he noble King Arthur is represented as an old dotard,
surrounded by knights who bear no resemblance in person or in the
nature of their adventures to their prototypes of romantic fiction.[27]

The ideal character of the yeomanry succeeded to the ideal character
of the knighthood; Robin Hood and his merry companions took the place
in the popular mind which belonged to King Arthur and his knights of
the Table Round. The yeomen of England were imbued with a spirit of
courage and liberty unknown to the same class on the continent of
Europe, and their love of freedom and restless activity of disposition
found a reflection in the person of their hero. Supposed to have lived
in the thirteenth century, his name and achievements have been sung in
countless rhymes and ballads, and have remained dear to the common
people down to the present day. The patron of archery, the embodiment
of the qualities most loved by the people--courage, generosity,
faithfulness, hardihood,--the places he frequented, the well he drank
from, have always retained his name, and his bow, with one of his
arrows, was preserved with veneration as late as the present
century.[28] The ideal of the yeomanry was similar to that of chivalry
in the love of blows fairly given and cheerfully taken, in the love of
fighting for fighting's sake. It was similar in the courtesy which was
always a characteristic of Robin Hood; in the religious devotion which
caused the outlaw to hear three masses every morning before setting out
on his depredations; in the gallantry which restrained him from
molesting any party which contained a woman.[29] But the tales relating
to Robin Hood differ from those of the Round Table in their entire
freedom from affectation and from supernatural machinery. They
breathe, too, an open-air spirit of liberty and enjoyment which was
pleasing and comprehensible to the dullest intellect, and which made
them, in the broadest sense, popular. The good-humored combativeness of
the yeoman sympathized with every beating which Robin Hood received,
and with every beating which he gave. In Robin's enmity to the clergy,
in his injunction to his followers,

"Thyse byshopppes and thyse archebyshoppes,
Ye shall them bete and bynde,"

the people applauded resistance to the extortion of the church. In
Robin's defiance of the law and its officers, they applauded resistance
to the tyranny of the higher classes. Waylaying sheriffs and priests,
or shootin