ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY MEN

The mythical Thomas Dun's redeeming qualities, supposing him, indeed, to have possessed any, are not set forth in those legends of him. He is a blackguard shape; while the equally legendary Robin Hood is one of the brightest figures of romance.

Robin Hood is a poor man's hero, and has been, for over seven centuries, to the peasantry of England something of what King Arthur was to the nobles and the aristocracy. While Arthur was, and is some day again to be, the national hero in the larger issues of war and conquest, Robin remains the lion-hearted outlaw; warring from his boskage in the greenwood of Sherwood Forest, or Barnsdale, against the rich oppressors of the people, whether they be the nobles or the fat ecclesiastics of mediÆval satire.

Many industrious writers have sought to reduce the Robin Hood myths to a connected whole, and to trace their origin, but the task has proved hopeless. He is as pervasive as the winds, and came whence no one knows, but may be traced back to the reign of Edward the Second, when he was already fully established as a ballad hero. Ritson, who collected and edited the ancient literature referring to him, is of opinion that he was a real person, Robert Fitzooth, and was born at Locksley, in Nottinghamshire, in 1160. But no evidence settles that point, and it is abundantly possible that he was really evolved from dim memories of Hereward the Wake, the Saxon hero, who long withstood William the Norman in the fens of Ely. In course of time his championship of a conquered nation was lost sight of, and merged into the endearing character of an English yeoman, outlawed for debt, taking refuge with others of his kin in the forest, whence they levied toll upon the oppressor, and, as they themselves were outlawed, respected no law, save that of the greenwood, where the best man was he who could draw the stoutest bow and shoot the straightest; who could make the best play with that truly English weapon, the quarter-staff, or deal the mightiest blow with the fist.

The whole cycle of Robin Hood legend is delightfully and most characteristically English, instinct with the purest and most passionate love of the countryside, and nerved with the championship of manhood's rights and with the fiercest hatred of the law and of the ruling classes in days when laws were the repressive measures instituted by the wealthy for the purpose of denying simple justice to the poor. The hatred of authority and the armed resistance to it, that are the leading features of Robin Hood legend, are no mere criminal traits, but violent protests (the only kind of protest then possible) against the bloody forest laws of the Norman and Plantagenet times, and the system by which the peasantry were serfs, with no more social rights than the negroes enjoyed before their emancipation in 1833.

Robin Hood legend was for centuries the expression of what might now be styled Liberal, or even Radical, or Socialist opinion, but it has an innate poetry and chivalry which those modern schools of thought conspicuously lack; and indeed, as personal liberty broadened, so did the legends of this splendid figure of romance become blunted and vulgarised in the countryside, until he is made interchangeable with the highwaymen who had only their own pockets to fill and no cause to represent.

How popular and how astonishingly widespread was the story of Robin Hood, we may readily guess from the many places or natural objects named after him. "Robin Hood's Butts" on the racecourse near Onibury, a mile and a half from Ludlow, are still pointed out. They are in the nature of sepulchral barrows. From there, says legend, Robin Hood shot an arrow that sped the mile and a half to Ludlow church, and fixed itself on the apex of the gable of the north transept! An arrow is certainly there, but Robin never shot it. It is, in fact, an iron likeness of an arrow, and is the sign of the guild of Fletchers, or arrow-makers, who built the transept.

There are other "Robin Hood's Butts" in the country: his "Cairns" on the Blackdown Hills in Somerset; "Robin Hood's Bay," on the Yorkshire Coast; his "Barrows," near Whitby; "Robin Hood's Tor," near Matlock; boundary-stones in Lincolnshire, known as "Robin Hood's Crosses"; a large logan-stone in Yorkshire, styled his "Penny Stone"; a fountain near Nottingham that figures as his; "Robin Hood's Well," between Doncaster and Wetherby; "Robin Hood's Stable," a cave in Nottinghamshire; a natural rock in Hopedale, Derbyshire, known as his "Chair"; his "Leap," a chasm at Chatsworth. A number of ancient oaks are "Robin Hood's," and legends of his exploits still cling to Skelbrooke Park, Plumpton Park, Cumberland, Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, and the forests of Sherwood, Barnsdale, Needwood, and Inglewood.

The forest of Inglewood, in Cumberland, is indeed associated with other outlaws as legendary as Robin himself or as that Irish figure of wild romance, "Rory o' the Hills." Andrew Bel, William of Cloudisdale, and Clym o' th' Clough are the great woodland triumvirate of the north.

It would be a thankless office to dwell greatly upon the probability that Robin Hood, as an individual person, never existed, and that he was perhaps not even typical of the woodland outlaws of old, whose ideas and practices doubtless fell far short of the ballad Robin's ideals. It is much more pleasant to consider the romantic spirit that evolved him and gave him his exquisite setting of mossy glades and giant oaks, where the sun comes in golden-green shafts through the embowering foliage, and you hear the winding of the hunters' horns in chase of the deer. There is a springtime gladness in the old verses, of which this is typical:

It is the springtime of the year and of the English nation that you glimpse in these lines; a picture of that larger rural England of possible adventure, and uncontaminated skies that is now a thing of the past.

Nature is portrayed in these ballads with a vividness and certainty that more ambitious poets cannot match:

It is versification of the simplest and the most sincere kind.

Robin Hood, real or imaginary character, has himself no criminal taint, but he is one of the original founts whence the stream of highwayman legend is fed. It does not, or should not, sully his fame, that the stream becomes polluted with much vileness as it flows down the channel of time. A gradual vulgarising of the beautiful old story of the manly outlaws in Lincoln green, who went on foot and chased and shot the deer, and redressed wrongs in the leafy coverts, is sadly to be noted; and by the middle of the eighteenth century it became so obscured that it was possible for one of the booksellers of the time to foist upon an undiscriminating public an absurd production, in which Robin and the seventeenth-century Captain Hind figure as contemporaries. The poor threadbare rags of chivalry are thrown over the recreant shoulders of the highwaymen, but they suit them ill; and the fine clothes the highwaymen sometimes wore and the excellent horses they rode, do not hide from us their essential coarseness.

When Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman was written, about 1362, Robin Hood long had been a popular figure; and in that wonderful descriptive poem we find, among those lifelike figures, Sloth, the priest, who confesses himself ignorant of hymns of the Saviour and the Virgin, and unable even to repeat his paternoster; "but," he says, "I can ryme of Robin Hode."

That confession would scarce have pleased the real Robin, who was an exceedingly religious man. In the oldest ballad surviving of him, he is found lamenting that he has not been to mass for a fortnight, and he thereupon, at great risk, goes to Nottingham town, to repair the omission. He especially venerated the Virgin, and is in one ballad found to be so extremely devoted to his religious duties as to have three masses daily, before dinner.

At the same time, although he is found declaring to his band that no damage is to be done to any husbandman "that tylleth with his plough," nor to any good yeoman, nor to any knight or squire "that wolde be a good felowe," he delights in persecuting ecclesiastical dignitaries. A fat abbot, or a steward of a monastery, unlucky enough to fall in with him, has a weary time of it. The higher these personages, the worse the treatment meted out to them. "Ye shall then beat and bind," we find Robin directing his merry men; and as these ballads were but the essence of the public feeling of the age, it is quite evident that when at last Henry the Eighth made away with the monasteries, he must have had a very considerable and long-established force of popular sentiment entirely in accord with him.

One of the chief exploits of Robin with the dignified clergy was the traditional meeting with the Bishop of Hereford, in Skelbrooke Park, where he was said to have made the Bishop dance round an oak, and then, after plundering him, to have left him bound securely to the tree. Variations of the story are met with in plenty in legends of other outlaws and highwaymen.

That the Robin Hood legends impelled other romantic souls to take to the woodlands and be also Robin Hoods, in admiring imitation, seems sufficiently evident from old records, of which the Derbyshire petition to Parliament in 1439 is typical. The petitioners solicited help to procure the arrest of a certain Piers Venables and others who, it is stated, "wente into the wodes like as it hadde be Robyn-hode and his meyne."

Nottingham was ever a town inimical to our Robin; probably because it was nearest to his haunts in Sherwood Forest. In the earliest ballad extant of his exploits, we learn how, going piously into the town for the feast of Pentecost, he met an old monk whom he had once robbed of £100. The monk "betrays" him, and to prevent his escape the town gates are closed. Robin, seeking to leave, is captured, after a desperate resistance, and thrown into prison; and the false-hearted monk sets out for London, to convey the welcome news to the King, who will be delighted to learn that the bold outlaw is at last laid by the heels.

But Little John and Much waylay the monk, and kill him and his little page, and themselves, with the despatches, seek audience of the King, who sends a command by them to the Sheriff of Nottingham, ordering him to bring Robin Hood before him.

Arriving at Nottingham, these bearers of the King's commands are received with due honours and elaborately entertained. Finally, after much feasting and drinking, and when the sheriff and his men are sunk in a drunken sleep, Little John and Much steal their keys, kill the gaoler, and release Robin Hood. Then they return happily to the forest. The ballad ends by the pardon of Little John, in consideration of his fidelity to his chief.

Another ballad tells of the adventure of Robin and the potter. Meeting an itinerant seller of earthenware pots, Robin challenges him to the usual test of who is best man, a fight with quarter-staff. On this occasion he meets his match and is badly beaten. But there was never such a hungry man for a fight as our hero, and he then suggested a combat with swords, in which he was also vanquished. Then he changes clothes with the man of pots, buys his stock, and goes to Nottingham, where he sells them at less than cost price and so makes a speedy clearance of all but five. These he gives to the sheriff's wife, who then invites him to dinner. At the dinner-table he hears of a trial of skill at archery to be decided that afternoon, and attends and surpasses all competitors. The sheriff asks him of whom he learned such marvellous archery. "Of Robin Hood," he answered; and then the sheriff expresses a wish to see the outlaw. The pretended potter then conducts him into the depths of the forest and there blows a single blast upon his horn.

Immediately they are surrounded by Robin's own merry men, who compel the sheriff to leave his horse and other gear; glad enough to get away on any terms. Robin, however, courteously sends the sheriff's wife a white palfrey that "ambles like the wind."

Indeed, Robin was very much of a lady's man, and no outlaw worthy the name of forester was ever else. They were all squires of dames, and in this at least were equal, in theory at any rate, to the best "perfit gentil knight" that ever wore a lady's kerchief.

Courtesy to beauty in distress was ever one of the chiefest salves with which bandits salved their self-respect. No sentence of outlawry could make them rue, if to that principle they held them true. Even an outlaw had his ideals: to play special providence, to succour the distressed, to punish the oppressor, and "never to lay hands on a woman, save in the way of kindness." There were, of course, many lapses from these altitudes of conduct, but the ideal long remained, and only seems to have greatly decayed in the eighteenth century.

We have the historical instance of that adventure of the fugitive Queen of Henry the Sixth, lost in 1459 in the wilds of Staffordshire, after the disastrous battle of Blore Heath. Plying from that stricken field, on horseback, with her son, the youthful Prince Edward and one only retainer, the little party were surprised in the mountainous district of Axe Edge by a band of robbers, who seized their money, jewels, and every article of value. These savage men knew nothing of their rank, save that they were obviously people of quality. Then the rogues fell to quarrelling among themselves, as to the division of the spoil. Menaces were growled out, and swords drawn. Margaret of Anjou, the high-spirited Queen, seeing the bandits so engaged with each other, took her son by the arm and hurried with him into an adjacent wood.

We hear no more of the solitary retainer. He seems to have left early.

The Queen and her son had not gone far when they encountered another outlaw. With the simple frankness of a great despair, she threw herself and the young Prince upon his mercy. "Friend," said she, "I entrust to your loyalty the son of your King."

What a generous-hearted bandit could do, he did. Taking them under his protection, he conducted them by secret and intricate ways into the comparative safety of the Lancastrian headquarters.

But to resume our Robin. The fate of Guy of Gisborne shows how rash it was to attack our friend in Lincoln green, who was by no means so green as he looked. Guy had sworn to apprehend the outlaw, and roamed the forest in search of him, in a "capull hyde," which is said to mean a horse's skin. Guy found him at last, with disastrous results to himself, for Robin slew him and mangled his body with what is particularly described as an "Irish knife." He then clothed himself in the "capull hyde" and took his deceased enemy's horn, and went off to Barnsdale, where his men, unknown to himself, had been in combat with the sheriff's force, with the result that several were killed and wounded on both sides. Robin's men had, however, the worst of the fight, and Little John had been taken prisoner and bound fast to a tree.

Robin, drawing near his men's haunts, blew a blast upon the horn he had taken, and the sheriff, recognising the note, and thinking it was Guy of Gisborne, come back victorious, went to meet him, with the result that he and his force were taken, and Robin's men released.

The many scattered ballads of Robin Hood that had long passed from mouth to mouth were collected, edited, and printed about 1500 by Wynkyn de Worde, under the title of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode and his meyne, and of the proude Sheryfe of Notyngham.

According to this, the home of Robin Hood was in Barnsdale, the woodland tract between Doncaster and Pontefract. There Little John and two companions waylay Sir Richard at the Lea, a knight passing through the forest: a melancholy man, as sad as he of the Rueful Countenance. He is not afraid to accompany the rovers to their master, for he has little to lose. But Robin, far from ill-using, entertains him to a sumptuous dinner, served (by what marvellous means we are not told) in the merry greenwood. Such mediÆval delicacies as swans, with, of course, pheasants, smoke at the outlaw's spread. The feast being concluded, the knight prepares to depart; but "Pay you, ere you wend!" says Robin; "it was never the custom of a yeoman to pay for a knight."

The knight, deeply humiliated, confessed he had but ten shillings.

"Go search," commands Robin to Little John. "If, sir, you have no more," he says to the knight, "I will not have a penny."

The search confirmed the knight's words; and it then appeared that this was a sorely stricken knight indeed.

"For a hundred winters," he explains, his ancestors had been knights, and until within the last two or three years he had possessed an income of four hundred pounds a year, as his neighbours well knew.

But his son was unlucky enough to kill a Lancashire knight, and a squire as well, in a joust; and, to help pay the penalty of his son's mishap, the father's goods had been "sette and solde," and his lands pledged to the Abbot of St. Mary's, for four hundred pounds. The day for repayment of this loan was close at hand, and the knight, unprovided with money, already foresees his estate pass from him.

Robin Hood then asks him, who would be the knight's surety, if he advanced the sum.

Alas! replies the knight, he is as badly in want of friends as of money. He can offer no surety, save Our Lady, who had never failed him before.

In Robin Hood's way of thinking, no better surety could be found, even if England were sought through and through; and the knight is immediately provided, not only with money, but with clothes, a horse, and a trusty squire, in the person of Little John. The whole band enter deeply into their leader's feelings, and weep salt tears over the knight's misfortunes, and themselves contribute liberally to supply his needs.

The second "fytte," or act, is placed at St. Mary's Abbey, on the day of reckoning, and the abbot is introduced, chuckling at the absence of the knight, and the probability of his lands being forfeited. The prior entreats his superior to show a little pity, but his call for moderation is scornfully rejected by the abbot, and by the cellarer, a fatheaded monk of the type made familiar in modern German paintings of tonsured voluptuaries eyeing tables full of food and stroking their paunches.

In midst of these proceedings, the knight enters, and humbly begs for an extension of time; but the abbot insists on his bond, and will have, and at once, either the money or the land. Then the high justice is introduced, as moderator:

The debt thus paid, the knight takes leave of the disappointed abbot, and "went hym forthe full merye syngynge, as men have told the tale."

Living at home in retirement, he soon saves sufficient to get together the sum that Robin had advanced; and then equips himself with a splendid present of bows and arrows for the outlaw, and rides, with a merry song and a light heart, to Barnsdale.

The third fytte tells the adventures of Little John, who, straying into Nottingham, attracts the attention of the sheriff by his skill in archery, and enters into his service for one year, in the name of Reynold Greenleaf. But in a little while, in the sheriff's absence, Little John raises a quarrel in the house and runs away with the cook. Together they go off to the greenwood, with the family plate, and ready money, "three hundred pounds and three." Robin Hood receives them, but they have not long returned when Little John plans to capture the sheriff himself, on his way home. The seizure is easily made, and the sheriff is taken to the foresters' camp, where supper is served to him on his own plate. He is then stripped to his shirt and breeches, and released the next morning, after being obliged to take an oath never to lie in wait for Robin Hood, "by water, ne by londe," and if any of the band fall into his custody, to help them to the best of his power.

The fourth fytte opens with the cellarer of St. Mary's, travelling with a large sum of money. He falls in with Robin and his men, but declares he has only twenty marks. Little John, however, on searching him, discovers eight hundred pounds; whereupon Robin Hood exclaims that the money must be sent by Our Lady, who, with her accustomed goodness, had doubled the sum he lent the knight.

The monk is then bidden go his way, after refusing a parting glass; vowing, with much truth, that he might have dined cheaper at Blyth or Doncaster. The knight, at this moment, arrives with the money to repay his loan. Robin accepts his presents, but will not take the money, as Our Lady has just now paid it back, together with another four hundred pounds, which he begs the knight to accept.

The fifth fytte opens with the Sheriff of Nottingham proclaiming a shooting match. Robin attends, and bears off the prize, but as he leaves the town, the cry of "Robin Hood" is raised. "Great horns 'gan they to blow"; the townsmen assemble, and a fight begins, in which Little John is wounded in the knee, so that he can neither walk nor ride. In this desperate pass, he entreats his captain to smite off his head with his sword, so that he may not fall alive into the hands of the enemy, but Robin indignantly refuses. Little Much takes him on his back, and carries him off, halting from time to time to speed arrows into the ranks of the pursuing sheriff's men. They then all escape to the castle of their knightly friend, who, in the sixth fytte, is waylaid, and carried off by the sheriff.

The knight's lady then appeals to Robin Hood, who calls his men, and, proceeding to Nottingham, slays the "proud Sheriff" and releases the knight.

In the seventh fytte we have the arrival of "our comely King," Edward the Third, at Nottingham, come to inquire into a complaint the sheriff had made against the knight for harbouring outlaws. The King, for a whole year, endeavours to capture Robin or the knight, but has no sort of success until a forester offers, if the King will assume the costume of an abbot, to conduct him to the outlaws' retreat, "a mile under the lynde"; i.e. in the midst of the lime-trees, or lindens.

This offer is accepted, and Robin receives the pretended abbot with unusual courtesy, taking but one-half of the forty pounds he offers for ransom of himself. The "abbot" then produces a summons under the Royal seal, inviting Robin to Nottingham "both to meat and meal."

Robin goes down on bended knee before this august message, and entertains the "abbot" in the best style, with venison and

After dinner he entertains his guest at a shooting-match; the chief condition being that whoever misses a rose-garland suspended between two poles shall forfeit bow, arrows, and quiver, and submit to receive a buffet on the head.

Robin misses by three fingers and more, and the King is entitled to inflict the penalty. He hesitates. "Smite boldly!" says Robin; "I give thee large leave."

Thus encouraged, the king, with one blow of his stalwart arm, makes the outlaw reel. Such an exhibition of vigour was more convincing than moral suasion, and Robin, perceiving that this is no abbot, but the King himself, submits at once, with his men. The sovereign graciously pardons them and invites them to London.

The eighth fytte concludes the story. Robin and his men follow the King to the Court; but within a year the love of the free and unconventional forest had lured away all but Robin and two companions, and Robin himself was sick to be gone. The finishing touch was the sight of a gathering of young archers.

says the sometime outlaw, longing to be a forester again.

So he forswears the Court, and retires again to the forest.

And there, the legends say, he lived as of old for twenty-two years; until falling sick, he resorted to the priory of Kirklees, where a kinswoman of his was prioress. After the medical fashion of the time, the remedy was to be slightly bled; but the treacherous prioress, and one Sir Roger of Doncaster, opened a vein by which he bled to death: dying "from the perfidy of a woman," as had been prophesied.

From the chamber in the gatehouse of the priory where he lay, he shot his final arrow, his faithful Little John whom he had summoned by three blasts of his horn, supporting him. The spot where the arrow fell was to be his grave, and there Little John was to lay him, with his bow bent by his side, a turf under his head, and another at his feet. The old ballad of his affecting end piously concludes:

The railed-in spot where he, by tradition, lies buried had once, we are told, a stone inscribed

But this appears to have been the invention of Martin Parker, author of the "True Tale" of the hero, c. 1632. It still, however, imposes upon the credulous and supports the somewhat sweeping saying current in Camden's time: "Tales of Robin Hood are good for fools."

Wykyn de Worde's collection of Robin Hood romances is itself a proof of the wide popularity the hero had always enjoyed, and did still enjoy; but it does not stand alone as proof. In 1444 we hear a grumbling voice speaking of Robin, Little John, Friar Tuck, and the others of that immortal band, "of whom the foolish vulgar, in comedies and tragedies, make entertainments, and are delighted to hear the jesters and minstrels sing them, above all other ballads."

A century later, none other than Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, preaching before Edward the Sixth, bore unwilling testimony to Robin's popularity with the masses: "I came once myself," he said, "to a place, riding on a journey homeward from London, and I sent word overnight into the town that I would preach there in the morning, because it was a holyday.... I thought I should have found a great company in the church, but when I came there, the church door was fast locked. I tarried there half an hour and more, and at last the key was found; and one of the parish comes to me, and says, 'Sir, this is a busy day with us, we cannot hear you; it is Robin Hood's Day. The parishes are gone abroad to gather for Robin Hood.'

"I thought my rochet should have been regarded, though I were not," added Latimer, plaintively; "but it would not serve; it, too, was fain to give place to Robin Hood's men."

Apparently at this point the congregation laughed, for we find him, resuming, rather heatedly: "It is no laughing matter, my friends, but rather a weeping matter, a heavy matter, under the pretence of gathering for Robin Hood, a traitor, and a thief, to put out a preacher, to have his office less esteemed, to prefer Robin Hood before the preaching of God's Word."

In 1601, when England was living under a recently reformed religion, it became again necessary to reconstruct Robin Hood legend for popular acceptance, and in a play, written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, he appears as the outlawed Earl of Huntingdon; a figure for which there is not the slightest historical warranty. Thus the fabricated "epitaph" at Kirklees must itself have been, as it were, a by-product of this play. Maid Marian and several other characters who appear in it originated only a century earlier, and have no part in the earliest ballads. The play then gradually merged into May Day festivities and the once familiar "Jack-in-the-Green," extinct only within the last forty years, but greatly vulgarised towards the end, when chimney-sweeps acted "Jacks-in-the-Green," and the Maids Marian were too often fat and fiery-faced sluts. The entertainment was found all too often outside public-houses.

Robin Hood has, of course, equally with other heroes, suffered greatly from being continually edited and restated, from age to age. How should he escape the fate that King Arthur experienced, of being made into a distinctly Victorian gentleman? Tennyson has redressed old Robin, with new clothes and a new conscience, in The Foresters; Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and there you cannot but entertain the horrible suspicion that he has become a typically respectable mid-Victorian, and that if any one offered to exchange his greenwood tree for a "parlour" with perhaps a suite of walnut furniture upholstered in green repp, and a marble clock with a couple of glass lustres on the dining-room mantel-piece, he would gladly accept, forswear his woodland glades, and live cleanly thereafter.

But the two most striking evidences of the old-time popularity of Robin Hood, not so long dead, are found in the many inns named after him, and in that great friendly society, the "Ancient Order of Foresters," whose title is directly inspired by the legendary story of Robin and his fellow outlaws. No one who has ever seen the Foresters in their regalia at their annual day at the Crystal Palace can have any doubt of that inspiration.