consideration of his countenance, entreats grace for himself and his followers, and is freely pardoned on condition that he and they shall enter into the king’s service.  To this he agrees, and for fifteen months resides at court.  At the end of this time he has lost all his followers but two, and spent all his money, and feels that he shall pine to death with sorrow in such a life.  He returns accordingly to the greenwood, collects his old followers around him, and for twenty-two years maintains his independence in defiance of the power of Edward.

Without asserting the literal verity of all the particulars of this narrative, Mr. Hunter attempts to show that it contains a substratum of fact.  Edward the First, he informs us, was never in Lancashire after he became king; and if Edward the Third was ever there at all, it was not in the early years of his reign.  But Edward the Second did make one single progress in Lancashire, and this in the year 1323.  During this progress the king spent some time at Nottingham, and took particular note of the condition of his forests, and among these of the forest of Sherwood.  Supposing now that the incidents detailed in the “Lytell Geste” really took place at this time, Robin Hood must have entered into the royal service before the end of the year 1353.  It is a singular, and in the opinion of Mr. Hunter a very pregnant coincidence, that in certain Exchequer documents, containing accounts of expenses in the king’s household, the name of Robyn Hode (or Robert Hood) is found several times, beginning with the 24th of March, 1324, among the “porters of the chamber” of the king.  He received, with Simon Hood and others, the wages of three pence a day.  In August of the following year Robin Hood suffers deduction from his pay for non-attendance, his absences grow frequent, and on the 22d of November he is discharged with a present of five shillings, “poar cas qil ne poait pluis travailler."[6]

It remains still for Mr. Hunter to account for the existence of a band of seven score of outlaws in the reign of Edward the Second, in or about Yorkshire.  The stormy and troublous reigns of the Plantagenets make this a matter of no difficulty.  Running his finger down the long list of rebellions and commotions, he finds that early in 1322 England was convulsed by the insurrection of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the king’s near relation, supported by many powerful noblemen.  The Earl’s chief seat was the castle of Pontefract, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.  He is said to have been popular, and it would be a fair inference that many of his troops were raised in this part of England.  King Edward easily got the better of the rebels, and took exemplary vengeance upon them.  Many of the leaders were at once put to death, and the lives of all their partisans were in danger.  Is it impossible, then, asks Mr. Hunter, that some who had been in the army of the Earl secreted themselves in the woods, and turned their skill in archery against the king’s subjects or the king’s deer? “that these were the men who for so long a time haunted Barnsdale and Sherwood, and that Robin Hood was one of them, a chief amongst them, being really of a rank originally somewhat superior to the rest?”