The manuscript in which this ballad occurs contains a variety of matters, and, as the best authority has declared, may in part have been written as early as 1650, but all the ballads are in a nineteenth-century hand, and some of them are maintained to be forgeries. There is no sufficient reason for regarding this particular piece as spurious; it may be a copy of a broadside, or a copv of a copy. The story resembles that of 'Robin Hood's Delight' (No, 136), pedlars taking the place of keepers; but Robin is reduced to an ignominy paralleled only in the second ballad of 'Robin Hood and the Beggar' (No, 134).
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