And now is Hereward to the greenwood gone, to be a bold outlaw; and not only an outlaw himself, but the father of all outlaws, who held those forests for two hundred years, from the fens to the Scottish border. Utlages, forestiers, latrunculi (robberlets), sicarii, cutthroats, sauvages, who prided themselves upon sleeping on the bare ground; they were accursed by the conquerors, and beloved by the conquered. The Norman viscount or sheriff commanded to hunt them from hundred to hundred, with hue and cry, horse and bloodhound. The English yeoman left for them a keg of ale, or a basket of loaves, beneath the hollins green, as sauce for their meal of “nombles of the dere.” “For hart and hind, and doe and roe, Were in that forest great plentie,” and “Swannes and fesauntes they had full good And foules of the rivere. There fayled never so lytell a byrde, That ever was bred on brere.” With the same friendly yeoman “that was a good felawe,” they would lodge by twos and threes during the sharp frosts of midwinter, in the lonely farm-house which stood in the “field” or forest-clearing; but for the greater part of the year their “lodging was on the cold ground” in the holly thickets, or under the hanging rock, or in a lodge of boughs. And then, after a while, the life which began in terror, and despair, and poverty, and loss of land and kin, became not only tolerable, but pleasant. Bold men and hardy, they cared less and less for “The thornie wayes, the deep valleys, The snowe, the frost, the rayne, The colde, the hete; for dry or wete We must lodge on the plaine, And us above, none other roofe, But a brake bushe, or twayne.” And they found fair lasses, too, in time, who, like Torfrida and Maid Marian, would answer to their warnings against the outlaw life, with the nut-browne maid, that-- “Amonge the wylde dere, such an archere As men say that ye be, He may not fayle of good vitayle Where is so great plentè: And water clere of the rivere, Shall be full swete to me, With which in hele, I shall right wele, Endure, as ye may see.” Then called they themselves “merry men,” and the forest the “merry greenwood”; and sang, with Robin Hood,-- “A merrier man than I, belyye There lives not in Christentie.” They were coaxed back, at times, to civilized life; they got their grace of the king, and entered the king’s service; but the craving after the greenwood was upon them. They dreaded and hated the four stone walls of a Norman castle, and, like Robin Hood, slipt back to the forest and the deer.