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.[19] 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 shawes be sheen, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the fowles song; To see the deer draw to the dale, And leave the hilles hee, And shadow them in the leaves green Under the green-wood tree." The poetical character of the season affords all the explanation that is required.