or to imagine his story must have been familiar to Plutarch, because in his Morals, translated by Dr. Philemon Holland, 1603, p. 644, we read the following passage:—“Evenso [i.e. as the crane and fox serve each other in Æsop], when learned men at a table plunge and drowne themselves (as it were), in subtile problemes and questions interlaced with logicke, which the vulgar sort are not able for their lives to comprehend and conceive; whiles they also againe for their part come in with their foolish songs, and vain ballads of Robin-Hood and Little John, telling tales of a tubbe, or of a roasted horse, and such like.” Who, indeed, would be apt to think that his skill in archery was known to Virgil? And yet, as interpreted by our facetious friend Mr. Charles Cotton, he tells us that
“Cupid was a little tyny,
Cogging, lying, peevish nynny;
But with a bow the shit-breecht elf
Would shoot like Robin Hood himself.”
In a word, if we are to credit translators, he must have {xviii} existed before the siege of Troy; for thus, according to one of Homer’s:
“Then came a choice companion
Of Robin Hood and Little John,
Who many a buck and many a doe,
In Sherwood forest, with his bow,
Had nabb’d; believe me it is true, sir,
The fellow’s Christian name was Teucer.”
Iliad, by Bridges, 4to, p. 231.[8]
This last supposition, indeed, has even the respectable countenance of Dan Geoffrey Chaucer:
“Pandarus answerde, it may be well inough,
And held with him of all that ever he saied,
But in his hart he thought, and soft lough,
And to himselfe full soberly he saied,
From hasellwood there Jolly Robin plaied,
Shall come all that thou abidest here,
Ye, farewell all the snow of ferne yere.”
Troilus (B. 5), Speght’s edition, 1602.
(4) “His extraction was noble, and his true name Robert Fitzooth.”] In “an olde and auncient pamphlet,” which Grafton the chronicler had seen, it was written that “This man discended of a noble parentage.” The Sloane MS. says “He was of . . . . parentage;” and though the material word is illegible, the sense evidently requires noble. So, likewise, the Harleian note: “It is said that he was of noble blood.” Leland also has expressly termed him “nobilis” (Collectanea, i. 54). The following account of his family will be found sufficiently particular. Ralph Fitzothes, or Fitzooth, a Norman, who had come over to England with William Rufus, married Maud or Matilda, daughter of Gilbert de Gaunt, Earl of Kyme and Lindsey, by whom he had two sons: Philip, afterward Earl of Kyme, that earldom being part of his mother’s dowry, and William. Philip the elder died without issue; William was a ward to Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in whose household he received his education, and who, by the king’s express command, gave {xix} him in marriage to his own niece, the youngest of the three daughters of the celebrated Lady Roisia de Vere, daughter of Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Guisnes in Normandy, and lord high chamberlain of England under Henry I., and of Adeliza, daughter to Richard de Clare, Earl of Clarence and Hertford, by Payn de Beauchamp, baron of Bedford, her second husband. The offspring of this marriage was our hero, Robert Fitzooth, commonly called Robin Hood. (See Stukeley’s Palæographia Britannica, No. I. passim.)
A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1793, under the signature D. H.,[9] pretends that Hood is only a corruption of “o’ th’ wood, q.d. of Sherwood.” This, to be sure, is an absurd conceit; but, if the name were a matter of conjecture, it might be probably enough referred to some particular sort of hood our hero wore by way of distinction or disguise. See Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 522. In Jonson’s masque of “The king’s entertainment at Welbeck” (Works, 1756, vii. 53), certain characters are introduced “in livery hoods,” of whom Fitz-ale says,
“Six hoods they are, and of the blood,
They tell of ancient Robin Hood.”
It may be remembered that Hugh Capet, the first king of France of the third and last race, obtained that surname from a similar circumstance. It is unnecessary to add that Hood is a common surname at this day, as well as a place in Yorkshire, formerly Hode; and that Edward the Third, in the tenth year of his reign, confirmed to Thomas, the son of Robert de Hode, of Hoveden, in tail-general, certain places of moorland, &c. in vasto de Incklesmore, &c. (Ro. Pa. 10 E. 3. m. 31).