Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws Part 1

Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws.

by Frank Sidgwick.

PREFACE

This volume concludes the series, begun in 1903, which was intended to comprise all the best traditional ballads of England and Scotland. The scheme of cla.s.sification by subject-matter, arbitrary and haphazard as it may seem to be at one point or another, has, I think, proved more satisfactory than could have been antic.i.p.ated; and in the end I have omitted no ballad without due justification.

In the fourteen years which have elapsed since the completion of Professor Child's collection, there has been discovered, so far as I know, only one ballad that can claim the right to be added to his roll of 305 'English and Scottish Popular Ballads.' That one is the carol of _The Bitter Withy_, which I was fortunate enough to recover in 1905, which my friend Professor Gerould of Princeton University has annotated with an erudition worthy of Child, and the genuineness of which has been sponsored by Professor Gummere.[1] I should perhaps have included this in its place in my Second Series, had I known of it in time, but I still hope to treat the traditional English Carols separately. I ought to admit here that the confidence with which I claimed, in my Third Series, a place on the roll for _The Jolly Juggler_, has abated, and I now consider it to be no more than a narrative lyric without any definitely 'popular' characteristics.

These four volumes contain in all 143 ballads, four of which are not to be found in Child's collection.[2] Thus, out of his 305, I have omitted more than half; but it must be remembered that his work was a collection, and mine--_si parva licet componere magnis_--has been selection. The omitted ballads are either:--

(i) Fragmentary or mutilated;

(ii) Closely related to ballads which I include;

(iii) Uninteresting, _e.g._ as dealing with obscure history;

(iv) Degenerate.

The last reason for exclusion particularly affects the Robin Hood ballads, among which Child prints thirty-three late broadsides and fragments which I omit. He preferred to err by inclusion rather than exclusion, and states that he has admitted more than one ballad, 'actually worthless and manifestly spurious, because of a remote possibility that it might contain relics, or be a debased representative, of something genuine and better.'[3]

I cannot take leave of nine years' intermittent work on this selection without remembering that its 'only begetter' was Mr. A. H. Bullen, with whom I published the first three volumes. While I regret to think how different it is in the result from the edition he then envisaged, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to him for the inoculation. The anthologist is strictly a plucker of the flowers of literature; but the ballads are not literature--they are lore, and therefore of warmer human interest.

F. S.

[Footnote 1: _The Popular Ballad_ (1907), p. 228.]

[Footnote 2: These are _The Nutbrown Maid_, First Series; The _Lyke-Wake Dirge_ and _Adam_, Second Series; and _The Jolly Juggler_, Third Series.]

[Footnote 3: Vol. v. p. 182.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROBIN HOOD BALLADS

'It is our olde manner,' sayd Robyn, 'To leve but lytell behynde.'

'It will scarcely be expected that one should be able to offer an authentic narrative of the life and transactions of this extraordinary personage. The times in which he lived, the mode of life he adopted, and the silence or loss of contemporary writers, are circ.u.mstances sufficiently favourable, indeed, to romance, but altogether inimical to historical truth.' In these words Joseph Ritson, the first and most painstaking of those well-meaning scholars who have tried to a.s.sociate the outlaw with 'historical truth,' begins his 'Life of Robin Hood,'

an account which occupies ten pages of his book, and is annotated and ill.u.s.trated through the following one hundred and five pages. The _Dictionary of National Biography_ includes Robin Hood, as it includes King Arthur; but it is better to face the truth, and to state boldly that Robin Hood the yeoman outlaw never existed in the flesh. As the G.o.ddess Athena sprang from the head of Zeus, Robin Hood sprang from the imagination of the English people.

That being so, he is a creation of whom the English people, who have kept him so long alive where he was born and bred, should be proud; and after reflecting on his essential characteristics--his love of the poor, his courteous robbery of the higher orders both spiritual and temporal, his loyalty to the king, his freedom with the king's deer, and his esteem of all women for the sake of the Virgin--an Englishman should be the first to resent any attempt to identify so truly popular a hero either with one of several historical nonent.i.ties, or with a member of the aristocracy, or worst of all, with an Aryan sun-myth.

All these attempts have been made at one time or another, but not until the spirit which begot him had begun to dwindle in the English heart. If King Arthur is the ideal knight of Celtic chivalry, Robin is the ideal champion of the popular cause under feudal conditions: his enemies are bishops, fat monks, and the sheriff who would restrain his liberty. It is natural that an enfranchised yeoman, who took toll of the oppressors, and so effected what we still call a redistribution of wealth, should be the hero of the oppressed and the law-abiding poor; and it is natural that, as social conditions altered (for better or for worse) with the national prosperity under Elizabeth, and cla.s.ses and ma.s.ses reconsidered their relative positions, Robin should fall from the popular pantheon, and should degenerate, as we find him degenerated in the broadsides of the Reformation hacks, into a swashbuckler unheroic enough to be defeated in quarter-staff bouts and so undemocratic as to find for himself a n.o.ble t.i.tle and a wife of high degree.

There are, then, four Robin Hoods:--

(i) The popular outlaw of the greenwood, as revealed to us in the older ballads.

(ii) The quasi-historical Robin, the outlaw enn.o.bled (by a contradiction in terms) as the Earl of Huntingdon, Robert Fitzooth, etc., and the husband of Matilda.

(iii) One of a number of actual Robert Hoods, whose existence (and insignificance) has been proved from historical doc.u.ments.

(iv) Robin Hood, or Robin o' Wood, explained by German scholars as the English representative of Woden, or a wood-G.o.d, or some other mythical personage.

We will now investigate these in turn, attempting so far as may be possible to keep them distinct.

I. THE BALLAD HERO ROBIN HOOD

The earliest known reference to Robin Hood the outlaw was first pointed out by Bishop Percy, the editor of the _Reliques_, in _Piers Plowman_, the poem written by Langland about 1377, where Sloth says (B. text, pa.s.sus v. 401):--

'But I can [know] rymes of Robyn hood, and Randolf erle of Chestre.'

Observing that this first mention of Robin is as the subject of ballads, and that he is coupled with another popular hero, one of the twelfth-century Earls of Chester, we pa.s.s to the next reference.

'Lytill Ihon and Robyne Hude Waythmen ware commendyd gude; In Yngilwode and Barnysdale Thai oysyd all this tyme thare trawale.'

This pa.s.sage, from Wyntoun's _Chronicle of Scotland_ (about 1420), is referred to the year 1283, and means that Robin and his man Little John were known as good hunters (cf. 'wight yeomen,' constantly in the ballads), and they carried on their business in Inglewood and Barnsdale at this time.

In 1439 a pet.i.tion was presented to Parliament concerning a certain Piers Venables, of whom it is stated that, having no other livelihood, he 'gadered and a.s.sembled unto him many misdoers' and 'wente into the wodes in that contre, like as it hadde be Robyn-hode and his meyne.'

About the same time (c. 1437), a longer description is given in Fordun's _Scotichronicon_, which was revised and continued by Bower, where the latter states that Robin Hood, 'that most celebrated robber,' was one of the dispossessed and banished followers of Simon de Montfort.

He proceeds, however, to couple with him 'Litill Johanne' and their a.s.sociates, 'of whom the foolish vulgar in comedies and tragedies make lewd entertainment, and are delighted to hear the jesters and minstrels sing them above all other ballads,'[4] and to describe briefly one of the 'tragedies.'

An extract from one more chronicler will suffice, and it should be noted that these three, Wyntoun, Bower, and Major, are all Scottish. John Major (or Mair) was born about 1450, and his _Historia Maioris Britanniae_ was published in 1521. In the part dealing with the reign of Richard I. (lib. iv. cap. ii.), we find:--

'About this time it was, as I conceive, that there flourished those most famous robbers Robert Hood, an Englishman, and Little John, who lay in wait in the woods, but spoiled of their goods those only who were wealthy. They took the life of no man, unless either he attacked them or offered resistance in defence of his property. Robert supported by his plundering a hundred bowmen, ready fighters every one, with whom four hundred of the strongest would not dare to engage in combat. The feats of this Robert are told in song all over Britain. He would allow no woman to suffer injustice, nor would he spoil the poor, but rather enriched them from the plunder taken from abbots. The robberies of this man I condemn, but of all thieves he was the prince and the most gentle thief.'[5] This is repeated almost verbatim in Stow's _Annales_ (1681).

These five references show that Robin Hood was popular in ballads for at least a century before the date at which we find those ballads in print; and apart from the fact that printing is usually the last thing that happens to a ballad of the folk, the language in which they are written is unmistakably Middle English--that is to say, the _Gest of Robyn Hode_ (at least) may be dated nearer 1400 than 1500. But Langland's evidence is clear; 'rymes' of Robin Hood were widely known by 1377. Neither Bower nor Major know anything of Robin except what they learnt from the ballads about him.

[Footnote 4: So translated by Ritson. 'Comedies and tragedies' is an ambiguous phrase in the fifteenth century, and may mean either the dramatised May-games or ballads. Cf. Chambers, _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 211.]

[Footnote 5: Translation (except the last phrase) by A. Constable, Edinburgh, 1892.]

II. ROBIN HOOD, EARL OF HUNTINGDON

In attempting to provide Robin Hood with a n.o.ble ancestry, Ritson quotes, amongst other authorities, a ma.n.u.script life of Robin, which, as it supplied him with other errors, had best be put out of court at once.

This is Sloane MS. 780 (Ritson calls it 715, which is due to the fact that in his time Sloane MSS. 715-7, 720-1, and 780-1 were bound up together); it is of the early seventeenth century, which is much too late for any faith to be put in its statements.

No allusion to the n.o.ble descent of Robin Hood has been found earlier than one in Grafton's Chronicle (1569), where the author alleges that he takes this information from 'an olde and auncient pamphlet.' As Child says, we must 'invoke the spirit of Ritson to pardon the taking of no very serious notice of Robin Hood's n.o.ble extraction.'

Stukely, an antiquary who published his _Palaeographia Britannica_ in 1746, derived 'Robert Fitzooth, commonly called Robin Hood, pretended Earl of Huntingdon,' from a series of Anglo-Norman lords.

It would be almost unnecessary to mention the two Elizabethan plays concerning Robert the Earl, were it not for an ingenious suggestion made in connection with them. _The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington_, and _The Death_ of the same, were written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, and are first mentioned in Henslowe's _Diary_ in 1598. The Earl, being outlawed, flies to Sherwood Forest, accompanied by Matilda, daughter of Lord Fitzwater; and there he a.s.sumes the style and t.i.tle of Robin Hood, and calls Matilda Maid Marian. This plot is introduced by an induction in which John Skelton the poet appears as stage-manager; and it has been suggested that Munday's play may be founded on a now-lost interlude or pageant of Skelton's composing. Robert, Lord Fitz-Walter, a descendant from the original Earls of Huntingdon, was patron of the living at Diss, in Norfolk, which Skelton held.'[6]