#B#, though found only in late garlands, is in the fine old strain. Robin Hood says to Little John that he can no longer shoot matches, his arrows will not flee; he must go to a cousin to be let blood. He goes, alone, to Kirkley nunnery, and is received with a show of cordiality. His cousin bloods him, locks him up in the room, and lets him bleed all the livelong day, and until the next day at noon. Robin bethinks himself of escaping through a casement, but is not strong enough. He sets his horn to his mouth and blows thrice, but so wearily that Little John, hearing, thinks his master must be nigh to death. John comes to Kirkley, breaks the locks, and makes his way to Robin’s presence. He begs the boon of setting fire to Kirkley, but Robin has never hurt woman in all his life, and will not at his end. He asks for his bow to shoot his last shot, and where the arrow lights there his grave shall be.[95] His grave is to be of gravel and green, long enough and broad enough, a sod under his head, another at his feet, and his bow by his side, that men may say, Here lies bold Robin Hood. The account of Robin Hood’s death which is given in The Gest, agrees as to the main items with what we find in #A#. The prioress of Kirkesly, his near kinswoman, betrayed him when he went to the nunnery to be let blood, and this she did upon counsel with Sir Roger of Donkester, with whom she was intimate. The Life of Robin Hood in the Sloane MS, which is mostly made up from The Gest, naturally repeats this story. Grafton, in his Chronicle, 1569, citing “an olde and auncient pamphlet,” says: For the sayd Robert Hood, beyng afterwardes troubled with sicknesse, came to a certain nonry in Yorkshire, called Bircklies, where, desiryng to be let blood, he was betrayed and bled to death: edition of 1809, p. 221. So the Harleian MS, No 1233, article 199, of the middle of the seventeenth century, and not worth citing, but cited by Ritson. According to Stanihurst, in Holinshed’s Ireland (p. 28 of ed. of 1808), after Robin Hood had been betrayed at a nunnery in Scotland called Bricklies, Little John was fain to flee the realm, and went to Ireland, where he executed an extraordinary shot, by which he thought his safety compromised, and so removed to Scotland, and died there. Martin Parker’s True Tale of Robin Hood, which professes to be collected from chronicles, ascribes Robin Hood’s death to a faithless friar, who pretended “in love to let him blood,” when he had a fever, and allowed him to bleed to death. Robin Hood and the Valiant Knight, a late and thoroughly worthless broadside ballad, says simply, He sent for a monk to let him blood, who took his life away. A Russian popular song has an interesting likeness to the conclusion of Robin Hood’s Death. The last survivor of a band of brigands, feeling death to be nigh, exclaims: