society, may be expected to show some kind of likeness to the English outlaw-ballads, and such resemblances will be pointed out upon occasion. Spanish broadside ballads dating from the end of the sixteenth century commemorate the valientes and guapos of cities, robbers and murderers of the most flaunting and flagitious description: Duran, Romancero, Nos 1331-36, 1339-43, II, 367 ff.[foot-note] These display towards corregidores, alcaldes, custom-house officers, and all the ministers of government an hostility corresponding to that of Robin Hood against the sheriff; they empty the jails and deliver culprits from the gallows; reminding us very faintly of the Robin Hood broadsides, as of the rescues in Nos 140, 141, the Progress to Nottingham, No 139, in which Robin Hood, at the age of fifteen, kills fifteen foresters, or of Young Gamwell, in No 128, who begins his career by killing his father's steward,[foot-note] But Robin Hood and his men, in the most degraded of the broadsides, are tame innocents and law-abiding citizens beside the guapos. The Klephts, whose songs are preserved in considerable numbers, mostly from the last century and the present, have the respectability of being engaged, at least in part, in a war against the Turks, and the romance of wild mountaineers. They, like Robin Hood, had a marked animosity against monks, and they put beys to ransom as he would an abbot or a sheriff. There are Magyar robber-ballads in great number;[foot-note] some of these celebrate Shobri (a man of this century), who spares the poor, relieves beggars, pillages priests (but never burns or kills), and fears God: Erdélyi's collection, I, 194-98, Nos 237-39; Arany-Gyulai, II, 56, No 49; Kertbeny, Ausgewählte Ungarische Volkslieder, pp 246-251, Nos 136-38; Aigner, pp 198-201. Russian robber-songs are given by Sakharof, under the title Udaluiya, Skazaniya, 1841, 1, iii, 224-32; Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, pp 44-50. There are a few Sicilian robber-ballads in Pitré, Canti pop. Siciliani, Nos 913-16, II, 125-37.
The Gest is a popular epic, composed from several ballads by a poet of a thoroughly congenial spirit. No one of the ballads from which it was made up is extant in a separate shape, and some portions of the story may have been of the compiler's own invention. The decoying of the sheriff into the wood, stanzas 181-204, is of the same derivation as the last part of Robin Hood and the Potter, No 121, Little John and Robin Hood exchanging parts; the conclusion, 451-56, is of the same source as Robin Hood's Death, No 120. Though the tale, as to all important considerations, is eminently original, absolutely so as to the conception of Robin Hood, some traits and incidents, as might be expected, are taken from what we may call the general stock of mediaeval fiction.
The story is a three-ply web of the adventures of Robin Hood with a knight, with the sheriff of Nottingham, and with the king (the concluding stanzas, 451-56, being a mere epilogue), and may be decomposed accordingly. I. How Robin Hood relieved a knight, who had fallen into poverty, by lending him money on the security of Our Lady, the first fit, 1-81; how the knight recovered his lands, which had been pledged to Saint Mary Abbey, and set forth to repay the loan, the second fit, 82-143; how Robin Hood, having taken twice the sum lent from a monk of this abbey, declared that Our Lady had discharged the debt, and would receive nothing more from the knight, the fourth fit, 205-280. II. How Little John insidiously took service with Robin Hood's standing enemy, the sheriff of Nottingham, and put the sheriff into Robin Hood's hands, the third fit, 144-204; how the sheriff, who had sworn an oath to help and not to harm Robin Hood and his men, treacherously set upon the outlaws at a shooting-match, and they were fain to take refuge in the knight's castle; how, missing of Robin Hood, the sheriff made prisoner of the knight; and how Robin Hood slew the sheriff and rescued the knight, the fifth and sixth fit, 281-353. III. How the king, coming in person to apprehend Robin Hood and the knight, disguised himself as an abbot, was stopped by Robin Hood, feasted on his own deer, and entertained with an exhibition of archery, in the course of which he was recognized by Robin Hood, who asked his grace and received a promise thereof, on condition that he and his men should enter into the king's service; and how the king, for a jest, disguised himself and his company in the green of the outlaws, and going back to Nottingham caused a general flight of the people, which he stopped by making himself known; how he pardoned the knight; and how Robin Hood, after fifteen months in the king's court, heart-sick and deserted by all his men but John and Scathlock, obtained a week's leave of the king to go on a pilgrimage to Saint Mary Magdalen of Barnsdale, and would never come back in two-and-twenty years, the seventh and eighth fit, 354-450. A particular analysis may be spared, seeing that many of the details will come out incidentally in what follows.
Barnsdale, Robin Hood's haunt in the Gest, 3, 21, 82, 134, 213, 262, 440, 442, is a woodland region in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a little to the south of Pontefract and somewhat further to the north of Doncaster. The river Went is its northern boundary. "The traveller enters upon it [from the south] a little beyond a well-known place called Robin Hood's Well [some ten miles north of Doncaster, near Skelbrook], and he leaves it when he has descended to Wentbridge." (For Wentbridge, see No 121, st. 6; the Gest, 135 1 .) A little to the west is Wakefield, and beyond Wakefield, between that town and Halifax, was the priory of Kyrkesly or Kirklees. The Sayles, 18, was a very small tenancy of the manor of Pontefract. The great North Road, formerly so called, and here, 18, denominated Watling Street (as Roman roads often are), crosses Barnsdale between Doncaster and Ferrybridge.[foot-note] Saint Mary Abbey, "here besyde," 54, was at York, and must have been a good twenty miles from Barnsdale. The knight, 1264, is said to be "at home in Verysdale." Wyresdale (now Over and Nether Wyersdale) was an extensive tract of wild country, part of the old forest of Lancashire, a few miles to the southeast of Lancaster. The knight's son had slain a knight and a squire of Lancaster, a, Lancashire, b, f, g, 53. It is very likely, therefore, that the knight's castle, in the original ballad, was in Lancashire. However this may be, it is put in the Gest, 309 f, on the way between Nottingham and Robin Hood's retreat, which must be assumed to be Barnsdale. From it, again, Barnsdale is easily accessible to the knight's wife, 334 f.[foot-note] Wherever it lay or lies, the distance from Nottingham or from Barnsdale, as also the distance from Nottingham to Barnsdale (actually some fifty miles), is made nothing of in the Gest.[foot-note] The sheriff goes a-hunting; John, who is left behind, does not start from Nottingham till more than an hour after noon, takes the sheriff's silver to Barnsdale,[foot-note] runs five miles in the forest, and finds the sheriff still at his sport: 155 f, 168, 176-82. We must not be nice. Robin Hood has made a vow to go from London to Barnsdale barefoot. The distance thither and back would not be much short of three hundred and fifty miles. King Edward allows him a seven-night, and no longer, 442 f. The compiler of the Gest did not concern himself to adjust these matters. There was evidently at one time a Barnsdale cycle and a Sherwood cycle of Robin Hood ballads. The sheriff of Nottingham would belong to the Sherwood series (to which Robin Hood and the Monk appertains). He is now a capital character in all the old Robin Hood ballads. If he was adopted from the Sherwood into the Barnsdale set, this was done without a rearrangement of the topography.
5-7. Robin Hood will not dine until he has some guest that can pay handsomely for his entertainment, 18, 19, 206, 209; dinner, accordingly, is sometimes delayed a long time, 25, 30, 143, 220; to Little John's impatience, 5, 16, 206, 211. This habit of Robin's seems to be a humorous imitation of King Arthur, who in numerous romances will not dine till some adventure presents itself; a custom which, at least on one occasion, proves vexatious to his court. Cf. I, 257 f.[foot-note]
8-10. Robin's general piety and his special devotion to the Virgin are again to be remarked in No 118. There is a tale of a knight who had a castle near a public road, and robbed everybody that went by, but said his Ave every day, and never allowed anything to interfere with his so doing, in Legenda Aurea, c. 51, Grasse, p. 221; Hagen, Gesammtabenteuer, III, 563, No 86; Morlini Novellæ, Paris, 1855, p. 269, No 17, etc.
13-15. Robin's practice corresponds closely with Gamelyn's:
Fulk Fitz Warine, nor any of his, during the time of his outlawry would ever do hurt to any one except the king and his knights: Wright, p. 77 f.
45. "Distraint of knighthood," or the practice of requiring military tenants who held 20 l. per annum to receive knighthood, or pay a composition, began under Henry III, as early as 1224, and was continued by Edward I. This was regarded as a very serious oppression under James I and Charles I, and was abolished in 1642. Stubbs, Constitutional History, II, 281 f; Hallam, Constitutional History, ed. 1854, I, 338, note x, II, 9, 99.
62-66. The knight has no security to offer for a loan "but God that dyed on a tree," and such security, or that of the saints, is peremptorily rejected by Robin; but when the knight says that he can offer no other, unless it be Our Lady, the Virgin is instantly accepted as entirely satisfactory. In a well-known miracle of Mary, found in most of the larger collections, a Christian, who resorts to a Jew to borrow money, tenders Jesus as security, and the Jew, who regards Jesus as a just man and a prophet, though not divine, is willing to lend on the terms proposed. The Christian, not being able, as he says, to produce Jesus Christ in person, takes the Jew to a church, and, standing before an image of the Virgin and Child, causes him to take the hand of the Child, saying, Lord Jesus Christ, whose image I have given as pledge for this money, and whom I have offered this Jew as my surety, I beg and entreat that, if I shall by any chance be prevented from returning the money to this man upon the day fixed, but shall give it to thee, thou wilt return it to him in such manner and form as may please thee. In the sequel this miraculous interposition becomes necessary, and the money is punctually restored, the act of grace being implicitly or distinctly attributed to Mary rather than her Son; distinctly in an English form of the legend, where the Christian, especially devoted to the Virgin, offers Saint Mary for his borrow: Horstmann, Die altenglischen Marienlegenden des Manuscript Vernon, in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, LVI, 232, No 6.[foot-note]
107. The abbot had retained the chief justice "by robe and fee," to counsel and aid him in the spoliation of the knight, 93. Taking and giving of robes and fees for such purposes is defined as conspiracy in a statute of Edward I, 1305-06; and by another statute, 20 Edward III, c. vi, 1346, justices are required to swear that they will take robes and fees from no man but the king: et que vos ne prendrez fee, tant come vos serez justicz, ne robes, de nul homme, graunt ne petit, sinoun du roi meismes. Statutes of the Realm, I, 145, 305: cited by J. Lewelyn Curtis, in Notes and Queries, S.I, VI, 479 f. All the English judges, including the chief justice, were convicted of bribery and were removed, under Edward I, 1289.
121. The knight would have given something for the use of the four hundred pound had the abbot been civil, though under no obligation to pay interest. In 270 the knight proffers Robin twenty mark (3 per cent) for his courtesy, which seemingly small sum was to be accompanied with the valuable gift of a hundred bows and a hundred sheaf of peacock-feathered, silver-nocked arrows. But though the abbot had not lent for usury, still less had he lent for charity. The knight's lands were to be forfeited if the loan should not be punctually returned, 86 f, 94, 106; and of this the knight was entirely aware, 85. "As for mortgaging or pawning," says Bacon, Of Usury, "either men will not take pawns without use, or, if they do, they will look precisely for the forfeiture. I remember a cruel moneyed man in the country that would say. The devil take this usury; it keeps us from forfeitures of mortgages and bonds." But troubles, legal or other, might ensue upon this hard-dealing unless the knight would give a quittance, 117 f.
135-37. A ram was the prize for an ordinary wrestling-match; but this is an occasion which brings together all the best yeomen of the West Country, and the victor is to have a bull, a horse saddled and bridled, a pair of gloves, a ring, and a pipe of wine. In Gamely n "there was set up a ram and a ring," v. 172.
181-204. The sheriff is decoyed into the wood by Robin Hood in No 121, 56-69, No 122, A, 18-25, B, 20-27, as here by Little John. Fulk Fitz Warine gets his enemy, King John, into his power by a like stratagem. Fulk, disguised as a collier, is asked by King John if he has seen a stag or doe pass. He has seen a horned beast; it had long horns. He offers to take the king to the place where he saw it, and begs the king to wait while he goes into the thicket to drive the beast that way. Fulk's men are in the forest: he tells them that he has brought the king with only three knights; they rush out and seize the king. Fulk says he will have John's life, but the king promises to restore Fulk's heritage and all that had been taken from him and his men, and to be his friend forever after. A pledge of faith is exacted and given, and very happy is the king so to escape. But the king keeps the forced oath no better than the sheriff. Wright, p. 145 ff. There is a passage which has the same source, though differing in details, in Eustace the Monk, Michel, pp. 36-39, vv 995-1070. The story is incomparably better here than elsewhere.
213-33. The black monks are Benedictines. There are two according to 213 f, 218, 2254, but the high cellarer only (who in 91-93 is exultant over the knight's forfeiture) is of consequence, and the other is made no account of. Seven score of wight young men, 2293, is the right number for a band of outlaws; so Gamelyn, v. 628. The sheriff has his seven score in Guy of Gisborn, 13.
243-47. "What is in your coffers?" So Eustace the monk to the merchant, v. 938, p. 34, Michel: "Di-moi combien tu as d'argent." The merchant tells the exact truth, and Eustace, having verified the answer by counting, returns all the money, saying, If you had lied in the least, you would not have carried off a penny. When Eustace asks the same question of the abbot, v. 1765, p. 64, the abbot answers, after the fashion of our cellarer, Four silver marks. Eustace finds thirty marks, and returns to the abbot the four which he had confessed.
213-272. Nothing was ever more felicitously told, even in the best dit or fabliau, than the "process" of Our Lady's repaying the money which had been lent on her security. Robin's slyly significant welcome to the monk upon learning that he is of Saint Mary Abbey, his professed anxiety that Our Lady is wroth with him because she has not sent him his pay, John's comfortable suggestion that perhaps the monk has brought it, Robin's incidental explanation of the little business in which the Virgin was a party, and request to see the silver in case the monk has come upon her affair, are beautiful touches of humor, and so delicate that it is all but brutal to point them out. The story, however, is an old one, and was known, perhaps, wherever monks were known. A complete parallel is afforded by Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst, No 59 (c. 1515). A nobleman took a burgess's son prisoner in war, carried him home to his castle, and shut him up in a tower. After lying there a considerable time, the prisoner asked and obtained an interview with his captor, and said: Dear lord, I am doing no good here to you or myself, since my friends will not send my ransom. If you would let me go home, I would come back in eight weeks and bring you the money. Whom will you give for surety? asked the nobleman. I have no one to offer, replied the prisoner, but the Lord God, and will swear you an oath by him to keep my word. The nobleman was satisfied, made his captive swear the oath, and let him go. The hero sold all that he owned, and raised the money, but was three weeks longer in so doing than the time agreed upon. The nobleman, one day, when he was riding out with a couple of servants, fell in with an abbot or friar who had two fine horses and a man. See here, my good fellows, said the young lord; that monk is travelling with two horses, as fine as any knight, when he ought to be riding on an ass. Look out now, we will play him a turn. So saying, he rode up to the monk, seized the bridle of his horse, and asked, Sir, who are you? Who is your lord? The monk answered, I am a servant of God, and he is my lord. You come in good time, said the nobleman. I had a prisoner, and set him free upon his leaving your lord with me as a surety. But I can get nothing from this lord of yours; he is above my power; so I will lay hands on his servant; and accordingly made the monk go with him afoot to the castle, where he took from him all that he had. Shortly after, his prisoner appeared, fell at his feet, and wished to pay the ransom, begging that he would not be angry, for the money could not be got sooner. But the nobleman said, Stand up, my good man. Keep your money, and go whither you will, for your surety has paid your ransom. Ed. Oesterley, p. 49. The gist of the story is in Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, fol. 62, Manuscript 17,509, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Scala Celi (1480), 159 b, "De Restitucione," and elsewhere: see Oesterly's note, p. 480. A very amusing variety is the fabliau Du povre Mercier, Barbazan et Méon, III, 17; Montaiglon et Raynaud, II, 114; Legrand, III, 93, ed. 1829.[foot-note]
2933. Reynolde. Possibly Little John borrows this Reynolde's name in 149, but there is no apparent reason why he should. In the following very strange, and to me utterly unintelligible, piece in Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia, which may have been meant to have only enough sense to sing, Renold, a miller's son, mickle of might (was he rechristened Much?), becomes one of Robin Hood's men. (Deuteromelia, p. 4: London, for Tho. Adams, 1609.)
302-05. The Klepht Giphtakis, wounded in knee and hand, exclaims: Where are you, my brother, my friend? Come back and take me off, or take off my head, lest the Turk should do so, and carry it to that dog of an Ali Pacha. (1790. Fauriel, 1, 20; Zambelios, p. 621, No 32; Passow, p. 52, No 61.)
357-59. The king traverses the whole length of Lancashire and proceeds to Plumpton Park, missing many of his deer. Camden, Britannia, II, 175, ed. 1772, places Plumpton Park on the bank of the Petterel, in Cumberland, east of Inglewood. (Hunter, p. 30, citing no authority, says it was part of the forest of Knaresborough, in Yorkshire.) Since this survey makes the king wroth with Robin Hood, we must give a corresponding extent to Robin's operations. And we remember that Wyntouu says that he exercised his profession in Inglewood and Barnsdale.
371 ff. The story of the seventh fit has a general similitude to the extensive class of tales, mostly jocular, represented by 'The King and the Miller;' as to which, see further on.
403-09. The sport of "pluck-buffet" (4243) is a feature in the romance of Richard Coeur de Lion, 762-98, Weber, II, 33 f. Richard is betrayed to the king of Almayne by a minstrel to whom he had given a cold reception, and is put in prison. The king's son, held the strongest man of the land, visits the prisoner, and proposes to him an exchange of this sort. The prince gives Richard a clout which makes fire spring from his eyes, and goes off laughing, ordering Richard to be well fed, so that he may have no excuse for returning a feeble blow when he takes his turn. The next day, when the prince comes for his payment, Richard, who has waxed his hand by way of preparation, delivers a blow which breaks the young champion's cheek-bone and fells him dead. There is another instance in 'The Turke and Gowin,' Percy Manuscript, Hales and Furnivall, I, 91 ff.
414-450. Robin Hood is pardoned by King Edward on condition of his leaving the green-wood with all his company, and taking service at court. In the course of a twelvemonth,[foot-note] keeping up his old profusion, Robin has spent not only all his own money, but all his men's, in treating knights and squires, and at the end of the year all his band have deserted him save John and Scathlock. About this time, chancing to see young men shooting, the recollection of his life in the woods comes over him so powerfully that he feels that he shall die if he stays longer with the king. He therefore affects to have made a vow to go to Barnsdale "barefoot and woolward." Upon this plea he obtains from the king leave of absence for a week, and, once more in the forest, never reports for duty in two and twenty years.
Hunter, who could have identified Pigrogromitus and Quinapalus, if he had given his mind to it, sees in this passage, and in what precedes it of King Edward's trip to Nottingham, a plausible semblance of historical reality.[foot-note] Edward II, as may be shown from Rymer's Fœdera, made a progress in the counties of York, Lancaster, and Nottingham, in the latter part of the year 1323. He was in Yorkshire in August and September, in Lancashire in October, at Nottingham November 923, spending altogether five or six weeks in that neighborhood, and leaving it a little before Christmas. "Now it will scarcely be believed, but it is, nevertheless, the plain and simple truth, that in documents preserved in the Exchequer, containing accounts of expenses in the king's household, we find the name of Robyn Hode, not once, but several times occurring, receiving, with about eight and twenty others, the pay of 3d. a day, as one of the 'vadlets, porteurs de la chambre' of the king;" these entries running from March 24, 1324, to November 22 of the same year. There are entries of payments to vadlets during the year preceding, but unluckily the accountant has put down the sums in gross, without specifying the names of persons who received regular wages. This, as Hunter remarks, does not quite prove that Robyn Hode had not been among these persons before Christmas, 1323, but, on the other hand, account-book evidence is lacking to show that he had been. Hunter's interpretation of the data is that Robyn Hode entered the king's service at Nottingham a little before Christmas, 1323. If this was so, his career as porter was not only brief, but pitiably checkered. His pay is docked for five days' absence in May, again for eight days in August, then for fifteen days in October. "He was growing weary of his new mode of life." Seven days, once more, are deducted in November, and under the 22d of that month we find this entry: Robyn Hode, jadys un des porteurs, poar cas qil ne poait pluis travailler, de donn par comandement, v.s. After this his name no longer appears.
A simple way of reading the Exchequer documents is that one Robert Hood, some time (and, for aught we know, a long time) porter in the king's household, after repeatedly losing time, was finally discharged, with a present of five shillings, because he could not do his work. To detect "a remarkable coincidence between the ballad and the record" requires not only a theoretical prepossession, but an uncommon insensibility to the ludicrous.[foot-note] But taking things with entire seriousness, there is no correspondence between the ballad and the record other than this: that Robin Hood, who is in the king's service, leaves it; in the one instance deserting, and in the other being displaced. Hunter himself does not, as in the case of Adam Bell, insist that the name Robin Hood is "peculiar." He cites, p. 10, a Robert Hood, citizen of London, who supplied the king's household with beer, 28 Edward I, and a Robert Hood of Wakefield, twice mentioned, 9, 10 Edward H.[foot-note] Another Robert Hood at Throckelawe, North umbria, is thrice mentioned in the Exchequer Rolls, Edward I, 19, 20, 30: Rot. Orig. in Cur. Scac. Abbrev., I, 69, 73, 124. A Robert Hood is manucaptor for a burgess returned from Lostwithiel, Cornwall, 7 Edward II, Parliamentary Writs, II, 1019, and another, of Howden, York, 10 Edward III, is noted in the Calendar of Patent Rolls, p. 125, No 31, cited by Ritson. In all these we have six Robin Hoods between 30 Edward I and 10 Edward III, a period of less than forty years.
433, 435-50 are translated by A. Grün, p. 166.
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