Naturally a much-loved figure in festival games was Robin Hood, and that some kind of drama was made out of the ballads surrounding him is proved by a Ms. fragment of 1475 or earlier of _Robin Hood and the Knight_, and a play of _Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar_ with a portion of _Robin Hood and the Potter_, printed by Copland, in 1550, as "very proper to be played in May-games."[34] These May-games occurred not only in May, but June, and gave employment to St. George and the Dragon, the Nine Worthies (at whom Shakespeare poked run in _Love's Labour's Lost_), the morris-dance, with its Lords and Ladies of the May, giant, hobby-horse, and sometimes devils, as well as to Robin and Little John, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck; and they were popular through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even earlier. If we may trust old Fenn's editing, Sir John Paston wrote in 1473 of a man whom he had kept for three years to play "Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottingham." There may be even earlier mention of such plays. For, with all deference to the best of authorities, Professor Child, I cannot but think that when Bower wrote, between 1441 and 1447, of the popular "comedies and tragedies" of _Robertus Hode et Litill Johanne_, he had reference to acted plays, since he took pains to specify in his account of them the _mimi_, as well as the _bardani_ who chanted them. These entertainments, he says, were then more popular than any other, and it is only natural to suppose that they had existed long before his time. The earliest mention of Robin in England is in _Piers Plowman_, 1377, and then as the subject of a ballad; but, as Warton long ago pointed out, pastoral plays of _Robin et Marion_ had been given in France upon festival occasions before the end of the thirteenth century. Although there appears to be no similarity between the incidents of Adam de la Halle's comic opera of 1283 upon Robin and his Marion and the English stories, and although we are ignorant of the nature of the spring game, or play, of the same title, which was already an annual function in Anjou, in 1392, the principal characters and conditions of life in the two series are sufficiently similar to suggest a connection by derivation or common source. If such connection exist, it is not impossible that some kind of Robin pageant or play was known in England earlier than we ordinarily think. The ballad plays, at any rate, had attained popularity long before an artistic level was reached by the allegorical drama, and while yet the craft cycles were in their prime. Stow, in respect of Mayings, which he leads us to believe were common in the reign of Henry VI., says that the citizens of London "did fetch in May-poles with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all the day long; and towards the evening they had stage-plays and bonfires in the streets." Robin Hood and his archers are the heart of a Maying devised