P. 218 (and 43-46).
Mr. H.L.D. Ward, in his invaluable Catalogue of Romances, etc., while treating of Fulk Fitz-Warine, has made the following important remarks concerning the literary history of Maid Marian (p. 506 f.).
"There were three Matildas who were popularly supposed to have been persecuted by King John. The most historical of these was Matilda de Braose. She was imprisoned, with her son and her son's wife, in 1210, some (Matthew Paris and others) say at Windsor, but another chronicler says at Corfe Castle (see a volume published by the Soc. de l'Hist. de France in 1840), and they were all starved to death. The second was Fulk's wife Mahaud, who was the widow of Theobald Walter. The third was the daughter of Robert Fitz-Walter. The only authority that can be quoted for the story of the third Matilda is the Chronicle of Dunmow, of which one copy of the 16th century remains, in the Cotton Manuscript, Cleopatra, C. iii. (ff. 281-7), but which was probably begun by Nicholas de Brumfeld, a canon of Dunmow in the latter part of the 13th century. It is there stated that, when Robert Fitz-Walter fled to France in 1213, his daughter took refuge in Dunmow Priory, where John, after a vain attempt at seduction, poisoned her. Now all these three Matildas may be said to appear in the two plays known as The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earle of Huntington, by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, which are first mentioned in Henslowe's Diary in February and November, 1598. Two of them indeed appear in their own names, Matilda de Braose (or Bruce) and Matilda Fitz-Walter; and the one is starved at Windsor and the other is poisoned at Dunmow in the second play. But in the first play Matilda Fitz-Walter escapes the solicitations of John by joining her newly-married husband in Sherwood, where they are called Robin Hood and Maid Marian. This is clearly owing to a combination of the second and third Matildas. It may have been effected by the course of tradition, or it may have been the arbitrary work of a single author. But if the romance of Fulk Fitz-Warin had been known to either Munday or Chettle, other portions of it would almost certainly have appeared in plays or novels or ballads. Now Munday introduces the piece as a rehearsal, conducted by John Skelton the poet, who himself plays Friar Tuck, with a view to performing it before Henry VIII. And it is not at all unlikely that it was really founded upon a May-day pageant devised by Skelton, but not important enough to be specified in the list of his works in his Garlande of Laurell. We know that Skelton did write Interludes, of which one still remains, Magnyfycence: and Anthony Wood tells us that at Diss in Norfolk, where Skelton was rector, he was 'esteemed more fit for the stage than the pew or pulpit.' Thus there was no man more likely than Skelton to devise a new Robin Hood pageant for his old pupil, Henry VIII. And again, there was no man more likely to celebrate the story of Matilda Fitz-Walter, for the patron of his living was Robert Lord Fitz-Walter, who was himself a Ratcliffe, but who had inherited the lordship of Diss through his grandmother, the last of the old Fitz-Walters.[foot-note] But whether Skelton may have read the then accessible poem about Fulk, afterwards described by Leland, or whether either he or Munday may have received the story in its composite form, it is pretty evident that the two reputed objects of King John's desire, Matilda Walter and Matilda Fitz-Walter, have become blended together into the Maid Marian of the play."
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