Came of the northe and of the sothern blode,
And somewhat kyne to Robyn Hode.
Gutch, Robin Hood, I, 55 f.
These passages show the popularity of Robin Hood ballads for a century or more before the time when the Gest was printed, a popularity which was fully established at the beginning of this period, and unquestionably extended back to a much earlier day. Of these ballads, there have come down to us in a comparatively ancient form the following: those from which the Gest (printed, perhaps, before 1500) was composed, being at least four, Robin Hood, the Knight and the Monk, Robin Hood, Little John and the Sheriff, Robin Hood and the King, and Robin Hood’s Death (a fragment); Robin Hood and the Monk, No 118, more properly Robin Hood rescued by Little John, MS. of about 1450, but not for that older than the ballads of the Gest; Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn, No 119, Percy MS. c. 1650; Robin Hood’s Death, No 120, Percy MS. and late garlands; Robin Hood and the Potter, No 121, MS. of about 1500, later, perhaps, than any other of the group.[[40]] Besides these there are thirty-two ballads, Nos 122–153. For twenty-two of these we have the texts of broadsides and garlands of the seventeenth century,[[41]] four of the same being also found in the Percy MS.; eight occur in garlands, etc., of the last century, one of these same in the Percy MS., and another in an eighteenth-century MS.; one is derived from a suspicious nineteenth-century MS., and one from nineteenth-century tradition. About half a dozen of these thirty-two have in them something of the old popular quality; as many more not the least smatch of it. Fully a dozen are variations, sometimes wearisome, sometimes sickening, upon the theme ‘Robin Hood met with his match.’ A considerable part of the Robin Hood poetry looks like char-work done for the petty press, and should be judged as such. The earliest of these ballads, on the other hand, are among the best of all ballads, and perhaps none in English please so many and please so long.
That a considerable number of fine ballads of this cycle have been lost will appear all but certain when we remember that three of the very best are found each in only one manuscript.[[42]]
Robin Hood is absolutely a creation of the ballad-muse. The earliest mention we have of him is as the subject of ballads. The only two early historians who speak of him as a ballad-hero, pretend to have no information about him except what they derive from ballads, and show that they have none other by the description they give of him; this description being in entire conformity with ballads in our possession, one of which is found in a MS. as old as the older of these two writers.
Robin Hood is a yeoman, outlawed for reasons not given but easily surmised, “courteous and free,” religious in sentiment, and above all reverent of the Virgin, for the love of whom he is respectful to all women. He lives by the king’s deer (though he loves no man in the world so much as his king) and by levies on the superfluity of the higher orders, secular and spiritual, bishops and archbishops, abbots, bold barons, and knights,[[43]] but harms no husbandman or yeoman, and is friendly to poor men generally, imparting to them of what he takes from the rich. Courtesy, good temper, liberality, and manliness are his chief marks; for courtesy and good temper he is a popular Gawain. Yeoman as he is, he has a kind of royal dignity, a princely grace, and a gentleman-like refinement of humor. This is the Robin Hood of the Gest especially; the late ballads debase this primary conception in various ways and degrees.
This is what Robin Hood is, and it is equally important to observe what he is not. He has no sort of political character, in the Gest or any other ballad. This takes the ground from under the feet of those who seek to assign him a place in history. Wyntoun, who gives four lines to Robin Hood, is quite precise. He is likely to have known of the adventure of King Edward and the outlaw, and he puts Robin under Edward I, at the arbitrary date of 1283, a hundred and forty years before his own time. Bower, without any kind of ceremony, avouches our hero to have been one of the proscribed followers of Simon de Montfort, and this assertion of Bower is adopted and maintained by a writer in the London and Westminster Review, 1840, XXXIII, 424.[[44]] Major, who probably knew some ballad of Richard I and Robin Hood, offers a simple conjecture that Robin flourished about Richard’s time, “circa hæc tempora, ut auguror,” and this is the representation in Matthew Parker’s ‘True Tale,’ which many have repeated, not always with ut auguror; as Scott, with whom no one can quarrel, in the inexpressibly delightful Ivanhoe, and Thierry in his Conquête de l’Angleterre, Book xi, IV, 81 ff, ed. 1830, both of whom depict Robin Hood as the chief of a troop of Saxon bandits, Thierry making him an imitator of Hereward. Hunter, again, The Ballad-Hero, Robin Hood, p. 48, interprets the King Edward of the Gest as Edward II, and makes Robin Hood an adherent of the Earl of Lancaster in the fatal insurrection of 1322. No one of these theories has anything besides ballads for a basis except Hunter’s. Hunter has an account-book in which the name Robin Hood occurs; as to which see further on, under stanzas 414–450 of the Gest. Hereward the Saxon, Fulk Fitz Warine, Eustace the Monk, Wallace, all outlaws of one kind or another, are celebrated in romantic tales or poems, largely fabulous, which resemble in a general way, and sometimes in particulars, the traditional ballads about Robin Hood;[[45]] but these outlaws are recognized by contemporary history.
The chief comrades of Robin Hood are: Robin Hood and the Monk, Little John, Scathlok (Scarlok, Scarlet), and Much; to these the Gest adds Gilbert of the White Hand and Reynold, 292 f. A friar is not a member of his company in the older ballads. A curtal, or cutted friar, called Friar Tuck in the title, but not in the ballad, has a fight with Robin Hood in No 123, and is perhaps to be regarded as having accepted Robin’s invitation to join his company; this, however, is not said. Friar Tuck is simply named as one of Robin’s troop in two broadsides, No 145, No 147, but plays no part in them. These two broadsides also name Maid Marian, who appears elsewhere only in a late and entirely insignificant ballad, No 150.[[46]]
Friar Tuck is a character in each of two Robin Hood plays, both of which we have, unluckily, only in a fragmentary state. One of these plays, dating as far back as 1475, presents scenes from Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn, followed, without any link, by others from some ballad of a rescue of Robin Hood from the sheriff; to which extracts from still other ballads may have been annexed. In this play the friar has no special mark; he simply makes good use of his bow. The other play, printed by Copland with the Gest, not much before 1550, treats more at length the story of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, and then that of Robin Hood and the Potter, again, and naturally, without connection. The conclusion is wanting, and the play may have embraced still other ballads. The Friar in this is a loose and jovial fellow, and gave the hint for Scott’s Clerk of Copmanhurst.[[47]]