This piece occurs also in the Roxburghe Ballads, III, 270, 845, the Douce, III, 120, was among Heber's ballads (a copy by W. Onley), and is probably in all collections of broadsides.
a or b was printed by Ritson, Robin Hood, 1795, II, 12. A copy in Evans's Old Ballads, 1777, 1784, I, 96, is later, and very like Douce, III, 120.
When Robin Hood is but fifteen years of age, he falls in with fifteen foresters who are drinking together at Nottingham. They hear with scorn that he intends to take part in a shooting-match. He wagers with them that he will kill a hart at a hundred rod, and does this. They refuse to pay, and bid him begone if he would save his sides from a basting. Robin kills them all with his bow; people come out from Nottingham to take him, but get very much hurt. Robin goes to the green wood; the townsmen bury the foresters.
This is evidently a comparatively late ballad, but has not come down to us in its oldest form. The story is told to the following effect in the life of Robin Hood in Sloane Manuscript 780, 7, fol. 157, written, as it seems, says Ritson, towards the end of the sixteenth century. Robin Hood, going into a forest with a bow of extraordinary strength, fell in with some rangers, or woodmen, who gibed at him for pretending to use a bow such as no man could shoot with. Robin said that he had two better, and that the one he had with him was only a "birding-bow"; nevertheless he would lay his head against a certain sum of money that he would kill a deer with it at a great distance. When the chance offered, one of the rangers sought to disconcert him by reminding him that he would lose his head if he missed his mark. Robin won the wager, and gave every man his money back except the one who had tried to fluster him. A quarrel followed, which ended with Robin's killing them all, and consequently betaking himself to life in the woods. Thorns, Early Prose Romances, II, Robin Hood, 37 ff.
Douce notes in his copy of Ritson's Robin Hood (Bodleian Library) the second stanza of this ballad as it is cited in the Duke of Newcastle's play, 'The Varietie':
Translated by A. Grün, p. 61; Doenniges, p. 170.
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