The Play of Robin Hood, an imperfect copy of which is printed at the end of Copland’s and of White’s edition of The Gest, is founded on the ballads of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar and of Robin Hood and the Potter. The portion which is based on the ballad of Robin and the Potter is given in an appendix.
Robin Hood and the Butcher, No 122, repeats many of the incidents of the present ballad. The sheriff is enticed into the forest (by Little John instead of Robin Hood) in The Gest, 181 ff. This part of the story, in Robin Hood and the Butcher, is much more like that of The Gest than it is in Robin Hood and the Potter. We shall have only too many variations of the adventure in which Robin Hood unexpectedly meets his match in a hand-to-hand fight, now with a pinder, then with a tanner, tinker, shepherd, beggar, etc. His adversaries, after proving their mettle, are sometimes invited and induced to join his company: not so here. In some broadside ballads of this description, with an extravagance common enough in imitations, Robin Hood is very badly mauled, and made all but contemptible.[[97]] In Robin Hood and the Potter, Little John is willing to wager on the result of a trial, from his own experience. Will Scadlock is equally confident in Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, perhaps for the same reason, although this is not said. In Robin Hood and the Shepherd, Little John takes his turn after his master, and so with three of Robin’s men in Robin Hood and the Beggar, No 133.
Hereward the Saxon introduces himself into the Norman court as a potter, to obtain information of an attack which William the Conqueror was thought to intend on his stronghold at Ely: De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis, 24, in Michel, Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, II, 69, attributed to the twelfth century. Wallace, in like manner, to scout in the English camp: Blind Harry’s poem, ed. Moir, Book Six, v. 435 ff, p. 123 ff. This is also one of the many artifices by which Eustace the Monk deceives his enemy, the Count of Boulogne: Roman d’Eustache le Moine, ed. Michel, p. 39, v. 1071 ff, a poem of the thirteenth century. See, for Hereward and Eustace, T. Wright’s Essays on Subjects connected with the Literature, etc., of England in the Middle Ages, II, 108 ff, 135.
Disguise is the wonted and simplest expedient of an outlaw mixing among his foes, “wherein the pregnant enemy does much.” Fulk Fitz Warine takes the disguise of an old monk, a merchant, a charcoal-burner; Hereward, that of a potter, a fisherman; Eustace the Monk, of a potter, shepherd, pilgrim, charcoal-burner, woman, leper, carpenter, minstrel, etc.; Wallace, of a potter, pilgrim, woman (twice), etc., in Blind Harry’s poem, of a beggar in ballads; Robin Hood, of a potter, butcher, beggar, shepherd, an old woman, a fisherman (?), Guy of Gisborne.
Translated by Anastasius Grün, p. 76.
1
In schomer, when the leves spryng,
The bloschoms on euery bowe,
So merey doyt the berdys syng
Yn wodys merey now.