and there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defied the power of the Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods and lived by plunder.  Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character.  He had the English love of fair play, the English readiness to shake hands and make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square fight.  He beat and plundered the fat bishops and abbots, who had more than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood.  He was a mighty archer with those national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft.  He tricked and baffled legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawless adventure which marked the free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England.  And, finally, the scenery of the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the exploits of “the old Robin Hood of England” and his merry men.

The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry.  Such is their use of conventional epithets; “the red, red gold,” “the good green wood,” “the gray goose wing.”  Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like,

  But out and spak their stepmother.

Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example,

    She had’na pu’d a double rose,
    A rose but only twae.

Or again,

  And mony ane sings o’ grass, o’ grass,
    And mony ane sings o’ corn;
  An mony ane sings o’ Robin Hood,
    Kens little whare he was born.

  It was na in the ha’, the ha’,
    Nor in the painted bower;
  But it was in the gude green wood,
    Amang the lily flower.

Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century, printed in black letter, “broadsides,” or single sheets.  Wynkyn de Worde printed in 1489 A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood, which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject.  In the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies called Garlands.  Early in the 18th century the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany.  But no large and important collection was put forth until Percy’s Reliques (1765), a book which had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott.  In Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th century, such as Jane Elliott’s Lament for Flodden, and the fine ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.  Walter Scott’s Proud Maisie is in the Wood, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of the old ballad makers.