associated itself with definite
localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in
the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have
been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon
de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier
free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by
plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national
conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness
to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the
King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave
to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal
authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby
appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a
vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and
hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness.
And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the
long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love
of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree. The
forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the
ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural
descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and
a wholesome, outdoor feeling:

"In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song:

"To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hillis hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tre."[33]

Although a few favorite ballads such as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy
Chase," "The Children in the Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had
long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been
regarded as literature worthy of serious attention. They were looked
upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and
unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns,
cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated man had had a
sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads--much as people nowadays
collect postage stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a
collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar