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:
The woodweele sang and wold not cease,
Sitting upon the spraye,
Soe lowde, he wakened Robin Hood,
In the greenwood where he lay.
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.