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.