The essential point, all this being admitted, is now to establish the identity of Robin Hood and the Hobby Horse. This we think we have shown cannot be done by reasoning founded on the early history of the games under consideration. Kuhn relies principally upon two modern accounts of Christmas pageants. In one of these pageants there is introduced a man on horseback, who carries in his hands a bow and arrows. The other furnishes nothing peculiar except a name: the ceremony is called a _hoodening_, and the hobby horse a _hooden_. In the rider with bow and arrows, Kuhn sees Robin Hood and the Hobby Horse, and in the name _hooden_ (which is explained by the authority he quotes to mean wooden) he discovers a provincial form of _wooden_ which connects the outlaw and the divinity.[24] It will be generally agreed that these slender premises are totally inadequate to support the weighty conclusion that is rested upon them. Why the adventures of Robin Hood should be specially assigned, as they are in the old ballads, to the month of May, remains unexplained. We have no exquisite reason to offer, but we may perhaps find reason good enough in the delicious stanzas with which some of these ballads begin. In summer when the shawès be sheen, And leavès be large and long, It is full merry in fair forèst To hear the fowlès song; To see the deer draw to the dale, And leave the hillès hee, And shadow them in the leavès green Under the green-wood tree. The poetical character of the season affords all the explanation that is required. Nor need the occurrence of exhibitions of archery and of the Robin Hood plays and pageants, at this time of the year, occasion any difficulty. Repeated statutes, from the 13th to the 16th century, enjoined practice with the bow, and ordered that the leisure time of holidays should be employed for this purpose. Under Henry the Eighth the custom was still kept up, and those who partook in this exercise often gave it a spirit by assuming the style and character of Robin Hood and his associates. In like manner the society of archers in Elizabeth's time, took the name of Arthur and his knights: all which was very natural then and would be now. None of all the merrymakings in merry England surpassed the May festival. The return of the sun stimulated the populace to the accumulation of all sorts of amusements. In addition to the traditional and appropriate sports of the season, there were, as Stowe tells us, divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all day long, and towards the evening stage-plays and bonfires in the streets. A Play of Robin Hood was considered "very proper for a May-game," but if Robin Hood was peculiarly prominent in these entertainments, the obvious reason would appear to be that he was the hero of that loved green-wood to which all the world resorted, when the cold obstruction of winter was broken up, "to do observance for a morn of May."