Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/57

Rh In the fourth fytte, Robin Hood is called "the poor man's friend," and says the hero himself—

The poem is remarkable for its extreme rancour against monks, abbots and priors, making against them the stock charge of habitual avarice, but supporting it only by the not very heinous fact of an abbot finding it necessary to foreclose a mortgage against a friend of Robin Hood for an overdue loan. The only other ballad (before alluded to by me) having any stamp of antiquity is "Robin Hood and the Potter," and this is chiefly interesting as betraying illiteracy as well as archaism, and therefore showing clearly the sort of people to whom the Epos was addressed.

This ballad also terms Robin Hood "a god yeman." The moral, too, is a true Robin Hood one. The Sheriff of Nottingham is coolly robbed of much money, and a handsome present out of it is made to the potter for no conclusive reason than his apparent poverty.

It will have been seen that of the "Rimes of Robin Hood," as Langland calls them, the surviving stock is but small. It is much to be wished that we had still many of them instead of the poor trash of the Robin Hood Garlands, Elizabethan in date, of which we have a great deal more than is at all needed. Fortunately, however, we have a poem, for such it is, of later date, but still not younger than the close of the Edwardian period, written with great vigour in pari materia, and breathing all the lawless spirit and animus of the old Rimes—I mean the now forgotten "Tale of Gamelin." This has been written (for it is a literary production) so closely upon the lines of the form of the older poems, like the Lytel Geste, and probably others now lost, that it is impossible to doubt that the writer's model was the Epos itself, to which he had an access, now closed to us. There should be accordingly no difficulty on our part in allowing this poem to supplement any deficiency of Robin Hood knowledge which the ravages of time have occasioned us in the present age.

Its form is a testimonial in its favour. Its author, though he must