Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/53

Rh But it is just this limitation of fact which brings the subject more strictly within the province of folk-lore, and forms the justification for its treatment in our pages.

My remarks have special reference to the Robin Hood ballads.

These interesting poems, though they may seem to us now merely harmless outbursts of enthusiastic and rude poetasters, were in their origin intended for anything rather than innocent and superfluous diversion. They were really intended to exasperate the rude mind of the yeomen into a ruthless crusade against the clergy and landed gentry; the proposed result of that crusade, if it should be successful, being their entire disappropriation for the behoof of a new order of proprietors, the yeomen.

To England, as we shall see, belongs the equivocal credit of having originated an epic of communism.

We have reason to believe that the Robin Hood ballads were a long series in their first composition. But, if that were so, most of them (I mean the genuine ones) have long since perished; two only, such as we can accept with full faith in their authenticity, remaining to our days. There is, however, sufficient in these two to furnish us with the true scope and intention of the agitators without any possibility of mistake or serious misconception. The necessary data are supplied to us by the "Litel Geste of Robin Hood" and "Robin Hood and the Potter." These two poems (of which the first is infinitely the best) will be found to lay bare the object and philosophy of the then new social science.

We are singularly fortunate in a literary question like this to be able to approximate closely to the era when the general epos was first composed and started by the unknown originators of the movement.

Langland, the author of The Vision of Piers Ploughman, writing in A.D. 1362, lets us know in unequivocal terms that the ballads of Robin Hood ("Rimes of Robin Hood" he calls them) were then in full circulation. This does not of course determine how long before this year the ballads were actually composed, but it certainly does a great deal to settle even that date; for if we allow five or six years for their inception and dissemination—and we cannot allow less and need not allow more—we are landed in the epoch of the great