Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 27.djvu/264

 Hood Graham Eden Hamond [q. v.], but had no issue.

 HOOD, JOHN (1720–1783?), surveyor and inventor, was born in 1720 at Moyle, co. Carlow. In 1772 was published in Dublin his 'Tables of Difference of Latitude and Departure for Navigators, Land Surveyors, &c.,' in which he recommends that in surveying the bearing of objects should be taken from the meridian of the place. The tables printed in the book are the natural sines of all the angles, in degrees and quarter degrees, to different radii, the latter ranging from 1 to 100, as being best adapted to Gunter's chain. Hood also gives an account of the diurnal variation of the magnetic needle and its correction, and a description of a new surveying instrument. This invention is elsewhere called Hood's compass theodolite, and is described as the basis of the theodolite now used in England and America. He is also said to have anticipated the invention of Hadley's quadrant, but took out no patents. He died about 1783.

A grandson, (1800?–1875), legal writer, born in Moyle, co. Donegal, about 1800, emigrated to Philadelphia, U.S.A., in 1826, and joined the bar there. He published a treatise 'On the Law of Decedents,' Philadelphia, 1847; and wrote, among other works, 'A Brief Account of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick' (1844) for the Hibernian Society of Philadelphia. He died at Philadelphia in 1875. ( Cyclopædia of American Biography, iii. 248.)

 HOOD, ROBIN, legendary outlaw, has been represented as an historical personage. There can be little doubt, however, that, as in the somewhat similar case of Rory o' the Hills in Ireland, the name originally belonged to a mythical forest-elf, who filled a large space in English, and apparently in Scottish,folk-lore, and that it was afterwards applied by English ballad-writers, chiefly of the northern and midland counties, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, to any robber-leader who made his home in forests or moors, excelled in archery, defied the oppressive forest laws, and thus attracted popular sympathy. Adam Bel, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudisdale, legendary outlaws of the forest of Inglewood, Cumberland, are credited in northern ballads with almost all Robin Hood's lawless characteristics and many of his adventures.

Inconclusive attempts have been made to extract from the ballad-history of Robin Hood a sun-myth, with Robin Hood as the central personage (Academy, 1883, xxiv. 250); to treat him as a popular and degraded manifestation of Woden, or to connect him with Hödr (= warrior), a Scandinavian deity. In its origin the name was probably a variant of 'Hodeken,' the title of a sprite or elf in Teutonic folk-lore (, Deutsche Mythologie, p. 472). The prefix Robin, a diminutive of Robert, implied an affectionate familiarity, as in Robin Goodfellow or in Robin of Redesdale, the assumed name of Sir William Conyers,leader of the Yorkshire rebels in 1469. The word Hood may have been applied to the elf because such creatures, according to popular belief, wore hoods; or it may be acorruption of 'o' th' wood,' because they were assumed to live in forests (cf. Gent. Mag. 1793, pt. i.) A 'Robin du Bois' is said to figure in the folk-lore of French peasants. The wide dissemination of the elf s fame is proved by the appearance of 'Robin Hood' in the names of places and plants in all parts of England. Hód's Oak, the name given in an Anglo-Saxon charter to a place in Worcestershire (cf. the modern Hodsock in Nottinghamshire), may embody a reference to Robin Hood. Cairns on Black Down, Somerset, and barrows near Whitby, Yorkshire, and Ludlow, Shropshire, have long been called Robin Hood's pricks or butts; there are Robin Hood's hills in Gloucestershire and Derbyshire; a rock, Robin Hood's Tor, is near Matlock; his wells are numerous in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire; a rock in Hope Dale, Derbyshire, is his chair; a cave in Nottinghamshire is his stable; a chasm at Chatsworthis his leap; Blackstone Edge, Lancashire, is his bed; and many old oaks are his trees. In western England red campion is invariably called Robin Hood, and Robin Hood's hatband is in many places a synonym for common club-moss. In Lancashire a searching southeast wind is known as a Robin Hood wind. In explanation of this nomenclature, various stories of no historical value have been fabricated. From the little eminence called after Robin Hood near Ludlow the hero is said to have shot an arrow into the roof of Ludlow Church, a distance of a mile and a half; and an arrow which still decorates a gable of the Fletchers' chancel of the church is said to be the one shot by Robin Hood. A similar legend is told in Holinshed's 'Chronicle' of a hillock in Oxmanstown, near Dublin, which was called Little John's Shot, and is said to owe its name to the fact that