Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/55

 Rh Here I must also remark that the French word Robin, used as the hero's name, completely disposes of the shadowy claim set up by some writers on his behalf, that he was a patriotic Anglo-Saxon of the early ages, burning with unquenchable hatred of the Norman oppressor. Still less can he have been the blind Scandinavian deity Hodr, who killed Balder the beautiful. He belongs not to history or mythology, but to English fiction.

The plan of the epic being decided, and the hero and his name thus satisfactorily settled, the remaining point—its didactics—presented no difficulty whatever to the syndicate who had the movement in their hands. The didactics were to be Communism and Anarchism—high flights for men of the Middle Ages. We find these two great systems, which seem to us so modern, explicitly unfolded in the two oldest of the poems. Communism was pithily summed up in the well-known description of the robber chieftain's rule and practice of life come down to us with the Robin Hood tradition itself. He was said to have "robbed the rich to feed the poor," a sort of liberal paraphrase of the operation of the subsequent Elizabethan poor law; and under the new philosophy of the Robin Hood school the poor were not to be content to have their needs supplied through the voluntary charity of the rich, but were to take it from the latter by the right of communistic compulsion.

This may be easily illustrated out of the ballads. In one of them quoted by Ritson (which, however, I cannot trace) Robin Hood is made to say:

The Lytel Geste says of our hero:—

The meaning of these two excerpts is that the goods thus liberally imparted to the poor without any other consideration than their real or apparent poverty were derived from the possessions of others, viz. the rich, for the outlaw had no other resources save what pillage would abundantly and constantly supply.