“The Yorkshire woods frequented much,”
being a-weary of forest glades and fallow deer, exclaimed,
“The fishermen brave more money have
Than any merchants two or three;
Therefore I will to Scarborough go,
That I a fisherman brave may be.”
But though the “widow woman” in whose house “he took up his inn,” lent him a stout boat and willing crew, he caught no fish, and the master laughed at him for a lubber. However, two or three days later, he espied a ship of war sailing proudly towards them, and then it was the master’s turn to lament, for the French robbers spared no man. To him then Robin:
“‘Master, tye me to the mast,’ saith he,
‘That at my mark I may stand fair,
And give me my bent bow in my hand,
And never a Frenchman will I spare.’
“He drew his arrow to the very head,
And drew it with all might and maine,
And straightway, in the twinkling of an eye,
To the Frenchman’s heart the arrow’s gane.
“Then streight they boarded the French ship
They lyeing all dead in their sight;
They found within that ship of warre
Twelve thousand pound of mony bright.”
The castle is national property, and as the bluff affords a good site for offence and defence, a magazine and barracks for a company of men have been built. For all garrison, at the time of my visit, there was but one invalid artilleryman, who employs his leisure in constructing models of the ruins for sale along with bottles of ginger beer. He will talk to you about the nice water of Our Lady’s Well; the cavern in the cliff, where the officers once dined; of the cannon balls that Cromwell sent across from Oliver’s Mount; about the last whale caught on the shore, and about the West Indies, where he lost his health; but he remembers little or nothing of Piers Gavestone or George Fox, and is not quite sure if he ever heard that Robin Hood went a-privateering. His duties, he told me, were not heavy; he did not even lock the gate at night, because folk came very early in the morning to fetch their cows from the pasture.
Since then, that is, in the autumn of 1857, the rains occasioned a landslip, which nearly obliterated the cavern; a whale thirty feet long was caught floundering in the shallows; and on Seamer Moor, about three miles distant, ancient gold and silver rings and ornaments, beads and broken pottery, and implements of bronze and iron and a skeleton, were found on excavating a chalky knoll.