“Some things to his honor are also related, as appears from this.  Once on a time, when, having incurred the anger of the king and the prince, he could hear mass nowhere but in Barnsdale, while he was devoutly occupied with the service, (for this was his wont, nor would he ever suffer it to be interrupted for the most pressing occasion,) he was surprised by a certain sheriff and officers of the king, who had often troubled him before, in the secret place in the woods where he was engaged in worship as aforesaid.  Some of his men, who had taken the alarm, came to him and begged him to fly with all speed.  This, out of reverence for the host, which he was then most devoutly adoring, he positively refused to do.  But while the rest of his followers were trembling for their lives, Robert, confiding in Him whom he worshipped, fell on his enemies with a few who chanced to be with him, and easily got the better of them; and having enriched himself with their plunder and ransom, he was led from that time forth to hold ministers of the church and masses in greater veneration than ever, mindful of the common saying, that

    “‘God hears the man who often hears the mass.’”

In another place Bower writes to the same effect:  “In this year [1266] the dispossessed barons of England and the royalists were engaged in fierce hostilities.  Among the former, Roger Mortimer occupied the Welsh marches, and John Daynil the Isle of Ely.  Robert Hood was now living in outlawry among the woodland copses and thickets.”

Mair, a Scottish writer of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the next historian who takes cognizance of our hero, and the only other that requires any attention, has a passage which may be considered in connection with the foregoing.  In his “Historia Majoris Britanniae” he remarks, under the reign of Richard the First:  “About this time [1189-99], as I conjecture, the notorious robbers, Robert Hood of England and Little John, lurked in the woods, spoiling the goods only of rich men.  They slew nobody but those who attacked them, or offered resistance in defence of their property.  Robert maintained by his plunder a hundred archers, so skilful in fight that four hundred brave men feared to attack them.  He suffered no woman to be maltreated, and never robbed the poor, but assisted them abundantly with the wealth which he took from abbots.”

It appears, then, that contemporaneous history is absolutely silent concerning Robin Hood; that, excepting the casual allusion in “Piers Ploughman,” he is first mentioned by a rhyming chronicler who wrote one hundred years after the latest date at which he can possibly be supposed to have lived, and then by two prose chroniclers who wrote about one hundred and twenty-five years and two hundred years respectively after that date; and it is further manifest that all three of these chroniclers had no other authority for their statements than traditional tales similar to