Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was a Cistercian monastery, dating from the twelfth century. (It is loosely called a nunnery in #A# 4.) The friar is called “cutted” in #A# and “curtal” in #B#, and these words have been held to mean short-frocked, and therefore to make the friar a Franciscan. Staveley, The Romish Horseleech, speaking of the Franciscans, says at p. 214, Experience shews that in some countrys, where friers used to wear short habits, the order was presently contemned and derided, and men called them curtaild friers. Cited by Douce, Illustrations of Shakspere, I, 61. So, according to Douce, we may probably understand the curtal friar to be a curtailed friar, and in like manner of the curtal dogs. “Cutted” in #A# can signify nothing but short-frocked. In the title of that version, though not in the text, the friar is called Tuck, which means that he is “ytukked bye,” like Chaucer’s Friar John, but not that he wears a short frock. The friar in the play (see below) has a “long cote,” v. 46. But I apprehend that #B# has the older word in curtal, and that curtal is simply _curtilarius_, and applied to both friar and dogs because they had the care and keeping of the _curtile_, or vegetable garden, of the monastery.[102] The title of #A# in the MS. is Robin Hood and Friar Tuck; from which it follows that the copyist, or some predecessor, considered the stalwart friar of Fountains Abbey to be one with the jocular friar of the May-games and the morris dance. But Friar Tuck, the wanton and the merry, like Maid Marian, owes his association with Robin Hood primarily to these popular sports, and not in the least to popular ballads. In the truly popular ballads Friar Tuck is never heard of, and in only two even of the broadsides, Robin Hood and Queen Katherine and Robin Hood’s Golden Prize, is he so much as named; in both no more than named, and in both in conjunction with Maid Marian. ‘The Play of Robin Hood,’ the first half of which is based on the present ballad, calls the friar Friar Tuck, and represents him accordingly. See the Appendix. He is also called Tuck in the play founded on Guy of Gisborne. In Munday’s Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, Friar Tuck is by implication identified with the friar who fell into the well, Dodsley’s Old Plays, ed. Hazlitt, VIII, 185; and Mr Chappell is consequently led to say, at p. 390 of his ‘Popular Music,’ that the ballad of the Friar in the Well was in all probability a tale of “Robin Hood’s fat friar.” Cavilling at this phrase of Shakspere’s only so far as to observe that the friar of the traditional Robin Hood ballad is as little fat as wanton, I need but say that the truth of the case had been already accurately expressed by Mr Chappell at p. 274 of his invaluable work: “the story is a very old one, and one of the many against monks and friars in which not only England, but all Europe, delighted.”