cycle were intimately connected with the popular festival held at the beginning of May. Indeed, either express mention of it, or a vivid description of the season, in the older ballads, shows that the feats of the hero were generally performed during this month. Unfortunately, we cannot distinctly trace back further than the fifteenth century the history of these games, and their connection with the name of Robin Hood. "Sir John Paston, in the time of king Edward IV. complaining of the ingratitude of his servants, mentions one who had promised never to desert him, and ther uppon,' says he, I have kepyd hym thys iii yer to pleye seynt Jorge, and Robyn Hod and the shryf of Notyngham, and now when I wolde have good horse, he is goon into Bernysdale, and I without a keeper."" The allusion is evidently to some story or ballad which then existed (similar to that of Reynaud Grenlefe) where Robin in disguise had hired himself as a groom to the sheriff, and had afterwards stolen his horses. This is a very favourite stratagem in the Roman of Eustace le Moine, who, more than once, in disguise, carries away the horses of the Count of Boulogne.

Ritson, from whom the above extract was taken, asserts that the May festival owed its origin to meetings for the purpose of practising with the bow. There can be little doubt, however, that Ritson was wrong, that the archery was an addition to the festival, and that the latter was, in its earlier form among our Pagan forefathers, a religious celebration, though, like such festivals in general, it possessed a double character, that of a religious ceremony and of an opportunity for the performance of warlike games. With the changes which this festival experienced at different periods we are not well acquainted; but a circumstance has

been preserved by Leland which seems to illustrate the subject, so far as regards the nature of the ceremony.

Adjoining to Cambridge there is a village called Barnwell, which was once celebrated for its abbey, and for the well which was inclosed within the abbey walls. The old chronicler of the monastery, whom Leland, if we remember right, read in its library, derived the name of the place from the Saxon beorna wil, which he interpreted, according to the acceptation in which the word beorn was taken in his days, the well of the lads, but which a few ages earlier would have signified the well of the champions. The story he tells in illustration of the name is this. From time immemorial it had been a custom for the young men and lads of the vicinity to assemble here at a particular period of the year, to perform gymnastic exercises and warlike games, and hence the well received its name. The circumstance of the meeting having been held at a well, proves that it had something religious in its character. After the entrance of the Normans, in addition to the games and festivities, it had become customary to hold there a market, and the festival seems to have taken the character of what we now call a wake or fair. The monastery was founded in the reign of the first William, in a position nearer to the castle; but, the place where the festival was held having been judged more convenient, and the Normans paying little respect to the popular prejudices of the Saxons, the second founder, in the following reign, built it in this new situation, and the fair was afterwards held in another spot. Perhaps it is still preserved in what is called the Pot Fair, which is held in the month of June. The name of the well was given to the monastery and to the village.

Here we have an allusion to a

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festival similar in object, if not in the period of its celebration, to the May games of after ages. At such festivals, the songs would take the character of the amusements on the occasion, and would most likely celebrate warlike deeds-perhaps the myths of the patron whom superstition supposed to preside over them. As the character of the exercises changed, the attributes of this patron would change also; and he who was once celebrated as working wonders with his good axe or his elf-made sword, might afterwards assume the character of a skilful bowman. The scene of his actions would likewise change-and the person whose weapons were the bane of dragons and giants, who sought them in the wildernesses they infested, might become the enemy only of the sheriff and his officers under the " grenewode lefe." As the original character became unintelligible to the peasantry, amongst whom all these changes were taking place, the name also might run into one more popular, and the hero of Saxon story might be brought to assume the simple title, which every one would understand, of Robin with the Hood. That this was a part of his dress we are assured by a passage of one of the older ballads, already quoted :

"Robyn dyde adowne his hode,

The monk whan that he see."

An instance of a similar name having been derived from an apparently similar circumstance, has been often pointed out in the German familiar spirit Hudekin.

We are, however, inclined to join in the conjecture which has been made, that the name Robin Hood is but a corruption of Robin of the Wood, because we find analogies in other languages. The name of Witikind, the famous opponent of Charlemagne, who always fled before his sight, concealed himself in the forests, and returned again in his absence, is no more than witu chint, in old High Dutch, and signifies the son of the wood, an appellation which he could never have received at his birth,

since it denotes an exile or outlaw. Indeed the name Witikind, though such a person seems to have existed, appears to be the representative of all the defenders of his country against the invaders. The old Norse expressions skoggangr and skogarmadr, which denote an outlaw, are literally one who goes in the woods, a man of the woods, as is urdarmadr, one who hides himself among the rocks. They correspond to the Anglo-Saxon weald-genga. The Servians have a remarkable expression, schuma ti mati, the wood be thy mother, that is, save thyself by flight, hide thyself in the wood. (See James Grimm's Deutsche Rechts Alterthümer, p. 733.) Jamieson has printed a modern ballad which, evidently to account for the name of our hero, supposing it to be Robin of the Wood, makes him the offspring of a baron's daughter, who had been gotten with child by her father's buttler, and who had been compelled to make the wild wood the scene of Robin's birth. name, however, is easily explained, when we know that, at least as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, Robin Hood had become the representative of the English outlaws. In the tale of Gamelin, one of the oldest of the suppositious works of Chaucer, which has evidently some connection with the Robin Hood cycle, and the name too bears a great resemblance to that of Gandeleyn which has already occurred, the outlaw seeks the woods as a shelter from the oppressions of his own kindred.

The

It is rather a remarkable confirmation of the northern origin of Robin Hood, that one circumstance of an early ballad of the cycle (Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee), when the latter yeoman shoots the apple off his son's head, is known to be a northern story, and is related by the historian Saxo.

One of the strongest proofs, perhaps, of the mythic character of Robin Hood, is the connection of his name with mounds and stones, such as our peasantry always attributed to the fairies of their popular superstition. A tumulus was generally the habitation

of the underground people, a well or a ruin was the chosen place of their gambols, and a spot which exhibits marks of some violent natural convulsion was a testimony of their vengeance. These were the dwarfs of the northern mythology; but the giants of the same creed left also marks of their presence in the loose masses of stone which, in their anger or in their playfulness, they had thrown to immense distances, and in others, more regularly placed, which had once served to mark the length of their steps.

Sometimes our hero is identified with the dwarfs of the popular creed. The barrows in the neighbourhood of Whitby and Guisbrough bear his name, and the peasantry have created a story that they were the buts where he placed his marks. A large tumulus we know well in our own county, near Ludlow in Shropshire, which is also called Robin Hood's But, and which affords us a curious instance how new stories were often invented to account for a name whose original import was forgotten. The circumstances, too, in this case prove that the story was of late invention. The barrow, as regarded superstitiously, had borne the name of Robin Hood. On the roof of one of the chancels of the church of Ludlow, which is called the Fletchers' chancel, as having been, when "the strength of England stood upon archery," the place where the fletchers held their meetings, and which is distant from the aforesaid barrow two miles or two miles and a half, there stands an iron arrow as the sign of their craft. The imagination of the people of the place, after archery and fletchers had been forgotten, and when Robin Hood was known only as an outlaw and a bowman, saw a connection between the barrow (from its name) and the chancel (from the arrow on its roof), and a tale was invented how the outlaw once stood upon the former and took aim at the weathercock on the church steeple, but, the distance being a little too great, the arrow fell short of its mark and remained up to the present day on the roof of the chancel. Near Gloucester also, and near Castleton in Derbyshire, are Robin Hood's hills. In Lancashire, in Yorkshire, and in Nottinghamshire, there are wells which bear his

name, and that in Lancashire is surrounded by places which have been long occupied by the fairies. It may also be noted as a curious circumstance, proving the antiquity of this connection of the outlaw and these objects of popular superstition, as having been carried by the English settlers into Ireland, that Little John has his hill near Dublin.

At other times Robin Hood figures as one of the giants. Blackstone Edge, in Lancashire, as we learn from Roby's Lancashire Legends, is called Robin Hood's bed or Robin Hood's chair. On a black moor, called Monstone Edge, is a huge moor-stone or outlier, which, though part of it has been broken off and removed, still retains the name of Monstone. It is said to have been quoited thither by Robin Hood, from his bed on the top of Blackstone Edge, about six miles off. After striking the mark aimed at, the stone bounded off a few-hundred yards, and settled where it now stands. A heap of old ruins at Kenchester, the site of the Roman Ariconium, was in Leland's time called the King of Fairies' chair, and King Arthur has many a chair and bed in Wales and Cornwall. Near Halifax, in Yorkshire, is an immense stone, supposed to be a druidical monument, which is called Robin Hood's pennystone, and which is said to be the stone with which he amused himself, by throwing it at a distant mark. Another stone, in the same parish, weighing several tons, is said by the peasantry to have been thrown by him from an adjoining hill with his spade as he was digging; "every thing of the marvellous kind," as saith Watson, the historian of Halifax, " being here attributed to Robin Hood as it is in Cornwall to king Artur." Gunton, in his history of Peterborough, mentions two long stones in a field in Suffolk, which were said by tradition to be the draught of arrows from Alwalton churchyard, shot thither by Robin Hood and Little John.

The legends of the peasantry are the shadows of a very remote antiquity, and in them we may place our trust with much confidence on a subject like the present. They enable us to place our Robin Hood with tolerable certainty among the personages of the early Mythology ofthe Teutonic peoples.