And then, after a while, the life which began in terror, and despair, and poverty, and loss of land and kin, became not only tolerable, but pleasant. Bold men and hardy, they cared less and less for
“The thornie wayes, the deep valleys,
The snowe, the frost, the rayne,
The colde, the hete; for dry or wete
We must lodge on the plaine,
And us above, none other roofe,
But a brake bushe, or twayne.”
And they found fair lasses, too, in time, who, like Torfrida and Maid Marian, would answer to their warnings against the outlaw life, with the nut-browne maid, that—
“Amonge the wylde dere, such an archere
As men say that ye be,
He may not fayle of good vitayle
Where is so great plentè:
And water clere of the rivere,
Shall be full swete to me,
With which in hele, I shall right wele,
Endure, as ye may see.”
Then called they themselves “merry men,” and the forest the “merry greenwood”; and sang, with Robin Hood,—
“A merrier man than I, belyye
There lives not in Christentie.”
They were coaxed back, at times, to civilized life; they got their grace of the king, and entered the king’s service; but the craving after the greenwood was upon them. They dreaded and hated the four stone walls of a Norman castle, and, like Robin Hood, slipt back to the forest and the deer.
Gradually, too, law and order rose among them, lawless as they were; the instinct of discipline and self-government, side by side with that of personal independence, which is the peculiar mark and peculiar strength of the English character. Who knows not how, in the “Lytell Geste of Robin Hood,” they shot at “pluck-buffet,” the king among them, disguised as an abbot; and every man who missed the rose-garland, “his tackle he should tyne”;—
“And bere a buffet on his head,
Iwys ryght all bare,
And all that fell on Robyn’s lote,
He smote them wonder sair.
“Till Robyn fayled of the garlonde,
Three fyngers and mair.”
Then good Gilbert bids him in his turn