had defied the power of the
Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods
and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character.
He had the English love of fair-play, the English readiness to shake
hands and {58} make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square
fight. He beat and plundered the rich bishops and abbots, who had more
than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the
distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood.
He was a mighty archer, with those national weapons, the long-bow and
the cloth-yard-shaft. He tricked and baffled legal authority in the
person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that
secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the
free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England. And finally the scenery of
the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the
exploits of "the old Robin Hood of England" and his merry men.

The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are
apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use
of conventional epithets; "the red, red gold," "the good, green wood,"
"the gray goose wing." Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like,

"But out and spak their stepmother."

Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless
helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,

"She had'na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae."

{59}

Or again,

"And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass,
And mony ane sings o' corn;
An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood,
Kens little whare he was born.

It was na in the ha', the ha',
Nor in the painted bower;
But it was in the gude green wood,
Amang the lily flower."

Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th
century, printed in black letter, "broad sides," or single sheets.
Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489, _A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood_, which
is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th
century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in
miscellanies, called _Garlands_. Early in the 18th century the Scotch
poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the
_Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. But no large and important
collection was put forth until Percy's _Reliques_, 1765, a book which
had a powerful influence upon W