[82] The precise purpose or meaning of setting up Robin Hood’s bower has not been satisfactorily ascertained. Mr. Hearne, in an attempt to derive the name of “The Chiltern country” (ciltern, Saxon) from silex, a flint, has the following words: “Certe Silcestriam, &c. _i.e._ Certainly Silchester, in Hampshire, signifies nothing but the city of flints (that is, a city composed or built of flint-stones). And what is more, in that very Chiltern country you may frequently see houses built of flints, in erecting which, in ancient times, I suppose that many persons involved themselves deeply in debt, and that, in order to extricate themselves, they took up money at interest of I know not what great men, which so far disturbed their minds that they would become thieves and do many things in no wise agreeable to the English government. Hence, the nobility ordered that large woods in the Chiltern country should in a great measure be cut down, lest they should conceal any considerable body of robbers, who were wont to convert the same into lurking places. It concerns this matter to call to mind that of this sort of robbers was that Robin or Robert Hood, of whom the vulgar dayly sing so many wonderful things. He (being now made an outlaw) before he retired into the north parts, frequently robbing in the Chiltern country, lurked in the thickets thereof on purpose that he should not be taken. Thence it was that to us boys (exhilarating, according to custom, the mind with sports) certain countrymen, with whom we had accidentally some conversation, shewed us that sort of den or retreat (vulgarly called Robin Hood’s bower) in Maydenhead-thicket; which thicket is the same that Leland in his Itinerary called Frith, by which name the Anglo-Saxons themselves spoke of thickets. For although frið in reality signifies peace, yet since numerous groves with them (as well as before with the Britons) were deemed sacred, it is by no means to be wondered at that a great wood (because manifestly an asylum) should, in the judgment of the Anglo-Saxons, be called by no other name than fr ðes: and that Maydenhead-thicket was esteemed among the greater woods Leland himself is a witness. Rightly therefore did Robin Hood (as frið-bena) reckon himself to abide there in security” (Chronicon de Dunstaple, p. 387). What he means by all this is, doubtless, sufficiently obscure: the mere name, however, of Robin Hood’s bower seems a very feeble authority for concluding that gallant outlaw to have robbed or skulked in the Chiltern hundreds. It may seem, perhaps, from a passage in Browne’s _Britannia’s Pastorals_ (Song 4), that _Robin Hood’s bower_ was prepared for the reception of himself and his Marian, as king and queen of May. The lines are these: “As I have seene the lady of the May _Set in an arbour_, on a holy-day, Built by the May-pole, where the jocund swains, Dance with the maidens to the bagpipe’s strains.”