Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series

Frank Sidgwick

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• Publié par: phuwyar
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 21
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws, by
Frank Sidgwick
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Title: Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws
Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series
Author: Frank Sidgwick
Release Date: May 10, 2009 [EBook #28744]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
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Contents
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Uniform with this Volume
POPULAR BALLADS OF THE OLDEN TIME
First Series.
Ballads of Romance and Chivalry. 1903.
Second Series.
Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth. 1904.
Third Series.
Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance. 1906.LONDON: SIDGWICK & JACKSON, LTD
POPULAR BALLADS
OF THE OLDEN TIME
SELECTED AND EDITED
BY FRANK SIDGWICK
Fourth Series. Ballads of
Robin Hood and other
Outlaws


‘Come sit we downe under this Hawthorne tree,
The morrowes light shall lend us daie enough,
And tell a tale of Gawen or Sir Guy,
Of Robin Hood, or of good Clem of the Clough.’


SIDGWICK & JACKSON, LTD
3 Adam Street, Adelphi
London. MCMXII
—C’est une vieille chanson.
—Qui l’a faite?
—On ne sait pas.
—Quand?
—On ne sait pas.
—Quand tu étais petit?
—Avant que je fusse au monde, avant qu’y fût mon père, et le
père de mon père, et le père du père de mon père. Cela a
toujours été. —Rolland, L’Aube.
vCONTENTS
PAGE
Preface vii
Introduction to the Robin Hood Ballads xiA GEST OF ROBYN HODE 1
The First Fytte 5
The Second Fytte 20
The Third Fytte 32
The Fourth Fytte 43
The Fifth Fytte 57
The Sixth Fytte 64
The Seventh Fytte 72
The Eighth Fytte 84
ROBIN AND GANDELEYN 92
ROBIN HOOD AND THE MONK 96
ROBIN HOOD AND THE POTTER 113
ROBIN HOOD AND GUY OF GISBORNE 128
ROBIN HOOD’S DEATH 140
ADAM BELL, CLYM OF THE CLOUGH AND WILLIAM OF CLOUDESLY 147
JOHNNY O’ COCKLEY’S WELL 177
THE OUTLAW MURRAY 183
SIR ANDREW BARTON vi196
HENRY MARTYN 213
JOHN DORY 216
CAPTAIN WARD AND THE RAINBOW 219
THE SWEET TRINITY 224
viiPREFACE
This volume concludes the series, begun in 1903, which was intended to
comprise all the best traditional ballads of England and Scotland. The scheme
of classification by subject-matter, arbitrary and haphazard as it may seem to be
at one point or another, has, I think, proved more satisfactory than could have
been anticipated; and in the end I have omitted no ballad without due
justification.
In the fourteen years which have elapsed since the completion of Professor
Child’s collection, there has been discovered, so far as I know, only one ballad
that can claim the right to be added to his roll of 305 ‘English and Scottish
Popular Ballads.’ That one is the carol of The Bitter Withy, which I was
fortunate enough to recover in 1905, which my friend Professor Gerould of
Princeton University has annotated with an erudition worthy of Child, and the
1 viiigenuineness of which has been sponsored by Professor Gummere. I should
perhaps have included this in its place in my Second Series, had I known of it
in time, but I still hope to treat the traditional English Carols separately. I ought
to admit here that the confidence with which I claimed, in my Third Series,
a place on the roll for The Jolly Juggler, has abated, and I now consider it to be
no more than a narrative lyric without any definitely ‘popular’ characteristics.
These four volumes contain in all 143 ballads, four of which are not to be found
2in Child’s collection. Thus, out of his 305, I have omitted more than half; but it
must be remembered that his work was a collection, and mine—si parva licet
componere magnis—has been selection. The omitted ballads are either:—
(i) Fragmentary or mutilated;(ii) Closely related to ballads which I include;
(iii) Uninteresting, e.g. as dealing with obscure history;
(iv) Degenerate.
The last reason for exclusion particularly affects the Robin Hood ballads,
ixamong which Child prints thirty-three late broadsides and fragments which I
omit. He preferred to err by inclusion rather than exclusion, and states that he
has admitted more than one ballad, ‘actually worthless and manifestly spurious,
because of a remote possibility that it might contain relics, or be a debased
3representative, of something genuine and better.’
I cannot take leave of nine years’ intermittent work on this selection without
remembering that its ‘only begetter’ was Mr. A. H. Bullen, with whom I
published the first three volumes. While I regret to think how different it is in the
result from the edition he then envisaged, I gratefully acknowledge my
indebtedness to him for the inoculation. The anthologist is strictly a plucker of
the flowers of literature; but the ballads are not literature—they are lore, and
therefore of warmer human interest.
F. S.
1. The Popular Ballad (1907), p. 228.
2. These are The Nutbrown Maid, First Series; The Lyke-Wake Dirge and
Adam, Second Series; and The Jolly Juggler, Third Series.
3. Vol. v. p. 182.
xi
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
xiibetter 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 thespirit 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,
xiiiwho took toll of the oppressors, and so effected what we still call a redistribution
of wealth, should be the hero of the oppressed and the law-abiding poor; and it
is natural that, as social conditions altered (for better or for worse) with the
national prosperity under Elizabeth, and classes and masses reconsidered
their relative positions, Robin should fall from the popular pantheon, and should
degenerate, as we find him degenerated in the broadsides of the Reformation
hacks, into a swashbuckler unheroic enough to be defeated in quarter-staff
bouts and so undemocratic as to find for himself a noble title and a wife of high
degree.
There are, then, four Robin Hoods:—
(i) The popular outlaw of the greenwood, as revealed to us in the older
ballads.
(ii) The quasi-historical Robin, the outlaw ennobled (by a contradiction in
terms) as the Earl of Huntingdon, Robert Fitzooth, etc., and the husband