[76]. hey hoy.
[77]. 435. The three in 433, as in 416, is for rhyme, and need not be taken strictly.
[78]. Critical and Historical Tracts, No IV, Robin Hood, p. 28 ff.
[79]. Think of Robin as light porter,—Robin who had been giving and taking buffets that might fell an ox. Think of him as worn out with the work in eleven months, and dropped for disability. Think of his being put on threepence a day, after paying his yeomen at thrice the rate, 171, not to speak of such casual gratuities as we hear of in 382. “There is in all this, perhaps, as much correspondency as we can reasonably expect between the record and the ballad,” says Hunter, p. 38.
[80]. Hunter asks if it is not possible to find in this Robert Hood of Wakefield, near Barnsdale, “the identical person whose name has been so strangely perpetuated.” This Robert Hood would be a person of some consideration, and he would thus be qualified “for his station among the vadlets of the crown,”—three-penny vadlets, Great Hob, Little Coll, Robert Trash, and their fellows. The Wakefield Robert’s wife was named Matilda, “and the ballad testimony is—not the Little Gest, but other ballads of uncertain antiquity,—that the outlaw’s wife was named Matilda, which name she exchanged for Marian when she joined him in the green-wood.” (Pp 46–48.) Hunter has made a trivial mistake about Matilda: she belongs to Munday’s play, and not to the ballads (ballad) he has in mind.
[81]. The sheriff flees from Barnsdale “towards his house in Nottingham,” in stanza 57. In fact, though these places are fifty miles apart, this ballad treats them as adjacent. See p. 50 f.
[82]. Formerly among Sir John Fenn’s papers (for the history of which see Gairdner, Paston Letters, I, vii. ff); now in the possession of Mr William Aldis Wright, of Trinity College, Cambridge. The fragment, Mr Wright informs me, is written on a paper which was evidently the last half-leaf of a folio MS. On the back are various memoranda, and among them this: Itm. Rd of Rechard Wytway, penter [or peuter], for hes hosse rent, in full payment, lx [ix?] s’, the vij day of November, aº Ed. iiijti xv \[1475]. The grammatical forms of themselves warrant our putting the composition further back. This interesting relic has already been printed in Notes and Queries, First Series, XII, 321, from a very incorrect copy made by Dr Stukely. It is given here from a transcript made for me by Henry Bradshaw, of honored memory. Mr Wright has compared this with the original, and given me the history of the paper, so far as known.
This paper, as far as we can see, came into Sir John Fenn’s hands in company with the Paston Letters. In a letter of the date 1473, Sir John Paston writes: W. Woode, whyche promysed ... he wold never goo fro me, and ther uppon I have kepyd hym thys iii yer to pleye Seynt Jorge, and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottyngham, and now, when I wolde have good horse, he is gone into Bernysdale, and I without a keeper. Fenn, Original Letters, etc., 1787, II, 134, cited by Ritson; Gairdner, Paston Letters, III, 89. The play cited above might be called one of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and may possibly have been the very one in which William Wood was used to perform, before he went “into Barnysdale,” that is, ran away from service.
[83]. The [d]oo in the last line is not quite certain. I am not sure that the parts are always rightly assigned in the third dialogue.
[84]. Norray should be Nornee, or Norny, the name of a court fool. He is mentioned in James IV’s Treasurer’s Accounts, 1503–12. See Laing’s Dunbar, II, 307 f. Allan Bell being sly at shot, it is probable that Allan is miswritten in the MS. for Adam.