130. by halves, lit. by sides; i. e. some to one side, some to the other. drowe by halves = sidled away.
131. 'May ye prosper ill!' Cf. Chaucer, Pard. Tale, C. 947.
136. 'I will teach thee some play with the buckler.' An allusion to the 'sword and buckler play,' described in Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, bk. iii. ch. 6. § 22. Not unlike our modern 'single-stick,' but with the addition of a buckler in the left hand. Strutt gives a picture from a Bodleian MS., dated 1344, in which clubs or bludgeons are substituted for swords; and, no doubt, the swords used in sport were commonly of wood. Gamelyn is speaking jocosely; he had no buckler, but he had a wooden 'pestel,' which did very well for a sword.
137. 'by Saint Richard was a favourite oath[[30]] with the outlaws of Robin Hood's stamp, probably because of his Saxon extraction'; Jephson. Mr. Jephson adds the following quotation from the English Martyrologe, 1608: 'Saint Richard, King and Confessor, was sonne to Lotharius, King of Kent, who, for the love of Christ, taking upon him a long peregrination, went to Rome for devotion to that sea [see], and, on his way homeward, died at Lucca, about the year of Christ 750, where his body is kept until this day, with great veneration, in the oratory and chappell of St. Frigidian, and adorned with an epitaph both in verse and prose.' But this is altogether beside the mark; for Mr. Jephson certainly refers to the wrong saint. There were four St. Richards, commemorated, respectively, on Feb. 7, April 3, June 9, and August 21; see Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. The day of
the Saxon king is Feb. 7; but he could hardly have been so fresh in the memory of Englishmen as the more noted St. Richard, bishop of Chichester, who died in 1253, and was canonized in 1262; his day being April 3. There is a special fitness in the allusion to this latter saint, because he was a pattern of brotherly love, and Johan is here deprecating Gamelyn's anger. Alban Butler says of him: 'The unfortunate situation of his eldest brother's affairs gave him an occasion of exercising his benevolent disposition. Richard condescended to become his brother's servant, undertook the management of his farms, and by his industry and generosity effectually retrieved his brother's before distressed circumstances.' His name still appears in our Prayer-books.
141. I mot nede is used for 'I must needs'; see examples in Mätzner, Alteng. Sprachproben, i. 302 (182). Mot is the present tense; whereas moste (mod. E. must) is the past tense, and was once grammatically incorrect as a form of the present tense.
150. of thing, of a thing; as in Sir Tristram, 406.
154. 'And mind that thou blame me, unless I soon grant it.'
156. 'If we are to be at one,' i. e. to be reconciled. Cf. l. 166.
158. 'Thou must cause me to possess it, if we are not to quarrel.'