ROBIN HOOD BALLADS, The. Ballads and tales of the outlaw have been steady favorites of the people of England. Soon after the Conquest, rebels of high rank, like Hereward and Fulke Fitz-Warine, and many a humbler hero who °concealed his life,' were said and sung by the popular muse. Their bal lads, however, are lost; and the single outlaw who survives as hero of an actual ballad-cycle, and of an epic made directly from the ballad stuff, is (Robin Hood) There is obvious temptation to put Robin into the Fulke Fitz Warine class, and to regard him as a disguised nobleman like the hero of that charming but sophisticated poem, Nut-Brown Maid) A passage in (Piers Plowman' (14th century) which certainly attests Robin's early and wide vogue, where Sloth, the alehouse idler, is said to know °rymes of Robin Hood and Randolf of Chester" better than his prayers, serves as an argument for the ra,uk of the first-named outlaw. He has been made earl of Hunting ton. Yet another theory of origins interprets •loocl" as "Woden'o and regards Robin as a divinity in disguise. Neither of these supposi tions is probable. It is true that legend often borrows from myth; but the supposed mythical attributes are very far fetched in the outlaw's case, and seem impertinent. °Robin') is prob ably the word for °bandit? and °Hood)) may mean °of the wood? Professor Child concludes a very careful in vestigation of all the evidence and all the theories by declaring that Robin Hood is neither a nobleman of record nor yet a god; he is simply the ideal and typical outlaw, and is 'ab solutely a creation of the ballad muse? Of course, some actual 'banished man)) who went to the greenwood as a victim and became a vic tor over the cruel forest-laws, may have been the nucleus of this tradition. But the story is localized in more than one place, and the hero is typical, not historical, in person, habit and surroundings. He has aristocratic traits; the °milk-white side' is no yeoman's, and his lavish but capricious generosity is part of the peasant's notion of a lord. His conventional foes are the sheriff and the monk, objects of popular satire. Like the Klepht, or bandit, hero of modern Greek ballads, Robin is the bumble man's friend; he takes from the rich to give to the poor, is pious, handsome, miraculously strong and brave. This is the hero of the best and oldest ballads; like other favorites, Char lemagne, for instance, in early Frcuch epic and in stories of the 12th century, 'Robin Hood' has two distinct phases and is at last the victim of his own typical excellence. In the best bal
lads be fights and kills the doughtiest of foes, like Guy of Gisborne, or else displays prodigious valor against overwhelming odds; but in the inferior verse of broadsides and garlands. Robin fares ill at the hands of wayside bullies,— tinkers, potters, what not,— who are thus glori fied by victory over the champion and typical hero. Like these inferior ballads, as significant of a second literary growth, must also be reckoned the Robin Hood plays. They intro duce with Maid Marian — however ancient their own proper rites —a sentimental note which is alien to the greenwood tradition. Such subjection to base uses, and such changes of character, were the penalty paid by Robin's venerable and universal fame. Pleasanter proof of this popularity is found in proverbial phrases like 'going round Robin Hood's barn° and in the many place-names which he has fathered.
The Robin Hood ballads have a double ap peal,— to the student of poetry for their signifi cance, and to the lover of poetry for their worth. Thirty-six ballads are preserved, which deal with individual adventures of the hero; a few of these are trash; some are spirited and readable, though low in the poetic scale; and perhaps half-a-dozen belong with the best nar rative verse. With these last must be counted the Gest (pasta, deeds), a little epic of 458 stanzas, or about 2,000 lines, which was made from ballads of the type of Hood and the Monk,' and was printed about 1500, al though the date of composition must be put earlier. Comparison of one of the older bal lads, like (Robin Hood's Death,' with the same story in the 'Gest' is very suggestive for the epic problem.
At their best, these ballads are a model of popular chronicle verse. They differ widely from the romantic ballads, lacking for the most part, repetition, refrain, and all choral sug gestions. They were sung, or chanted, for the story alone. Nowhere, however, is a story bet ter told than the adventures of the Knight, Robin and the abbey folk in the 'Gest,' and the complication of Robin and Little John and the Sheriff; while the opening stanzas of 'The Monk' are famous for their descriptive beauty. The literature of the subject is given by Child, 'Ballads,' III Introduction to the Gest. Some books and articles of later date are noted in the bibliography of the chapter on the Popular Ballad in the second volume of the 'Cambridge History of English Literature.'