The picture of our hero is yet a common sign in the country, and, before hanging-signs were abolished in London, must have been still more so in the City; there being at present no less than a dozen alleys, courts, lanes, &c., to which he or it has given a name. (See Baldwin’s New Complete Guide, 1770.) The Robin Hood Society, a club or assembly for public debate, or school for oratory, is well known. It was held at a public-house, which had once borne the sign, and still retained the name of this great man, in Butcher Row, near Temple Bar. It is very usual in the North of England for a publican whose name fortunately happens to be John Little to have {xcv} the sign of Robin Hood and his constant attendant, with this quibbling subscription: “You gentlemen, and yeomen good, Come in and drink with Robin Hood; If Robin Hood be not at home, Come in and drink with Little John.”[78] An honest countryman, admiring the conceit, adopted the lines, with a slight, but, as he thought, necessary alteration, viz.: “If Robin Hood be not at home, Come in and drink with—Simon Webster.” Drayton, describing the various ensigns or devices of the English counties at the battle of Agincourt, gives to “Old Nottingham, an archer clad in green, Under a tree with his drawn bow that stood, Which in a chequer’d flag far off was seen; It was the picture of old Robin Hood.” (33) —“_the supernatural powers he is, in some parts, supposed to have possessed._”] “In the parish of Halifax is an immense stone or rock, supposed to be a Druidical monument, there called Robin Hood’s pennystone, which he is said to have used to pitch with at a mark for his amusement. There is likewise another of these stones, of several tons weight, which the country-people will tell you he threw off an adjoining hill with a spade as he was digging. Every thing of the marvellous kind being here attributed to Robin Hood, as it is in Cornwall to King Arthur” (Watson’s History of Halifax, p. 27). At Birchover, six miles south of Bakewell, and four from Haddon, in Derbyshire, among several singular groups of rocks, are some stones called Robin Hood’s stride, being two {xcvi} of the highest and most remarkable. The people say Robin Hood lived here. (34) —“_having a festival allotted to him, and solemn games instituted in honour of his memory_,” _&c._] These games, which were of great antiquity and different kinds, appear to have been solemnised on the first and succeeding days of May, and to owe their original establishment to the cultivation and improvement of the manly exercise of archery, which was not, in former times, practised merely for the sake of amusement.