With hel an tow,
And rum-be-low,
And chearily we’ll get up,
As soon as any day O,
All for to bring the summer home,
The summer and the May O.”
“After which,” he adds, “there is something about the grey goose wing; from all which,” he concludes, “the goddess Flora has nothing to say to it.” She may have nothing to say to the song, indeed, and yet a good deal to do with the thing. But the fact is, that the first eight days of May, or the first day and the eighth, seem to have been devoted by the Celtic nations to some great religious ceremony. Certain superstitious observances of this period still exist in the Highlands of Scotland, where it is called the Bel-tein; Beltan, in that country, being a common term for the beginning of May, as “between the Beltans” is a saying significant of the first and eighth days of that month. The games of Robin Hood, as we shall elsewhere see, were, for whatever reason, always celebrated in May.—N.B. “Hel-an-tow,” in the above stanza, should be heave and how. Heave and how, and Rumbelow, was an ordinary chorus to old ballads, and is at least as ancient as the reign of Edward II., since it occurs in the stanza of a Scotish song, preserved by some of our old historians, on the battle of Bannockburn.
To lengthen this long note: Among the Harleian MSS. (num. 367) is the fragment of “a tale of Robin Hood dialouge-wise beetweene Watt and Jeffry. The morall is the overthrowe of the abbyes; the like being attempted by the Puritane, which is the wolfe, and the politician, which is the fox, agaynst the bushops. Robin Hood, bushop; Adam Bell, abbot; Little John, colleagues of the university.” This seems to have been a common mode of satirising both the old Church and the reformers. In another MS. of the same collection (N. 207), written about 1532, is a tract entitled “The banckett of John the reve, unto Peirs Ploughman, Laurens Laborer, Thomlyn Tailyor, and Hobb of the Hille, with others;” being, as Mr. Wanley says, a dispute concerning transubstantiation by a Roman Catholic. The other, indeed, is much more modern: it alludes to the indolence of the abbots, and their falling off from the original purity in which they were placed by the bishops, whom it inclines to praise. The object of its satire seems to be the Puritans; but here it is imperfect, though the lines preserved are not wholly destitute of poetical merit.—“Robin Hood and the Duke of Lancaster, a ballad, to the tune of The Abbot of Canterbury,” 1727, is a satire on Sir Robert Walpole.
[68] Chatterton, in his “Memoirs of a Sad Dog,” represents “Baron Otranto” (meaning the honourable Horace Walpole, now Earl of Orford), when on a visit to “Sir Stentor,” as highly pleased with Robin Hood’s ramble, “melodiously chaunted by the knight’s groom and dairy-maid, to the excellent music of a two-stringed violin and bag-pipe,” which transported him back “to the age of his favourite hero, Richard the Third;” whereas, says he, “the songs of Robin Hood were not in being till the reign of Queen Elizabeth.” This, indeed, may be in a great measure true of those which we now have, but there is sufficient evidence of the existence and popularity of such-like songs for ages preceding; and some of these, no doubt, were occasionally modernised or new-written, though most of them must be allowed to have perished.
The late Dr. Johnson, in controverting the authenticity of Fingal, a composition in which the author, Mr. Macpherson, has made great use of some unquestionably ancient Irish ballads, said, “He would undertake to write an epick poem on the story of Robin Hood, and half England, to whom the names and places he should mention in it are familiar, would believe and declare they had heard it from their earliest years” (Boswell’s Journal, p. 486).