Or like Little John his varlet;
Here and there they shew them doughty,
In cells and woods to get their booty.”
Whitlock relates that “the [parliament] committee who carried the propositions of peace to Oxford, had the king’s answer sealed up and sent to them. They, upon advice together, thought it not fit for them to receive an answer in that manner . . . and made an address to his majesty that they might know what his answer was, and have a copy of it: to which his majesty replied, What is that to you, who are but to carry what I send, and if I will send the song of Robin Hood and Little John, you must carry it? To which the commissioners only said, that the business about which they came was of somewhat more consequence than that song” (Memorials, p. 115).
[65] There is, in fact, such a place as Barnwood forest, in Buckinghamshire; but no one, except Mr. Hearne, has hitherto supposed that part of the country to have been frequented by our hero. Barnwood, in the case reported by Yelverton, has clearly arisen from a confusion of Barnsdale and green wood. “Robin Hood in the greenwood stood” was likewise the beginning of an old song now lost (see post, p. [197]): and it is not a little remarkable that Jefferies, serjeant, on the trial of Pilkington and others, for a riot, in 1683, by a similar confusion, quotes the line in question thus:
“Robin Hood upon Greendale stood” (State-trials, iii. 634).
A third corruption has taken place in Parker, p. 131 (King v. Cotton), though expressly cited from Yelverton, viz.
“Robin Hood in Barnwell stood.”
The following most vulgar and indecent rime, current among the peasantry in the North of England, may have been intended to ridicule the perpetual repetition of “Robin Hood in greenwood stood:”
Robin Hood