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 196 HENRY MARTYN 213 JOHN DORY 216 CAPTAIN WARD AND THE RAINBOW 219 THE SWEET TRINITY 224 PREFACE 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 genuineness of which has been sponsored by Professor Gummere.[1] 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 in Child’s collection.[2] 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.