.

[Footnote 1: _The Popular Ballad_ (1907), p. 228.]

[Footnote 2: These are _The Nutbrown Maid_, First Series;
The _Lyke-Wake Dirge_ and _Adam_, Second Series; and _The Jolly
Juggler_, Third Series.]

[Footnote 3: Vol. v. p. 182.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROBIN HOOD BALLADS

'It is our olde manner,' sayd Robyn,
'To leve but lytell behynde.'

'It will scarcely be expected that one should be able to offer an
authentic narrative of the life and transactions of this extraordinary
personage. The times in which he lived, the mode of life he adopted,
and the silence or loss of contemporary writers, are circumstances
sufficiently favourable, indeed, to romance, but altogether inimical to
historical truth.' In these words Joseph Ritson, the first and most
painstaking of those well-meaning scholars who have tried to associate
the outlaw with 'historical truth,' begins his 'Life of Robin Hood,'
an account which occupies ten pages of his book, and is annotated and
illustrated through the following one hundred and five pages. The
_Dictionary of National Biography_ includes Robin Hood, as it includes
King Arthur; but it is better to face the truth, and to state boldly
that Robin Hood the yeoman outlaw never existed in the flesh. As the
goddess Athena sprang from the head of Zeus, Robin Hood sprang from the
imagination of the English people.

That being so, he is a creation of whom the English people, who have
kept him so long alive where he was born and bred, should be proud; and
after reflecting on his essential characteristics--his love of the poor,
his courteous robbery of the higher orders both spiritual and temporal,
his loyalty to the king, his freedom with the king's deer, and his
esteem of all women for the sake of the Virgin--an Englishman should be
the first to resent any attempt to identify so truly popular a hero
either with one of several historical nonentities, or with a member of
the aristocracy, or worst of all, with an Aryan sun-myth.

All these attempts have been made at one time or another, but not until
the spirit which begot him had begun to dwindle in the English heart. If
King Arthur is the ideal knight of Celtic chivalry, Robin is the ideal
champion of the popular cause under feudal conditions: his enemies are
bishops, fat monks, and the sheriff who would restrain his liberty. It
is natural that an enfranchised yeoman, who took toll of the oppressors,
and so effected w